Colección Crewe MS - Crewe Manuscripts

c. 200 volumes

Nearly all of these manuscripts were collected by Richard Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton. Those he acquired loose he had bound; those bought as volumes were either re-bound or left as they were. After Lord Houghton’s death in 1885 the manuscripts descended, with the rest of his library, firstly to his son the 1st Marquess of Crewe, and eventually to Lord Crewe’s daughter the Duchess of Roxburghe. The duchess died in 2014, having bequeathed the contents of the library to Trinity College, of which both her father and grandfather had been members.

Mary Innes-Ker, Duchess of Roxburghe

The collection includes manuscripts in various European languages, dating from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Most of them are, broadly speaking, of a literary, historical, or religious nature, but it is not easy to summarise the range of subjects they cover. They include, for instance, from the seventeenth century, notarial instruments in French relating to Charlotte de Beaune, an English translation of Den Spegel der Gherechticheit by Hendrik Niclaes of the so-called ‘Family of Love’, and a collection of English court poetry; from the eighteenth, papers on British trade, literary copyright, notorious criminals, and the French revolution; and from the nineteenth, a collection of papers and prints relating to the history of ballooning, items collected by Richard Burton on his travels, and a series of volumes recording the transactions of the Philobiblon Society.

As the manuscripts vary widely in subject, date, language, and other re-spects there was no obvious principle by which to arrange them. They have therefore been numbered in simple height order, which is the order in which they are set on the shelves in the Wren Library. This arrangement was chosen in order to provide the best support for the volumes, as there is a large difference in height between the tallest and the shortest.

This material is open for research unless otherwise stated.

The Library also owns a large proportion of Lord Houghton’s collection of printed books, which were bequeathed to the college together with the manuscripts. See the catalogue of printed books.

Dimensions are given in the order height by width, and rounded up to the nearest centimetre. Unless otherwise stated, the leaves of the books are paper, and half-bound and quarter-bound volumes are bound partly in leather and partly in paper or some other material.

This catalogue was begun by A. C. Green in 2016 and is still being compiled.