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1422-1509. A.D.

A NEW EDITION:
CONTAINING UPWARDS OF FOUR HUNDRED LETTERS &c.

HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.

EDITED BY

JAMES GAIRDNER,

Of the Public Record Office.

VOLUME II.

EDWARD IV-1461-1471. A.D.

LONDON:

87 ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD, CAMDEN SQUARE, N.W.

ANNOTATED REPRINTS.

15 May 1874.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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PREFA CE.

INCE the publication of the first volume of this work, a few further points relative to the original MSS. of the Paston Letters have come under the Editor's notice, and it seems right that they should be mentioned here.

As to the manner in which Blomefield became the owner of some of the Earl of Yarmouth's papers, the conjecture offered in the preface to vol. i. (p. x.) was owing to a misapprehension, which was noticed in an appendix at the end of the introduction. The MSS. sold by the last Earl of Yarmouth to Peter Le Neve constituted only a portion of the family papers. The Earl himself outlived Le Neve, and at his death in 1732, some thirty or forty chests of valuable letters and documents remained at the family seat at Oxnead. These treasures the Rev. Francis Blomefield was allowed to examine three years later, with a view to his county history, and as we know that he afterwards became the owner of a number of letters of the Paston collection, I presume that he purchased a portion, if not the whole, of what remained in the hands of the executors.

With regard to the papers sold by the last Earl to Le Neve, I stated, on the authority of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes (i. 415), that on the death of that antiquary they were dispersed, but that a considerable portion of them came into the hands of Thomas Martin of Palgrave, who married Le Neve's widow. This statement, too, I find, requires some correction. Just before his death in 1729, Le Neve made a will,1 by which he bequeathed his MSS. to the erudite Dr. Tanner, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph's, and Thomas Martin of Palgrave; but this bequest was subject to the condition

1 See Appendix after Introduction.

that within a year after his death they should "procure a good and safe repository in the Cathedral Church of Norwich, or in some other good and public building in the said city," for their preservation, the object being to make them at all times accessible to those who wished to consult them. It was evidently while this object was still kept in view that Blomefield talked of adding his own collection of MSS. to that of Le Neve; but the condition seems never to have been fulfilled. The bequest ought, under the circumstances, to have become null, but as Martin married Le Neve's widow, he acquired the collections by another right.

Of the MSS. that were owned by Blomefield, a few are now to be found in one of the volumes of the Douce Collection in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. These appear to have been part of the collections relating to the counties of Norfolk and Cambridge, which Gough, in his British Topography (vol. ii. p. 5) informs us that he purchased at the sale of Mr. Ives's papers. To the same collections probably belonged also a few scattered documents relating to the Paston family, which have been met with among the miscellaneous stores of the Bodleian Library, and for a knowledge of which I am indebted to Mr. W. H. Turner. Transcripts or notices of these will be found under their several dates; but one or two of them which belong to the reign of Henry VI., and should have been inserted in Volume I. if they had been discovered in time, are reserved for an appendix to be given at the end of Volume III.

In addition to letters and documents preserved at one time by the Paston family themselves, there will be found in the present volume a number of papers derived from a new source-the muniments contained in the tower of Magdalene College, Oxford. As the execution of Sir John Fastolf's will ultimately devolved upon Bishop Waynflete, who, instead of a college at Caister, made provision for a foundation of seven priests and seven poor scholars in Magdalene College,

a number of papers relative to the disputes between the executors and the arrangement between the Bishop and John Paston's sons have been preserved among the documents of that college. My attention was first called to these two or three years ago by Mr. Macray, through whom I obtained copies, in the first place, of some entries from an old index of the deeds relating to Norfolk and Suffolk, which had already been referred to by Chandler in his Life of Bishop Waynflete. Afterwards Mr. Macray, who has for some time been engaged in a catalogue of the whole collection, was obliging enough to send me one or two abstracts of his own made from the original documents. But before this volume was ready for the press, he was able to refer me to his own report on the muniments of Magdalene College, printed in the Fourth Report of the Historical MSS. Commission, which will probably be issued to the public about the same time as the present volume. It will be seen that I have transcribed several interesting entries from this source.

By a statement in the recently published book of the Princess Marie Liechtenstein,1 the Editor was made aware of the existence of an original letter belonging to the Paston Collection in Holland House. Having obtained Lady Holland's permission to examine it, he found that it was one of those printed by Fenn in his third volume, and already reprinted as No. 38 in Volume I. of this edition. Here, then, we have a second original recovered of the missing letters. Of the three volumes of MSS. presented to the King in 1787, which contained the originals of Fenn's first and second volumes, we have as yet no information; but we have now two of the documents printed in his third volume, one of these being among the Paston papers in the British Museum,2 and the other at Holland House. The discovery of this second document tends to confirm the opinion before expressed by the

1 Holland House. By Princess Marie Liechtenstein, vol. ii. p. 198. 2 See vol. i., Preface, p. xi.

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