Sir Christopher Wren

Sir Christopher Wren died on 25 February 1723. On this 300th anniversary of his death there are several commemorations around the UK, listed on the dedicated website wren300.org. In Cambridge we celebrate the Library of Trinity College as being arguably Wren’s greatest secular building. In preparation for the tercentenary celebrations we have digitised all of …

Advent Calendar of Christmas Cards from Trinity College Archives

The ephemeral nature of Christmas cards makes them quite rare in the Trinity College archives.  Here are 24 from across the collections, some traditional, some quirky, some personal:   Rose Macaulay designed Christmas card MACR.8.99 Christmas card sent by Wittgenstein WITT.402.6 E.M. Forster's Christmas Card TRER.3.25 Frederick Anthony White's Christmas Card Add.ms.a.84.16  Rose Macaulay designed …

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me. I know you love me-” – Erskine Childers’ goodbye

“It doesn’t matter what you think of me, I know you love me.” So wrote Erskine Childers to his friend Ivor Lloyd-Jones on 24th November 1922, hours or even minutes before he faced a firing squad. Robert Erskine Childers was executed at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, in the recently formed Irish Free State. Before his …

Last Poems after a Century

  Nicolas Bell considers a new edition of A. E. Housman’s second poetry collection 2022 is a year of literary centenaries: on 2 February 1922 Joyce’s Ulysses first went on sale at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and the October issue of the magazine Criterion included another modernist masterpiece, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. …

Fellows and Felony: A Kitchen Clerk’s Autograph Book

Henry Coggin, an accounts clerk in the kitchen at Trinity in the 19th century, kept a small book (O.10a.45) in which he pasted autographs and letters collected during his working life. He added handwritten notes alongside the entries. This blog highlights some of the contents. Henry Coggin was born at Old Lambeth in 1823 but …

Cambridge (and Oxford) Blues in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

A guest blog by Richard Gameson and Andrew Beeby The sensational discovery of Egyptian blue in Trinity’s magnificent early tenth-century copy of Hrabanus Maurus’s De laudibus sanctae Crucis (B.16.3) was reported in earlier blog, and the manuscript remains exceptional for the quantity of this extremely rare pigment that was deployed in its artwork. On-going work …

Thanks for the Cheese

An archivist at Trinity has shared a humorous poem ‘Thanks for the Cheese’ written by Hassard Hume Dodgson (1803-84), uncle of Lewis Carroll. The poem was composed for Susan Emma Smith, mother of Trinity Fellow Sir Henry Babington Smith and found among his papers. Dodgson begins Should you wonder, why it pleases Mrs Smith to …

Trinity Lends to Roskilde Museum

Sub-Librarian Steven Archer describes why a medieval manuscript is so important to Roskilde, Denmark. In the year 1022, King Cnut, ruler of both England and Denmark, assembled a group of his nobles and church leaders on St Æthelthryth’s Day (23 June) to witness the grant of a piece of land at Wood Ditton to the …

Prior Wibert’s Waterworks Plan

A guest blog by Professor Paul Bennett, Director of Canterbury Archaeological Trust from 1984 to 2020. In the mid-1160s, when Thomas Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury, a map was drawn of the Cathedral and its surrounding Benedictine Priory buildings to show a newly built aqueduct and its structures within and outside the city walls. This …

Cake, Caraway and Commemoration

A commonplace book typically includes notes and passages from literature compiled as work of reference. Manuscript R.2.45 is an example of this kind of memoranda and was probably put together by the printer William Bowyer (1699–1777) sometime in the 1750s. This is a very personal miscellany including many ‘stories’, description of the parts of a …