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Reproduced from the President's article in the autumn newsletter

The OAHS’s current activities focus very much on three areas: our lectures and excursions are aimed primarily at serving our own members, while publishing Oxoniensia supports others by publishing the results of their research, and the work of the listed buildings committee and Archaeology Forum foster discussions about conservation issues and decision-making in the historic environment. A fourth aspect of what the OAHS does – or rather did – is the curation of resources for studying the past. Before the days of county record offices, local authority museums and historic environment records – which mostly appeared in the later 20th century – our predecessors were actively engaged in collecting and preserving resources for studying the past, supplementing the University’s collections. The OAHS no longer actively collect such materials, though occasionally people offer us papers, artefacts or art works, which we usually refer on to other bodies. The main way we foster access to resources these days is our online guide to resources for studying Oxfordshire’s history. But members may also be aware that the Society still retains some valuable original resources for the study of history, architecture and archaeology, which are both significant in their own right and represent tangible evidence of how 19th century societies operated.

In some ways, our current conservation activities, which seek to promote well-informed approaches to change in our physical surroundings, are a modern day equivalent of what the OAHS’s earliest predecessor, the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture sought to do in 1839. The OAHS’s collections directly reflect the purpose of the 1839 Society, which was ‘to collect books, prints and drawing, models of the forms of arches, vaults etc, casts of mouldings, and details and such other architectural specimens as the funds of the society will permit.’ The idea behind the collection of such materials was partly to inform church architects as to the forms of medieval Gothic that they were trying to replicate in the buildings of the so-called Gothic Revival of the mid 19th century.

Perhaps the most unusual part of the Society’s surviving collections which reflects the 1839 remit is thus the surviving assemblage of over 100 plaster ‘casts of mouldings, and details’ of medieval carving, mostly from Oxfordshire churches, but some from as far afield as Lincoln and Yorkshire. They are currently stored by the County Museum Service at Standlake and at the end of July, several members took the opportunity to view the collection on one of this year’s excursions. John Rhodes, the curator at the time, has commented as follows on the rationale for the museum entering this arrangement with the OAHS: ‘the cast collection was taken into care because of what seemed to be its exceptional importance, to Oxfordshire and on a much wider scale, as the 3-dimensional product of an early interest in the Gothic and the need to record and preserve surviving examples - a central reason for the very establishment of the county society in the late 1830s. This was in the county which became a major centre nationally for such studies, and for what grew from them through the Gothic Revival. It was more a question of accepting deposit of important material on behalf of a related historic local organisation, rather than a conventional loan to augment collections. It seems to me that the continuing link through ownership between the collection and the Society which created it is an important aspect of its historic significance, which would be lost if the link were severed.’

In the 19th century, the Society had rooms – at one stage in the Holywell Music Room – in which its collections could be examined and consulted. Physical evidence for this seems to survive in the wires attached to many of the plaster casts from which they could be hung on a wall. Some sister Societies in other counties still have rooms for their libraries and collections, and indeed those for both Wiltshire and Dorset run major museums. The role of the University in Oxford made this less necessary for our county society – which in any case has always had very close links with the University through the large number of academics amongst its members. Over the years, the need for separate rooms dwindled as the original collection policy faded, and by the 1960s most of the Society’s collections were being housed by other institutions.

Thus, the Society's important collection of brass rubbings, which seem to have complemented the casts as a means of recording authentic gothic style from extant medieval monuments, is now kept in the Ashmolean. The majority of the Society's papers were deposited in the Bodleian Library, and have been indexed in the card index of Oxford topographical views, in the Arts End of the Old Library. Apart from Proceedings, minute books and the like, the Bodleian deposit includes a substantial collection of topographical views of buildings, monuments and places in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. In 1955, the portfolios of topographical material for counties other than Berkshire and Oxfordshire were given to the National Buildings Record (now the National Monuments Record of English Heritage at Swindon), and the contents were distributed into the Record topographically and so cannot now be physically be identified as a specific collection (though may well be retrieved virtually from the computerised catalogue).

At much the same time, the foreign material in the collection was given to the Royal Institute of British Architects (The British Architectural Library: Drawings Collection 21 Portman Square, London). This included 48 prints of foreign churches; 5 sketches of Newfoundland churches by the Rev. William Grey; 11 drawings of a design for a timber church by James Cranstoun; and 9 sketches of' St Sermin Toulouse and Droutheim by J.P. Harrison, dating from 1824 and 1839.

The Society’s library of printed books is now housed in the University’s Sackler Library, the collection being catalogued under architectural subjects (including gothic, continental and foreign and special features of church architecture); ecclesiology; local studies (city, county, university history descriptions and memoirs); biography and family history; other areas (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Gloucestershire and Cambridge); heraldry and armour; and miscellaneous subjects.

One of the inevitable effects of this dispersal of the Society’s collections amongst such a range of different institutions is that it has lost the coherence of the original purpose of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, as quoted above. The original idea seems to have been to assemble a very wide range of practical sources to assist in the study of architecture, not just for its own sake, but to influence the design of new buildings – a remarkably prescient approach to what in modern parlance would be termed ‘informed conservation’. It seems highly likely that there are more connections between the collections of drawings, casts, new designs, papers and books than is now evident, but with careful research it may be possible to re-establish what some of these connections were, and thereby gain some insight into how the original purpose of the Society to influence Neo-Gothic was achieved.

The Society’s committee will be discussing how we can do more to foster interest in and use of our collections in October, and it seems likely that a key starting point for this would be to take another look at the cast collection to establish its significance more clearly. This could involve establishing a photographic record linked to the catalogue, and then perhaps to link key pieces to the Society’s other records, such as its Proceedings, minutes etc; and perhaps to other collections such as the topographical drawings and designs. Further areas of interest are to check whether any casts are now important as records of original medieval carvings that may have since been lost or deteriorated. There is also a question of how the OAHS collection relates to equivalent activity in other fields – especially natural history in which membership of the early societies were often overlapping.

Over the next year or so, we are likely to be recruiting volunteers to help explore some of these questions, so if you are interested in helping please let us know!

Note: The About tab at the top of the page leads to a page with links to information about the Society's collections, including a catalogue of casts and a scanned version of the Proceedings.