Transcribed and translated by Gloria Moss, annotated by Arthur MacGregor

Ashmolean Museum, AMS 2, compiled 1683-1766. Folio volume with modern board covers, quarter-bound in morocco and with reinforced comers, gold-lettered on the spine "ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, BOOK OF BENEFACTORS, 1683-1766 '. 82 vellum leaves, 55 of them blank. 395 by 300 mm.

As implied by its title, the Book of Benefactors is not so much a record of material acquired by the Museum in its early years as a memorial to those who enriched the collections with their benefactions. Following Ashmole's founding gift to the University, comprising natural and man-made rarities, coins and medals, books and manuscripts, our attention is attracted first by a close-knit triumvirate of natural scientists who can claim an importance for the early history of the Museum in almost equal measure. A strong place for primacy in this group is made elsewhere (p. 153) for Martin Lister, who subscribed not only shells and fossils but also Roman antiquities from his native Yorkshire. Robert Plot, the first keeper, was similarly generous with donations of natural specimens (some of which had formed the raw materials for his Natural History of Oxfordshire) and Roman antiquities from his home territory in Kent. Edward Lhwyd, Plot's under-keeper and ultimately his successor, deposited many of the fossils or 'figured stones' on which much of his own reputation, as well as that of the Museum, was built before his early death in 1709.

The names of several important private collectors of the day appear in the lists, although major benefactions from any of them proved elusive. William Charleton and John Woodward both contributed modest numbers of specimens, but despite the expectations of the curators that they might look forward to 'many others of the same kind,' they waited in vain. (Other collectors who were courted for contributions ~ Sir Hans Sloane and Ralph Thoresby, for example, both received overtures ~ were to resist those advances).

A number of specialist coin collectors were more forthcoming. Thomas Braithwait of Ambleside in Westmorland proved particularly generous and was encouraged in his philanthropy by Sir Daniel Fleming. John Sowter, a merchant of London, made several smaller benefactions over a decade or more, as well as sending occasional gifts of other material. The Revd James Ivie gave a useful series of Roman coins from Wiltshire while Richard Dyer contributed more recent numismatic specimens and several donors gave commemorative medals.

Amongst the additions to the early collections of antiquities, special interest attaches to the gift recorded in 1696 from Charles Hopkins. Not only does the 'gold plate' from Ballyshannon--in fact a discoid ornament or 'sun-disk' of Bronze Age date (see Case 1977)--represent the earliest documented discovery of a prehistoric artefact from the British Isles, but its documentation already extended to publication, in Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia, which appeared in 1695. To the Roman antiquities from Kent contributed by Plot were added others from Reculver and Canterbury, given in 1686 by William Kingsley, but the most spectacular piece recorded here is of Anglo-Saxon date: the record of Thomas [recte Nathaniel] Palmer’s gift in 1718 of ‘a picture of an old man ... in a gold and crystal frame’ is a surprisingly laconic acknowledgement of the acquisition of what remains today one of the Museum’s most prized possessions ~ the Alfred Jewel (see Hinton 1974, no. 23). Scarcely less remarkable are the two rune-stones sent from Sweden by John Robinson (chaplain to the English embassy to the Swedish court) in 1689 with the declared intention of ensuring that epigraphy of this nature was represented in Oxford (see MacGregor 1997, nos. 31.1-2).

Other inscriptions, noteworthy for the history of Egyptology, include the inscribed coffin lid acquired personally in Egypt and donated to the Museum in the year of its foundation by Robert Huntington (see Malek 1983) and the mummy contained in an inscribed coffin and given in the same year by Aaron Goodyear. The record of a further mummy, given in 1766 by Isaac Hughes, forms the final entry in the volume.

