AN AMATEUR DORSET MUSEUM CATALOGUED
Catalogue of the museum of local antiquities collected by mr. henry durden, Of Blandford, Dorsetshire.
Lewes.
South Counties Press, Limited, [s.d., c.1892]
8vo.
4, 60pp. With a portrait frontispiece (included in pagination) and seven further plates featuring numerous examples of antiquities from the museum. Contemporary gilt-tooled red half morocco, marbled boards. Marbled endpapers. Date of 1891 added to foot of title in manuscript; a further manuscript note to the head of the first leaf of the preface notes 'This collection was purchased by the British Museum for £900 in 1892'.
A rare catalogue of the archaeological museum - initially housed above a grocer's shop in Blandford - of pre-Roman, Roman, Anglo- Saxon and Medieval coins and artefacts, formed by Mr. Henry Durden of Dorset, featuring over 1200 separate entries.
In addition to the detailed list of the contents of the museum, the text of this volume includes extensive narrative detail of the opening of barrows in Roke Down, Bere Regis, during the 1840s by Durden and others, and of the Milborne barrow in 1864. Whilst the majority of the items included in the catalogue were discovered in Dorset, especially around Hod Hill, 'the site of a Roman castrum, within a British oppidum' in the Blackmore Vale, the collection also includes 'Anglo-Saxon objects...obtained from Wye and Crundale Downs' and 'examples of pre-historic stone implements from Denmark, Ireland, and the Mississippi'.
The final line of the preface expresses the 'hope that his vast labours in the cause of Archaeology may be finally rewarded by the collection being preserved in its entirety, either in the Country whose past history it illustrates, or in the National Museum'; following Durden's death in 1892 this was indeed achieved.
Rare; COPAC and OCLC locate just two copies worldwide, at BL and Oxford.
£ 950.00
Antiquates Ref: 32137
In addition to the detailed list of the contents of the museum, the text of this volume includes extensive narrative detail of the opening of barrows in Roke Down, Bere Regis, during the 1840s by Durden and others, and of the Milborne barrow in 1864. Whilst the majority of the items included in the catalogue were discovered in Dorset, especially around Hod Hill, 'the site of a Roman castrum, within a British oppidum' in the Blackmore Vale, the collection also includes 'Anglo-Saxon objects...obtained from Wye and Crundale Downs' and 'examples of pre-historic stone implements from Denmark, Ireland, and the Mississippi'.
The final line of the preface expresses the 'hope that his vast labours in the cause of Archaeology may be finally rewarded by the collection being preserved in its entirety, either in the Country whose past history it illustrates, or in the National Museum'; following Durden's death in 1892 this was indeed achieved.
Rare; COPAC and OCLC locate just two copies worldwide, at BL and Oxford.