Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
(1923)
numismata (quà argentea quà aerea quinquaginta) plus minus'), but without date. Macray, op. cit
(1981)
Great Ornament
(1991)
Numismatics in Britain from 1600 to the outbreak of the Civil War ’ , in Europäische numismatische Literatur im 17 . Jahrhundert
This selection represents only a portion of Barton's numismatic library. Heberden Archives
(2010)
Mildenberg recorded only a large silver tetradrachm of the revolt (T 96.9) in the Ashmolean
A Great Ornament to the University: the development of numismatics in Oxford in the seventeenth century
Antiqua numismata (Venice, 1736)
NCA 813 is a copy of an extract from the will. There is no such coin chest in the college today
(2001)
The Heberden Coin Room: Origin and Development (Oxford, 1972, rev
(2009)
10; see also his 'The Development of Numismatics in Britain during the 18th Century
(1986)
Antiquarian Studies
F. McCall (2013)
Baal's Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution
The letters to Ducarel were printed in John Nichols
(1940)
Oxford Coin-collectors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Jean Loop (2013)
Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century
Martyn Wade (2009)
In the National Library of ScotlandThe Works of Thomas de Quincey
(1993)
Thesaurus temporum (Leiden, 1606), sigs. xx. For summary but authoritative statements on these matters see Anthony Grafton
(1980)
Sadleir's dated note on her intended gift of books '& my coins' can be found in the front end-papers of Trinity College
Tabulam hanc à se restauratam, et supplementis quibusdam egregijs humanissimè sibi subministratis auctam
NCA Lib/L1, formerly library MS 382
It is now NB.149.27, and was dedicated to Wykeham's two colleges. Barton also gave Jean-Pierre Niceron's Memoires pour servir à l'Histoire des Hommes Illustres dans la
For Swinton's coin collecting see Milne, op. cit
(2005)
Numismatics in Britain from 1600 to the outbreak of the Civil War
(2013)
Hunter’s world: The art and science of eighteenth-century collecting (Farnham
Opera selecta (Amsterdam, 1709), 'Chronologia Veteris Testamenti . . . nummis antiquis subinde illustrata
(1963)
Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones'. The account quoted below comes from pp. 19-20, where Waley is translating from Anquetil-Duperron's own account
Michael Hunter (2016)
William Hunter’s World. The Art and Science of Eighteenth-Century CollectingJournal of The History of Collections, 29
The reference fits both the first (1744) and second editions of Frölich (1754), and see pp. 83--91 in full
The identity of this 'Gentleman
(2014)
Dr Barton's Benefaction of Books to the College Library at Winchester, 1762; Dr Shipman's Benefaction of Books to the College Library at Winchester, 1762' (noted by Carly Watson
Orbis eruditi literatura à charactere samaritico deducta
(1985)
Azaria de’Rossi and Septuagint Traditions
(1984)
), and for the inscriptions see p
Abstract The growth of coin collections in the University of Oxford is only partially understood, with most scholars having focused on the original Bodleian cabinet, or on early collectors based in Corpus Christi and in Christ Church. This article addresses Philip Barton (d. 1765), a Canon of Christ Church, but who had been educated at New College. On his death he bequeathed his small but valuable collection of English coins to Christ Church, but it was New College that profited from his very extensive classical collection, numbering over 4,000 pieces, and accompanied by a library of around fifty valuable numismatic books. This article traces the rise of numismatic study in that college, the terms under which the Barton cabinet was received, and its fortunes to the present day. Contemporary interpretations of one of Barton’s most prized coins, a Jewish ‘shekel’, are also discussed and appraised. Catalogues of Barton’s bequests are supplied as online appendices. Historians of numismatics generally deprecate that activity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, identifying only a ‘faltering start’ after the foundation of the British Museum in 1753.1 Earlier, many individuals collected coins, and many scholars wrote about them; but when compared to their European counterparts, they have been judged inferior both in the quantity and quality of their collections and publications. Several studies have significantly nuanced this position, especially Jonathan Kagan’s fine essay on numismatics in Britain from 1600 to the outbreak of the Civil War, and David Berry and Henry Kim’s study of seventeenth-century numismatics at Oxford;2 but it remains true that the study of coins in Britain was throughout this period chiefly a story of individual scholars, sometimes isolated, sometimes working in loose networks. Institutional commitment, perhaps especially necessary for managing coins, was slow to materialize. In the University of Cambridge, for instance, Andrew Perne (1519?–1589), as part of his enormous collections of books, antiquities, and instruments, bequeathed coins to his college, Peterhouse, and also to the university itself, which received further small bequests in 1649, 1657, and 1686; and in 1649 Anne Sadleir announced her intention to give both coins and books to Trinity College, these only arriving in the college library after the Restoration.3 But these were isolated events, and did not provoke much specialist research in that university. What was required was a more general shift within academic culture, and that perhaps came only in the later seventeenth century, when the illustrative value of coins in teaching ancient history at the undergraduate level became popular enough to provoke semi-textbooks such as Obadiah Walker’s admittedly rambling Greek and Roman History Illustrated by Coins and Medals (London, 1692). The fruits of this genteel learning, assisted too by the