EXETER, a town and one of the county-seats of Rockingham county, New Hampshire, U.S.A., on the Squamscott river, about 12 m. S.W. of Portsmouth and about 51 m. N. by E. of Boston, Mass. Pop. (1890) 4284; (1900) 4922 (1066 foreign-born); (1910) 4897; area, about 17 sq. m. It is served by the Western Division of the Boston & Maine railway. The town has a public library and some old houses built in the colonial period, and is the seat of Phillips Exeter Academy (incorporated in 1781 and opened in 1783). In its charter this institution is described as “an academy for the purpose of promoting piety and virtue, and for the education of youth in the English, Latin and Greek languages, in writing, arithmetic, music and the art of speaking, practical geometry, logic and geography, and such other of the liberal arts and sciences or languages, as opportunity may hereafter permit.” It was founded by Dr John Phillips (1719-1795), a graduate of Harvard College, who acquired considerable wealth as a merchant at Exeter and gave nearly all of it to the cause of education. The academy is one of the foremost secondary schools in the country, and among its alumni have been Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, Lewis Cass (born in Exeter in a house still standing), John Parker Hale, George Bancroft, Jared Sparks, John Gorham Palfrey, Richard Hildreth and Francis Bowen. The government of the academy is vested in a board of six trustees, regarding whom the founder provided that a majority should be laymen and not inhabitants of Exeter. In 1909-1910 the institution had 20 buildings, 32 acres of recreation grounds, 16 instructors and 488 students, representing 38 states and territories of the United States and 4 foreign countries. At Exeter also is the Robinson female seminary (1867), with 14 instructors and 272 students in 1906-1907. The river furnishes water-power, and among the manufactures of the town are shoes, machinery, cottons, brass, &c. The town is one of the oldest in the state; it was founded in 1638 by Rev. John Wheelwright, an Antinomian leader who with a number of followers settled here after his banishment from Massachusetts. For their government the settlers adopted (1639) a plantation covenant. There was disagreement from the first, however, with regard to the measure of loyalty to the king, and in 1643, when Massachusetts had asserted her claim to this region and the other three New Hampshire towns had submitted to her jurisdiction, the majority of the inhabitants of Exeter also yielded, while the minority, including the founder, removed from the town. In 1680 the town became a part of the newly created province of New Hampshire. During the French and Indian wars it was usually protected by a garrison, and some of the garrison houses are still standing. From 1776 to 1784 the state legislature usually met at Exeter.
See C.H. Bell, History of the Town of Exeter (Exeter, 1888).
EXETER BOOK [Codex Exoniensis], an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry presented to Exeter cathedral by Leofric,[1] bishop of Exeter, England, from 1050 to 1071, and still in the possession of the dean and chapter. It contains some legal documents, the poems entitled Crist, Guthlac, Phoenix, Juliana, The Wanderer and others, and concludes with between eighty and ninety riddles. It was first described in Humphrey Wanley’s Catalogus ... (1705) in detail but with many inaccuracies; subsequently by J.J. Conybeare, Account of a Saxon Manuscript (a paper read in 1812; printed with some extracts from the MS. in Archaeologia, vol. xvii. pp. 180-197, 1814). A complete transcript made (1831) by Robert Chambers is in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 9067). It was first printed in 1842 by Benjamin Thorpe for the Soc. of Antiq., London, as Codex Exoniensis ... with an English Translation, Notes and Indexes. More recent editions, chiefly based on Thorpe’s text, are:—in Chr. Grein’s Bibliothek der A.S. Poesie (vol. iii. part 1, ed. R. Wülker, Leipzig, 1897, with a bibliography), J. Schipper in Pfeiffer’s Germania, vol. xix. pp. 327-339, and Israel Gollancz, The Exeter Book, pt. i. (1895), with English translation, for the Early English Text Society.
A detailed account, with bibliographies of the separate poems, is given by R. Wülker, in Grundriss ... der A.S. Literatur, pp. 218-236 (Leipzig, 1885); see also the introduction to The Crist of Cynewulf ..., edited by Prof. A.S. Cook, with introduction, notes and a glossary (Boston, U.S.A., 1900). For the poems contained in the MS. see also [Cynewulf] and [Riddles].
[1] For Leofric, see F.E. Warren, The Leofric Missal (1883).
EXHIBITION, a term, meaning in general a public display,[1] which has a special modern sense as applied to public shows of goods for the promotion of trade (Fr. exposition). The first exhibition in this sense of which there is any account, in either sacred or profane history, was that held by King Ahasuerus, who, according to the Book of Esther, showed in the third year of his reign “the riches of his glorious kingdom, and the honour of his excellent majesty, many days, even a hundred and fourscore days.” The locale of this function was Shushan, the palace and the exhibits consisted of “white, green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white and black marble. And they gave them drink in vessels of gold, the vessels being diverse one from another.” The first exhibition since the Christian era was at Venice during the dogeship of Lorenzo Tiepolo, in 1268. On that occasion there was a grand display, consisting of a water fête, a procession of the trades and an industrial exhibition. The various gilds of the Queen City of the Seas marched through the narrow streets to the great square of St Mark, and their leaders asked the dogaressa to inspect the products of their industry. Other medieval exhibitions were the fairs held at Leipzig and Nizhni Novgorod in Europe, at Tanta in Egypt, and in 1689 that by the Dutch at Leiden.