New book acquisition: Tusser’s ‘Five hundreth pointes of good husbandrie’ (1585)

Written by Fiona Melhuish (UMASCS Librarian) and Amy Thomas (UROP project student)

I am pleased to announce that we were able to acquire an early edition of Five hundreth pointes of good husbandrie by Thomas Tusser at the Rothamsted Collection/Lawes Agricultural Library auction at Forum Auctions in July this year. This 1585 edition, with its splendid frontispiece, bound in mottled calf with gilt turn-ins, will join other early editions of Tusser’s work in our collections, including editions printed in 1672 and 1812. The first edition of Tusser’s work was published in 1557.

We were particularly delighted that one of our students, Amy Thomas, was able to make immediate use of the new acquisition and our other editions of Tusser’s book in her research. Amy has been working on a Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) project entitled ‘How To Be Rural: Agricultural Instruction in the MERL collections’, examining forgotten agricultural manuals and countryside ‘how-to’ books from the MERL library collections.

Title page from ‘Five hundreth pointes of good husbandrie’ by Thomas Tusser (1585) RESERVE–630.942-TUS

As part of the project, Amy has written the following piece as an introduction to Tusser and his descendants, and his significance in the history of agricultural writing:

Tusser Illustrated

Thomas Tusser was a musician, farmer and writer who lived in the sixteenth century. He was born in Essex in 1524 to a family with gentry status. He was blessed with a singing voice good enough that he was sent to Wallingford to be a chorister, and later to St. Paul’s Cathedral where he made connections and friends. He was educated at Eton, and later at Cambridge. He spent ten years at court working as a musician for Lord Paget during King Edward VI’s reign, but left after ten years to go back to farming. He tried to farm three times but with each failure he went back to his music career. He married twice in his life and had children with his second wife, Amy Moon. He died in a debtor’s prison in 1580.
While Tusser was not a successful farmer, his book about farming was. His didactic poetry is said to be the beginning of the English rural didactic tradition, a tradition that has continued since in a variety of forms. A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry was expanded to Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry in 1573,with five editions being published during Tusser’s lifetime. His book has continued to be published throughout the centuries, one of these editions was revised by Dorothy Hartley and published in 1931.

Notes on husbandry in September in ‘Five hundreth pointes of good husbandrie’ by Thomas Tusser (1585) RESERVE–630.942-TUS

Hartley’s notes and correspondence suggest that she was planning an illustrated version of Tusser’s work based on her own research. She planned to have a frontispiece of Tusser’s farm as it was, and what seem to be a chapter of comparative images of the twentieth century and the sixteenth century. There are sketches in Hartley’s collection at MERL showing that she was working on a calendar based on Tusser’s work. She had done sketches for February, March, April, August and November. Three out of the five sketches depict women carrying out farming tasks.

Why did Hartley draw women in her sketches? It could be because she was a woman, but Tusser himself included A Hundred Good Points of Housewifery in his book which compliments the housewife and her work with reverence. He even said, “take huswife from husband, and what is he then?” His writing praises domestic harmony and family while also showing that he expects a wife to work too.

Title page of ‘Five hundred points of good husbandry’ by Thomas Tusser (1672) RESERVE–630.942-TUS

Another book in the agricultural instruction genre that has gender inclusive illustrations is A Book of Farmcraft by Michael Greenhill and Evelyn Dunbar. Michael Greenhill was 25 years old in 1941 when A Book of Farmcraft was written. He was an agricultural instructor at Sparsholt Farm Institute where land girls were trained. Evelyn Dunbar was a war artist who focused on depicting the efforts of women on the home front. She spent some time at Sparsholt to draw and paint the land girls’ training. Greenhill saw Dunbar’s art and how the land girls often did things wrong and thought they should write an instructional book together. A Book of Farmcraft was acclaimed for the use of teaching newcomers how to farm in a time when unskilled farm labour was needed.

 

All our editions of Tusser’s work are available to view through the Special Collections Service reading room.

Research bursaries available: Land Settlement Association and Landscape Institute

This year, thanks to the generous funding from an anonymous donor and the Landscape Institute we are pleased to offer bursaries to encourage use and engagement with our Land Settlement or Landscape Institute archives.

The Land Settlement Association was established in 1934 to provide employment on the land for unemployed industrial workers from depressed areas.  Find out more here.

The Landscape Institute was founded in 1929 as the Institute of Landscape Architects. It is the Royal Chartered institute for landscape architects.  Find out more here.

You can search our catalogue here.

Details below, please apply by email to merl@reading.ac.uk

Image from our Land Settlement collections

Land Settlement Association: Academic Engagement Bursary

The purpose of this award is to encourage academic engagement with the Land Settlement archive held at Reading. The archive contains minutes, annual reports, accounts, estate records, correspondence, film, photographs, press cuttings and maps.

