![BOURNE, William (c.1535-1582). Partly autograph manuscript signed of Inventions or Devises, n.p. [Gravesend], n.d. [c.1576], AUTOGRAPH DEDICATION SIGNED in Bourne's italic hand to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the text a neat secretarial copy, AUTOGRAPH EMENDATIONS AND ADDITIONS IN BOURNE'S SECRETARY HAND TO APPROXIMATELY 95 PLACES ON 67 PAGES, AUTOGRAPH ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES comprising one full-page drawing, 3 drawings on inserted slips, 6 smaller illustrations and diagrams in text, of ships, a cannon, a besieged town, a ground plan of 'a strong fortiffycation' etc. and 4 tables, autograph foliation and headings, approximately 237 pages, 4to (foliated 1-118), (occasional very slight dampstains, short tear to f.32, not affecting text, some leaves skilfully mounted on guards with no loss of text), speckled calf, rebacked (some scuffs on sides).](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/1999/CKS/1999_CKS_06222_0207_000(122309).jpg?w=1)
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BOURNE, William (c.1535-1582). Partly autograph manuscript signed of Inventions or Devises, n.p. [Gravesend], n.d. [c.1576], AUTOGRAPH DEDICATION SIGNED in Bourne's italic hand to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the text a neat secretarial copy, AUTOGRAPH EMENDATIONS AND ADDITIONS IN BOURNE'S SECRETARY HAND TO APPROXIMATELY 95 PLACES ON 67 PAGES, AUTOGRAPH ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES comprising one full-page drawing, 3 drawings on inserted slips, 6 smaller illustrations and diagrams in text, of ships, a cannon, a besieged town, a ground plan of 'a strong fortiffycation' etc. and 4 tables, autograph foliation and headings, approximately 237 pages, 4to (foliated 1-118), (occasional very slight dampstains, short tear to f.32, not affecting text, some leaves skilfully mounted on guards with no loss of text), speckled calf, rebacked (some scuffs on sides).
THE PARTLY-AUTOGRAPH SOURCE FOR A SIGNIFICANT ELIZABETHAN WORK: A MANUSCRIPT OF EXCEPTIONAL RARITY
Inventions or Devises Very necessary for all Generalles and Captaines, or Leaders of men, as wel by Sea as by Land was a pioneering text, offering a practical guide to a range of ingenious 'devises' for use on land or sea: these include for example a number of techniques for boarding enemy ships, or avoiding being boarded, for entering enemy harbours, or for defending one's own, and also for besieging towns, manhandling artillery, arranging and calculating the numbers of infantry and so forth. Although there is some evident pride in Bourne's assertion that 'the most part of them hath been mine owne invention', his preface is self-deprecating about the work, describing it as a 'rude and barbarous volume', and himself as 'so rude and simple a person': but the importance of Inventions or Devises lay in that very fact, that the work took no part in learned theorisation of warfare, but concentrated on specific, straightforward advice, introducing practical scientific principles to general currency. It formed a notable part of the Elizabethan 'new learning', the movement of the centres of science from the court to the town, from the aristocracy and their retainers to the independent, practical common man.
Inventions or Devises was first printed in 1578, although no copy of that edition is known to survive; the work is known from the second edition of 1590, itself now extant in only a few copies. The present manuscript can be dated to a few years before the first edition, and represents an earlier form of the work than the surviving printed edition: it contains 133 devices, against the 1590 edition's 113, and orders them differently; in addition the printed work contains only four small and crude woodcuts, as opposed to the ten illustrations in the manuscript. The manuscript does not contain twenty devices from the printed version, including, among the more sensational devices, Bourne's designs for a submarine and a diving suit, and the earliest description of Humphrey Cole's geared log for measuring the way of a ship. Of the additional devices in the manuscript, five appear to correspond to sections of Bourne's A Treasure for Traveilers; the most part however are unpublished. The changes from manuscript to publication appear to point to a sharpening of the work's naval and military focus (at a time of increasing perception of a military threat from Spain) at the expense of those parts relating to surveying, navigation and geometrical measurement.
