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Elias Burling, A Call to
Back-Sliding
Israel, New York, 1694: An Unrecorded Tract
Printed by William Bradford
by
A. N. L. Munby
The purpose of this brief note is to draw attention to a New York-printed pamphlet, apparently unrecorded hitherto, which has recently been acquired by Cambridge University Library. It would ill become an English librarian, who has handled a couple of Bradford imprints in his life, to make any pronouncement on the pamphlet's place in the Bradford canon: and it would be still less appropriate for him to attempt to assess its position in the intricate mosaic of controversial literature occasioned by George Keith's secession from the orthodox Quakers in late seventeenth-century New England. These matters will, I hope, receive the attention they deserve from specialists; and in the meantime I offer a physical description of the tract and some notes on the provenance of this copy.
The paper has vertical chain-lines and a cropped watermark at the head of the last leaf only, a fleur-de-lys in a pointed shield (not in Heawood). The type size is pica, roman and italic, with thirty-one lines to a full page, excluding pagination and catchword. Twenty lines of text measure eighty-two millimetres. The format, watermark, chain-lines and surviving deckles on $1 and 2 are consistent with octavo printing by half-sheet imposition.[1] The pages, trimmed at the upper and lower edges, measure 5¾ x 3½ inches, indicating a sheet measuring at least 11½ x 14 inches. The pamphlet has been stabbed and sewn, the original light grey wrappers surviving.
The text, which is addressed 'to the inhabitants of Burlington etc.', is one of those trenchant and hard-hitting pleas for love and unity with which students of ecclesiastical controversy will be familiar. The author cudgels his opponents with a well-knotted olive branch, vigorously supporting the cause of George Keith and accusing his opponents, "a Scorn to Fools, and a Reproach justly among the Heathen", of disrupting the unity of the
The pamphlet, which bears no note of previous ownership, came to light in the parish library of Broughton, a little village not far from St. Ives in the County of Huntingdonshire. This collection, consisting of about eight hundred bound volumes and a large group of unbound pamphlets, was almost exclusively composed of divinity books of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and contained a sizeable assemblage of Quaker tracts.
Many of the books bear the inscription "The Rev. Mr. W. Torkington's gift", others the names of Robert Hodson senior and Robert Hodson. William Torkington, of St. John's College, Cambridge, was Rector from 1705 to 1737 of the village of Wistow, Hunts., not far from Broughton, and his will, which was proved in the Court of the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon is preserved in the Hunts. County Record Office. ". . . Also I give and bequeath to the Reverend Mr. Hodson of Broughton in the County of Huntington all my printed Books of which he hath none of the kind towards the setting up a publick Library." Torkington's books therefore reached Broughton at his death in 1737. Three generations of the Hodson family provided Broughton with Rectors for over a century, with one short break; Robert senior, a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1668 to his death in 1680, Benjamin, also of Magdalene, from 1680 to 1697 and Robert junior, of Jesus College, from 1713 to 1774. The will of the last, also in the Hunts. County Record Office, throws more light on the books at Broughton. It is dated 8 January 1772 and after certain bequests to "Philippe Holmes Spinster the Niece of my Friend Mr. John Cox deceased now living with me" it adds:—
Time dealt hardly with Mr. Hodson's "publick Library". The Victorian restorers in their zeal for emptying the churches banished it from the chancel and in due course it was housed in a room at the top of the tower, where the books were exposed to damp and, when I first saw them in 1956, were coated deep with a century's dirt and pigeon droppings. To the enterprise
Notes
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