The successful proposal will attract a stipend of £1,500. The funding can be used to offset teaching and administration costs, travel and other research-related expenses.

Appropriate facilities are provided and the successful applicant will be encouraged to participate in the academic programmes of the Museum.

The intention for this award is to create an opportunity for a researcher to develop and disseminate new work relating to the Land Settlement Association.

Applications will be by email to merl@reading.ac.uk  (please put “Land Settlement Bursary” in the subject line). Please outline the proposed research including dissemination outcomes of the research and budget for how the bursary will be spent. (e.g. conference paper, article, blog, exhibition etc).

Interested applicants should submit a CV and a statement (max 800 words) outlining their interest in the bursary, and current work.

 

Student travel bursaries

The purpose of the student travel bursaries is to enable student access to the Land Settlement or the Landscape Institute archives held at Reading. The collections include minutes, annual reports, accounts, estate records, correspondence, film, photographs, press cuttings, maps and published material.

  • One bursary of £150 to use our Land Settlement collections.
  • Two bursaries of £150 each to use our Landscape Institute collections.

Applications are invited from any student in part or full-time higher education.

Applications by email to merl@reading.ac.uk (please put “Land Settlement Bursary” or “Landscape Institute Bursary” in the subject line)

Interested applicants should submit a CV, and a short statement (max 400 words) outlining their interest in the Land Settlement Association or Landscape Institute, stating how the bursary would be spent and how it would be beneficial to their studies.  Applicants should identify those materials in the archive that would be of most benefit to them.

AR JEL DO1 S2/20

Geoffrey Jellicoe collection, part of Landscape Institute collections, Shute House, AR JEL DO1 S2/20

Timetable

 

Academic engagement bursary:

13 September 2017 – applications open

30 November 2017 – applications close

1 December 2017 – successful candidates announced

Any work will need to be carried out and finances claimed by 31 July 2017.

 

Student travel bursaries:

13 September 2017 – applications open

5 January 2018 – applications close

5 February 2018 – successful candidates announced

Any work will need to be carried out and finances claimed by 31 July 2017.

 

For informal enquiries please email c.l.gould@reading.ac.uk

We look forward to receiving your applications!

No longer such a new town: Milton Keynes at 50

Plan of Milton Keynes

This year Milton Keynes turns 50.  Tonight BBC4 is marking this anniversary with the programme Milton Keynes and Me by Richard Macer.

Designed to provide housing for over populated London, which had been badly bombed during World War II, development of the existing village of Milton Keynes began in 1967.

Milton Keynes was part of the third wave (1967-70) of new towns, designated following the 1946 New Towns Act, which designated sites to become new towns and passed responsibility for developing them to Development Corporations.  The Milton Keynes Development Corporation was the organisation behind the development of Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire.  The Act followed the Greater London Plan of 1944, prepared by Patrick Abercrombie at the request of the Minister of Town and Country Planning, which laid out plans for how to rebuild London and deliver housing needed for the growing population, following World War II.  Other new towns in England you might be familiar with include Stevenage (1946), Bracknell (1949) and Redditch (1964).

Plan of Milton Keynes from the Milton Keynes Survey

So what does this have to do with English rural life?

Those new towns needed to be built somewhere.  Often existing settlements were expanded by building on surrounding undeveloped or agricultural land.

The Milton Keynes Survey was conducted by representatives of the Department of Agricultural Economics, at The University of Reading, in the late 1960s to early 1970s.  Files, publications, documents, press cutting and maps relating to the survey are held in the archives of the Museum of English Rural Life (reference: SR DX34).  The material in this collection was compiled by and relates to several studies they published about the impact of Milton Keynes on agriculture in the area.

Our Landscape Institute collections also hold information for researchers of new towns.  We hosted a FOLAR seminar on the topic of new towns and landscape last year.  We hold a copy of The plan for Milton Keynes published by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation in 1970.  The Plan outlines ideas around the transition of land from rural to urban usage and the impact on the environment and landscape the expansion will have.

Selection of Milton Keynes material from SR DX 34

When training to be a landscape architect in the late 1970s, Marian Thompson, chose to create a design for a lake in Milton Keynes for one of her exams, named Las Venice.  Though we do not know if the design ever went beyond her exam, the area is now called Tear Drop Lakes and is part of Loughton Valley Park.

Marian Thompson’s plan for Las Venice, Milton Keynes

The development of new towns in the mid to late twentieth century, such as Milton Keynes, brings into sharp focus the reciprocal, but sometimes conflicting relationship between urban areas and the countryside.  How do we balance the need to provide for a growing population with concerns over protecting the landscape and environment?

