Early Modern History

14:11:59 o'clock BST

I have the best possible excuse for not having written any posts here recently. For the last two days, I have been exploring the resources of the Internet Archive site which I found completely by accident on Monday morning. I am sorry to confess that I had known nothing of it before then.  It holds digital copies of between 400,000 and 500,000 books. Amongst them are:

Copies of eighty five Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports.

Several dozen early Camden Society volumes.

Four of the volumes from the Calendar of State Papers Domestic between 1603 and 1625.

The complete run of S.R.Gardiner's History of England.

Copies of the House of Commons' debates edited by Gardiner for 1610 and 1625; Notes of Proceedings in the House of Lords in 1621, 1624 and 1628; Sir John Eliot's Apology for Socrates: John Forster's two volume biography of Eliot; Helen Relf's 1917 work on the Petition of Right; Notestein and Relf's edition of the Proceedings in the House of Commons in 1629: Notestein's edition of D'Ewes's diary for 1640-1641: both volumes of D'Ewes's autobiography and correspondence; the Fairfax Correspondence; Robert Baillie's Letters and Journals; the Hardwicke State Papers. I could go on singing its praises indefinitely.

It is a marvellous resource about which I had not known. Do not expect to find every eighteenth or nineteenth-century publication there that you may hope to find. But you will be surprised to see how many there are.

Go to:   http://www.archive.org/details/texts     to start searching.

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11:55:22 o'clock BST
I was going to begin this post by claiming to have had one of those serendipitous moments when a significant discovery of importance has been made. If only I could!  As readers of this blog will know, I have been working on the origins of the Massachusetts Bay Company for some time (despite my invitation to the BGEAH conference in September disappearing) and I thought I knew the printed sources pretty well. After all, hardly any area of English colonial history has been more explored by modern American scholars. Even so, I was surprised earlier this morning when investigating discussions amongst Charles I's opponents before the second session of the 1628-1629 Parliament to find in one of the best known printed sources the information linking the Lincolnshire men with the Londoners and the West Country men, i.e. associating the members of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Companies together with many of their allies in 1628-1629. Unfortunately, this source is very well known indeed to me and has been for several decades and has been almost completely overlooked by the historians of New England. I am just about as embarrassed as it is possible to be

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11:56:41 o'clock BST
Andy Wood of the University of East Anglia will be giving a paper entitled "Customary law, local memory and the possibilities for popular solidarity in early modern England" at the ESRC-funded symposium in Manchester on 10th and 11th July.

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11:56:34 o'clock BST
Andy Wood of the University of East Anglia will be giving a paper entitled "Customary law, local memory and the possibilities for popular solidarity in early modern England" at the ESRC-funded symposium in Manchester on 10th and 11th July.

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10:11:56 o'clock BST
Twenty years ago, I published an article in The Suffolk Review (New Series 10. Spring 1988. Pp.18-24) on the election of the Knights of the Shire for that county in 1628. I must apologise to everyone for having mistakenly identified Sir John Rous of Henham with the man of the same name and title who acted as an adviser, ally and friend to the Lords Rich, later Earls of Warwick from 1618. I am mortified to have made this elementary error and thank Ben Coates for having pointed it out to me. I offer my apology to everyone who may have been misled and who may be misled in the future.

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13:57:07 o'clock BST
I had the welcome opportunity to talk to my old friend, Arthur Searle, formerly of the Essex Record Office and the British Library, on the telephone this morning. He is best known as the editor of the Barrington family's letters between 1628 and 1632 published by the Camden Society in 1983. In recent years, he has been concentrating on musical matters.

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11:56:34 o'clock BST
I have spent a good part of the last two days adding the footnotes to my transcripts of the material in BL Egerton Ms.2644. As usual, the number of references to be checked has grown in the course of this work but, at least, the end - publication - is in sight.

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10:52:01 o'clock BST


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08:26:58 o'clock BST

A late-16th or early-17th century building.

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16:30:50 o'clock BST

The History Department is in the building to the rear on the left - on floor 5, I think.

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