1 Introduction

This chapter is taking an unusually long view of the second half of the 20th century, starting as it does with the English Reformation of 1539. To provide some background to the proliferation of denominational libraries in the UK it will begin by sketching a quick history of the changing religious scene in England from the 16th century until 1945, and the relationships between the Church of England, the State, and those who were out of communion with the Established Church. The second part looks at examples and case studies of different types of libraries in different denominations: how they flourished or floundered at different points in history, and how this was affected by or had an effect on the English religious scene and wider society. I will eventually tackle the prescribed subject of the Festschrift in the last part of the chapter, investigating the effect changes in religious adherence in the latter part of the 20th century have had on theology libraries, and suggesting how the history of religious libraries in England may be repeating itself in new ways in the present day.

As with all the other chapters in this book, the circumstances under which it has been written have had a significant effect on the research I have been able to carry out. Most libraries in the UK have had extremely limited on-site access for over a year, and no on-site access at all for about half of that time. As an added impediment, all three of London’s major Church history libraries (Dr Williams’s Library, Lambeth Palace Library and Friends’ House Library) are in the middle of major construction projects, which have temporarily made their collections inaccessible even to their own staff (who nevertheless went out of their way to be helpful). These three repositories hold important collections of pamphlets, annual reports, lectures, magazines and official histories of denominations and religious institutions, and it is in this suddenly unavailable grey literature which information on library history so often resides. I have had to use the resources I could get at, rather than the resources which would have been my first choice. As a consequence, some of my references are a little eccentric, and some basic facts are glossed over simply because under current conditions I could not access the materials which I knew contained the answers. I would like to offer my thanks to those who have generously answered emails with details of their own research, looked up references for me, lent me volumes from their bookcases at home, and offered various other forms of assistance. I would also like to acknowledge the Bibliographical Society who provided me with a small grant for membership of the London Library so that I could use their scholarly e-resources and borrow academic books by post while reading rooms were closed.

Even with the kindness of friends and strangers, the pandemic has resulted in some glaring gaps in this tale, for which I apologise but take no responsibility. Any errors which have crept in are, of course, mine, and for these I am willing to bear the full weight of the reader’s criticism.

2 Historical Background

The Church of England is a strange beast. It is a State Church which receives no state funding; it supplies half-a-dozen bishops to the upper chamber of parliament and its parish councils control local government in rural areas, but it has no real political power; its ultimate authority is the reigning English monarch, who is not required to belong to any religion so long as they are not Roman Catholic; it is the founding member of and controlling interest in the Anglican Communion, whose average member is a thirty-something woman living in sub-Saharan Africa.¹

Historians can and do argue endlessly about the precise causes of the English Church’s rebuttal of Papal authority in the mid-16th century, but acknowledge that it happened when King Henry VIII (reigned 1509–1547) defied the Pope because he wanted to annul his marriage and the Pope wouldn’t let him. England had fallen out with Rome before (the country was under an interdict 1208–1213), and in 1539 it could not have been clear either to the governing authorities or to the people at large that this particular rupture with the Roman Catholic Church would be permanent. Over the hundred years following the English Reformation there was little ideological agreement on whether the Church of England was a fully Reformed Protestant Church, or a Catholic Church temporarily out of communion with Rome. For much of the century allegiance to the Pope and the presentation of the Mass in Latin were strictly forbidden on pain of death, but the secular authorities were not ferociously assiduous in rooting out ordinary Catholics who practised their religion in private so long as they conformed in public.

A civil war broke out in 1642. Again, historians can and do argue endlessly about the causes, but one of the many lines of division was the role of episcopacy in the Church of England.² For a time, the English Church adopted a presbyterian model of governance, but reverted to episcopacy with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.³ The transition back to bishops and kings was surprisingly smooth, but a significant minority of ministers (around 2,000 men at a time when the Church of England had around 12,000 parishes) dissented from the reversion, and refused to conform to the revived liturgies of the Church of England.⁴ Rather than creating a string of martyrs, dissent from the Church of England was (except for a very brief period) permitted from this time.⁵ Non-Conformists lived under significant legalised discrimination, but they did not risk their lives for following their religious consciences. As with the Church of England’s break with Rome, it was by no means clear at the time that this tolerance of religious dissent would continue indefinitely, but Non-Conformists grew in confidence and influence as time went on, and by the mid-19th century the Church of England was in many ways just one denomination in the marketplace of religious adherence, albeit one with special status.⁶

