The Account of Pythagoras's school in Cambridge as in Mr. Grose's antiquities of England and Wales, and other notices.

£750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An uncommon book with an interesting Oxford provenance. The Reverend Joseph Kilner (ca.1721-1793) was a member of Merton College, Oxford, a keen coin collector -he left his collection to the college -, who lived at Cirencester (he is recorded in the 1791 Directory), and built up substantial collections devoted to the town, where he was friendly with the antiquary, the Rev.John Collinson (1757-1793).The son of a country clergyman, the Rev. James Kilner (educated at Westminster School and Oxford), Joseph Kilner began his Oxford career at University College, but took his MA. from Merton. He had a younger brother Samuel (born 1732), who became fellow and eventually sub-warden (1814) of Merton. In this work he ostensibly discusses ‘Pythagoras’s School’, an extremely ancient building in Cambridge, which belonged, and had belonged since the 1270s, to Merton College, but in fact the book is mostly about the early history of that college, and draws extensively on the college muniments. He clearly communicated information from this source to others: Lysons in his Environs of London vol. I (1796) p. 332 note 5 refers to Mr.Kilner of Cirencester as having provided him with information about Malden, Surrey from the Merton muniments It seems to have been written originally around 1760 by Kilner as a text to accompany an engraving of the building (plate 2 in the list below), but remained unused (and indeed rejected) until it appeared without any acknowledgment, in Francis Grose’s Antiquitie

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