William Bourne was an inhabitant of Gravesend on the lower Thames: he is listed as one of the jurats of the town in the first and second charters of incorporation of 1562 and 1568. In this capacity he recorded his own name in 1571 as one of the innkeepers of Gravesend fined for giving short measures; but he also worked as a gunner (he describes himself as such in the dedication to A Treasure for Traveilers) - probably on the Greenwich bulwark, one of the Thames defences. He combined these two professions with writing. His earliest works were a series of almanacs, with appended rules for navigation, which in 1573 he expanded and published as A Regiment of the Sea': these works formed the beginnings of the English literature of navigation. In 1578 he published The Treasure for Traveilers ... conteynyng very necessary matters, for all sortes of Traveilers, eyther by Sea or Lande (which introduces a number of geometric techniques, including the first demonstration of triangulation for surveying), The Arte of Shooting in great Ordnance (the first book in English on gunnery) and Inventions or Devises. Crudely written, eminently practical but at the same time demonstrating the highest invention, his writings are the works of 'a self-taught genius, who ... had mastered mathematics as then understood in all its branches' (DNB) and show Bourne to have been an independent and original mind, and not the least of the scientific innovators of the Elizabethan age.
The manuscript is dedicated to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, lord high treasurer and the foremost statesman of England, to whom Bourne had dedicated the manuscript of The Art of Shooting in great Ordnance three years before: Bourne had ambitious plans for his practical guide 'all thof that yt be verrie sympll & rudly handelled bothe In the wrytyng & other wyse'. In the printed version however the dedicatee had become Lord Howard of Effingham, who as lord high admiral was to command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada ten years later (and the printed dedication mentions another manuscript of the work having been sent to the Earl of Lincoln, Howard of Effingham's predecessor). The change of dedication accords with the changes in emphasis between manuscript and printed work, to a more exclusively military and naval approach. An intriguing direct link to the Armada campaign is Bourne's ninth device describing one of the more celebrated techniques of the campaign, the use of fireships: a later hand has noted in the manuscript against this device 'practiced in 88 ag[ains]t the Spanishe armado'.
One other substantial manuscript by Bourne is known: his previous dedication to Lord Burghley, The Art of Shooting in great Ordnance, (in the British Library, Sloane 3651), to which the present manuscript is clearly a sister piece. Both manuscripts contain sections of The Treasure for Traveilers, and together they complete the sources for Bourne's three significant works of 1578. AUTOGRAPH OR PARTLY-AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPTS OF SIGNIFICANT PRINTED WORKS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE ARE EXCEPTIONALLY RARE: ONLY A HANDFUL EXIST OUTSIDE THE BRITISH LIBRARY AND THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY; PERHAPS ONLY THREE OR FOUR ARE IN PRIVATE HANDS. OUR RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT THIS IS THE ONLY SUCH MANUSCRIPT TO HAVE APPEARED AT AUCTION THIS CENTURY.
THE PARTLY-AUTOGRAPH SOURCE FOR A SIGNIFICANT ELIZABETHAN WORK: A MANUSCRIPT OF EXCEPTIONAL RARITY
Inventions or Devises Very necessary for all Generalles and Captaines, or Leaders of men, as wel by Sea as by Land was a pioneering text, offering a practical guide to a range of ingenious 'devises' for use on land or sea: these include for example a number of techniques for boarding enemy ships, or avoiding being boarded, for entering enemy harbours, or for defending one's own, and also for besieging towns, manhandling artillery, arranging and calculating the numbers of infantry and so forth. Although there is some evident pride in Bourne's assertion that 'the most part of them hath been mine owne invention', his preface is self-deprecating about the work, describing it as a 'rude and barbarous volume', and himself as 'so rude and simple a person': but the importance of Inventions or Devises lay in that very fact, that the work took no part in learned theorisation of warfare, but concentrated on specific, straightforward advice, introducing practical scientific principles to general currency. It formed a notable part of the Elizabethan 'new learning', the movement of the centres of science from the court to the town, from the aristocracy and their retainers to the independent, practical common man.
