Assembled over three centuries, the Clifford Collection is the largest family library to have been acquired by the Library. It contains over 10,000 volumes and 1500 pamphlets (about 6430 titles), written in English, Latin, French, Italian, German and Spanish, with particular strength in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reflecting the interests of many different family members, it is broad in its coverage: Greek and Latin classics, ancient history, British history, local history, European history, heraldry, genealogy, biography, politics, religion, theology, church history, philosophy, law, economics, land management, agriculture, animal husbandry, gardening, botany, medicine, optics, astronomy, architecture, art, music, exploration, travel and literature.

The following are examples of early imprints in the collection:

• Homeliarius Doctorum, Nuremberg, 1494
• Geremia, Peter, Divinum Petri hieremie opus, Brescia, 1502
• Mazocchi, Jacopo, Epigrammata antiqvae vrbis , Rome, 1521
• Sallust, Opera Sallustiana, Lyons, 1526
• Ioannes Frobenius candido lectori S. D. En Novum testamentum, ex Erassi Roterodami recognitione, Basel, 1527
• Dűrer, Albrecht, Clariss: pictoris et geometrae Alberti Dureri De varietate figurarum et flexuris partium ac gestib, Nuremberg, 1534
• Hardying, John, The chronicle of John Hardying in Metre, London, 1543
• Pollio, Vitruvius, M. Vitruvii viri suae professionis peritissimi, de architectura libri decem, Strasbourg, 1543
• Stumpf, Johannes, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschaft Stetten/Landen und Voelckeren Chronickwirdiger thaaten beschreybung, 2 vols in 1, Zurich, 1548
• Demosthenes, Demosthenis oratorum Graeciae principis opera, Basle [c. 1549]
• Alberti, Leandro, Descrittione de tutta Italia, Bologna, 1550
• Hall, Edward, The chronicle of England, London, 1550
• Machiavelli, Niccolo, Tutte le opera di Nicollo Machiavelli, 5 vols in 1, 1550
• More, Thomas, The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, Sometime Lorde Chancellour of England, London, 1557.

Religion and philosophy

While there are standard works on theology, such as writings of Thomas Aquinas and Thomas à Kempis, the great majority of religious works are of a devotional kind, including sermons, liturgies, breviaries, prayer books, catechisms and lives of the saints. There is a copy of the Rheims New Testament of 1582, the first English translation from the Vulgate (often known as the Douay-Rheims Bible). There are also a large number of tracts, some of them relating to the Test Acts and the relations between church and state.

English and Scottish historians

The collection is strong in publications of English and Scottish historians, including George Buchanan, Gilbert Burnet, William Camden, Lord Clarendon, William Dugdale, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Peter Heylyn, Richard Knolles, Walter Raleigh, William Robertson, Tobias Smollett and John Speed. Other scholarly English writers represented in the collection are Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Johnson, Isaac Newton, William Petty, John Selden and Adam Smith.

Art and architecture

There are a number of books on art and architecture, some of them with lavish illustrations, by such writers and artists as Colin Campbell, William Gilpin, Andrea Palladio, Giambattista Piranesi, Joshua Reynolds and Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Literature

The collection contains a diversity of literary works, many by obscure writers and others by famous figures such as Samuel Butler, Lord Chesterfield, Jeremy Collier, William Congreve, John Dryden, Maria Edgeworth, John Evelyn, Oliver Goldsmith, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Samuel Richardson, Jonathan Swift, James Thomson and Walter Scott. European writers include Giovanni Boccaccio, Luis de Camoens, Baldassare Castiglione, Dante Alighieri, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Molière, Michel de Montaigne, Jean Racine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.

French history

Another strength of the collection is French history and political and economic affairs. Some examples are books by the historians Henri de Boulainvilliers, Jean de Launoy and Abbé de Mably, the theologians Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and François de Fenelon, the banker and finance minister Jacques Necker, the politicians Lazare Carnot and the Comte de Mirabeau, and the agronomist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.

