Dudley Diggs 1614-1643

Dudley DIGGES or DIGGS 1614-1643

Biographical Note

Son of Sir Dudley Digges of Chilham Castle, Kent. BA University College, Oxford 1632; fellow of All Souls College, Oxford 1632, MA 1635. Entered at Gray’s Inn 1641. Enlisted with the royalist forces at the beginning of the Civil War, and died of camp fever in Oxford shortly afterwards.

Books

Digges bequeathed his library of ca.1300 books and pamphlets to All Souls (the largest gift the Library there had then received); the books were temporarily stored in the Warden’s lodging until 1665, when new shelving was built. A manuscript catalogue of the donation was made at this time but some books were disposed of as duplicates, or unwanted. The collection includes some older material, but dates largely from the late 16th/early 17th century, and ranges across theology, classics, history, dictionaries and grammars, with a little medicine and law; there are a number of French, Spanish and Italian books.

Characteristic Markings

Most of Digges’s books are in plain and simple bindings of his time. He sometimes wrote in “Dudleius Digges”, but typically did not inscribe them.

Sources

• Craster, E. History of All Souls College Library, 1971, 60-63.
• Morgan, P. Oxford libraries outside the Bodleian. 2nd edn, Oxford, 1980.
• Stoker, David. "Digges, Dudley (1613–1643), royalist political writer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.