rise of the Grand Tour, included such fine works as Joseph Addison’s Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (London, 1726, but composed in or just after 1702, when Addison had been on the Continent). This book shows that the study of coins was beginning to appeal to a broader audience, and was also becoming more ambitious as a discipline. Addison, for instance, mentioned that ‘an ingenious Gentleman of our own nation’ was intending a work on the history of ancient architecture solely from coin evidence, many of the actual structures having long since disappeared.4 This was a more sophisticated use of coins than as merely illustrative of matters otherwise known from textual sources, but it is true that Addison in the main defended the use of coins ‘Especially in relation to the Latin and Greek poets’, as his subtitle read. Eighteenth-century English scholars, indeed, had less enthusiasm for the harder business of comparative metrology than their seventeenth-century predecessors, who had produced such impressive works as John Greaves’s Discourse of the Roman Foot and Denarius (1647), and Edward Bernard’s De mensuris et ponderibus antiquis libri tres (1688). Addison was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and he doubtless picked up his fashionable interest in coins there. Nevertheless, early coin collecting in the Oxford colleges is understood only very partially: activity in Corpus Christi and in Christ Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been charted, but the picture is unclear for most of the other colleges, as is the transition from personal to corporate collecting.5 This article will focus on what we can recover of such interests in New College, Oxford, a college not normally associated with such activities. The earliest indication of personal collecting in New College, a society with a statutory number of no fewer than seventy fellows at any one time, comes in the form of a bequest recorded in the early 1670s of William Hunt, bd and fellow of the college, who left around fifty silver and bronze coins to the Bodleian’s collection;6 this may indicate that there was no corresponding college collection at this point. Hunt, from Burford, was active in the college in the 1620s and 30s (ba 1624, ma 1628, bd 1636),7 and his enthusiasm may have had its origin in this period; Archbishop Laud established the Bodleian coin cabinet in 1636. Most institutions must have acquired books on coins before any coins themselves, and indeed various numismatic books entered the college library in the seventeenth century, both by bequest and by purchase. From the 1690s, the college sold library duplicates and bought new books with the proceeds, and in 1696 we find copies purchased by this mechanism of Ezechiel Spanheim’s De praestantia et usu numismatum antiquorum (1671) and Jacques Oisel’s Thesaurus selectorum numismatum antiquorum (1677), each costing 12s. The Restoration warden, Michael Woodward, bequeathed to his college in 1675 both his own library and an annuity for the acquisition of new books, and from the Woodward bequest were purchased, in 1695 Jean Foy-Vaillant’s Numismata (probably the edition of 1694), in 1711 a new edition of Spanheim (1706), and finally in 1751 Francis Wise’s recent Bodleian coin catalogue of 1750.8 The first evidence we have of corporate interest in actual coins in New College is secondary: in the eighteenth century, Richard Rawlinson remarked that part of the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood’s collection of ‘many and curious’ coins was purchased by the college library following Wood’s death in 1695.9 There seems no reason to doubt this testimony; but no corroboration has been recovered. The next piece of evidence is also the major event in the college’s history of coin collecting, and the subject of this article. This is the bequest of Philip Barton (d. 1765), one of a family of academics, of Worcestershire origins. Barton, a Wykehamist, took his degrees in law at New College (bcl 1720, dcl 1733), and steadily collected ecclesiastical dignities, including prebends at Chichester (1730), Winchester (1731), and finally a canonry (Second Prebend) at Christ Church (1733), having held a fellowship of Winchester College since 1724. A keen antiquary, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1752. A few of his letters to fellow Antiquaries survive, including two to Richard Rawlinson on Wykehamist matters, and two to the numismatist Andrew Ducarel, showing Barton in action, describing and weighing English coins in the collection at Corpus Christi College for Ducarel.10 His brother Henry’s son, also Henry, was the Warden of Merton College from 1759 until his death in 1790, and that Henry’s brother, Philip, also attended New College, matriculating in 1737 (ba 1741, ma 1745, bd 1752). In a charming letter written from a coffee house in 1791, when he must have been a very old man, this Philip presented £500 to the college, wishing, he said, to avoid stamp duty on legacies.11 A third Philip, who attended Christ Church – nothing to do with these Worcestershire men – has been confused with Philip the coin collector, and this mistake has obscured the common origins of the Barton coins in Christ Church and New College.12 For it was the elder Philip who gave to Christ Church towards the end of his life ‘his small but extremely choice cabinet of English coins, amounting to 591 pieces, many of them of rarity and distinction; included in this number were 14 British gold and silver, 102 English gold, 339 English silver and 59 Scottish gold and silver’.13 To his other institution, Winchester College, went books, specifically 400 editions of the classics and works of theology, apparently in 1762.14 Finally, as Barton set down in his will: Whereas I have in my life time given to Christ Church and Winchester College such Medals Coins and