3 Libraries and the English Reformation

The Catholic Church and its monasteries were the principal places for exchange of learning and knowledge in Mediaeval England. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 caused difficulties in the transmission of information, and for the perpetuation of libraries.⁷ When the religious houses were closed down their books were generally dispersed rather than destroyed, and the dispersed volumes often stayed within the local area or ended up in the hands of booksellers in the University towns.⁸ Although many books – particularly manuscripts – were destroyed around this time, it is thought that often this was because they were out of date, rather than because they were heretical. Even before the rupture with Rome, many libraries had already been modernising collections by replacing old-fashioned manuscripts with state-of-the art printed books, and books created with the old technology of hand writing were often recycled as waste paper rather than being semi-ritually burned.⁹ Many of the most valuable books and manuscripts from religious houses often went to the libraries of the king or his friends, a process which had started earlier in the 1530s when courtiers had been sent out to gather evidence to support annulment of the King’s marriage.¹⁰ A more deliberately ideological refinement of libraries took place during the reign of the actively Reformed Edward VI (reigned 1547–1553), but even this does not seem to have led to a popular orgy of book burning.¹¹ Although a few English monastic books were to end up in Germany, this predominantly local redistribution is in distinct contrast to the results of the 18th and 19th century declericalising revolutions on the continent, where a very large number of the books removed from monastic libraries ended up in the bookshops of London.¹²

English libraries housed in secular (in this instance meaning non-monastic) cathedrals, and in the newly Anglicanised college libraries of Oxford and Cambridge continued to some extent undisturbed by the Reformation. It was not made illegal to own Catholic books, and – even more so than in monastic establishments – books were sold, censored, or given away, but seldom deliberately destroyed.¹³ The library of Durham Priory presents an interesting case study of the fate of monastic libraries, although in some ways its remoteness from London makes it atypical.¹⁴ The Priory was founded in 1083, but its library can be traced back to a 7th century monastery at Lindisfarne.¹⁵ The area around Durham provided a significant centre of learning during the ‘dark ages’ of the 6th–8th centuries when much of Western Europe’s intellectual infrastructure crumbled in the face of war, plague and famine. During that period the north-east of England provided Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (634–687), hyperbolically described as “the only teacher of the first rank the West knew between Gregory the Great and the eleventh century,” Carolingian courtier and reviver of classical Latin Alcuin of York (735–804), and the great Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede (672–735).¹⁶ Britain had been the furthest, most exotic and least developed part of the Roman Empire, but eventually became the preserver and saviour of much of the learning of Rome, which it re-exported to the continent via the court of Charlemagne.

Far from disappearing at the Reformation, Durham Priory’s library was transferred almost completely to the newly secularised cathedral, where it continued to expand throughout the 1530s and 1540s.¹⁷ Durham’s statutes of 1551 included detailed provision for the library, which is considered to be an indication that the library was intended as a resource not just for the cathedral, but for all clergy in the surrounding area.¹⁸ Of course, some books were dispersed or destroyed in the 16th century, but not all deaccessioning is sinister, and weeding books is not a recent innovation.¹⁹ Few volumes seem to have travelled far from the old priory: of the 660 manuscripts and books identified from the pre-Reformation collections (it is unclear how many books the Priory library held in 1539), most are still housed in libraries in Durham.²⁰

The greater emphasis on vernacular books in the revived ecclesiastical libraries is at least partly a reflection in a coincident growth of the local printing trade: English printers did not produce books in Latin, and never really had.²¹ The increasing use of English in place of Latin was to have as strong an effect on ecclesiastical libraries as any direct result of changes in religious allegiance. Roman Catholics did not cease to exist in England of course, and needed books in Latin as well as English, but such works were generally printed on the continent, and smuggling literature from abroad was a risky enterprise. The greatest post-Reformation English Catholic libraries were built up across the Channel in colleges for English refugees in Italy, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

4 Anglican Libraries

Despite a certain continuity between the libraries of pre- and post-Reformation England, a need for additional theologically flavoured publicly available collections to take the place of the suppressed Roman Catholic institutions can be seen in a flurry of library-founding which took place in the early 17th century. In Oxford, the University library was re-founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley specifically for the use of the ‘public’ [i.e. middle or lower class] students, most of whom were preparing to be ordained.²² In 1610 in London, Archbishop Richard Bancroft set up Lambeth Palace Library for the “use of the Archbishops successively for ever,” which contained a large number of works which had previously belonged to monastic libraries including, somewhat ironically, many which arrived via the library of Henry VIII.²³ Two decades later, Sion College – which despite its name was not a seat of higher education, but more of a vicars’ social club – established a library for the use of clergy in the City of London.²⁴ This library was to become extremely famous, and even acted as a quasi-national library until the foundation of the British Museum in the mid-18th century. Most of the books in each of these Anglican libraries related directly to ‘Divinity’, but the collections also contained books on history, science, agriculture, medicine, foreign languages and any other subject which had gained the interest of the original founder or collector: as everything was subject to and created by God, any topic could be deemed relevant to the ‘Queen of Sciences’, as theology was sometimes grandly known.²⁵

