Thomas Blount
Worcestershire, 1618 - 1679, Herefordshire
LC Heading: Blount, Thomas, 1618-1679
Biography:
Blount, Thomas (1618–1679), antiquary and lexicographer, was born at Bordesley Park, Worcestershire, the eldest of the three sons and five daughters of Miles Blount (c.1585–1663), gentleman, and his wife, Anne (d. 1669), daughter of William Bustard of Adderbury. Both his parents were from strongly Catholic families and his adherence to the religion was to affect his life profoundly. It is not known where he was first educated, but he did not attend a university, and his choice of a legal training—he entered the Inner Temple in 1639 and was called to the bar in 1648—qualified him for a profession which his religion prevented him from practising. The sequestrations of his father's estate in 1646 and 1649 also strained the family income, and it was probably in the hope of financial gain that Blount first turned to writing to supplement his modest income from conveyancing.
Neither of Blount's first two books—The Art of Making Devises (1646) and The Academie of Eloquence (1654)—made an important contribution to scholarship, the former being a translation of a French work, and the latter a book of demonstration letters for young people largely copied from earlier examples; both, however, were popular. His third book was a much greater achievement. Glossographia, or, A dictionary interpreting all such hard words, of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue, which appeared in 1656, was only the fourth monolingual English dictionary, and the first attempted on such a scale. It was also the first dictionary to give sources for definitions (albeit only in a minority of cases), and to attempt etymologies. Within a year it was heavily plundered by Edward Phillips for his New World of English Words.
Meanwhile, at some date between July 1650 and February 1652 Blount had married Anne (1616/17–1697), daughter of Edmund Church of East Maldon, Essex, and his wife, Anne, daughter of Edward Atlsow of Eversholt, Bedfordshire, a family as firmly Catholic as his own, Atlsow and Church both having been imprisoned for recusant activities. In 1658 Blount ventured to publish, under the name of Grass and Hay Withers, The Lamps of the Law and Lights of the Gospel, a satirical look at contemporary radical protestant writing. It was not until the Restoration, however, that he felt he could write in favour of his own religion and its recent martyrs. Then—and for the next four years—he published nothing which did not further the Catholic cause. First among these works was A catalogue of the lords, knights and gentlemen (of the Catholick religion) that were slain in the late warr (1660), a work demonstrating the loyalty of the Catholics in England, reprinted many times in works by him as well as others. In the same year he published Boscobel, or, The history of his sacred majesties most miraculous preservation after the battle of Worcester, in which he again stressed the part played by the Catholics in the defence of the king's person. Far from being mere propaganda, this work was compiled from eyewitness accounts obtained from the individuals involved, and approved by the king, who ordered Blount to continue it, although Boscobel, the Second Part, with the Addition of Claustrum regale reseratum did not appear until 1681. In 1661 he published Calendarium Catholicum, the first edition of his Catholic almanac which, under various titles, he produced five times over five years.
In 1666 Blount tackled a different subject with Booker Rebuked, a critique of John Booker's almanac of the previous year; in the later 1660s he returned to the subject of lexicography. In 1667 he published a new edition of Les termes de la ley, an alphabetical dictionary of legal terms first published in 1527. In this he attempted to eradicate antiquated expressions, and add new ones; but it was soon made redundant by the appearance in 1670 of his own Nomolexikon: a Law-Dictionary. This work, which has been described as his most important, seems largely to have been based on John Cowell's The Interpreter, but it was much more than a mere modernization. Indeed, it was so well received that it was not long before it was, like Glossographia, plundered, plagiarized, and published under a different name. Within a matter of months Blount was writing to Anthony Wood that it was ‘at the presse surreptitiously, being transcribd and mutilated, and disguisd with som new title, and this by a beggarly halfwitted schollar hird for the purpose’ (Bodl. Oxf., MS Wood F.40, fols. 89–90). The halfwitted scholar in this instance was Thomas Manley, and the new book, Nomothet?s, appeared in 1671. The publication in the same year of a new edition of The New World of Words, which had been copied from Glossographia, caused Blount scrupulously to write A World of Errors Discovered in ‘The New World of Words’ (1673). Refusing to let the plagiarists deter him, he continued to make notes for a second edition of Nomolexikon, which was published posthumously in 1691.
