Wilkins's Copy of Sir Henry Spelman's ‘Concilia’

In his elegant prospectus to the four volumes of his Concilia, issued in 1733 in order to obtain subscriptions for the great enterprise, David Wilkins, once a penniless Prussian orientalist, now Archdeacon of Suffolk, has included a complete list of contents. He has affixed, he tells us, asterisks to each document in the list, indicating its source; one if it came from Spelman's Concilia, two if it hailed from Archbishop Wake's own collections, three if it was drawn from his own. This starring is adopted in the prefatory list of contents at the beginning of each volume of the Concilia. In a recent paper the present writer was able to identify the Archbishop's collections as vols. ccciv–cccxxxix in the Wake Archives at Christ Church, Oxford. He pointed out there that Wake's design had been to augment his volumes of transcripts and extracts originally made for his State of the Church and the Clergy of England (1703) with a view to a new and revised edition of Spelman's Concilia. Wilkins's own collections, for many years at Leeds Castle before they passed into the Phillipps Library, were sold with the Fairfax papers in 1898, and nothing has been heard of them since; but Spelman is with us, in two solid volumes of print, and we have among Wake's letters direct testimony to show that these two volumes (the second compiled by Dugdale) served as the basis for Wilkins, when, on the Archbishop's instructions, he set out to augment and correct that valuable text for the new edition of the Concilia.