All three of these major new ecclesiastical libraries underwent different fates during the Civil War (1642–1651) and the Commonwealth (1653–1660) which followed quickly on the heels of their openings. The two universities picked different sides in the war: while Cambridge was firmly associated with the Parliamentarians, Oxford was a Royalist stronghold, although the Bodleian Library managed to stave off disaster thanks to the intervention of a former student on the Parliamentarian side.²⁶ The clergy guild of Sion College became a hotbed of Puritanism, and as a consequence its library collection grew in esteem during the Commonwealth and was relatively – although not completely – safe from the military looting and vandalism which is a feature of all civil wars.²⁷ Of the trio, it was the archepiscopal library at Lambeth which underwent the greatest turmoil. Lambeth was nearly subsumed by Sion College, but a note in Archbishop Bancroft’s will meant that the books were dispatched wholesale to Cambridge, from where they were returned to London in 1664.²⁸ Many cathedral collections suffered significant disruption during the Civil War; perhaps more so than during the Reformation. However, the library in Durham escaped relatively unscathed, partly by ignoring orders to dismantle itself, and partly by opportunistically reinventing itself as the library of ‘Cromwell College’ for a short period of time.²⁹ In general, ecclesiastical libraries further from London and from the battle sites of the Midlands fared better than those in locations more easily accessed by Parliamentarian and Royalist troops. However, at the end of the Interregnum it was revealed that some cathedral collections had been at least partially hidden or reinvented rather than destroyed: notably, Gloucester Cathedral’s collection had remained intact and in situ, but been temporarily redesignated as a ‘Publique Library’. Despite their misfortunes, most cathedral libraries were fairly swiftly revived in the late 17th century with benefactions from sympathetic book collectors.³⁰

Parish libraries had first been a legal requirement for each church in England in the late 14th century, when it was ordered that every parish must own a set list of eight liturgical books which were replaced by a smaller number of compulsory vernacular works including the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in the mid-16th century.³¹

When legislation which had restricted printing to London, Oxford, Cambridge and York expired in 1695, the provincial publishing trade exploded. A flood of relatively cheap books became available to the reasonably literate middle and even working classes, and parish libraries could afford to expand their scope beyond prescribed texts.³² The size and purpose of parochial collections varied greatly, from a handful of volumes chained to a desk for use only by the incumbent, to public behemoths such as John Cosin’s library of 5,000 books in Durham or Thomas Tenison’s 7,000 volume library in London.³³ However, it was Thomas Bray who effected the most startling revolution in the public provision of theological books by founding the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) to send small but useful libraries across England, Wales, and the American colonies.³⁴ He also urged wealthy laity to set up lending libraries in market towns for the use of clergy and gentlemen, even going so far as to write a catalogue of the 55 books of theology, history and geography which he thought it should contain, and could be supplied for the modestly substantial sum of £30 (around €3,500 in 2020).³⁵

5 Tolerating the ‘Others’: Libraries of Religious Dissenters and Recusants

So far, we have dealt chiefly with the Established Church through its changing theologies and structures. But after the Civil War and Restoration the relatively small number of Roman Catholic Recusants were joined outside the Church of England by a large number of Protestant Dissenters. The Great Ejection of 1661 not only left expelled clergymen and their families homeless and unemployed, it also disbarred them – and their children and congregations – from access to many of their previous stores of scholarship. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both required students to subscribe to official Anglican doctrine and to the religious authority of the reigning monarch, and those whose consciences did not allow them to do so could not study or work there.³⁶ Even schools for the middle and upper classes were officially Anglican foundations: schoolmasters were licensed by the Church of England.³⁷ The sons of Dissenters were either not accepted for admission, or did not wish to risk being indoctrinated with High Church principles.

Dissenters quite quickly set up their own academies of secondary and higher education. At first these institutions were rather small and secretive, as active persecution of Non-Conformists could have erupted at any time.³⁸ Access to books was initially a significant problem at these new seats of learning: while persecution (rather than merely legal discrimination) remained a threat, and harassment from the authorities a present reality, it was important for the institutions to remain in a portable form, which prevented the amassing of large collections of books.³⁹ The extreme poverty of educated Dissenting clergy combined with a belief that Puritans would soon return to ascendancy in the Church of England and its Universities were added disincentives to the formation of libraries in early Dissenting Academies.⁴⁰ Non-Conformists grew in confidence as the new order grew in stability, but it was not until Philip Doddridge opened his Northampton Academy in 1730 that a single one of the new academies owned a library which was even moderately capable of properly supporting higher education.⁴¹ Nevertheless, the standard of education offered soon rivalled or even surpassed that of Oxford and Cambridge, not least because Non-Conformists maintained an intellectual contact with Reformed European theologians which the Church of England’s Universities almost entirely lacked. Modern foreign languages were routinely taught and read at Dissenting Academies, while the Universities stuck resolutely to the Classics.⁴² Cut off linguistically from Reformed scholars, and ideologically from Catholic scholars, Oxford and Cambridge became self-perpetuating intellectual backwaters in the 18th century, while the excluded Dissenters kept up to date with developing currents in continental theology.

