More royals

The supporters on my mystery coat of arms (I discovered after a bit of investigation of heraldic beasts, where it was sorely tempting to be sidetracked!) are yales, and the arms are those of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, who founded, and whose arms are used by, both St John's and Christ's Colleges, Cambridge (as are her Tudor rose and portcullis badges). So how does a Cambridge college binding come to be in Somerville? The donor of the book was Mrs Octavia Adler, whose address is given in an old copy of the college register as "Kings and Princes, West Chiltington, Sussex". And there is indeed an 18th century farmhouse called Kings and Princes in West Chiltington - although not even Google can satisfy my curiosity as to how it came by that name! Google can, however, supply the information that her husband Herbert Marcus Adler was an alumnus of St John's College, Cambridge - so I assume he either had his own book bound in a college binding, or acquired the book from the college by some (I hope legitimate!) means.

Learned and right royal ...

The spirit of liberty : papers and addresses of Learned Hand --
I was assuming that "The Learned Hand" was a pseudonym, but it turns out that the author was in fact christened Learned Hand, or in full Billings Learned Hand, his mother's maiden name having been Learned. "His mother's family traditionally used surnames as given names" says Wikipedia -- which could have unfortunate consequences; I have several cousins who bear the no doubt honourable but somewhat infelicitous surname of Daft.

I'm now puzzling over a late Victorian or Edwardian heraldic binding, with an earl's coronet, a Tudor rose and the House of Commons portcullis on the spine, and a coat of arms on the boards which must have some royal connection, as the central escutcheon shows the three lions of England quartered with three fleurs-de-lys. The supporters are some kind of cross between a lion and a goat, I think ...

Heaven at last! or, the convolutions of Scottish family history

A three-volume edition of The book of the farm : detailing the labours of the farmer, farm-steward, ploughman, shepherd, hedger, cattle-man, field-worker and dairy maid, by Henry Stephens. Sounds fascinating as a glimpse of The Way Things Were, and was apparently the 'bible' of the BBC TV series Victorian Farm - but I'm not sure Somervillians will have made much practical use of it! Stamped on the cover of each volume is a Scottish clan badge, the central device being a crescent, and the motto on the surrounding strap and buckle being 'Denique coelum' - At the last, heaven. Simple to type the motto into Google and find out it belongs to the Clan Melville - but their device is a hound's head, not a crescent. Maybe some side-branch of the clan? Google Images found me the following, on the University of Toronto's register of British Armorial Bindings:

which is exactly what I've got, and comes with the information that it was used by the families of Melville of Murdocairnie in Fife 1672, and of Melville of Strathkinness also in Fife 1773. So how does it come to be on a book published in 1844? A bit more ferreting around, and I discover that the Strathkinness estate, which by then had been joined with the Bennochy estates of the Whyte family,  was inherited in 1883 by John Balfour of Pilrig, who assumed the name and arms of Melville of Strathkinness.

So how did the books come to Somerville? Written on the bookplates is the information that they were given by Mrs Stotherd, but there is no Stotherd listed in the College Register, so she must have been a well-wisher rather than an old member. But there is one Stotherd in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who ended up as director-general of the Ordnance Survey, and who in 1875 married as his second wife one Elizabeth Janet Melville. Serious genealogists may like to pursue this further; I think I'd better get back to my books!

Ukraine to Canada, Cornwall to Australia (and Vlad the Baptizer)

An 1819 edition of the Traité d'économie politique by Jean-Baptiste Say was given to the Library by the Hon. Mrs Cunnack in 1955. M. Say has a long list of distinctions, the first of which is "Chevalier de Saint-Wolodimir". Who, I wondered, is the splendidly-named Saint Wolodimir? A quick trip to Google revealed a Ukrainian Orthodox saint spelt Volodymyr with a cathedral in (somewhat unexpectedly!) Toronto, Canada; he was Grand Prince of Kiev 980-1015 and known as The Baptizer, having been responsible for the conversion to Christianity of his subjects. His name is more familiarly (and therefore a little less exotically) rendered as Vladimir.

The name Cunnack also seems to have undergone a far-flung transportation, being associated mainly with Cornwall and Australia. But who was the Hon. Mrs Cunnack (no forename given), and what was her connection with Somerville? No Cunnacks in the index of the college register - so I had recourse once again to Google, where I found that a search for "hon cunnack" turned up the Hon. Alice Elizabeth Millicent Erskine-Wemyss (born 1906, the daughter of Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss), who married Major Francis Henry Cunnack in 1953. She looks to have been an intellectual character - she was given an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Toulouse for her work on French Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is mentioned in the online catalogue of Balliol archives for her work in classifying the Morier family papers (her mother's maiden name having been Morier), and Agatha Ramm, former Fellow of Somerville, wrote a biography of her grandfather Sir Robert Morier - but that's the closest Somerville connection I can find.
 

A gentleman philosopher

Volume 2 of The light of nature pursued, by Abraham Tucker (vol. 1 seems to have got lost ...) --

Wikipedia describes Abraham Tucker (1705-1774) as "an English country gentleman, who devoted himself to the study of philosophy." He was the son of a wealthy city merchant, who entered Merton College, Oxford as a gentleman commoner and studied philosophy, mathematics, French, Italian and music. In 1727 he bought himself a country estate and settled down to a life of amateur scholarship. The light of nature pursued was published in two sections, the first four volumes in 1765 and the final three posthumously, having been composed despite the fact that he had lost his eyesight, by virtue of an ingenious apparatus which he devised, and which enabled him to write clearly enough for his daughter to transcribe.

The Oxford DNB reveals that he married the daughter of a neighbour who was "cursitor baron of the exchequer and receiver of the tenths" (now there's a distracting collection of titles ...). It describes The light of nature pursued as "noticeably unsystematic and occasionally rambling in tone" (much like this blog!).