Although Blount deserves notice both for his dictionaries and for Boscobel, it is primarily as an antiquary that he is remembered today. However, it was only in the last ten years of his life that he turned his attention to this field; his only antiquarian publication before 1670 was his edition (the third, 1661) of Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman, to which he added one chapter and a genealogy of his own family. Several factors may have provoked this change: the death of his mother in 1669 and the subsequent benefit of her estates, and his recent friendship with William Dugdale and Anthony Wood were probably the most important, but the catalyst seems to have been the publication in 1670 of the fifth edition of Sir Richard Baker's popular Chronicle of the Kings of England, a work to which Blount was probably already highly indisposed after a continuation had been published by Edward Phillips, the plagiarist of Glossographia, in the third edition (1660). In 1671 he proposed to Wood that they collaborate on a Chronological History of England, and on being turned down, turned for help to his cousin, the Catholic writer John Belson. The work, which was not published, disappeared until parts were rediscovered by Theo Bongaerts among the Barrett-Belson family papers. Blount's Animadversions upon Sir Richard Baker's Chronicle was published, however, in 1672, with Wood's help. The following year Blount composed a similar Animadversions on Blome's Britannia, although it seems that this was not published.
In the mid-1670s, after a brief foray into merchant law with A Collection of Statutes Concerning Bankrupts (1670) and The Several Forms of Instruments Relating to the Affairs of Merchants and Traders (1674), Blount began to write what would prove his most significant book—a history of Herefordshire. In the months when John Belson was unable to work due to ill health, Blount collected material, making use of printed chronicles as well as manuscripts, in London as well as in Herefordshire. He also visited a large number of churches, and about 1677 compiled the history in two volumes, arranged alphabetically by parish. Although never published, it has been used by every subsequent historian of the county. The first volume, relating to parishes A–K, was unfortunately lost in the mid-eighteenth century, having been lent to Sir Robert Cornewall, but not before William Brome, Richard Walwyn, and James Hill had used it; the second volume was acquired by Hereford City Library in 1956.
Blount's last work, Fragmenta antiquitatis, Antient Tenures of Land, and Jocular Customs of some Manors, was published in 1679. The book, made up of snippets from legal manuscripts found while he had been researching Nomolexikon, was intended both to be amusing and instructive, and indeed shows more than any other publication his sense of humour. As to its instructiveness, Sir William Holdsworth spoke highly in its favour. At the same time as it appeared, however, the wave of anti-Catholic sentiment in the wake of the Popish Plot threatened Blount, and on 28 April 1679 he wrote to Wood that he was sick with ‘a spice of the palsey, from what occasion you may conjecture’ and that he had ‘quitted all books except of devotion’ (Bodl. Oxf., MS Wood F.40, fol. 230). He died at Orleton Manor, Herefordshire, on 26 December of that year, and was buried two days later in the chancel of the parish church. His widow, who erected a memorial to him, still extant, died on 4 March 1697, aged eighty. They had one daughter, Elizabeth (b. before 1663, d. 1724), who married Richard Griffin of Brickmarsh, Warwickshire.
Ian Mortimer
Sources The correspondence of Thomas Blount (1618–1679): a recusant antiquary, ed. T. Bongaerts (1978) · C. R. J. Currie and C. P. Lewis, eds., English county histories: a guide (1994) · Wood, Ath. Oxon., new edn · DNB · Gillow, Lit. biog. hist. · R. C. Alston, A bibliography of the English language from the invention of printing to the year 1800, 10 vols. in 1 [1965–73]; repr. with corrections (1974) · N&Q, 8 (1853), 286 · Bodl. Oxf., MS Wood F. 40 · P. Richardson, ‘Serial struggles: English Catholics and their periodicals, 1648–1844’, PhD diss., University of Durham, 2003, 19–23, 256
Archives BL, political and civil observations, Add. MS 27320 :: Bodl. Oxf., letters to Anthony Wood, MSS F.40, 45
Wealth at death Orleton Manor, ‘a fair and plentiful estate’; widow died eighteen years after him, leaving goods worth £800: Wood, Ath. Oxon.
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Ian Mortimer, ‘Blount, Thomas (1618–1679)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/2697, accessed 15 Oct 2015]
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