In spite of the ‘Five-mile-Act’ which banned Non-Conformist ministers from coming within five miles of incorporated towns, in 1730 a major Non -Conformist library was able to open within the City of London, making the 7,600 books owned by leading Dissenter Dr Daniel Williams available to the public.⁴³ Dr Williams’s Library “acted as the headquarters of London Dissent” until the loosening of religious restrictions in the 19th century.⁴⁴ It now contains some 300,000 titles, and continues to be the centre of historic study for congregations with roots in the Independent, Presbyterian and Baptist traditions.⁴⁵ Dissenters continued to be forbidden from taking part in political life in the 18th century, but business and trade remained open to them as a sphere of activity. While most Protestant Dissenters remained in the poorer section of society, a small number – particularly from among the Quakers – did very well indeed, and were suitably poised to become extremely prominent figures in England’s late 18th century Industrial Revolution.⁴⁶ Non-Conformists were often perceived – or at least caricatured – as culturally and intellectually barren, and so as their danger decreased and their wealth increased they were keen to show that they were the intellectual and cultural equals of their Anglican neighbours.⁴⁷ By the 19th century Dissenters were beginning to develop institutional libraries as showpieces as well as for use. When a Baptist college was founded at Stepney in East London in 1810 its library initially had to rely on donations of relevant books from well-wishers, but by the end of the century the College had been able to move to fashionable Regent’s Park, and to build up a substantial specialist collection focusing on the history of the Baptist movement.⁴⁸ Now numbering some 70,000 titles and based in once-Anglican Oxford, this has become one of the foremost Baptist historical collections in the world.

The rise of the Methodist movement during the 18th century struck a further blow to Anglican hegemony. Methodism began as a reforming strand firmly within the Church of England, but became a separate denomination in 1795. Methodists only began formal denominationally focused training for its clergy in 1834, almost a century after it had first been suggested.⁴⁹ After a few years in North-East London, in 1843 the Wesleyan Theological Institution: Southern Branch moved to Richmond, which was then a commuter town to the South West of London. It was a very substantial institution, and its library was designed not only to support education, but also to act as a public statement of erudition. The library was to a great extent the intellectual offspring of the president of the Wesleyan conference Thomas Jackson (1783–1873).⁵⁰ Born in very humble circumstances, Jackson was an auto-didact who regretted that after leaving school at the age of 11, he had had no money to buy books, and no-one to direct his reading. He wanted ministers who came after him to have better opportunities, and he also wanted the library in Richmond College to be open to and suitable for use by the local public, and chose the titles accordingly.⁵¹ After Jackson’s personal library of 7,510 books was added in 1859, the library was described as “the completest collection of Protestant Theological Literature in the Connexion.”⁵²

The larger Non-Conformist denominations began to set up central administrative headquarters and libraries in London in the 19th century. The Congregationalists opened a library in 1831 which, by the 1860s, housed 8,000 volumes. It was largely the project of Joshua Wilson (1795–1874) who wanted to provide “a respectable building … erected in the metropolis, in a convenient and central situation” containing a “select library” on Congregational history, and to act as a headquarters for the Congregational churches in England, and as a rival to Dr Williams’s library, which Wilson felt was becoming dangerously Unitarian.⁵³ Wilson’s plan to raise £12,000 (ca. €1 million today) was thought to be too extravagant from the outset, and this view proved accurate: the library and headquarters had no endowment for ongoing support, and were therefore always short of funds.⁵⁴ The collection was in inaccessible storage for almost a third of its independent life, and was constantly on the verge of closure from 1914 onwards, although it managed to limp on until 1970s.⁵⁵

