Rosinus

Description

Jacobean Armorial Binding

Romanarum antiquitatum libri decem

Basel, ex off. Petri Pernae, per Conradum Waldkirch, 1583.

Folio, [24], 491, [65] p., printer’s device on title and at end, double-page plan of early Rome, woodcuts in the text (some of them large), some spotting owing to poor quality paper, title very slightly soiled and creased, flyleaf torn, contemporary, probably French, calf, gilt ornaments in compartments of spine, gilt fillet, large English armorial stamp (height 105 mm) added some 20 years later, neat but quite extensive repair.

A popular handbook of Roman Realien, which ran through many editions right up until 1743.

The arms are of Leigh (a cross engrailed, a lozenge in the dexter chief) with a label of three points, impaling Egerton (a lion rampant between three pheons). This marshalling of the arms is a marital achievement. Actually two Leighs married Egertons, but the label (denoting an heir apparent) rules out Sir Francis Leigh, who married Elizabeth Egerton (daughter of Lord Ellesmere, James I’s Lord Chancellor), since there was no title he was due to inherit. The arms therefore have to be those of Sir Thomas Leigh (1595-1671), who married Mary Egerton, Lord Ellesmere’s grand-daughter, and on the death of his grandfather, 3 Feb., 1625/6, inherited the baronetcy created 29 June, 1611, his father having died in 1608. To believe the Complete Peerage the arms would be correct at any time between 1611 and 1625 (sc. In the reign of James I), since it cites evidence that he married remarkably young, 11 Nov., 1610: this would ensure that his eldest child, Catherine, was conceived in wedlock, since Camden’s Visitation of Warwickshire records that she was eight on Easter Day 1622.

Foster records that Leigh matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1608, aet. 13; he was M.P. for Warwickshire 1628/9; and he was created Baron Leigh of Stoneleigh by Charles I 1 July, 1643 in recognition of his support and hospitality in the Civil War; he died Feb. 1671/2. The Leighs were an old Staffordshire family whose money came from trade in London (his great-grandfather was Lord Mayor in 1558). Leigh probably did not commission the binding: the ornaments on the spine are quite unrelated, suggesting that the arms were added to a bound book. However, though the book is appropriate enough for an Oxford-educated young man, he must have had the stamp made, and thus joins the quite small company of commoners in England who paid their books this compliment. The nearest family connexion who did so is Sir Robert Dudley, whose stamp of a bear and ragged staff is well known; but though Sir Robert was married to Leigh’s aunt Alice he had abandoned her in 1605, and was living in Italy with Elizabeth Southwell. Leigh lived 45 years after 1626, and there is no evidence that he remade his stamp without the label: so perhaps his bibliophily was merely a youthful fling.

Adams R799: according to Adams a ‘close reprint’ of the first edition, same imprint, same year.