books as I intended to leave to those Societies by my Will I do therefore give to New College in Oxford all my Greek Roman City Consular Imperial and other antient Coins desiring they may be first Carefully examined under the Direction of my two Executors [his nephews, Philip and Henry Barton] and all Duplicates and Superfluous pieces may be first taken away unless where there is Something Particular in the Coin or the Preservation beautifull and then I desire they may be left so that the Collection may be as entire and Valuable as it reasonably Can when they are thus separated I desire a Catalogue of them may be made and that they may Continue in the Cabinet where they now are and my Desire and Request is the Warden and Fellows of the said College will please to permit them as also such Books of Medals as I shall convey with them to stand in some distinct and separate part of the Archives of their Library under the immediate Care and Direction of the Warden Subwarden and Librarian of the Said College and never to be seen or perused by any person whatsoever but in the continued Presence or constant attendance of either one or more of them the said Warden Subwarden and Librarian of the said College[.] And my further Desire is that they may be constantly examined and compared by the Catalogue every Lady Day in the Morning as is most convenient before the time of Dinner and in the Presence of the Deane Bursars and other Officers of the College who are in Town and who are hereby desired that they will please to attend[.] The Cabinet is large and Capable of receiving such future Benefactions as shall be given and which I hope will be Supplyed from time to time so as to continue each respective Series and to encourage so agreeable and usefull a Study in the said College.15 So Barton’s English coins went to Christ Church, and his Greek and Roman coins to New College. The New College bequest was noted in the library’s benefactors’ register too, although as a collection of ‘ærorum et aureorum’ – that is bronze and gold, no silver mentioned – even though the collection inevitably contained many silver coins. The ‘Books of Medals’ bequeathed were said to have numbered ‘ultra quinquaginta’, over fifty.16 This bequest of coins together with books for interpreting them is conspicuous for its clear pedagogical aim, and may be compared with Wake’s famous bequest to Christ Church in 1737, and to the slightly later cabinet and library of William Hunter (1718–1783), relocated from London to Glasgow in 1807.17 It may be contrasted with the coins of Joseph Kilner of Merton, who left his chest behind him when he left the college in 1767, but probably for the use of his younger brother Samuel Kilner, the antiquary, and so these were not, or not yet, a collegiate collection.18 A catalogue of Barton’s bequest was indeed made, and survives in the college’s archives.19 It is a large thin folio, commencing with exactly the same extract from Barton’s will as quoted above. The coins are then presented, usually just through one-word descriptions, arranged, as detailed below, into sixty-seven drawers, represented in the catalogue by rubricated ‘N’s (I have placed in bold in {} brackets total numbers of specimens originally listed under each category): Nummi Aurei Græci et Romani [n i] {42} Nummi Græci Argentei | Tetradrachmi Urbium et Virorum Illustrium [n ii] {40} Nummi Urbium et Populorum, listed Alpha-Omega [n iii-xi] {578} Nummi Regum & illustrium Virorum [n xii- xvii] {266} Nummi Consulares seu Denarij Familiarum Romanarum [n xviii-xxii] {309} Nummi Imperatorum Romanorum, vertically by reigns, but horizontally by: ‘Denarii argentei’ [n xxiii-xxix] {557} ‘Græci’ [n xxx-xxxviii] {518} ‘Ex Ære magno’ [n xxxix-xlix] {422} ‘Ex Ære medio’ [n l-lvi] {427} ‘Ex Ære minimo’ [n lvii-lxiv] {789} ‘Ex Ære Latini’ (i.e. Anastasian coinage) [n lxv] {28} ‘Ægyptiaci’ [n lxvi] {31} [= 2683 imperial coins] Nummi maximi Moduli Miscellanei [n lxvii] {13} Spurious coins {2} Thus the total number of specimens in the collection, even after the abstraction of duplicates, was 4,022, a very considerable collection for the time, far outstripping Barton’s bequest to Christ Church, and comparable to the Bodleian Coin Chest itself, to judge from Francis Wise’s catalogue, published fourteen years before Barton’s executors got to work. Indeed, the comparison with the Bodleian underlines certain strengths of Barton’s collection, for instance his twenty-eight gold imperial coins, as opposed to the Bodleian’s thirteen. (A full comparison between the two collections is beyond the scope of this article, but in online Appendix ii I have marked with an asterisk or a dagger items also appearing in Wise.)20 The Barton catalogue shows signs of use: loosely tucked in at the front is a near-contemporary attempt to recast on proper lines the opening pages of the catalogue, specifically the gold coins, giving descriptions of obverse (‘a’) and reverse (‘b’), with cross-references to the scholarly literature, namely to the standard works of Beger, Liebe, Occo, Pembroke, Theupolus, and Wise. These works, with the exception of Theupolus (or Theupolis),21 are all held by the college today, chiefly thanks to Barton and his executors; thus this attempt is also an example of Barton’s coins and books being used in concert, as he had intended. Thanks to this insert, we can securely identify these types, and most of these specimens, today. The catalogue itself contains the odd later note, such as, after two final examples in the ‘Miscellanei’ marked as spurious, a list of further ‘fictitios’ items among the foregoing catalogue. There are several pencil annotations, mainly marked ‘1812’, noting missing coins (not many); and there is another such note dated 1842 (though to 19 June 1842, so not Lady Day). So Barton’s coins were at least checked in those years, and the collection suffered some