Memorials of London and London life, in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth centuries : Being a series of extracts, local, social, and political, from the early archives of the City of London, A.D. 1276-1419 / Selected, translated, and edited by Henry Thomas Riley ... Published by order of the Corporation of London, under the superintendence of the Library Committee.

  • City of London (England). Corporation.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memorials of London and London life, in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth centuries : Being a series of extracts, local, social, and political, from the early archives of the City of London, A.D. 1276-1419 / Selected, translated, and edited by Henry Thomas Riley ... Published by order of the Corporation of London, under the superintendence of the Library Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in the sequel, the earliest among them would seem to have almost escaped his notice, or, at all events, to have been subjected by him to no very searching examination. It was in a like liberal and indulgent spirit probably, that the City authorities allowed two of their early volumes, the Liber Cus- tumarum and Liber Legum Regum Antiquorum, belonging to the time, and once the property, of Andrew Horn, fishmonger, learned lawyer, and City Chamberlain, who died in 1328, to pass from the hands of Recorder Fleetwood into those of Stow’s contemporary, F rancis T ate, a member of the Academy ofAntiquaries, and Sir Robert Cotton, the well known collector of manuscripts. The result of this loan or transfer was, that, after 1 reiterated demands, spreading over no less than eight years, one half of each of those volumes was returned to its rightful owners, while the other two halves, bound up together, and made refulgent in many a page with the quarter- ings of the Bruce and Cotton Arms, found a permanent resting- place on the shelves of the Cottonian Library, and now conjointly figure as Manuscript Claudius d.ii of that Collection, in the British Museum. It was not improbably owing to this act of meanness on the part of Sir Robert Cotton,—dishonesty which would have been called downright peculation in a person of more humble station,—that the City authorities throughout a long period seem to have resolutely closed their records to all consulters from without. At the close of a century nearly after the last ineffectual application to Cotton had been made, not without some difficulty, (as he himself has informed us in the Preface to his Edition of 1720), John Strype, the Historian, gain- ed access to them for the purposes of his revised edition of Stow’s Survey. For a long time he seems to have had to submit to what was little less than repulse and neglect; and even after he had ob- tained the limited leave “ to take notes out of the City books,” it was only by a profuse expenditure of patience, time, and trouble, that, at the end of eighteen months after he had delivered them up for inspection, he could obtain the further permission to make use of them in the way of2 publication. The recital of his annoyances and vexations might almost form a chapter in a new edition of “ The “ Calamities of Authors,” but the exigencies of space in the present Volume, which has already outgrown its originally intended dimen- sions, are imperious, and deny room for further allusion to its details. After Strype’s day, the Corporation Records seem to have slum- bered in a silence unbroken by the enquiries of literature, and to have received little, if any, further notice from the antiquaries or 1 See Repertories (at Guildhall) No. 29, fol. 350; No. 28, fols. 117, 323, 344, and No. 30. fol. 44. - He appears to have principally de- voted his attention to the contents of the Liber Albus and Liber Horn; the latter, a manual of City and Statute law, for- merly in the possession of Andrew Horn.