Nathaniel Crynes

Rev. Nathaniel Crynes (1685/6-1745), was an English antiquary, physician and Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.

Life Crynes was born in Coventry to Jonah and Sarah Crynes. He was educated at King Henry VIII Grammar School in Coventry, matriculating at St John's in 1704. He received a BA in 1708 and an MA in 1712. In 1716 the university appointed Crynes Superior Bedel of Arts and Physic, and he held this position until his death. Crynes gave up his Fellowship at St John's in late 1716, thereafter practising as a physician in Coventry. He died, most likely in Coventry, on 5 August 1745. On his death, as stipulated in his will, Crynes bequeathed to the Bodleian Library the books in his collection that it did not already own. This amounted to 968 volumes in octavo and smaller sizes (with a few quartos) dating from the 16th to 18th centuries, many of which are very scarce. Crynes also gifted St John's with around 1,500 volumes, including eleven works produced by William Caxton – some of the earliest volumes to be printed in English. The rest of Crynes books were divided equally between Balliol and Lincoln colleges.

In addition to the 968 volumes bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in Crynes's will – which are kept together on its shelves as the Crynes collection – the Bodleian holds many of Crynes's folios, more than twenty of his incunabula and eighteen manuscripts. The latter comprise philosophical, theological and literary works and Biblical and legal documents in English, French and Latin dating from between the 11th and 18th centuries. Three such manuscripts were purchased from Crynes in 1723, seven were presented by him in 1736, and eight were bequeathed in 1745. This perhaps explains how Crynes's library came to include a wide range of historical material that significantly supplemented the Bodleian's collections. In addition to a large quantity of rare English work, Crynes collected many 16th-century octavo European editions, which the Bodleian had previously overlooked in favour of the larger folio volumes preferred by Thomas Bodley himself for public use in his library. The story is likely to be apocryphal, since Crynes did in fact collect Milton's political writings where he could find them: the Bodleian copies of Defensio Secunda (1654) and Pro Se Defensio (1655) were both once owned by him and are now marked Crynes 272 and 273 respectively.