losses – although almost all these, it may be noted, occurred in categories where the college had multiple specimens, so the series themselves were almost never broken. The catalogue volume then concludes with a list of numismatic books,22 evidently the volumes bequeathed by Barton to accompany his collection. These are all included in the online appendix. Barton was not a very productive scholar. His publications are exhausted by four occasional sermons and an edition of Plutarch’s parallel life of Demosthenes and Cicero (Oxford, 1744), a copy of which he also presented to New College.23 We do have one character sketch of the comfortable Canon Barton, as provided by the French scholar of Zoroastrianism, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who visited Oxford in 1762.24 He dined at Barton’s lodgings in the company of the eccentric orientalist Dr John Swinton (1703–1777),25 and, in Arthur Waley’s description, ‘was pained to observe the obsequious manner in which Dr Swinton behaved towards Dr Barton. He could find no cause for this except the fact that though Dr Swinton was rich, Dr Barton, owing to the many benefices which he enjoyed, was richer still.’ After dinner they went to visit Thomas Hunt, Regius Professor of Arabic and also a Canon of Christ Church. As Anquetil-Duperron later wrote: I could not help laughing to myself by the figure cut by my two guides. Dr Swinton, all huddled-up in his gown, his head poked forward and crowned with a filthy old three-cornered cap, looked the complete Academic stooge. Dr Barton, tall and well-built, walked several paces ahead of him, solemnly fluttering a noble gown with satin-lined facings which were well matched by a velvet cap, the front peak worn well down over his forehead, an arrangement which seemed to enhance his air of pride. Add to that a continual turning of the head, now this way, now that as though better to admire his own stately progress, and you have the faithful portrait of an opulent English Canon. As his surviving letters to Ducarel demonstrate, Barton evidently enjoyed communicating his numismatic interests. There is a further, notable example of this. In the 1750s, Barton lent a certain coin to the London-based librarian and antiquary Charles Morton for his revision of Edward Bernard’s 1689 palaeographical table attempting to derive all the scripts of the ‘learned world’ from a ‘Samaritan’ original.26 Bernard, followed by Morton, had lumped together into his first and oldest category ‘Adamic’, ‘Noachic’, ‘Samaritan’, and ‘Phoenician’ scripts, drawn mainly from assumed coin evidence and from the Samaritan Pentateuch; we would today classify Bernard’s first category as comprehending the related Palaeo-Hebrew, Samaritan, and Phoenician scripts. That the current Hebrew script had a different predecessor, often by analogy called ‘Phoenician’ or ‘Samaritan’, was a realization as old as the church father Jerome, who had traced the origin of the current script to the time of the biblical Ezra (Esdras) the Scribe.27 Study of this hypothesis was associated in sixteenth-century scholarship chiefly with Guillaume Postel, who had presented coin evidence to support Jerome’s claim,28 and Joseph Justus Scaliger, who accepted the historical priority of the script now used solely by the modern Samaritans, with whom he was in epistolary contact.29 Barton’s coin featured such ‘Samaritan’ characters, and Morton had it engraved for his new edition of Bernard’s chart (Fig. 1). This is the very coin described in the Barton catalogue as ‘Siclus Samaritanus quantivis pretij’ (‘a Samaritan shekel of great value’), cross-referenced to this engraving and to illustrations of similar coins in Erasmus Frölich’s Annales Syriæ (1744, 2nd edn 1754).30 It was kept in a drawer with other ‘nummi rariores’, including four coins inscribed literis Punicis, being a coin of Tiberius from Tripoli (i.e. Oea), and three of unspecified periods from Cadiz and Carteia.31 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Detail from Bernard, rev. Morton, Orbis eruditi literatura à charactere samaritico deducta (1759), image from EEBO (Newberry Library copy). Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Detail from Bernard, rev. Morton, Orbis eruditi literatura à charactere samaritico deducta (1759), image from EEBO (Newberry Library copy). Those involved in handling this specific ‘Samaritan’ coin (Fig. 2) in the 1750s would not have doubted its Jewish origin. Very similar coin types had been discussed at length since the time of Postel by scholars including, in chronological order, the Jewish scholar Azaria de’Rossi in Ferrara,32 and then the Christian scholars Arias Montanus in Antwerp,33 Juan Bautista Villalpando in Seville,34 Athanasius Kircher in Rome,35 Brian Walton in London,36 Jean Hardouin in Paris,37 and Adriaan Reland in Utrecht. It was the latter’s influential De nummis veterum Hebraeorum qui ab inscriptarum literarum forma Samaritanis appellantur (Utrecht, 1709) that provided the parti pris for the eighteenth century.38 The debate was important, because such coins provided the best evidence for the original Hebrew script, and if they could be authenticated and dated accurately they might suggest certain conclusions about the script in which the Old Testament itself had first been written down and circulated. The appraisal of numismatic evidence was here essential to biblical criticism, where the authenticity or otherwise of the received Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and whether that original had included vowel-pointing or not (for Samaritan was unpointed), were matters of intense interconfessional debate. Fig. 2 a-b. View largeDownload slide Barton’s bronze ‘Samaritan shekel of great value’, Heberden Coin Room 38134. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Fig. 2 a-b. View largeDownload slide Barton’s bronze ‘Samaritan shekel of great value’, Heberden Coin Room 38134. