INTERVIEW ‘‘
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
Our users range from academics to local businesspeople or students looking for a quiet area to study as well as a core group of homeless users who use our computers every day. – Melanie Strong
How a library survives for 600 years
Guildhall Library celebrates a 600-year anniversary and illustrates how the idea of a library transcends its buildings and even its collections. Senior Librarian, Melanie Strong, explains how what happened hundreds of years ago is still playing out today.
GUILDHALL Library is a reincarnation of what is believed to be England’s first public library, opening in London 600 years ago, and which is celebrating the anniversary with a free exhibition Guildhall Library 600 (
https://tinyurl.com/Guildhall600).
Opening in 1425 the library thrived for over a century until political events during the Reforma- tion led to the contents of the original library being stolen, leading to the building being repurposed in 1553. But the history and legacy survived a near 300-year gap and was used to resurrect the project in the Nineteenth Century.
Founding The library’s creation is sometimes credited to the City’s most famous Mayor, Richard (Dick) Whittington. But while the money to build it did come from his will, it was John Carpenter, the principal executor of the will, who decided to use some of it to found the library.
Melanie Strong, Senior Librarian at Guildhall Library, who has worked there for eight-and-a-half years, said: “Carpenter was Town Clerk or Common Clerk of the City from 1417-1438. With Whittington, he had written Liber Albus (the white book) which was the first book written about the laws and prac- tices of the City of London. Carpenter was a keen reader and bibliophile and oversaw the building of the library. His own will consists of 72 books, on subjects such as political theory and religious text. He left many of his books to friends, naming which book went to which person in his will; the rest he left to be “chained” at the common library at Guildhall.” But they said: “Much less is known about what a
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public library would have looked like then. We don’t have a catalogue of books, or a list of users. We don’t even know if women would have been admitted. The library was attached to the theological college at Guildhall. Many of the people who donated books to the library were clergy, but recent scholarship believes that merchants who were members of the Livery Companies could also have used the library.”
Collection development
Melanie said that all the books traced to the original library collection were theological, rather than his- torical, but they said there may be some interesting literary possibilities. “Scholars have looked through wills at the City of London and seen examples of books that were donated to the library, and all of those were theological texts. This includes a copy of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra gentiles written between 1259 and 1275 and De proprietatibus re- rum (‘On the properties of Things’) by Bartholemew the Englishman, a popular medieval encyclopaedic reference book written in the 13th century. These books were left by Hugh Damlet, the rector of St Peter Cornhill. John Graunt left a Latin English dictionary, as well as a book of epistles and gospels for mass. The British Library hold a copy of Thomas Aquinas’ Sentences, which has an inscription that it was donated to the library at Guildhall, but the name of the donor is missing.”
More evidence of the theological focus comes from the schedule for the Guildhall College in 1549 saying that “the library is a house appointed by the Mayor and commonality for […] all students for their edu- cation in divine scriptures” and the only book from the original library in the current collection is, Peter
Winter 2025
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