A former Visiting Fellow at Durham found a Royal charter issued by King John. Here's what I found on my next day with the Special Collections

So far in Durham, I've not been inside the Cathedral - though I've walked pretty well right around it - and I've not been into other interesting places such as the Market Hall in the main square which looks inviting. The reason: I've been somewhere else special - a place where discoveries are made, the Palace Green library's Special Collections Barker Room.

I see that a previous library fellow from Bristol University made national and international news when they found a handwritten royal charter of King John from 1200. 

'Cool Find' as reported in the Smithsonian Magazine, March 29, 2019

The discovery of King John's Royal Charter as headlined in The Times, March 26, 2019

Nothing I have found is quite on that scale but I'm buzzing from the glimpses I'm getting into the lives of several generations of the Headlam family from their papers.

What I found today fell into two halves, pretty well before my lunch break - of around 20 minutes - and after it. Other than that, from when the library opened through to closing time at 4.30, I moved my my seat only to return notebooks and folders to the Special Collections desk and swap those for fresh ones.

The afternoon even involved me finding something that left the librarians initially unsure what to do - more on that later.

First though - what I found pre-lunch. I spent the morning with notebooks. Well I actually started earlier, on the commute to Durham from Newcastle, wondering whether I could find the poem by Hartley Coleridge in the little sketchbook I looked at yesterday. Oh yes I did! This will be for a later follow up expect to say that the note is Coleridge's own and that the poem WAS written for Margaret ...

Her namesake Margaret Headlam - letters to whom I've spent several days reading - herself, I found out today, wrote poetry. I spent most of the morning with her poems including ones written when she was young - aged 11 (I think - I must check that). These poems were not classically-themed although, reading as a classicist, I found poems very much focused on imagery of flowers and on young women dying young, their deaths occurring in place of marriage. Reading this poetry, I created my own reception (if it was just mine - perhaps Margaret intended it - I'll likely never know, but I do hope at least to find out more about any classical knowledge Margaret will have had): of Persephone's journey underground to a marriage to death, and one she makes as the flower maiden who dies with the autumn and rises with the spring.

I shall be re-reading the poems in due course - they're unpunished as far as I can tell. They merit a study and I would like to find out how far they are modelled on common 19th-century themes. The same goes for the text - in the one of the notebooks - of a play, an unfinished one, set in Italy.

This play has some classical features. The opening scene is set in:

A garden, adorned with Busts of the Epic Poets. 

The poets in question are a Classical one and one from the 15th-16th centuries:

In the Front of the Scene, that of Virgil to the Right, that of Ariosto to the Left

Up until lunch, the focus of what I looked at was Margaret. Post-lunch it turned to another Headlam family female member - one whose brothers' letters I had read from when they were children. Those brothers were Arthur and Lionel, and this sister was Rose Gladys who, like her Aunts Isabella and Margaret, stayed unmarried and kept up a regular correspondence with her family. 

This included regular letters to her father, Arthur Headlam. I read letters from when she was young until well into the 20th century. Of these, those written to 'dear Papa' when a young girl, mixed everyday details with some colourful ones. In one from Morpeth, dated August 27th, for example, details about who she has had tea with (the Miss Cresswells) lead into an account of finding:

Old Smith with his head on the path and his body and legs on the road.

Another letter, meanwhile  wishes her father a happy birthday and then includes such details as this:

It was so hot I never went to church - I slept with Mama last night and I tumbled out of bed

The letters weren't in chronological order. What I read, for instance, were several that had been put into a much later envelope, after her father's death, perhaps, when Rose might have found her letters to him among his papers. Letters from young Rose were mixed in with her adult correspondence - in a way that was immersive for me and quite jarring. 

She addresses one letter, of August 27 1871 in French - to 'Mon cher Pere' - and in another mentions music lessons. She talks also about her disappointment at opening the shutters one morning to find that it had been showing (!) - although, in another letter, she talks enthusiastically, and in detail, about a snowball fight. 

These letters written as a young girl reveal a strong interest in nature. In a letter of June 16th 1876, for example, she writes:

Have you heard the cuckoo yet [...] There are a great many ferns out of the backs now, and they are very pretty and green [...] The Narcissus are going off now [...]

As the day in the library drew to a close, I made unexpected progress through the final several boxes because they were mostly full of letters of condolence - many, many of them - sent on the death of her father, then, the following year of her mother, and then, decades later of her brother, Arthur. There were letters too from Arthur and from John. 

Of the condolence letters, it was here that I found one that had never been opened - and it was this one  that caused the stir among the librarians that I mentioned at the start of this posting - who did come to update me about what the procedure turns out to be. I can let you know if you're interested!

That was it for the day - I left with my head spinning from all I'd read. 

More asap...