Ethnographic specimens, as yet classified with little more rigour than the ‘artificial rarities’ that had been received from the Tradescant collection, arrived from the furthest-flung colonies, though in small numbers. Sir William Hedges gave an ‘idol’ named Gonga or Ganga, brought back from India, where he had acquired it from an island temple at the mouth of the Ganges (see Harle 1983), while Roger Burrough gave a small marble figure of an Indian god, Edward Pococke, Regius Professor of Oriental Languages, enhanced the collections with Jewish as well as Turkish items acquired in the course of his travels, and another Oxford man, the Revd Thomas Hues, bequeathed what was evidently taken to be an inscription of some importance for the history of the ‘Turkish church’ in North Africa, where Hues had served in the Anglican ministry. A small collection of runic calendars arrived from Sweden in 1683, it seems in fulfilment of a pledge made during an earlier visit to England by their donor, John Heysig, when, evidently, he had learned of the newly founded Museum. From the Americas, Nathaniel Crynes gave a Mexican feather picture (a much sought-after commodity in Continental Kunstkammer of the period and one which was said to have been brought to England by Mary of Modena (Ovenell 1986, p. 137), Justinian Shepherd contributed a wampum belt and John Yeomans, a ship’s captain from Bristol, was the donor of a canoe--perhaps a model rather than full-sized, to judge from the fact that it came complete with a native occupant. Undoubted models followed also in the eighteenth century, contributed respectively by Dr George Clarke in 1719 (a warship) and by Dr Richard Rawlinson in 1757 (two types of Venetian boats).

More prominent, and doubtless considered of greater relevance to the new institution, were numerous gifts of natural history specimens. Edward Morgan, the celebrated plantsman, effectively founded the collection of plants with his donation in 1689 of some 2,000 specimens (almost all grown by himself) preserved in a three-volume hortus siccus. A further collection of plants as well as animals collected in India by James Pound, a physician, evidently included a number of specimens preserved in spirits, displayed for visual effect in glass jars in the windows of the Museum; a further sixteen specimens in jars, contributed by Smart Lethieullier, previously had formed part of the Woodward collection. Others came in the form of skins--a zebra from Charles Harris, an Angora goat from Timothy Lannoy and a lizard from Henry Johnson--or perhaps as stuffed specimens, as in the case of William Perrot’s bat or ‘flying fox’. Two significant donations of bird specimens ~ twenty-four of them from Edward Ent and what was evidently an interesting collection of northerly sea-birds from Nicholas Roberts, are also likely to have been stuffed specimens, while the only fish specimen recorded here, a ‘Setang’ from the Indian Ocean given by William Gibbons, may have been dried or in spirits.

Thomas Shaw’s donation in 1716 of an extensive collection of insects caught in the Oxford neighbourhood forms a valuable indicator that the Ashmolean's sphere of interest encompassed entomology from at least this date.

The early importance of mineral and fossil specimens in the collections is more firmly founded. The interests of Lister, Plot and Lhwyd all converged in this subject-area and combined to establish the Ashmolean’s reputation in this field by an early date. Woodward’s tentative contribution was also in material of nature and there is evidence elsewhere in the archives that others were more forthcoming. Later in the eighteenth century, interest in the earth sciences enjoyed a brief revival under the enlightened keepership of William Huddesford, when further contributions to the collections were made by William Borlase, Thomas Pennant and Joshua Platt.

The experimental dimensions of the Ashmolean’s role are alluded to only belatedly in the gift from Edward Seymour in 1756 of specimens of the chemical dyes which he had developed and, perhaps, in the huge lodestone sent in the same year by the Countess of Westmorland, which survives today in the Museum of the History of Science.

The Countess is one of three women recorded amongst the benefactors. Dorothy Long’s ivory crozier-head remains in the collections, still prized although now recognized as twelfth-century work and as having no possible connection with the saint posited as its owner by the donor. Anne Mary Woodford’s contribution of a paper collar ornamented in openwork by her own hand, has long since vanished.

Finally, it may be noted that two of the benefactors listed here, Ashmole's father-in-law Sir William Dugdale and the writer John Aubrey, contributed to the Museum's library with generous gifts of books and manuscripts rather than enriching its collections of exhibits. Here their volumes joined not only Ashmole's own extensive library but also the equally valuable manuscript collection of Anthony Wood, bequeathed together with over 1,000 printed books in 1695. The failure of Wood's bequest to register any impact in the Book of Benefactors underscores the very partial nature of the volume, while Ovenell (1986, p. 137) notes the presence in the text of several retrospective interpolations, indicating that even its present imperfect state resulted from intermittent rather than sustained attention. While the Book of Benefactors forms an interesting complement to the manuscript catalogues of the various Visitors, as reproduced below, its significance as a record of the collections themselves remains secondary.