Several Catholic libraries which had been set up on the continent to support the education of English Catholic priests, gentry, and aristocracy made a return to the British Isles at the beginning of the 19th century as declericalising revolutions swept Europe, and Britain began to overturn the harshest of its anti-Catholic restrictions.⁵⁶ The college and school which had been founded in 1568 at Douai had to leave when Britain and France declared war in 1793, and the French authorities began to arrest British Catholics as enemy aliens.⁵⁷ The Douai community re-established itself near Durham, settling at Ushaw College in 1808. Unable to salvage any of their historic library from France, Ushaw librarian Thomas Wilkinson (1763–1857) gathered a magnificent collection of modern and historic printed and manuscript works in an obsessive attempt to create a facsimile of the Douai library in north-east England. With appropriate circularity, some volumes acquired by Wilkinson have since been proved to have belonged to the mediaeval priory in Durham.⁵⁸ Another Jesuit College had been founded in St Omer in 1598, moving first to Bruges, and then to the Jesuit College at Liege in the Austrian Netherlands after the Society of Jesus was suppressed in France in 1762. The Napoleonic Wars forced the College to flee again, this time moving to England in 1795. Unlike the Douai community, the St Omer/Liege foundations were able to bring some of their collections back across the Channel, and a few items were transferred to libraries in their successor institutions of Stonyhurst and Heythrop.⁵⁹

6 The Secularisation of Learning and Libraries

By 1830 most official political hurdles had been dismantled for non-Anglican Christians, and by the 1850s even Oxford and Cambridge had begun to allow limited entry to non-Anglicans. England had opened its first non-confessional University in London in 1826, which admitted the Protestant Dissenters, Jews and Roman Catholics who were excluded from the old Universities. Often credited to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the idea for a non-sectarian University based in the capital city had first been suggested by Stepney College tutor F.A. Cox, who was ultimately appointed as University College London’s first librarian.⁶⁰ Meanwhile, the Congregational and Independent colleges on the then outskirts of London (Homerton, Coward and Highbury) joined to form New College, London in 1850. A further merger with the non-denominational Evangelical Hackney College took place in 1900, at which point it became the official theology department of the University of London.⁶¹ Its complicated history gave New College a rich historical library comprised of the collections of 12 of the early Dissenting institutions including Doddridge’s Northampton Academy.⁶²

By the end of the century half a dozen new non-denominational ‘Redbrick’ Universities had opened in England’s major manufacturing cities, and had made higher education more accessible to the disproportionately Non-Conformist commercial middle classes. Together with the looming threat of ‘secularisation’ (in this instance meaning ‘de-Anglicanisation’) of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, this led to a rival spate of counter-foundations to secure the future of Anglican teaching and learning.⁶³ The century saw the opening of the first Theological Colleges to provide vocational training for Church of England ordinands beyond (or instead of) that provided at Oxford and Cambridge.⁶⁴ Previously, it had been the custom for young men to take a degree (in any subject), then spend a year ‘reading with’ and receiving informal on-the-job training from an established clergyman before being examined by or on behalf of an ordaining bishop. Influential lists of books to be read by ordinands had been drawn up in the early 18th century, notably by William Wotton (d. 1726) and Bishop Lloyd (d. 1717), and the syllabus for episcopal examinations strayed very little from these lists until the end of the 19th century.⁶⁵ Ordinands were generally tested on a fairly unvarying group of set texts frequently comprised of Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s Analogy, Burnet’s Reformation, Pearson On the Creed, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (book 5 only) and Wheatley On the Prayerbook, plus a book of the New Testament in Greek.⁶⁶ When the first Anglican theological college aimed at post-graduate students opened in Chichester in 1839, much of its teaching during the first couple of terms was simply ‘reading out’ examination texts including Eusebius, Burton’s Popular Ecclesiastical History, Herbert’s Country Parson, and sermons from staid Anglican divines.⁶⁷ Inevitably, such works are the backbone of nearly all Church of England theological college libraries founded in the first half of the 19th century, often padded out by personal libraries left to colleges in the wills of their supporters. The thinness of the these libraries is in stark contrast to the best of the Dissenting Academies’ collections, which supported teaching across many disciplines from classical and modern languages, to natural history and mathematics.⁶⁸

By 1900, 60% of the population had relatively easy access to a public library, which some of the establishment saw not as a source for self-improvement, but as terrifying “nurseries of socialism.”⁶⁹ Anglican angst on the matter led some individuals to set up independent libraries as a counterpoint to this growing number of secular reading rooms. A ‘House of Sacred Learning’ was founded in Oxford in 1882 in memory of the Tractarian E.B. Pusey to house his extensive and idiosyncratic theology library which was explicitly not part of the University.⁷⁰ Likewise, Pusey’s friend the former Prime Minister William Gladstone left his collection of 20,000 mostly theological books to form an independent Anglican library and study centre in Hawarden on the Welsh border which opened in 1902.⁷¹ This fear of a growing distance between the Church of England and the British state was not misplaced. Of the seven Prime Ministers between 1905–1940, only Stanley Baldwin was ‘properly’ Church of England. The (Anglican) Church of Ireland was disestablished – by Gladstone, who also supported the Public Libraries Act – in 1871, and the Church in Wales in 1920.⁷² To many, the disestablishment of the Church of England seemed the next logical step.