Pamphlets

The large number of pamphlets in the Clifford Collection were mostly published between 1750 and 1850. They deal with an extraordinary range of subjects: Catholic emancipation, the French Revolution, the Royal Navy, the government of Ireland, Indian affairs, colonies, parliamentary reform, the slavery question, Catholic education, the employment of children in factories, public health, agriculture, inventions and the repeal of the Corn Laws.

The most famous item in the Clifford Collection is the Chertsey Cartulary, the only medieval cartulary held in Australia and one of a very small number held outside Britain. It is a volume containing charters, accounts and property transactions of St Peter’s Benedictine Abbey at Chertsey, Surrey, between 1312 and 1345. During this period John de Rutherwyk was abbot and the abbey, which was probably founded in Saxon times, was extremely prosperous. The cartulary was bound by Sydney Cockerell.

The collection contains nine other medieval manuscripts, seven of which are illuminated. They are devotional works—Bibles, books of hours, a prayer book, a breviary, a psalter—executed in England, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. In most instances, the bindings are of a later date. Two of the books of hours (MS 1097/5, 9) contain full-page miniatures of Biblical scenes and saints and are works of great beauty.

Most of the other manuscripts in the collection, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, are of a religious and devotional nature. They include an original manuscript by Gregory Martin (d. 1582) entitled Roma Sancta and manuscripts by George Oliver on the history of Catholicism in Devon and Cornwall. Other works deal with the poor laws, prisons, hospitals, freemasonry, legal disputes, the Civil War and the defence of Devon during the war with France (1794–1802).

Of special interest is a nineteenth-century manuscript catalogue of the library of Lord Clifford (RBf CLI 4263).

A small number of documents of the Clifford family are to be found in the collection. They include a commonplace book of the 1st Baron Clifford and his horoscope (1670), manuscripts by the 6th Baron on the lives of saints, financial accounts of estates of Lord Clifford in other counties (1748–50), verse written to celebrate the return of Lord Clifford to the House of Lords (c. 1831), a sketch book of Walter Clifford (1872) and a farm ledger (1844–1915).

The Clifford Collection was purchased in 1963 from Hugh Clifford, later 13th Baron Clifford. Hugh Clifford had lived in Australia in his younger days, following the marriage of his father to May Knox, the daughter of the Chief Justice, Sir Adrian Knox. One item in the collection, the Chertsey Cartulary, was not received until 1974, when an export licence was granted by the British Government.

All the books in the Clifford Collection, including the small number of modern books, are kept together in the Rare Books Collection. The books have been catalogued individually and the call numbers have the prefixes RB CLI, RBq CLI, RBf CLI and RBef CLI.

The manuscripts and personal documents are held in the Manuscripts Collection. They have been catalogued as a collection and you can used the finding aid. More detailed descriptions of the 10 medieval manuscripts can be found in:

• KV Sinclair, Descriptive catalogue of medieval and renaissance western manuscripts in Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney, [1969].

The illuminated manuscripts are described in detail in:

• Margaret M Manion and Vera F Vines, Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts in Australian collections, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 1984

Other cartularies of Chertsey Abbey are held in the British Library (Lansdowne 435) and the National Archives in London (E 164/29).

This guide was prepared using these references:

• Chertsey Abbey cartularies, volume II, part I: being the second portion of the Cartulary in the Public Record Office, Surrey Record Society, Frome, 1958.
• Chertsey cartularies, volume II, part 2: being extracts from British Museum Lansdowne MS. 435 and the Clifford Cartulary, together with index to volume II, Surrey Record Society, Frome, 1963.
• Ronald Hutton, Thomas Clifford, First Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 12, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 115–19.
• Mary Jones, The history of Chudleigh, Devon: with a description of the surrounding scenery, seats, families etc., S. Drayton & Sons, Exeter, 1875.
• Charles Moseley (ed.), Burke’s peerage and baronetage, vol. 1, Delaware, Wilmington, 2003, pp. 821–3.
• Ugbrooke House: www.ugbrooke.co.uk/