News of Acquisitions
The Dering Roll Saved for the nation
Thanks to the generous support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund, The Friends of the National Libraries, Friends of the British Library and numerous individual donors the British Library has successfully acquired the Dering Roll, the oldest extant English roll of arms, dating from c.1270-1280.
The Roll, a vital record for the study of knighthood in medieval England depicts 324 coats of arms, representing approximately a quarter of the entire English baronage during the reign of King Edward I (1272-1307).
The Roll was sold at auction in December 2007 but was subsequently placed under a temporary export bar by Culture Minister Margaret Hodge. It was awarded a starred rating by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, who considered it to be of particular importance and of outstanding significance for the study of early English heraldry.
The Dering Roll will now be made available to researchers in the British Library's Manuscripts Reading Room and it will be on display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library from 1 September 2008.
Claire Breay, Head of Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts at the British Library, commented: “The Dering Roll was identified as a priority acquisition for the British Library, and we are very pleased that we were able to secure the funding required to purchase the Roll and keep it in the UK. The Library holds an extensive collection of outstanding historical and heraldic manuscripts and the acquisition of the Dering Roll provides an extremely rare chance to add a manuscript of enormous local and national significance which will greatly strengthen and complement its existing collection”.
Harold Pinter Archive Saved for the Nation
Thanks to the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and generous grants from Dr Alice Griffin, the American Trust for the British Library, the Michael Marks Charitable Trust and other private trusts and donors, we were able to purchase the archive of the pre-eminent Nobel Prize-winning playwright and writer Harold Pinter in December 2007.
Comprising over 150 boxes of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs, programmes and emails, the archive offers an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars of Pinter's work for stage, cinema, and poetry. Highlights include an exceedingly perceptive and enormously affectionate run of letters from Samuel Beckett, letters and hand-written manuscripts revealing Pinter's close collaboration with director Joseph Losey; a charming and highly amusing exchange of letters with Philip Larkin; and a draft of Pinter's unpublished autobiographical memoir of his youth, 'The Queen of all the Fairies'. Together with material relating to the award of the Nobel Prize, cuttings books, and photographs, these papers amount to one of the most significant post-War literary archives of one of the greatest Anglophone playwrights of the 20th century.