7 The Decline of Denominations

Although the British Empire was physically largest between 1919–1922, Britain’s remarkable international dominance began to fade at the end of the First World War, and crumbled completely after the Second World War.⁷³ The country’s religious institutions followed the fate of the wider nation, and church attendance in England declined from the 1930s.⁷⁴ However, the spirit of international co-operation which swept Europe after 1945 also made itself felt in English Churches, and under the influence of the World Council of Churches and the British Council of Churches many denominations within the United Kingdom began to investigate formal reunification.⁷⁵ The Wesleyan, Primitive, and United Methodists had joined together as the Methodist Church as early as 1932; in 1972 the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church in England and Wales merged to form the United Reformed Church; attempts were made to unite the Church of England with the Methodist Church in the 1970s (and less realistically, with the Roman Catholic Church).⁷⁶ In 1964 the British Council of Churches even set a date of Easter Day 1980 for the merger of all 16 of its member Churches.⁷⁷ Unfortunately the noble quest for visible unity ended in a greater focus on unity of administration than unity of spirit, and led not to revival but stagnation and decline: church membership fell from 25% to 10% of the population during the 20th century.⁷⁸ By 2018, only 38% of British people described themselves as Christian, while the proportion of citizens describing themselves as ‘non religious’ rose to 52%: an almost complete inversion of the same statistics 35 years earlier.⁷⁹

The sharpest decline in religious affiliation took place in the 1970s as the post-war ‘Baby boomers’ became adults. Broader changes to Higher Education also had an effect on church-owned colleges as several new universities were set up, fees were removed, and students were provided with grants to pay for accommodation and living costs.⁸⁰ Young people from less financially secure backgrounds no longer had to find creative options to access Higher Education, in which theological and denominational teacher training colleges had frequently played a part. A very large number of religious training institutions – and their libraries – closed or merged at this time: casualties not just of loosening of religious identity, but also of a wider over-expansion of educational provision which occurred immediately after the Second World War.⁸¹ Usually theological college mergers happened within denominations, but there are a number of instances of cross-denominational mergers taking place, both to promote ecumenical relationships, and to secure regional training at an affordable price for smaller Churches. Many colleges of smaller denominations simply disappeared without trace, and even the larger denominations were heavily affected. The Congregational Cheshunt College merged with the Presbyterian Westminster College in Cambridge (1967); Handsworth Methodist College moved in with the Anglican Queen’s College in Birmingham (1970); Northern Baptist College, Hartley Victoria Methodist College, the United Reformed and Unitarian Church Colleges in Manchester all joined forces on a single site – with a single library – from 1984.⁸² Between 1970 and 1981, the Methodists closed or merged four of their six colleges, leaving only Bristol and Cambridge (now, only Cambridge) as distinctive Methodist ministerial training institutions.⁸³ The important library of Richmond College (the former Wesleyan Theological Institution: Southern Branch) only escaped total destruction through the initiative of members of staff at another Methodist college who rescued as many books as possible in three journeys in a hired van. Some of the most valuable books had already gone missing, but eventually much of the remaining collection was divided between the Methodist Archives in the City Road, London, the New Room and Wesley College in Bristol, and the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Such was the chaos of the library’s last days that it has not been possible to ascertain the final size of the collection, or what proportion of the collection was salvaged.⁸⁴ Anglican theological colleges also underwent a major round of closures in the 1960s and 70s. Seven (Ely, St Aidan’s Birkenhead, Bishop’s College Cheshunt, Kelham, Lichfield, Rochester and Worcester) closed entirely. There were mergers of Salisbury and Wells in the South-West; Clifton, Tyndale, St Michael’s and Dalton House (the latter two providing pastoral training for women) in Bristol; and Cuddesdon and Ripon in Oxford. King’s College London ceased ordination training, and specialist pre-training colleges also closed. Although some non-residential training courses were founded at this time, the number of residential Anglican training institutions halved between 1960 and 1980. Several more (Chichester, Lincoln, and Nottingham) have closed since, and there are now fewer than ten remaining. It seems likely that parts of the Anglican libraries which closed in the 1960s and 70s were given to other larger theological or Higher Education colleges, with other parts being sold through booksellers, but the decisions about the Anglican colleges were all made in isolation, and what happened to the libraries was seldom well documented, if at all: a report assessing the situation was not written until after the closures had happened.⁸⁵ Of the Anglican institutions closed in the mid-20th century, only the library of Ely was preserved in any meaningful sense, by being sent first to the University of Sheffield, and then to the library of Norwich Cathedral.⁸⁶ The libraries of those which were closed more recently have generally fared better. Chichester Theological College has deposited its fairly small collection of pre-1800 books in the library of Chichester Cathedral, and its ‘modern’ collections at the local Higher Education institute. Members of the diocese can continue to access the books in both of these locations, and an associated charity uses funds from the sale of the College buildings to expand the modern collections, and takes a lively interest in the care of the historic material.⁸⁷

