Christ Church MS. 473

Provenance and Acquisition

This small, unadorned manuscript is a copy of a Puritan petition and accompanying ‘supplication’ to the Parliament that met in November 1584 (on the context, see Patrick Collinson, Godly People(London, 1983), 361–64). The text has been attributed to Thomas Sampson who, by the time of their composition, must have been in his late sixties. His origins are not fully clear, but he graduated at Cambridge in 1542 and was a fellow of Pembroke College in 1548; he was a Marian exile and, on his return, refused a bishopric; instead, he was appointed Dean of Christ Church, being installed on 5 September 1561, and made his mark by his determination to extirpate remnants of ‘superstition and idolatry’, including missals (see Introduction). His tenure, however, was short-lived: he was deprived four years later for his Puritan refusal to wear the surplice. This was not quite the end of his association with the House: in 1567, he donated one volume of the set of Concilia generalia, published in Cologne in that year (now G.1.3.3; Ker, ‘Provision’, 503). Meanwhile, he was re-establishing his career as a preacher, only to be afflicted by a series of strokes in 1573 which left him in fear of his life, though he recovered partially and survived until 9^th April 1589, producing some writings – apart from this petition attributed to him – in his later years (Alec Ryrie in Oxford DNB; J. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis Part I, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1922–24), 4:12; for his time in Oxford, see C. M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983), 29–39).

The history of our manuscript is unclear until the early nineteenth century when it was included in the 1824 catalogue of the London bookseller, Thomas Rodd (no. 4981 – the number is written in pencil at the top left of fol. 1 – priced at 7s 6d; Schoenberg Database, no. 85360), and was one among several volumes bought by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) (A. N. L. Munby, The Formation of the Phillipps Library up to the Year 1840(Cambridge, 1954), 47). It was his MS 4064: the number is at top left of fol. 1 and again, below his book-stamp, at the final verso; it is also on a glued slip at the foot of fol. 1. It appears in his catalogue: The Phillipps Manuscripts…, intro. A. N. L. Munby (London, 1967) [Photostat reproduction of Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in bibliotheca D. Thomae Phillipps, Bart A.D. 1837(Middle Hill, 1837)], 58. After his death, it was put up for sale at Sotheby’s in London on the first day of the sale of part of his manuscript collection, taking place on 19–22 June 1893, when it was number no. 199, being described in the sale catalogue as ‘curious and important’. It would appear that it was bought back by his grandson, Thomas Fitzroy Fenwick, who had charge of the collection after Phillipps’s death, since at bottom right of final verso, written at right angles to page: ‘T.F.F. x D[?] 1893’.

He did not hold on to it for long: as is revealed by the tipped-in folio at the front board, it soon passed to the London booksellers, Ellis & Elvey, from whom it was bought by the Dean of ChCh, Francis Paget. He, in turn, donated it to the House with another manuscript of ‘eleven letters of Dean Gaisford to Dr. Ch. Burney’, now MS 436 (both gifts recorded for 1899–1900 at Library Records 45/15, no. 5). It is not clear whether Paget had purchased this small volume conscious of the association with one of his earliest predecessors; he was certainly aware of the significance of Thomas Sampson from Strype’s Annals, for he mentions him in his Introduction to the fifth book of Hooker’s treatise Of the laws of ecclesiastic policy(Oxford, 1899). Paget (1851–1911), himself a Houseman, was appointed Dean in succession to Henry Liddell in 1892. His tenure is partly remembered for the raucousness of the undergraduates in his time: a letter, dated 17^th May 1894 survives in which he assures complainants about his harsh treatment of student revellers that those who smashed windows the previous Friday had not been sent down, only rusticated, and that the blame for the damage rested with ‘strangers who were guests of the Bullingdon Club’ (Library Records 94/1). In 1901, he was preferred to the bishopric of Oxford, which he held until his death (E. H. Pearce, rev. J. F. A. Mason in Oxford DNB).