Catalogue description COLLECTIONS OF REVEREND ROBERT HOLMES EDLESTON

MANORIAL RECORDS OF WICKEN 1764-1873, CAMBRIDGE DEED 1856 AND PAPERS ABOUT ST PAUL'S HOSTEL, CAMBRIDGE 1884-88

There are 23 items.

The scheme used for listing is the standard one of the time, identifying as refix codes, M for manorial records, T for title deeds, E for estate papers, Q for educational records and Z for miscellaneous items.

Listed by P.C. Saunders, January 1977 & September 1978

Substantial records of the Edleston and Hanby Holmes families are deposited at the Durham County Record Office and additional biographical information can be found in that office's catalogues of those archives (or see www.durham.gov.uk/recordoffice). Records of the Manor of Chesterton also deriving from R.H. Edleston have been deposited in the County Record Office through his friend and fellow County Durham antiquary, Surtees Raine (collection 399).

Edleston, Reverend Robert Holmes, 1868-1952, of County Durham and Cambridgeshire

R.H. Edleston (1868-1952) was a landowner and an antiquary of County Durham origins with significant Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire connections, living at times in Jesus Lane Cambridge and Buckden Tower. He was a somewhat exotic figure, a supporter of the Old Catholic church and rejoicing in the title of Baron de Montalbo, granted by the Republic of San Marino in gratitude for his acting as consul for the republic in Newcaste-on-Tyne. He also purchased the lordships and accompanying records of many manors, including in Cambridgeshire those of Burgh Hall in Swaffham Bulbeck, Chesterton and Wicken, the earlier records of the latter two being deposited by his sister Sarah Alice in the Cambridge University Library in 1953 (Doc.3974). Other records eventually passed to his friend and solicitor E.R. Hanby Holmes of Barnard Castle, whence to his son R.J. Hanby Holmes, who deposited these records here in January and November 1977, and September 1978.

The papers about the proposed St Paul's Hostel derive from R.H. Edleston's father, Rev. Joseph Edleston, M.A. LL.D., evidently a close friend of Robert Potts (1805-85), undergraduate at Trinity College in the 1830s and a mathematician of some note, producing a school edition of Euclid's Elements which sold widely throughout the Empire, from which his interest in Indian students seems to have arisen. He was a near contemporary at Trinity of Edleston, who shared his mathematical interests, being 15th wrangler in 1838 and later editing the correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton. He was thus Potts' natural choice to take over his ill-starred hostel project, with which the papers are concerned. Potts was an energetic and persuasive reformer of the university, but his dying efforts were unable to overcome the opposition of Jesus College which had a controlling interest in the property concerned, apparently his own house at Furness Lodge (as it was later called) in Park Terrace, Cambridge. Joseph Edleston evidently continued the campaign but unsuccessfully.

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