The pace of library closures across all denominations was so swift in the 1960s and 70s that the Association of British Theological and Philosophical Libraries almost ceased to function, but by 1986, ABTAPL was sufficiently recovered to publish a Directory of Theological Libraries, with a second edition being produced in 1999.⁸⁸ The number of libraries listed actually increased from 388 to 397 between the first and second editions, although this is partly because the remit for inclusion became slightly wider.⁸⁹ In 2016 a follow up survey was carried out of the 92 Christian theological libraries outside public or university libraries listed in the 1986 ABTAPL Directory. Of these, only 27 remained in situ, and a further 55 had been taken in by other libraries as complete collections, or been part of mergers or rebrands, meaning that 80% of Christian theology collections identified in 1986 remained broadly complete and accessible three decades later. Of the remainder, one was in storage, four had been sold, and three dispersed among other collections, but 12 could not be traced at all.⁹⁰

Denominational libraries not attached to training colleges underwent significant dispersal in the 1980s, as many denominations followed a general secular trend to replace Victorian headquarters in central London with modern buildings in areas where property was cheaper, and wages lower. Most of these old flagship buildings had libraries and archival collections which were redistributed or disposed of when the administration moved out of London. Individually many of the holdings may not have been of the greatest interest, but they had value as collections, and provided important material heritage relating to the history of their organisations. This retrenchment was generally more orderly than the college closures of the previous decades, but is still regrettable from a library history point of view. For example, when the Baptist Union moved from central London to Didcot in 1989, most of its 8,000 volume historic library (including the libraries of the Baptist Historical Association and various former training colleges, but probably not including the working reference library) was transferred to sit largely unused for three decades in the basement of Regent’s Park College (the former Stepney College) in Oxford.⁹¹ It was by no means neglected, but it has only been fully catalogued and publicised within the last decade as priority always had to be given to the current teaching collections used by students. The large Anglican reference library in Church House, Westminster was dissolved in 1972, and although its 10,000 titles were reportedly split between Lambeth Palace Library, the Church of England Record Centre and the Care of Church Buildings Library (now themselves combined into a single institution), miscellaneous volumes from it seem to appear in every major Anglican library in the country, suggesting a much wider dispersal and disposal than was officially recorded.⁹² Dr Williams’s Library took in the historic collections from the Congregational Library in the early 1980s after the closure of its headquarters left the library homeless, and also the most important books from New College London on its closure in 1972.⁹³ Mirroring the collections of Church House Library, modern books with New College provenance have a tendency to appear in many Non-Conformist libraries, and mirroring Richmond College, there seems to be no record or memory of the size of the collection at the time it was dispersed. The most recent closure of a major central London theological library took place in the 1990s when after decades of financial precarity Sion College sold its buildings, and divided its matchless collection of 200,000 books and manuscripts between Lambeth Palace Library, Kings College London and the London Metropolitan Archives.⁹⁴ Of the 40 religious libraries operating in the heart of London in the mid-20th century, only eight made it relatively intact and in situ to the 21st century.⁹⁵

More recently general changes within English Higher Education have had a deleterious effect on theological collections within university libraries. Tuition fees were introduced in 1998, but state funding has been reduced faster than fees have risen, and the government is constantly encouraging institutions to reduce humanities courses in favour of more lucrative STEM subjects.⁹⁶ At the same time, subject librarians have been replaced with roles more heavily focused on specific skills than specific knowledge, and this has inadvertently tended to remove the strongest advocate for theology collections within large libraries. As a fairly aggressive secularism has become the default in much of Higher Education, some institutions which were established in particular religious traditions have explicitly forbidden library staff from doing any work to care for founding theological collections, although others are taking a renewed interest in their ‘old books’ as special collections which provide material evidence of institutional history, and as a source of institutional pride.⁹⁷ Regrettably, the number of major grant making bodies willing to fund projects working on collections of religious books has declined by 17% between 2000 and 2016, and the number willing to fund Christian collections has fallen by over 30% in the same period, making it increasingly difficult to find external finance for projects on theological libraries.⁹⁸

Christian theology has in general become fairly marginalised field within most UK universities. Numbers of undergraduates enrolled on theology and religious studies degrees fell by almost a third between 2007/8 and 2011/12, and taught postgraduate courses have seen a similar decline.⁹⁹ Enrolment on research degrees in theology has remained more stable, but almost half of these postgraduates are international students, particularly from the USA.¹⁰⁰ There has been a shift away from theology degrees towards courses on world religions, meaning that many universities are reshaping their teaching collections to focus on books which look at faith from the outside-in, rather than looking out at life through the lens of faith. Only 18 out of 106 universities in England were offering a theology undergraduate degree for the 2021–2 academic year, compared with 36 offering a religion/religions/religious studies course.¹⁰¹ All universities which offer a theology course also teach religion: the reverse is not true.