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. The history of this debate, which had been running since at least the time of Maimonides in the twelfth century, is a subject in itself, but for present purposes only the tail-end of the controversy is relevant. As can be seen in Fig. 1, Morton’s engraving of Barton’s coin cross-referenced a passage on the ancient Hebrew coinage in the clergyman John Jackson’s learned three-volume Chronological Antiquities (London, 1752). Jackson, following the work of Reland and others, argued from 1 Maccabees 15:6, ‘I [King Antiochus] give thee [Simon] leave also to coin money for thy country with thine own stamp’, that the Jews had only coined money from start of the Hasmonean Period (140 bc), when Simon the High Priest was thus given leave to coin in his own name. He associated this incident, as had several previous scholars, with various coins inscribed in the older Hebrew script and bearing the name of Simon/Shimon/Simeon and a ‘year of freedom’, from first to fourth. It seemed safe to these scholars to argue that Simon Maccabeus and the Simon of the coins were one and the same man, and that these were thus the first Hebrew coins, dating from 140 bc and the three or four years after that. Coin evidence, it seemed, showed that the older script was still in use long after the period in which the books of the Old Testament had been written down. No wonder Barton or his executors called this a coin ‘quantivis pretij’, and we may note that both Barton and his nephew were subscribers to Jackson’s book.39 This dating was ingenious but incorrect. In fact the coin illustrated is of the much later ‘Bar Kokhba revolt’ (ad 132–135, often referred to as the Second Jewish Revolt), led by Simon bar Kokhba. The revolt coinage is indeed stamped with the name Simon and the year of his rebellion, and Barton’s example is a large bronze of the regular coinage from the first year of the revolt, translations of the inscriptions being ‘Shimon Prince of Israel’, and ‘Year One of the Redemption’.40 Jackson had argued that written and incised scripts were unlikely to differ from one another at any given date, and thus his ‘Maccabean’ coins were evidence that Scripture itself was still written in such forms at that time. Ironically, just like the coinage of the First Jewish Revolt (ad 66–73), these issues, almost three centuries younger than eighteenth-century scholars thought, employed the palaeo-Hebraic lettering at a time when it was indeed either barely or no longer in use. A final irony is that the Bar Kokhba Revolt coinage was actually created by overstriking chiefly Roman coins–Barton’s ‘Samaritan shekel’ was not at all what it seemed. Barton inherited this mistake from the tradition detailed above–almost every collection of ‘ancient’ Jewish coins illustrated by the writers mentioned displays an unfiltered mixture of genuine Hasmonean coins, and coins of the Revolts. By the time of Wise’s Bodleian catalogue of 1750, a prevailing scepticism seemed safest: the commentary on Hebrew coins appended to that catalogue surveyed the whole debate, and while admitting the possibility of genuine Hasmonean coins, declared the Bodleian’s ‘Samaritan shekel’ to be a fake, cast (conflatum) rather than struck.41 The subsequent history of Barton’s coins at New College is not known, beyond the odd addition or pencil annotation to his testamentary catalogue. The library’s benefactors’ register does not record further donations, although it seems that the collection did expand; and in 1907, the college, the first to do so, placed its entire coin collection on deposit with the Ashmolean. Concerning this process we have only the information of the formal minute from the college meeting: It was resolved that the collection of coins in the possession of the college should be lent to the Ashmolean Museum with a view to the exhibition of the best coins under the following conditions 1. That the loan be revocable at will in whole or in part. 2. That the coins be granted safe storage. 3. That the Warden or any of the Fellows have ready access to the Collection for the purpose of inspection or study. 4. That, if a Catalogue be made, a copy should be sent to the New College Library.42 A copy of this declaration was then signed by Arthur Evans at the Ashmolean, and by Harold Butler, the college librarian, dated 19 March 1907.43 What prompted this handover was not written down, but we might note that 1907 was also the year in which Bodley’s Librarian, E.B.W. Nicholson, finally persuaded the college to deposit its manuscripts in the Bodleian, part of a general campaign he had been waging for twenty-five years. New College was in fact one of the last colleges to agree; in the 1880s and 1890s Nicholson had persuaded five other colleges to hand over their manuscripts. New College, the last to do so, followed fully fifteen years after Lincoln.44 The college appointed a committee to debate the matter in January, a final agreement was signed on 5 February 1907 by Butler and Nicholson, and Nicholson’s receipt of the manuscripts is dated 18 February of that year.45 Given this chronology, it is certainly plausible that Nicholson’s scheme suggested a similar manoeuvre for the coins. Evans had been campaigning since 1884 for the unification of the university’s various coin collections, and he had been annoyed by the Bodleian’s refusal to hand over to the Ashmolean the coins in its keeping. The decision of New College to split its collections between the Ashmolean and the Bodleian was a harbinger of what was to come, as the Bodleian finally capitulated over its coins, and the Heberden Coin Room opened its doors in 1922.46 Barton’s coins remain one of the core collections of the Heberden Coin Room, now incorporated into the systematic collection of the collegiate university, and many