Search results for ""Devon Cornwall Record Society""

This carto-bibliography of over 1300 Devon manuscript maps published in two volumes contains details not only of the maps themselves, extracted from 30 separate repositories in addition to some in private hands, but also biographical information on the surveyors who made them, over a third of whom have not appeared in any national cartographic reference book. There is also an Introduction which explains the significance of these, mostly large-scale, Devonmaps and how they fit into the national cartographic picture. The detailed list of maps is arranged in alphabetical order of parish for ease of reference and there is a Personal Names index. There are coloured illustrations of some of the maps and the two volumes will be presented in a slipcase. The volumes will be an indispensable reference tool for all interested in the social history, the landscape and archaeology of Devon.

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A major re-examination of the history of map-making in Exeter, following on from the recent discovery of a 'new' town map of the city in 1743 This major re-examination of the history of map-making in Exeter, the historic county town of Devon, follows from the recent discovery of a 'new' Georgian town map of the city. That map, by William Birchynshaw (a man not known tohave produced any other), is reproduced in facsimile, along with nearly two dozen other maps from 1587 through to 1949. They are prefaced by an introduction which places the new discovery within the context of four centuries of map-making, demonstrating how Birchynshaw owed a debt both to John Hooker's map of 1587 and to that by Ichabod Fairlove of 1709; and provides an overview of Exeter in 1743, showing that, although was city was basking in economic prosperity due to its cloth trade, it was also still largely confined within its ancient walls. The volume as a whole represents a significant reassessment of Exeter's history. RICHARD OLIVER is a historian and has been a Research Fellow in the History of Cartography at the University of Exeter since 1989. ROGER KAIN CBE is a Fellow of the British Academy and its Vice-President (Research and Higher Education Policy). He is Professor of Humanities in the School of Advanced Study, University of London and was previously its Dean and Chief Executive, 2010-17. TODD GRAY MBE is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and the author of more thana dozen books on Exeter.

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Letters offering a rich insight into eighteenth-century life both in Devon and in London In 1740, at the age of 17, Sir Francis Henry Drake of Buckland and Nutwell in Devon succeeded his father as Baronet and in due course followed him as MP for Bere Alston. This volume presents 320 letters written to Sir Francis between 1740 and 1778 by his Devon overseer, Nicholas Rowe, and by his London agent, William Hudson, who was a well-known apothecary and botanist and author of Flora Anglica (1762). The early letters from Devon have much to say about elections and related property dealings in the pocket borough of Bere Alston, while the later ones centre on Sir Francis's reshaping of Nutwell Court and its gardens. Health matters are an issue throughout, and the letters from London are a rich source of information on eighteenth-century medical practice in the city as well as in the country. They also informed Sir Francis about London society and parliamentary business during the months he spent in Devon. Taken as a whole, they offer a rich insight into eighteenth-century life both in Devon and in London. CHARITY SCOTT-STOKES (M.A., D.Phil.) is a retired university lecturer, secondary school teacher, free-lance translator and editor. ALAN LUMB (B.A., M.A.) is a retired sociology lecturer and secondary school teacher with special interests in vernacular architecture, plants and gardens.

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The priory of Launceston was founded in the 1120s and owned a large collection of properties in the Launceston area. Its cartulary gives information about many aspects of the Priory's existence, including its tenants, quarrels over land and boundaries, and dealings with local laypeople. Particularly interesting are the details about the Priory's relationship to local parishes, where we see disputes over church maintenance, lights, and other day to day aspects of parish life.

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The Exeter Cathedral Fabric Accounts document the history of Exeter Cathedral during a period when it was being extensively rebuilt by a series of active bishops. They show how the rebuilding was financed and give a detailed account of what was involved in a medieval building project, listing workers' wages, the cost of materials, and they show how building materials were transported to Exeter from Devon and from other parts of England. This informationtells us much not only about the history of Exeter Cathedral and its bishops, but also about the relationship between the Cathedral and the surrounding area, and the economic history of the region. This volume presents the accounts from 1328 to 1353, and Volume One (new series 24) presents the accounts from 1279 to 1326.

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Sheds light on the history of East Devon's churches from the Middle Ages onwards, illustrating the ways in which parish churches were transformed in the late nineteenth century. In the mid nineteenth century the Devon antiquarian James Davidson visited all of East Devon's churches and made detailed notes about their buildings, fabric and fittings. His notes are an eyewitness record of the state of these parish churches at the time before changes in liturgy and fashion in the later Victorian period brought about irreplaceable change. Davidson's descriptions highlight what has been lost from the archaeological record and allow us to make comparisons with the churches today. In this way they shed light on the history of East Devon's churches from the Middle Ages onwards and illustrate the ways in which parish churches were transformed in the late nineteenth century. Davidson's records of memorials and inscriptions in the churches also provide rich and fascinating material for research into local history, social history and family history from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and illustrate changing attitudes to death and commemoration.

