Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of English Court and Manorial Documents
- Scope of the Bacon Collection
- Acquisition of the Bacon Collection
- Cataloging of the Bacon Collection
Scope of the Bacon Collection
The Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection in the University of Chicago Library comprises a remarkably complete chronological series of English court and manorial documents spanning the period from 1250 to 1700.The core of the collection consists of the muniments of title, court rolls, account rolls, rentals, and other documents that came to Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510-1579), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth and father of Sir Francis Bacon, when he purchased monastic and other lands in the mid-sixteenth century.
While numerous families and properties are represented in the Bacon collection, the great majority of the manuscripts are concerned with the Bacons and their holdings in East Anglia and London. Preserving a fine chronological series of manorial court and account rolls spanning, in certain localities, four centuries, the Bacon collection provides an unusually detailed view of the development of English rural and agricultural society.
Much of the documentary material in the Bacon collection relates to Redgrave Hall, Suffolk, Sir Nicholas Bacon's chief seat and a former manorial holding of the Monastery of Bury St. Edmunds. Other lands from the Monastery of Bury St. Edmunds acquired by Sir Nicholas were Rickinghall, Wortham, Hinderclay, Burgate, and Gislingham, all in Suffolk.
Other properties held by the Lord Keeper were Mettingham College, Mellis St. Johns, Wiverston, Brandon, Ingham, Tymworth, Plaford in Barnhams, Bramfelde, Parham and others in Suffolk; Stanforde, Stoffy, Stiffkey and Eccles in Norfolk; Markes in Essex; Cheddar in Somerset; various London properties; Gorhamburie in Hertforshire; and others.
The Bacon lands and therefore the Bacon muniments increased with the marriage of Sir Nicholas, eldest son of Sir Nicholas the Lord Keeper, to Anne, daughter of the Tudor court physician, Sir William Butts. This marriage brought into Bacon control the Norfolk lands of Thornage, Riborough, and Culford, among others, and the lands of Foxerth and Pentlowe in Essex and Reydon in Suffolk.
Another important part of the Bacon collection is the papers of Sir Robert Drury, the younger Sir Nicholas's son-in-law. In addition, there are the title deeds connected with the break-up of the Bacon estates in the later seventeenth century, a disintegration that began with the death of Sir Edmund Bacon, the Lord Keeper's grandson, in 1649, and some papers of Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench from 1689 to 1710, who subsequently purchased Redgrave in the early eighteenth century.
Acquisition of the Bacon Collection
In 1921, the Holt-Wilson family, descendants of Sir John Holt, offered for sale at Sotheby's auction house in London a large group of accumulated family and property records documenting five centuries of the Bacon family lands and history. Although there had been cursory attempts to describe this mass of documents, no adequate calendar existed to properly encompass its variety of court and compotus rolls, deeds, letters, and various state papers.In anticipation of this extraordinary sale, the Times Literary Supplement noted that these documents "would doubtless throw much fresh and interesting light on the domestic history of England during the Middle Ages and up to the seventeenth century."
The documents were purchased intact at Sotheby's by London bookseller Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., from which the British Museum and a private collector, antiquary Edmund Farrer, subsequently purchased about 60 of the 227 lots as described by Sotheby's. The remaining documents were offered for sale by Quaritch in December 1923 in its catalogue No. 380 with a few of the more prestigious items being offered as individual lots. But the greater part of the collection, some 4,500 items, were grouped in two lots, Lot 213 and Lot 214, and it was these two lots which came to the attention of University of Chicago Professor Charles R. Baskervill during the summer of 1924.
Baskervill had gone to London to continue his own research in English literature and, at the request of his Department of English colleague Professor John M. Manly, to make recommendations for the purchase of manuscripts which might be available on the market. This quest for manuscripts coincided with a deeply felt need, shared by Manly and Baskervill, for original documents to train students at the University of Chicago. Manly with another University of Chicago colleague in English literature, Edith Rickert, had recently embarked on a major scholarly enterprise, the editing of the text of the Canterbury Tales. The close continuity of the documents among the Bacon muniments offered an excellent opportunity for paleographical training for their students.
Soon after his arrival in London, Baskervill viewed the documents at Quaritch's and wrote to Manly recommending their purchase. This was quickly accomplished with the assistance of Martin A. Ryerson, then chairman of the University's Board of Trustees and a man committed to the support of humanistic studies at the University. In October of that year, the documents arrived in Chicago, still in the muniment boxes in which they had been stored since the eighteenth century.
In 1929, the University acquired, through private hands, again with the assistance of Martin Ryerson, some further manuscripts from the Redgrave estate which had been omitted from the 1921 Holt-Wilson sale. Included was the important building account book for Redgrave.
Since then a number of occasional manuscripts relating to the Bacons and their holdings have been added to the collection, including an account book, purchased in 1971, giving the charges for work on Stiffkey manor in 1582/3 then in the possession of Sir Nathaniel Bacon, a son of Sir Nicholas and noted amateur painter.
Cataloging of the Bacon Collection
After the Bacon collection was installed in Wieboldt Hall at the University of Chicago, the work of cataloging the documents was undertaken by Edith Rickert and other members of the Department of English. Nearly all of the deeds within the collection had been indexed by Rickert by the time of her death in 1936. Apart from serving the limited teaching purposes intended by Professor Manly, no extended historical analysis of the content of the collection was undertaken. While well aware of its historical value, Manly and Rickert were heavily preoccupied during this period with the completion of their edited text of the Canterbury Tales, which was published in eight volumes by the University of Chicago Press in 1940.The Bacon documents were used occasionally by other investigators such as Sir William Beveridge, who obtained copies of those pertinent to his pioneering study of English wages and prices. After Manly's death in 1940, the collection was transferred to the University of Chicago Library, still in the original muniment boxes. In the early 1950s scholarly interest was revived by Professor R. Cecil Bald, who attracted public attention with his fortuitous discovery of the holographs of John Donne among the documents.
The final description and ordering of the Bacon collection was accomplished at the hands of Professors Kenneth Dodd and James E. Farnell, both former students of Professor Alan Simpson. Their effort resulted in an extensive calendar of the documents, Calendar of the Martin A. Ryerson Collection of Court and Manorial Documents from the Estate of Sir Nicholas Bacon in the University of Chicago Library (1974), which was distributed by the Library to the principal research libraries and record offices of Great Britain and the United States.
In 1972, the Department of Special Collections produced an exhibition based on the Sir Nicholas Bacon collection. The catalogue of this exhibition, The Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection: Sources on English Society, 1250-1700 (University of Chicago Library, 1972), is available for sale from the Special Collections Research Center.
For further information on manuscripts in the Sir Nicholas Bacon collection or related holdings, please contact:
Special Collections Research Center
University of Chicago Library
1100 E. 57th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
SpecialCollections\
@lib.uchicago.edu.