page_title: Exeter Cathedral
section_title: Library
hierarchical_section_title: Exeter Cathedral / Notable features / Library
caption_attribution_description: English: The east window in Lady Chapel Exeter Cathedral, designed by Dorothy Marion Grant (1951).
context_page_description: Exeter Cathedral, properly known as the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Exeter, is an Anglican cathedral, and the seat of the Bishop of Exeter, in the city of Exeter, Devon, in South West England. The present building was complete by about 1400, and has several notable features, including an early set of misericords, an astronomical clock and the longest uninterrupted vaulted ceiling in England.
context_section_description: The library began during the episcopate of Leofric (1050–1072) who presented the cathedral with 66 books, only one of which remains in the library: this is the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501) of Anglo-Saxon poetry. 16 others have survived and are in the British Library, the Bodleian Library or Cambridge University Library. A 10th-century manuscript of Hrabanus Maurus's De Computo and Isidore of Seville's De Natura Rerum may have belonged to Leofric also but the earliest record of it is in an inventory of 1327. The inventory was compiled by the Sub-Dean, William de Braileghe, and 230 titles were listed. Service books were not included and a note at the end mentions many other books in French, English and Latin which were then considered worthless.
  In 1412–13 a new lectrinum was fitted out for the books by two carpenters working for 40 weeks. Those books in need of repair were repaired and some were fitted with chains.  A catalogue of the cathedral's books made in 1506 shows that the library furnished some 90 years earlier had 11 desks for books and records over 530 titles, of which more than a third are service books.
  In 1566 the Dean and Chapter presented to Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels which had been given by Leofric; in 1602, 81 manuscripts from the library were presented to Sir Thomas Bodley for the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In 1657 under the Commonwealth the Cathedral was deprived of several of its ancillary buildings, including the reading room of 1412–13. Some books were lost but a large part of them were saved due to the efforts of Dr Robert Vilvaine, who had them transferred to St John's Hospital. At a later date he provided funds to convert the Lady chapel into a library, and the books were brought back.
  By 1752 it is thought the collection had grown considerably to some 5,000 volumes, to a large extent by benefactions.  In 1761 Charles Lyttelton, Dean of Exeter, describes it as having over 6,000 books and some good manuscripts.  He describes the work which has been done to repair and list the contents of the manuscripts. At the same time the muniments and records had been cleaned and moved to a suitable muniment room.
  In 1820 the library was moved from the Lady Chapel to the Chapter House. In the later 19th century two large collections were received by the Cathedral, and it was necessary to construct a new building to accommodate the whole library. The collections of Edward Charles Harington and Frederic Charles Cook were together more than twice the size of the existing library, and John Loughborough Pearson was the architect of the new building on the site of the old cloister. During the 20th century the greater part of the library was transferred to rooms in the Bishop's Palace, while the remainder was kept in Pearson's cloister library.
  Today, there is a good collection of early medical books, part of which came in 1948 from the Exeter Medical Library (founded 1814), and part on permanent loan from the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital (1,300 volumes, 1965).  The most decorated manuscript in the library is a psalter (MS 3508) probably written for the Church of St Helen at Worcester in the early 13th century. The earliest printed book now in the library is represented by only a single leaf: this is Cicero's De officiis (Mainz: Fust and Schoeffer, 1465–66).
caption: The Lady Chapel east window, inserted post-war replacing Victorian glass which was destroyed during WWII
exif: {"Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.2.1 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2017:01:12 22:09:44", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "216", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "128", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "160", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "Uncompressed", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Thumbnail StripOffsets": "983", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail RowsPerStrip": "160", "Thumbnail StripByteCounts": "61440", "Thumbnail XResolution": "300", "Thumbnail YResolution": "300", "Thumbnail PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "16/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Shutter Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "500", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2017:01:10 11:28:01", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:01:10 11:28:01", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5906891/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "209759/62500", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "157/50", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "223/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2515", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3114", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "\u0001\u0001\u0001\u0001", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[2, 0, 0, 0]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "764", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "68269609/32768", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "68269609/32768", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "33", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}