The 750-Year-Old Oxford Library That Began in a Locked Chest

At Merton College in Oxford, an antique wooden chest still sits near the entrance of an old library room. In the Middle Ages, three different people had to be called together before it could be unlocked, because the treasure inside was unusually precious. It was not gold or jewels, but books.

That level of security may seem extreme today, but before the printing press a single book was a real luxury, since every word had to be written out slowly by hand. Merton College therefore asked its 13th-Century scholars to donate volumes, much as universities now ask alumni for money.

The Archbishop of Canterbury issued a formal order in 1276 that turned this practice into a rule, and the library at Merton has run without a break ever since. To put that span in context, the library predates the Aztec Empire, survived the Black Death, and is still standing after the Covid-19 pandemic. Its readers have ranged from medieval mathematicians to Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien.

The early library looked very different from a modern one, because there was no librarian and no shelves to browse. According to Dr Julia Walworth, Merton's current librarian, the whole community would gather to open the chest whenever books were needed. In the 1370s, the college built a purpose-built room to hold its growing collection. Horizontal shelves were installed so books could stand upright, and Walworth notes that this was the earliest recorded use of that storage method in Britain.

Curiously, the books were placed with their spines facing inwards, because chains were clipped to the front edge of each cover, and the fellows believed chained books had a better chance of survival. Today only a few volumes are still chained, kept that way for display. The medieval room otherwise remains a remarkable time capsule, and students continue to use it during term.

The library's reputation as something ancient grew during the Victorian era, when Oxford became a popular tourist stop. Visitors came to admire its stained-glass windows and rare books, including a 15th-Century edition of The Canterbury Tales. In 1884, a young Beatrix Potter described the library's "beautiful oak roof" and "ancient, dusty smell" in her diary. By 1885, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was calling Merton "the oldest existing library in England".

Some claims went further still, and by the 1920s a few writers had begun calling Merton the oldest library in the world. The myth was even strong enough to appear in the classic novel The Great Gatsby, in which the wealthy hero fills his mansion with copies of famous historic rooms, including a fake "Merton College Library". As Walworth explains, Merton had become a kind of shorthand for any "best" old library.

Walworth herself is more careful, and she prefers to call Merton "one of the oldest still-functioning academic libraries in Europe". That phrase recognises that not all old libraries can be grouped together, since monastic libraries worked very differently from later private collections. It also accepts that very old libraries exist in other parts of the world.

The Al-Qarawiyyin library in Morocco, which was restored in 2016, has been called the oldest in the world by some media outlets. Other sources point instead to Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt. The picture is complicated further by the Dunhuang Library Cave in China, which was sealed around the 11th Century and only rediscovered in 1900. As one Cambridge historian notes, it really depends on how you count it, and on what should mark the real beginning of a library.

For Walworth, the most interesting story is not really about age but about community. The tradition of donating books that began with the Archbishop in 1276 continues today. Whether new volumes arrive on parchment or as digital files, she believes readers will still want to visit a library and see how earlier generations used books.