8 What Next?

The situation for theological libraries in Britain can often seem rather bleak, and was already being described as ‘parlous’ 45 years ago, but the sector has seen change rather than the absolute decay predicted in 1973.¹⁰² Although theological education in universities may be in decline, strong alternative provision remains for high level theological study through specialist colleges accredited by universities, and these are treated with more academic respect than they were 50 years ago.¹⁰³ Moreover, like many countries in Europe, England has been heavily affected by a South Asian and West African diaspora, and these relatively new communities are significantly ‘more religious’ than the nation as a whole: Pentecostal Protestant Churches and non-Christian religions are growing, as are Catholic congregations which have been boosted by immigration from central Europe.¹⁰⁴ It is hard to ignore the fact that many mid-century arrivals from the Caribbean and Africa arrived as Anglicans, but were made so unwelcome in Church of England congregations that they had little option to start their own denominations. Had the Church of England been less hostile in the 1950s, its membership may have been significantly larger today.¹⁰⁵ In many cases, the ‘new’ denominations arriving in the UK are the fruit of ‘old’ denominations: the fastest growing denomination in the UK is the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), a Pentecostal Church founded by a Nigerian pastor baptised by an Anglican.¹⁰⁶ There is often a mistrust between the old and new denominations, rather akin to that between Anglicans and others in previous generations, and an intellectual snobbery which is reflective more of educational opportunity than intellectual ability, just as it was in the 18th century. The RCCG and similar denominations are often followed by bad press for their ‘regressive’ views in a tone reminiscent of prevailing opinions on Roman Catholics in the 17th and 18th centuries.¹⁰⁷ What is acceptable difference, and what is heresy? What is the dividing line between cultural style and theological doctrine? Who should make what adaptations to protect whose sensibilities?¹⁰⁸ How do we even know of each other’s existence?

These are important questions about how established but declining denominations and newer but growing parts of the Universal Church in England can support each other and build one another up. One side has plentiful resources in terms of libraries, but few people to read the books: the other is rich in people (and comparatively young people at that), but lacks embedded support and connections. It can be difficult to track nascent training institutions and libraries, and for ‘old’ and ‘new’ denominations to develop personal and working relationships at local and national level, despite shared history and heritage. We are really only starting to explore these questions in the UK, but at the present time it seems likely that as the Anglophone hegemony is being eclipsed, Christian learning in the British Isles may be sustained and revitalised by people from countries Britain over-ran, just as the Catholic scholarship was revitalised by the Insular Culture of learning preserved and reimported from the edges of the former Roman Empire in the 8th century.¹⁰⁹ The long term survival of historic religious libraries in England may well depend on reaching out to new audiences who share a common heritage with more established Churches in England.

9 Conclusion

It is difficult to explain the history of religious libraries in England from 1945 without looking back at the denominational variety which arose from the break with Rome in 1539 and from the legal tolerance of Protestant Dissent after the English civil wars of the mid-17th century. While the Church of England took over control of the Catholic libraries after the Reformation, those who remained loyal to the Pope gathered libraries at new English Catholic seats of learning on the continent. From the late 17th century onwards Protestant Dissenters founded higher education academies in England, which initially had extremely limited access to books, but eventually created large multi-lingual libraries to support a broad liberal education across all subjects. By the 19th century the Catholic institutions were able to return to England, and the Dissenting denominations had sufficient confidence and support to open major administrative institutions in central London, most of which had an historical library as a centre piece for study and display. The high point both numerically and reputationally for religious libraries in England was at the start of the 20th century, after which religious adherence went into decline. A very large number of ministerial training colleges closed very quickly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the libraries of these defunct institutions are generally partly or completely untraceable. Widespread retrenchment of headquarters from London to the provinces which took place in the 1980s dispersed a large number of important central libraries, although these were generally treated with more care than the theological college collections, and were largely transferred either to major historic libraries, local Higher Education libraries or to larger denominational colleges. Libraries continue to close as the UK continues to become ever ‘less religious’, but the diaspora from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Africa is significantly more religious than the majority of the population. Consequently Pentecostal Churches and non-Christian religions are experiencing growth rather than decline, but these newer communities lack physical and financial resources and have limited influence in wider society. Both the older and newer denominations have a great deal to gain from working together more closely, and for Christian libraries in particular, reaching out to these relatively new audiences with a shared heritage provides a major opportunity for renewal, and for the libraries to continue to be used for the purposes for which they were founded.