The Legacy of Matthew Parker

The legacy left by Matthew Parker to Corpus Christi College continues after four-and-a-half centuries with our stewardship of the Library, his generous benefactions and our continuing mission of teaching and research.

Matthew Parker (1504-75) was a powerful figure of the English Reformation who was largely responsible for shaping the Church of England as a national institution. Parker's talents were sought by both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. He served as chaplain to Anne Boleyn and proved himself a capable administrator, becoming Master of Corpus Christi College (1544-53), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and Archbishop of Canterbury (1559-75). As a benefactor to Corpus Christi College, Parker is renowned for his Mastership, his generosity and for the collection of manuscripts and early printed books he bequeathed to the College and which is now held in the Library that bears his name.

On 4 December 1544, on the recommendation of Henry VIII, Parker was elected Master of Corpus Christi, where he had been a student from the age of 16. Upon his election he began the process of organising the College finances, repairing buildings and constructing new ones. He worked hard to make Corpus a centre of learning. In 1548 Parker established six scholarships, sixteenth-century forerunners of the College's recent transformative engagement with widening participation. The Parker scholars are described in the language of the College history of 1753 as those chosen "out of such as should be competently learned in grammar, of the poorest men's children, being of such qualities as should be thought meet". Scholars were generously provided for; each was to have "a small allowance per annum for laundress and barber, together with a chamber and his reading in the hall free."

Parker's Bequest

The Parker Library's holdings of Old English texts account for one of the most significant collections of manuscripts anywhere in the world, including the Augustine Gospels (c 600) and the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c 890). Other subjects represented in the collection are music, including the earliest known example of polyphonic music produced in England, medieval travelogues and maps, apocalypses, bestiaries and historical chronicles. The illuminated manuscripts held within the collection, notably two giant twelfth-century Bibles from the abbey of Bury St Edmunds and Dover priory, as well as the two volumes of the Chronica Maiora written and illustrated by Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century monk at St Albans, are also of unparalleled importance to the study of medieval art.  

The Parker Library holds approximately 4,750 books printed before 1820 in the Parker Library, of which around 1,075 are from Parker's collection. To guarantee the integrity and safety of his collection, Parker specified in his endowment that should Corpus ever lose more than a certain number of his books, the rest of his collection would pass first to Gonville and Caius College and then – if there were any further losses – to Trinity Hall. Although this has had no legal force since the nineteenth century, the invitation to the Masters of these two Colleges to view select manuscripts and celebrate Parker’s collection with a formal Audit Lunch has been renewed in this century.