#40 Pocket Benefactor's Book

This item marked the end of donors week, and the last of our #400Things. We hope you’ve enjoyed our dig through the special collections as much as we have. If you have any questions about anything, do get in touch.

We’re finishing with another Benefactor’s Book, but one on a rather different scale to the start of the week.

1. This small book covers the period c.1620-1821

2. It is 150 by 100 mm in size.

3. It is very simply bound in tanned ‘Oxford style’ skin over pulp (rather than the more expensive wooden) boards.

4. The first page introduces the book as a record of donations for the enlargement of Broadgates Hall and is written by Thomas Clayton, Principal, 15 July 1620.

5. Pembroke is first recorded on the third page, where Clayton records its creation, and his own appointment as Master.

6. Despite his importance to the College, these signatures are some of the very few traces we have of Clayton. No identified portrait of him survives.

7. The first three donors recorded in the book are Sir William Spencer, his wife Penelope and his sister Mary (the same Spencer family as Diana, Princess of Wales). Penelope was the daughter of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

8. Later in the book is recorded a gift from Mary Washington, an ancestor of first US President, George Washington.

9. Towards the end of the book is a record of donations towards the further enlargement of Broadgates Hall in 1821, including the addition of heating and a new high table, the latter donated by the Master, George Hall.

10. The donations are scattered rather randomly through the book and, rather oddly, there are records of felled timber interspersed with them.