extant specimens can be tied with varying degrees of accuracy to specific entries in the Barton catalogue. For instance, there are four didrachms from ‘Neapolis’ in the current collection acknowledged as on loan from New College, and under ‘Nummi urbium et populorum’ in Barton’s catalogue we find eight specimens from ‘Neapolis’. The Barton catalogue does not distinguish between the various different cities called ‘Neapolis’ in antiquity, and the four specimens surviving today are very probably Barton coins. Likewise, there are six coins of ‘Tarentum’ of the right provenance in the modern collection; the Barton list has five. Where the Barton catalogue lists only one specimen we are on firmer ground for a direct match, especially, of course, in the gold coins, as they are rarer, and were also redescribed in detail, as we saw above. Thus the fourth coin on Barton’s list, a coin of Alexander, is described as having a ‘Caput imbarbe galeatum, fortasse Palladis’ on the obverse, and with ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ on the reverse, and ‘Victoria stans alis expansis, dextrâ coronam sinistrâ tridentem gerens. Ex adverso galea’. This can be matched exactly to a gold stater of Alexander the Great, struck c.325–c.310 bc, still in the collections today.47 Supplementary information Online appendices at Journal of the History of Collections online present (i) a list of the numismatic books identified in New College library, present or printed before 1800, and (ii) the text of the Executors’ Catalogue, transcribed from nca, Lib/l1. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Andrew Burnett, Aneurin Ellis-Evans, Christopher Howgego, and Andrew Meadows for assistance with numismatic questions. Footnotes 1 The phrase is that of Andrew Burnett, in ‘The British Museum and numismatics past and present’, in The British Museum and the Future of UK Numismatics, ed. Barrie Cook (London, 2011), pp. 2–10; see also his ‘The development of numismatics in Britain during the 18th century’, in Numismatik und Geldgeschichte im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: Beiträge zum Symposium Residenzschloss Dresden, 4.-9. Mai 2009, Heinz Winter and Bernhard Woytek (eds), (Vienna, 2015), pp. 29–41. 2 Jonathan Kagan, ‘Numismatics in Britain from 1600 to the outbreak of the Civil War’, in Europäische numismatische Literatur im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. C. E. Dekesal and Thomas Stäcker (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 125–39; David Berry and Henry Kim, ‘“A Great Ornament to the University”: the development of numismatics in Oxford in the seventeenth century’, in ibid., pp. 125–39. 3 Patrick Collinson, David McKitterick, and Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Andrew Perne: Quartercentenary Studies (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 36, 104, 112, 113; Philip Gaskell, Trinity College Library: The first 150 years (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 120–21, 290–91, 484; J. C. T. Oates, Cambridge University Library: A history from the beginnings to the Copyright Act of Queen Anne (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 139--41. Sadleir’s dated note on her intended gift of books ‘& my coins’ can be found in the front end-papers of Trinity College, Cambridge, ms r.16.2. 4 Joseph Addison, Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (London, 1726), p. 23. The identity of this ‘Gentleman’, who appears not to have brought this project to fruition, has not yet been established. 5 In addition to Berry and Kim’s ‘Great Ornament’, see J. Grafton Milne, ‘Oxford coin-collectors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Oxoniensia 14 (1949), pp. 53–62; C.H.V. Sutherland, ‘The coin collection of Christ Church’, Oxoniensia 5 (1940), pp. 140–45; Stuart Piggott, ‘Antiquarian studies’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. v: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 757–77, at pp. 759–60. For the Bodleian, Ashmolean, and Radcliffe collections, see W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1890), pp. 483–4; Edmund Craster, History of the Bodleian Library, 1845–1945 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 116–19; Berry and Kim, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 127–8. 6 Hunt’s bequest is noted in the Bodleian Benefactors Book, vol. 1 (= Bodleian, Lib. recs. b 903), p. 408, (‘numismata (quà argentea quà ærea quinquaginta plus minus’), but without date. Macray, op. cit. (note 5), p. 429, inferred 1672; Craster (‘h.h.e.c.’) in his ‘Miscellaneous donations recorded in the Benefactors’ Register’, Bodleian Library Quarterly 4 (1923–35), pp. 22–4, 43–7, 68–71, at p. 47, preferred ‘c.1674’. It is hard to be confident about undated entries in this period. 7 All such information comes, without further comment, from Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1500–1714 (Oxford, 1891–2). Warden Sewell’s Register (New College Archives [nca] 3968) adds that he was from Burford, and resigned his fellowship in 1641 on being appointed rector of Birchanger, but was never instituted because the incumbent lingered on, at what time ‘Constat vero eum ad aliud quoddam opimum beneficium \viz. Kibworth, com. Leicestr.,/ quo privatus in motibus civilibus, obit Oxonii ad \12 Feb./ 1659/60 et sepultus est in Claustro Collegii’. (For Hunt, who had a difficult time at Kibworth in the wars, see Fiona McCall, Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist clergy and the English Revolution (London, 2013), pp. 204--5.) Hunt’s bequest certainly arrived at (or was retrospectively processed by) the Bodleian in the 1670s, but the problem here is that the Hunt recorded above indeed made his will on 10 February 1659[/60], administration granted 20 July 1660 (National Archives, prob/11/299, fols. 172v--173r, testament of William Hunt, ‘Clerke late Fellow of new Colledge’), and this obviously does not square with the date the coins were acknowledged by the Bodleian. It is a short, hasty testament and mentions no coins, but Hunt’s sole inheritor was his son, also William, and it is possible they came to Oxford through him. There was a commoner of that name in the college (nca 3058, Sewell’s List of Commoners, giving a William Hunt, son of an Oxford ‘Plebius’, matriculating 17 November 1615, aged fifteen), but no degrees were recorded for this man and we know nothing more about him. 8 As recorded in nca 3968, Sewell’s Register. 