Inventions or Devises was first printed in 1578, although no copy of that edition is known to survive; the work is known from the second edition of 1590, itself now extant in only a few copies. The present manuscript can be dated to a few years before the first edition, and represents an earlier form of the work than the surviving printed edition: it contains 133 devices, against the 1590 edition's 113, and orders them differently; in addition the printed work contains only four small and crude woodcuts, as opposed to the ten illustrations in the manuscript. The manuscript does not contain twenty devices from the printed version, including, among the more sensational devices, Bourne's designs for a submarine and a diving suit, and the earliest description of Humphrey Cole's geared log for measuring the way of a ship. Of the additional devices in the manuscript, five appear to correspond to sections of Bourne's A Treasure for Traveilers; the most part however are unpublished. The changes from manuscript to publication appear to point to a sharpening of the work's naval and military focus (at a time of increasing perception of a military threat from Spain) at the expense of those parts relating to surveying, navigation and geometrical measurement.
William Bourne was an inhabitant of Gravesend on the lower Thames: he is listed as one of the jurats of the town in the first and second charters of incorporation of 1562 and 1568. In this capacity he recorded his own name in 1571 as one of the innkeepers of Gravesend fined for giving short measures; but he also worked as a gunner (he describes himself as such in the dedication to A Treasure for Traveilers) - probably on the Greenwich bulwark, one of the Thames defences. He combined these two professions with writing. His earliest works were a series of almanacs, with appended rules for navigation, which in 1573 he expanded and published as A Regiment of the Sea': these works formed the beginnings of the English literature of navigation. In 1578 he published The Treasure for Traveilers ... conteynyng very necessary matters, for all sortes of Traveilers, eyther by Sea or Lande (which introduces a number of geometric techniques, including the first demonstration of triangulation for surveying), The Arte of Shooting in great Ordnance (the first book in English on gunnery) and Inventions or Devises. Crudely written, eminently practical but at the same time demonstrating the highest invention, his writings are the works of 'a self-taught genius, who ... had mastered mathematics as then understood in all its branches' (DNB) and show Bourne to have been an independent and original mind, and not the least of the scientific innovators of the Elizabethan age.
The manuscript is dedicated to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, lord high treasurer and the foremost statesman of England, to whom Bourne had dedicated the manuscript of The Art of Shooting in great Ordnance three years before: Bourne had ambitious plans for his practical guide 'all thof that yt be verrie sympll & rudly handelled bothe In the wrytyng & other wyse'. In the printed version however the dedicatee had become Lord Howard of Effingham, who as lord high admiral was to command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada ten years later (and the printed dedication mentions another manuscript of the work having been sent to the Earl of Lincoln, Howard of Effingham's predecessor). The change of dedication accords with the changes in emphasis between manuscript and printed work, to a more exclusively military and naval approach. An intriguing direct link to the Armada campaign is Bourne's ninth device describing one of the more celebrated techniques of the campaign, the use of fireships: a later hand has noted in the manuscript against this device 'practiced in 88 ag[ains]t the Spanishe armado'.
One other substantial manuscript by Bourne is known: his previous dedication to Lord Burghley, The Art of Shooting in great Ordnance, (in the British Library, Sloane 3651), to which the present manuscript is clearly a sister piece. Both manuscripts contain sections of The Treasure for Traveilers, and together they complete the sources for Bourne's three significant works of 1578. AUTOGRAPH OR PARTLY-AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPTS OF SIGNIFICANT PRINTED WORKS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE ARE EXCEPTIONALLY RARE: ONLY A HANDFUL EXIST OUTSIDE THE BRITISH LIBRARY AND THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY; PERHAPS ONLY THREE OR FOUR ARE IN PRIVATE HANDS. OUR RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT THIS IS THE ONLY SUCH MANUSCRIPT TO HAVE APPEARED AT AUCTION THIS CENTURY.