Some years ago I did work on the library of the Leighs of 
Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire.  I found that many of the 
remarks already made by Peter Hoare also applied there.

The Stoneleigh library is in many ways a country house 
library with a difference.  Unlike many collections, 
nothing has been dispersed in recent years.  But equally, 
unlike many collections, the books are no longer in place 
in the house of the family that collected them.  The line 
of the Lords Leigh of the first creation became extinct in 
1786, and while the Abbey and most of its contents passed 
to a junior branch of the family, the books and the 
scientific equipment which went with them came to Oxford, 
and are still here.  They were bequeathed to Oriel, which 
built a beautiful neo-classical library, which still houses 
the Leigh books in much the same order as when they arrived 
in 1795.

I investigated the collection in three separate ways.  To 
begin with I transcribed the handlists which accompanied 
the books to Oxford, and matched the entries up with the 
books on the shelves by a combination of using the card 
catalogues and, as I became more familiar with Oriel 
eighteenth-century classification scheme, of intuition.  
The books themselves were generally bookplated, and this 
generally made identifying them fairly easy.  However, 
very few had any other marks which enabled me to draw any 
more detailed conclusions about their provenance.

At this stage I moved to the Leigh family archives in the 
record office in Stratford.  I found an extraordinary mass 
of material: library papers, booklists, a large number of 
detailed bills and receipts from London booksellers.  These 
all tended to point in the same direction: that the 
Stoneleigh Abbey collection had not been assembled by the 
Leigh family over many generations, but was substantially 
the creation of Edward, the 5th and last Lord Leigh 
(1742-1786), who spent thousands of pounds on books in a 
brief period in the 1760s. This was confirmed by a detailed 
reading of the library papers which Lord Leigh himself 
wrote, though there were a small number of books inscribed 
by earlier members of the family.  Sorting these out 
required a lot of work with the genealogies, because 
approximately 80% of the male members of the Leigh clan 
seemed to have been called either Edward or Thomas!  The 
bills also seemed to refute the idea which had been 
accepted at Oriel since the 19th century that the books 
were collected on the Grand Tour; not only were there no 
signs of substantial expenditure on travel, but most of the 
books which appeared to have originated in Italy were shown 
by archival sources to have been purchased from London 
dealers like Paul Vaillant.

More general material in the archives showed something of 
how the collection was arranged, and helped with 
reconstructing its social and architectural context.  This 
was particular important because I was unable to gain 
access to the buildings, most of which were re-arranged and 
redecorated for the same man who collected the books.  
Architectural plans and drawings not only revealed grand 
plans for a new library wing and museum at the Abbey, but 
also suggested that the many foreign architectural books 
were providing source material. It became apparent that the 
library was merely part of a huge and incomplete scheme of 
building, collecting and artistic patronage - quite 
different from the conventional and compartmentalised view 
of library history.  Sadly, there were no personal papers 
belonging to the library's creator to allow the 
intentions behind this to be pursued further: it turned out 
that these were deliberately destroyed.  This was puzzling 
until I discovered that Lord Leigh has died a certified 
lunatic, whose sufferings had greatly distressed members of 
his family.  

My final source of information was material in other sets 
of papers, including those of other great Warwickshire 
families.  This contained nothing on the library, but cast 
particular light on the complex web of social and political 
relationships which underlay Edward Leigh's career, and 
explained how and why the books came to end up in Oxford.  
Printed sources, on the other hand, were not hugely useful, 
though they did provide further material about 
eighteenth-century Warwickshire, and some information about 
similar collections.  In general, however, I found accounts 
of country house collections rather pedestrian, and I 
tended to make more of descriptions of the rather larger 
collections amassed by George III (now in the BL), and 
Francis Douce (in the Bodleian), and more general books 
about collecting in 18th-century England.

As far as methodology goes, my main conclusion was that it 
was necessarily to attack the problem from many different 
angles, and not simply to rely on drawing conclusions from 
the books without further corroboration.

Mark Purcell



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