9 Anthony Wood, Life and Times, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1891–1900), vol. i, p. 238; vol. iii. p. 506, from Bodleian, ms Rawl. J. fol. 6. 10 Bodleian, ms Rawl. letters 114*, fols. 53, 58 (two letters to Rawlinson, 22 January and 4 February 1753); ms Don. d. 87, nos. 21, 22 (two letters to Andrew Ducarel, 2 and 8 July 1755). The letters to Ducarel were printed in John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), vol. iv, pp. 585--6. 11 It is kept with the extract from his uncle’s will concerning coins (nca 813). 12 Sutherland, op. cit. (note 5), p. 143. Milne, op. cit. (note 5), p. 61, skirted the issue by naming Barton for Christ Church, but stating merely that New College ‘accumulated a very considerable collection’ in this period, without further comment. The same misunderstanding is implied by the remark of J. D. A. Thompson, ‘The Merton College coin collection’, Oxoniensia 17--18 (1952--53), pp. 188--92, at p. 188: ‘Kilner [i.e. Joseph Kilner, fellow of Merton from 1744 to 1767 and coin collector], like Barton, was more interested in English coins [than classical ones]’. 13 Sutherland, op. cit. (note 5), p. 143. Several lists pertinent to Barton may be found in the Heberden Coin Room’s archives, notably (1) Arch. Coll. Safe 1 (catalogue of Barton’s Irish coins by W. J., July 1785); (2) Arch. Coll. 8 (British coins and medals, 1782, with additions to 1826, of which Arch. Coll. 13--14, by the historian and numismatist C.W.C. Oman of All Souls, September 1890, with additional notes to 1939, is a revision); (3) Arch. Coll. 11 (English gold coins, 1776); and (4) Arch. Coll. 15 (‘P B’s Coins, Jan: 1st 1764’, with additions to the chest made by his executors and by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode, as he has signed these additions with his distinctive monogram). Arch. Coll. 21, a chronological list of emperors, may be associated with Barton, and Arch. Coll. 12, as discussed below, is a booklist, possibly of Barton’s numismatic books. 14 Winchester College, Fellows’ Library, ms 204, ‘Dr Barton’s Benefaction of Books to the College Library at Winchester, 1762; Dr Shipman’s Benefaction of Books to the College Library at Winchester, 1762’ (noted by Carly Watson, ‘The Legacy of an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman: Alexander Thistlethwayte’s Books in Winchester College Fellows’ Library’ (University of Birmingham, Ph.D. thesis, 2014), p. 157). 15 National Archives, prob 11/910, fols. 326v--27r, dated 16 July 1764, proved 14 August 1765. nca 813 is a copy of an extract from the will. There is no such coin chest in the college today; it may have accompanied its contents to the Ashmolean, but is now lost. 16 Benefactors Register (New College, bt1.4.6 = nca 3582, kept in library), p. 180. 17 Donal Bateson, ‘William Hunter’s numismatic books’, in William Hunter’s World: The art and science of eighteenth-century collecting , E. Geoffrey Hancock, Nick Pearce and Mungo Campbell (eds), (Farnham, 2013), pp. 283--303 (ch. 17). 18 Thompson, op. cit. (note 12). 19 nca Lib/l1, formerly library ms 382. 20 See online Appendix ii for an explanation. The present comparison is at best suggestive, and cannot indicate where the Bodleian chest held types lacking in Barton, nor the numbers of specimens in the Bodleian collection. Sometimes, for instance, the collections complemented each other neatly: Wise in his Nummorum antiquorum scriniis Bodleianis reconditorum catalogus (Oxford, 1750) lists one specimen for Gordian II but none for Gordian I; Barton conversely had one of the latter and none of the former. Barton’s executors also classed around fifty coins as incerti. 21 Laurentius Theupolus, Antiqua numismata (Venice, 1736). 22 This selection represents only a portion of Barton’s numismatic library. Heberden Archives, ms Arch. Coll. 12 is an unsigned catalogue of numismatic books divided into in folio, quarto, and octavo sections; its content and archival context strongly suggest that it is a list of Barton’s fuller numismatic library, including a two-volume manuscript catalogue of the Wake coins, although there are some items in Barton’s bequest list not represented in the Arch. Coll. catalogue. 23 Benefactors’ Register, p. 169. It is now nb.149.27, and was dedicated to Wykeham’s two colleges. Barton also gave Jean-Pierre Niceron’s Memoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Hommes Illustres dans la Republique des Lettres (Paris, 1727--45) in 43 volumes, now nb.64.1--43. A donation not recorded in the register is Minucius Felix, Octavius (Cambridge, 1712), nb.61.5, copy marked ‘E Dono Reverendi Phil: Barton L.L.B. è coll.nov.soc.’ 24 See Arthur Waley, The Secret History of the Mongols and other pieces (London, 1963), pp. 11--29, ‘Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones’. The account quoted below comes from pp. 19–20, where Waley is translating from Anquetil-Duperron’s own account, in French, which can be found in the first volume of his edition of the Zend-Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre (Paris, 1771), ‘Discours Préliminaire’, pp. cccclix--lx. 25 For Swinton’s coin collecting see Milne, op. cit. (note 5), p. 61, and Sutherland, op. cit. (note 5), p. 142. 