Author: lwilkinson

In this blog, Claire Arrand, Special Collections Librarian, University of Lincoln, who is seconded to Lincoln Cathedral Library, provides us with a fascinating overview of the Minster Yard Project.

Without their input this fascinating insight into the people who lived in and around the Cathedral would not have been unearthed and enjoyed by visitors. The Cathedral is indebted to Angela, Joan, Jonathan, Lynne and Ros who must be congratulated for providing the text below, highlighting the treasures held in Lincolnshire Archives and revealing possibilities for future research for the University of Lincoln and other researchers.

Examples:

3 Priory Gate (currently the Cathedral’s Works Department)

This building is currently the administrative office of the Works Department of the Cathedral. A date on the outside of the present building states it was built in 1695 but in 1649 it was known as The Elephant Inn and divided into dwellings. This earlier property seems to date back to 1566 and occupants of a variety of occupations lived there: a tailor in 1566 (see Bij/3/16 f.138), a yeoman in 1604, a doctor of physic in 1626, a gentleman in 1726, a soldier in 1732, in 1812 it became 3 separate dwellings until 1851 when a carpenter lived there until 1888. In the late 19th century and early 20th century it was occupied by the Cathedral Clerks of Works, including Robert S. Godfrey 1918 – 1953. A memorial to Mr Godfrey CBE MA is on the wall in the Cloister and states he ‘served the Cathedral as a Plumber and later Clerk of the Fabric to whose inventive genius and skill the preservation of the Minster from collapse and ruin in 1921 was mainly due.

Memorial to R. S. Godfrey, Clerk of Works in Cathedral Cloister, south wall.

12 Minster Yard / Graveley Place

Jane (sometimes known as Joan) Duckett was a female servant in the household of Robert Swan according to the 1841 census when her father was a blacksmith. Jane married the jeweller James Usher, who was the son of a dyer. Their son James Ward Usher continued to work in the jeweller’s shop after his father died. He made a fortune from souvenir items decorated with figures of the Lincoln Imp. On his death he left money for the building of the Usher Gallery to house his own collection of clocks, porcelain and portrait miniatures, which he gifted to the City of Lincoln.

The Usher Gallery rotates this huge collection, including a golden Lincoln Imp tie pin, as well as a portrait of James Ward Usher. The image below has been supplied courtesy of Jim Newton, verger (and photographer) at Lincoln Cathedral.

1A Vicars Court (gatehouse)

William Hilton was a scenery and portrait painter, who did occasional painting for the Cathedral. Lincolnshire Archives holds fabric accounts detailing small payments (see D & C BJ/1/17). His son William painted large canvases in the grand manner, portraying great moments in history or the Bible and was a keeper to the Royal Academy. His sister Harriet married the landscape painter Peter de Wint, and all three owned a house in Lincoln. A cenotaph in the Cathedral’s north transept dedicated to their memory has renditions of paintings by both artists carved in stone.

Please visit Lincoln Cathedral for the latest update on the exhibition opening date and Lincolnshire Archives to view the records mentioned above.  Please also visit the Usher Gallery, Art at The Collection. See also Lincoln Civic Trust’s The survey of ancient houses in Lincoln series.

Mark Clark has recently joined the University of Lincoln and our Medieval Studies Research Group as a Visiting Research Professor. Professor Clark is the John C. and Gertrude P. Hubbard Chair of Medieval Church History and Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he has taught for many years. Professor Clark is working on two exciting projects that arise directly from discoveries he has made at Lincoln Cathedral Library.

First, he is editing, together with Joshua Benson and Riccardo Saccenti, the earliest known versions of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, preserved in Lincoln MS 230 and Lincoln MS 31, respectively. The former, which shows that Peter Lombard originally composed the Sentences in three books and not four, is invaluable, because it shows he began by working from the biblical Gloss early in his career to produce a book for teaching and not, as long supposed, by working on the Sentences late in his career as a theological masterwork. The latter, in four books but with a radically different organization from the version edited by Brady, which is now known to date to the mid-thirteenth century, shows Lombard’s development of the Sentences during his own teaching career at Paris from the early 1140s until his death in 1160. These are the only two copies we know of made by him during his teaching career. Together, and they are being juxtaposed in this edition and translation, they will literally remake and revolutionize all existing scholarship on the origins of Scholasticism, on the schools of Paris, and on the University of Paris that grew out of them.

Second, he is writing a monograph on how Scholastic lectures became schoolbooks in the High Middle Ages, a topic that will be of keen interest to the many scholars who study the history of the book. The two manuscripts just mentioned are crucial, since they illustrate this process beautifully between 1140 and 1160, when the first institutional processes were put into place. David D’Avray asked Professor Clark and Christopher de Hamel how to understand the change between the chaotic orality that he has documented in Professor Clark’s publications and the beautiful finished process that he showed for the Glossa ordinaria of the thirteenth century. Using manuscripts that preserve primitive and augmented versions of the Gloss, Professor Clark can now show, owing to these Lincoln mss and owing to still more recent discoveries of copies of Lombard’s actual lectures on the Old Testament (apart from the well-known work on the Psalms), that those who augmented the Gloss also turned the Sentences, even while Peter Lombard was still teaching, into a textbook. He is also using Lincoln MSS 80 and 86, which preserve early versions of Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, to show how this process continued in the next twenty years, from 1160 to 1180. A Hereford manuscript, O.VIII.9, which preserves another early version of the Sentences copied at Paris, is also of keen interest, since it is apparent that Lincoln, as the hub, and Hereford, together with other English cathedrals, were intimately connected to the cathedral school at Paris, first that of the old Cathedral of St. Mary and then of its successor, the current Notre Dame, from the time when Lombard first began to teach. This too is of considerable interest, since it would appear that scholars have mistaken the character of the cathedral schools in England during the twelfth century and leading up to the founding of the universities at Oxford and Cambridge.

We are delighted to welcome him to our group and look forward to hearing more about his work.