The Willoughby Library
- Debbie Jordan
- Aug 7
- 3 min read
In the 15th century, the Willoughby family began to collect books, manuscripts and documents. This formed the Willoughby Library. The family prized these books, even mentioning them in their wills. Over the generations, the family accumulated numerous valuable medieval texts, manuscripts, leaflets, documents, newspapers and books on a very wide range of subjects from the classics to language, religion, romance, plays, art, history, law, travel, foreign countries, medicine, natural history, science and more. It even included propaganda pamphlets from both sides of the English Civil War. The Willoughby Library came to be regarded as one of the best private medieval libraries in the country.
It is known that the Willoughby Library was housed at Middleton Hall continuously from the time of Margaret de Freville (wife of Sir Hugh Willoughby and Sir Richard Bingham) until the late 17th century, when the contents were moved to Wollaton Hall by Cassandra and Thomas Willoughby (children of Francis Willughby). An inventory of Middleton Hall from 1687, described the presence of three connected libraries on an upper floor, the first room being full of “writings” and the middle room being completely full of books placed all the length from end to end on shelves, tables and in chests. There were also a number of other study rooms.
After the Willoughby Library was moved to Wollaton Hall, Cassandra meticulously went through the family’s extensive documents that formed part of the collection, teaching herself old script and various old languages in order to do so. The first known inventory of the Library was compiled by Thomas Willoughby, 1st Lord Middleton, at the start of the 18th century. However, the remains of this inventory are damaged and incomplete and it is thus impossible to fully know what the Library once contained.
The Willoughby Library remained intact at Wollaton Hall until 1925. Just as the family needed to sell many of their Estates to pay for death duties, they also had to sell many of their possessions too. The Willoughby Library was then broken up and 765 items from it were sold at Christie’s between 15th and 18th June 1925. Its sale catalogue is consequently a helpful source of information on some of the historic contents of the Library. The books and manuscripts that were once in the Willoughby Library were then scattered between numerous worldwide private collections and institutions.
This has inadvertently led to something of a worldwide treasure hunt for curators, known as their holy grail quest. In the 16th century many of the books of the Willoughby Library were rebound and very ancient religious texts were broken up and used in the new bindings. Historically, it was argued that this was an act of vandalism. However, modern curators point to the fact that this re-binding appeared to have happened at the time of the Reformation when to be found in possession of Catholic religious texts was severely punishable. Furthermore, it is also now known that the recycling of old texts as bindings had been practised for centuries. However, when the Willoughby Library was sold and its contents dispersed, no-one knew that the books contained individual pages from ancient texts. To make discovering them even more difficult, the Willoughby family rarely placed their name in the books they owned. Over time, some of these ancient pages have been discovered when books have undergone conservation work and were rebound. The British Library has acquired a number of these lost pages and still actively seeks and aims to purchase these lost pages whenever one is discovered in order to reconstruct the manuscripts page by page.
Despite the sale, a significant portion of the family’s archive, legal papers, manuscripts and books remained in the Willoughby family’s possession. A large portion of this was subsequently transferred for safekeeping to the University of Nottingham. In 2007, the University of Nottingham, with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, purchased from Lord Middleton the core remaining medieval manuscripts and 43 early books from the remaining Willoughby Library, which is now known as the Wollaton Library Collection.
Further Reading:
Ralph Hanna & Thorlac Turville-Petre (ed), The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts, 2010.
"Wollaton Library Collection", Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham, https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/collectionsindepth/medievalliterarymanuscripts/wollatonlibrarycollection/wollatonlibrarycollection(wlc).aspx
Author - Debbie Jordan, Middleton Hall Volunteer.
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