Claire Wooldridge and Jen Glanville

Discovering the landscape: cut it out!

Written by Claire Wooldridge, Project Librarian

Over the past few years, my colleague Jen (Landscape Institute Archivist) and I have been working to integrate the library and archive of the Landscape Institute into the collections of the Museum of English Rural Life.

The LI collections are rich and varied, including material such as books, pamphlets, periodicals, press cuttings, minutes, membership lists, financial papers, Institute publications and a slide library.

Now the time has come for me to sort out the Landscape Institute cuttings collection.

What are cuttings?

In a library context a cuttings collection is most likely to include articles cut out of newspapers or other periodicals, or press cuttings.  It is also likely that other types of ephemera will find their way into a cuttings collection, such as offprints (reprints of articles from editions of a publication), leaflets, advertisements, catalogues or posters.

A collection such as this arises from individuals cutting out relevant articles and compiling them.  So they are a kind of personally (or institutionally) curated collection.  A lot of us are likely to have done this ourselves – cutting out and keeping articles of printed material that have a personal connection or are of local interest.

Therefore we treat cuttings as a library collection, as they are culled from printed material.

The LI cuttings collection includes material from the 1960s to the early 2000s.  It includes a lot of biographical articles on leading landscape architects, especially obituaries.  This is alongside material on policy affecting the work of the landscape architect and features on particular parks, gardens and landscape projects.

Does the MERL Library hold any other cuttings?

Yes we hold a MERL Library cuttings collection which we still add to.  This is in filing cabinets in the Reading Room and is organised in a sequence based on the MERL Library subject classification scheme.

Why keep cuttings?

Cuttings can be a problem for librarians!  Their ephemeral and often flimsy nature can make their provenance difficult to attribute, while storage and organisation can also be a challenge.

Nonetheless, it is precisely the ephemeral nature of cuttings that make them so valuable to researchers.  There is no better insight into contemporary views and public opinion on landscape architects and their projects than by reading what was being written about them at the time.

Of course, a lot of this material will now be available online or elsewhere.  Still this collection is of historical interest in itself, as a record of what the Landscape Institute felt it was important to cut out and keep.

When will the cuttings be made available?

I am currently about 25% of the way through sorting the LI’s collection of hundreds of cuttings!  Thankfully I have a wonderful volunteer, Tina, who is going to help me with the project.  Together we will be numbering, listing and repackaging the cuttings.  I would hope that this project will be completed towards the end of the year, but please get in touch via merl@reading.ac.uk if you are interested in using the collection before then.

Improved Open Access Library fully accessible again

The MERL and Special Collections Open Access Library is now fully accessible again! In this library, which can be accessed from the Reading Room, you can find reference works relating to our Special Collections and to Samuel Beckett, as well as the library collection of the MERL, consisting of about 50,000 books, pamphlets and periodical volumes. We have been working hard to improve the layout of these collections to make it easier for you to quickly find the items that you need. We have also been able to create more space for future purchases and gifts.

This is a summary of the changes we have made:

  • We have integrated our Landscape Institute collection into the main MERL Library
  • We have created a dedicated pamphlet room for MERL and MAFF pamphlets
  • We have turned a storeroom into an additional room for the MERL periodicals

We would like to thank our readers for their patience while the works were taking place.

Discovering the landscape: lost landscapes of Michael Brown

In this post Amber Roberts, recipient of MERL’s landscape academic engagement bursary talks about her work on our Michael Brown collection (Landscape Institute collections).

Michael Brown’s work is unfortunately little known to today’s landscape architects. Thanks to a generous research bursary from MERL I have been able to delve into his archive and begin to uncover Brown’s idiosyncratic approach, his lost landscapes and his lost research.

Michael Brown Collection (AR BRO)

Brown (1923-1996) was an Edinburgh-born architect and landscape architect whose career had an international scope and strong links to key designers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Ian McHarg, Dan Kiley and Basil Spence. Brown’s projects covered all scales of landscape architecture and are of particular interest due to his commitment to integrating the theories and practices of landscape and architecture that resulted in a body of work that was both inventive and pragmatic. Brown stated:

The art and aesthetic delight of landscape must emerge out of solving down to earth problems elegantly and simply.

With this focus on the solution of ‘down to earth problems’, his work navigated the complex tensions of the profession that existed both then and now by advocating an objective, theoretical and interdisciplinary approach.

If spaces between buildings are to be used to their best advantage it is essential that methods of analysis and comparison be evolved which will enable the designer to analyse the functions and uses of external spaces very rigorously.

