Main Content
Summary
Author: Jones, William Basil & Freeman, Edward Augustus
Title: The history and antiquities of Saint David’s.
Publication: London, J.H. & J.Parker (and others) 1856.
Price: £245
Reference: 09649
Full Description
4to. xii + 400pp, (10) engraved plates (1 folding), (13) litho plates. Publisher’s gilt and blind stamped blue cloth, slightly worn at joints of spine but binding otherwise in good, fresh condition. A little spotting on margins of plates. An untrimmed and largely unopened copy. Later nineteenth century pictorial bookplate of Alfred Trapnell.
A good copy of one of the most substantial and carefully researched nineteenth-century histories of a British cathedral, written by W.B.Jones (1822-1897), a future Bishop of St Davids, and his friend and contemporary E.A.Freeman (1823-1892), afterwards Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. Freeman was already at this date a recognised authority on mediaeval church architecture, and this book provides a clear and well-illustrated account of the complicated building history of the cathedral, with its associated college and architecturally important bishop’s palace. The plates are from drawings by Orlando Jewitt. Although the title leaf carries the imprint of the Parker firm, the text pages were in fact produced in Pembrokeshire by the printer R.Mason, High Street, Tenby, and the book is a good example of what such a local Welsh printing firm could achieve.