The Paston Letters, A. D. 1422-1509 (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: first purchased by the noted antiquary John Ives,1 who acquired a number of Le Neve's, Martin's, and Blomefield's Mss.; and after his library was sold by auction in March 1777, they became part of the collections relating to the counties of Oxford and Cambridge, which Gough, in his British Topography (vol. ii. p. 5), informs us that he purchased at the sale of Mr. Ives' papers. To this same collection, probably, belonged also a few of the scattered documents relating to the Paston family which have been met with among the miscellaneous stores of the Bodleian Library, for a knowledge of which I was indebted to the late Mr. W. H. Turner of Oxford. Martin's executors seem to have done what they could to preserve the integrity of his collections. A catalogue of his library was printed at Lynn in 1771, in the hope that some purchaser would be found to take the whole. Such a purchaser did present himself, but not in the interest of the public. A By Mr. certain Mr. John Worth, a chemist at Diss, bought both the Worth. library and the other collections, as a speculation, for 630. The printed books he immediately sold to a firm at Norwich, who disposed of them by auction; the pictures and smaller curiosities he sold by auction at Diss, and certain portions of the Mss. were sent, at different times, to the London market. But before he had completed the sale of all the collections, Mr. Worth died suddenly in December 1774. That portion of the Mss. which contained the Paston Letters he had up to that time reserved. Mr. Fenn immediately purchased them of his executors, and they had been twelve years in his possession when he published his first two volumes of selections from them. So much for the early history of the Mss. Their subsequent fate is not a little curious. On the 23rd May 1787...