Frederic Madden - Conservation

Conservation

In April 1837, when still the Assistant Keeper of MSS, Madden was shown a garret of the old museum building which contained a large number of burnt and damaged fragments and codices of vellum manuscripts. Madden immediately identified them as part of the Cotton Library collection, which had been badly damaged in a fire of 1731.

During his tenure as Keeper of MSS, Madden undertook extensive conservation work on the Cotton manuscripts (often in the face of opposition from the Museum’s board, who deemed the enterprise prohibitively expensive). In collaboration with the bookbinder Henry Gough, he developed a conservation strategy that restored even the most badly damaged fragments and manuscripts to a usable state. Vellum sheets were cleaned and flattened and mounted in paper frames. Where possible, they were rebound in their original codices.

As well as the fragments found in the garret, he carried out conservation work on the rest of the collection. Many manuscripts had become brittle and fragile, including the codex that contains the only known copy of Beowulf (Cotton Vittelius A xv). By 1845, the work was largely complete, though Madden was to suffer one more setback when a fire broke out in the Museum bindery, destroying completely some further works from the collection.