This approach is particularly evident in his work at Livingstone Road, London (1962 and later awarded a Civic Trust Award 1968) developed with the architects George, Drew and Dunn Partnership, a project that is due to be lost to a £300m regeneration project. By undertaking a disciplined survey and analysis of the site Brown identified key issues and opportunities that ranged from the particular microclimate of the site to cut and fill balance and pedestrian movement lines. Brown interwove this analysis with the ‘Court House Concept’ of his tutor McHarg to develop a series of spaces that were given careful detailing landform and levels to create a range of soft spaces.

Great West House, Michael Brown Collection (AR BRO)

Beyond the layout of the courtyard system of open space, Brown sought to foster a sense of ownership for the spaces among the new residents. This was a key approach of Brown’s that he had begun to develop during his early British work with SPAN Housing. Brown himself became a resident of Fieldend and member of the Resident’s Association for the upkeep of the landscape within the estate. The courtyards at Livingstone Road were each given a distinct character and function that was embellished with sculptures and wall panels and Brown actively promoted a resident’s association for the scheme.

Overall Brown had a deeply personal and idiosyncratic approach to landscape,  his publications and designs offered exemplary solutions responding to complex issues from housing and motorway design to the design of public squares. Each of which combined his joint skills in architecture, urban design and landscape. Brown’s breadth of projects are testament to his rich and varied experience merging together disparate ideas and skills.  This research on Brown will be presented with Lead Researcher Dr Luca Csepely-Knorr at the Society of Architectural Historians Conference in Glasgow next month.

Find out more about Amber’s work or our Landscape Institute.

Medieval Caxton leaf: on display from 10 May

University of Reading Special Collections Librarian, Erika Delbecque, with new Caxton discovery

Our discovery of a unique example of 15th century printed text by English printer William Caxton has led to considerable media interest. As a result, the item will be going on display in the University of Reading’s Special Collections department, within The Museum of English Rural Life, from tomorrow (10 May) and not 9 May as previously stated. The display will run until 30 May.

Access to the MERL and Special Collections Library: May 2017

Due to essential maintenance work, we regret to inform you that access to the MERL and Special Collections open access library corridor will be restricted or unavailable on the following dates:

  • Tuesday 16 May – Thursday 18 May
  • Tuesday 23 May – Friday 26 May

This will affect access to Special Collections and MERL open access library material, including books, periodicals and pamphlets.

Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience.

If you are planning to visit the Reading Room on these days, please inform of us of any requests you have for library material in advance by contacting merl@reading.ac.uk

Please contact us for further assistance at merl@reading.ac.uk

Access to The MERL periodicals

Due to essential maintenance work, we regret to inform you that The MERL periodicals will be unavailable from Monday 13th February 2017 until further notice.

These are the volumes found in the rooms at the far end of the open access library corridor and includes Country Life, The Engineer, Farmers Weekly, Farmer & Stockbreeder, The Field and Royal Agricultural Society Journal among other journals.

We will make an announcement when they are accessible again.

Students: apply for a landscape research bursary before the end of February

Why should I apply?

Our landscape collections are pretty special.

Read this overview of our landscape collections or search our combined library, archive and object catalogue.

Take a look at reasons to use our landscape collections in your research and topic and resource ideas.

Highlights from our Landscape Institute Collections

Highlights from our Landscape Institute Collections

But could I apply?

Are you:

A) A taught undergraduate or postgraduate student?

B) Studying landscape architecture, design or management?  History, geography, architecture, environmental science, ecology or design?

C) Desperate to impress your dissertation supervisors?

D) Reading this before 28 Feb 2017?

Then we look forward to receiving your application!  (Just ask us if you want to check you are eligible).

If you are a taught student in part or full-time higher education, you can apply for one of landscape student travel bursaries.

We welcome your innovative ideas on how you will use our collections in your research.

How do I apply?

The purpose of the student travel bursaries is to enable students to access collections held at Reading related to landscape, including landscape design, management and architecture.

We are offering 2 bursaries of £150 each.

Applications will be by email to merl@reading.ac.uk (please put “Landscape Bursary” in the subject line).  Applications will be invited from any student in part or full-time higher education.

Interested applicants should submit a CV, and a short statement (max 400 words) outlining their interest in and current work on landscape, stating how the bursary would be spent and how it would be beneficial to their studies.  Applicants should identify those materials in the archive that would be of most benefit to them.

Timetable

28 February 2017 – applications close

31 March 2017 – successful candidates announced

Any work will need to be carried out and monies claimed by 31 July 2017.

 

Please feel free to get in touch with our Reading Room if you have any questions. We look forward to welcoming you and telling you more about our landscape collections.  

Written by Project Librarian: Claire Wooldridge