Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (detail of portrait
attributed to Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen)
Sir Robert Cotton (1570 (or 71) – 1631) was an English politician of Huntingdonshire stock, but he is now remembered chiefly for his library, which housed manuscripts of many famous works, quite a few of them unique. Without Cotton we would probably not know anything of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Lindisfarne Gospels and the like.
The library was housed in a room 26 feet long by six feet wide filled with book cabinets. Each cabinet was surmounted by a bust of a character of antiquity, mainly Roman emperors. The documents were catalogued by referring to the relevant character, the shelf and the position from the left of the shelf. So for example, the MS of Beowulf is known as Cotton Vitellius A XV, because it was the 15th from the left on shelf A under the bust of Vitellius.
Cotton donated part of his collection to the Bodleian Library in Oxford when it was re-opened with this name in 1602. The rest of the collection was donated to the nation by Cotton’s grandson. In 1731 it was housed in Ashburnam House, in Westminster — a very ironic name. There was a disastrous fire there in that year and a number of manuscripts were lost, not all of which had been copied.
Cotton’s library is now part of the British Library and the original cataloguing scheme has been retained.