26 Edward Bernard, rev. Charles Morton, Orbis eruditi literatura à charactere Samaritico deducta, & ab ipso edit. a.d. 1689 . . . Tabulam hanc à se restauratam, et supplementis quibusdam egregijs humanissimè sibi subministratis auctam, Musei Britannici curatoribus . . . d.d.d. Carolus Morton . . .a.d. 1759 ([London], 1759). The English Short Title Catalogue recognizes only one copy of this augmented edition in the British Isles, in the National Library of Scotland. But there is a fine exemplar bound before p. 25 of one Bodleian copy of Edmund Chishull, Antiquitates Asiaticæ (London, 1728), shelfmark Vet. a4 c. 424, once the copy of the numismatist Charles Godwyn and another in the ‘Animed versiones,’ p.103. 27 The three main discussions in Jerome are in his preface to (Vulgate) 3 Kings, and his comments on Ezekiel 9 on ‘the writer’s inkhorn’, and to (Vulgate) 4 Esdras 14. These were well known, and routinely discussed in any context dealing with ‘Samaritan’: see e.g. Angelus Rocca, Bibliotheca apostolica Vaticana (Rome, 1591), p. 89. 28 Guillaume Postel, Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum (Paris, 1538), sigs. cijv--[civ]v. 29 J. J. Scaliger, Thesaurus temporum (Leiden, 1606). For summary but authoritative statements on these matters see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A study in the history of classical scholarship.ii: Historical chronology (Oxford, 1993), pp. 734--6; Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic studies in the seventeenth century (Oxford, 2013), pp. 102--12. 30 ‘Vide Frolich Annales Syriæ Prolegomen. p. 87 et ejusdem Tabulam 18. Numm. 1 item Mortoni literaturam a Samaritano Charact. deductam’. The reference fits both the first (1744) and second editions of Frölich (1754), and see pp. 83--91 in full, with his table 18, fig. 1, a poor engraving of a worse specimen. 31 For the Punic coin of Tiberius see Roman Provincial Coinage [rpc] I, 832; the coin of Carteia is rpc i, 120 (both these have been identified in the current Heberden Collection). An uncertain coin in ‘Spanish’ lettering (probably a bronze or silver with Celtiberian script) is also included at the end of this category, and referenced to the discussion in ‘Morellius in Famil. Afraniâ’, i.e. Andreas Morell, Thesaurus Morellianus (Amsterdam, 1734), vol. i, p. 15. 32 See Joanna Weinberg, ‘Azaria de’Rossi and Septuagint traditions’, Italia 5 (1985), pp. 7--35, esp. pp. 26--8 for the coin debate. 33 Benedictus Arias Montanus, in Biblia Sacra [i.e. the Antwerp Polyglot] (Antwerp, 1569--72), vol. viii, ‘Thubalcain’, pp. 12--23 (reprinted in his Antiquitatum Iudaicarum Libriix (Leiden, 1593), pp. 113--40), ‘De Siclo’, at pp. 12--13. 34 Hieronymus Pradus and Joannes Baptista Villalpandus, In Ezechielem explanationes et Apparatus vrbis, ac templi Hierosolymitani (Rome, 1596--1605), Apparatus (vol. iii), pars ii, disp. iv, cap. 20--21 with table. 35 Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, (Rome, 1652-5) vol. ii, part 1, pp. 87--102, ‘Simon’ coin at p. 95. 36 Brian Walton, Biblia Polyglotta (London, 1657), vol. i, tract 1, pp. 36--38, being Walton’s supplement on shekels to Brerewood. Walton conjectured that Samuel was Samuel the Prophet, the coins being struck for him, ‘cùm ante reges ipse Rempublicam administraret’. 37 Jean Hardouin, Opera selecta (Amsterdam, 1709), ‘Chronologia Veteris Testamenti . . . nummis antiquis subinde illustrata’, pp. 601--3, where these coins are placed under 142 bc. This is followed by a useful register of biblical mentions of money. 38 Adriaan Reland, De nummis veterum Hebraeorum qui ab inscriptarum literarum forma Samaritanis appellantur (Utrecht, 1709), e.g. pp. 208--9, where the amphora types are called the most ancient of all Hebrew struck coins. 39 John Jackson, Chronological Antiquities (London, 1752), vol. i, pp. 114--19. 40 F. W. Madden, Coins of the Jews (London, 1881), pp. 230--46; Leo Mildenberg, Coinage of the Bar Kokhba War (Aarau, 1984), p. 294 (ser. iii, no. 1), and for the inscriptions see p. 354; David Hendin, Guide to Biblical Coins, 5th edn (New York, 2010), p. 385, no. 1376. Mildenberg recorded only a large silver tetradrachm of the revolt (t 96.9) in the Ashmolean, but the coin under discussion here is also still in the collections. 41 Wise, op. cit. (note 20), pp. 213--16. He offers some interesting remarks on the provenance of the original ‘Samaritan shekel’ in the Laudian coins, procured by Laud’s man in Germany, Samson Johnson, and said to be the very coin illustrated by Montanus (his evidence is the entry in the original Laudian catalogue, ms Laud misc. 554, where Johnson’s own source is named in the marginal note as one ‘Abraham of Crete’ (Abrahamus Cretensis), whose uncle, so ‘Abraham’ evidently claimed, had originally lent the coin to Montanus). 42 nca 9462, p. 548. 43 nca 3109. The relevant catalogues accompanying the loan are now Heberden Coin Room Archives, Arch. Coll. 2--3 (catalogue of coins in Muniment Room, supposedly by E. C. Wickham and presented to the Ashmolean on 7 February 1928); and Arch. Coll. 4--5 (catalogue of coins incorporated into the university collections, compiled by Grafton Milne in 1928 from the notes of H.G.G. Payne, ‘not checked throughout’ (this is Humfrey Payne, assistant in the Ashmolean’s Department of Antiquities from 1926 to 1928). Copies of these are held in New College Archives as l2/1–2 and l3/1–2 respectively. 44 Craster, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 189--93. 45 nca 9651, pp. 289–90; nca 3109. 46 C. M. Kraay and C. H. V. Sutherland, The Heberden Coin Room: Origin and development (Oxford, 1972, rev. 2001). 47 Heberden Coin Room, no. 23806 (http://hcr.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coin/hcr23806) © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
Journal of the History of Collections – Oxford University Press
Published: Nov 14, 2018
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.