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Winner of the Best Books on Devon's History: Academic Award from the Devon History Society A richly illustrated exploration of the national and international importance of the early modern Exeter cloth trade. This book reproduces a newly discovered manuscript detailing the exports of Claude Passavant, a Swiss émigré merchant. Passavant's dispatch book comprises the most extensive surviving collection of Devon cloth with 2,475 surviving cloth samples. Thirteen chapters discuss the local and wider contexts of eighteenth-century cloth making. This study explores the quality, range, and vibrancy of cloth that lead to Exeter becoming an internationally renowned centre for the manufacture and trade of woollen cloth.

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A study of the British Home Front of the First World War, on a local level, from the perspective of the Lord Lieutenant of Devonshire: the fourth Earl Fortescue. This book is a study of the British Home Front of the First World War, on a local level, from the perspective of the Lord Lieutenant of Devonshire: the fourth Earl Fortescue. As a Lord Lieutenant during the Great War, Hugh Fortescue was a pre-eminent figure in Devon's local elite, to which his involvement with the war effort in the county was significant. This volume considers the wartime experiences of a county's Lord Lieutenant through a presentation ofrecords from Fortescue's private papers. It contains the original typescript that Earl Fortescue wrote in 1924 as a retrospective account of his experiences during the conflict and the diaries that he kept from 1914 to 1918. In particular, the wartime diaries of the fourth Earl Fortescue are a rich, insightful and multifaceted account of Earl Fortescue and the Fortescue family during the war years. Alongside the original typescript and his wartime diaries,this book also presents a selection of documents related to the Great War from the Fortescue family at Castle Hill archive. By presenting these documents from Lord Fortescue, this book raises awareness of his involvement with thewar effort in the county and the momentous challenges that he faced as the Lord Lieutenant of Devon during the First World War. RICHARD BATTEN is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, where he completed a PhD in History. He has contributed to the blog of the Centre of Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter and was interviewed by BBC Radio Devon in August 2014 and March 2016 as part of the events marking the centenaryperiod of the First World War.

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These Devon parish tax records provide details on thousands of Devonians who are otherwise unrecorded. The documents printed in this volume comprise parish tax records for parishes across Devon. These rates not only show the range of taxes payable in the county but also show how differently they were organised from one parish to another. The documents have been drawn from archives in Devon, London and Somerset and have not been previously published. This series will provide details on thousands of Devonians who are otherwise unrecorded.

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Exeter Cathedral is rich in its medieval archives, which record not only its buildings but also its personnel from the thirteenth century onwards. This volume lists the names of about a thousand people who served in the Cathedralbetween 1250 and the Reformation in 1548, including vicars choral, chantry priests and choristers. It provides their biographies as far as these can be constructed. In this way the book recreates a medieval religious community inalmost unparalleled detail, ranging from distinguished musicians to violent or unsatisfactory men, some of whom were dismissed. It also traces many of the boys and men back to their places of origin in Devon and Cornwall, and shows how cathedral clergy often left to work in churches elsewhere in the South West. It is therefore an important resource for local history, providing information about the origins and careers of many clergy of the region's parishchurches.

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Death, burial, and the commemoration of the dead have been much studied by historians in recent years, but far less has been done to make available the sources on which these studies are based. This book sets out to fill the gap with an anthology of the rich and varied evidence that survives from the medieval city of Exeter. It begins with a history of burial practices in the city: where people were buried and why. This is followed by an edition of theonly remaining local burial list, relating to the hospital of St John, and by a register of all the 650 people known to have had a funeral or burial in Exeter between 1050 and 1540 with details of dates and places. The second part of the book deals with wills and executors. It prints the eighteen earliest Exeter wills (1244-1349), and two rare documents drawn up by executors: the inventory of a prosperous widow's possessions (1324) and the impressive, hitherto unedited, executors' accounts of Andrew Kilkenny, dean of Exeter (1302-15). A list of all the surviving Exeter wills up to 1540 (over 700 complete or in part) is also provided. The final section centres on how the deadwere remembered. This contains over a dozen obituary records naming men and women and the dates of their deaths, ranging from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. The records include some remarkably early lists of members of guilds in the neighbourhood of Exeter, dating from about the year 1100; the obituary list of the Exeter guild of Kalendars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the oldest specimens of the cathedral's 'obit accounts' from 1305-7; a document establishing a chantry in 1305; and several 'obit calendars' from Exeter Cathedral. Altogether the volume contains 2 registers of names and 36 documents, nearly all of which are making their first appearance in print. All the documents have been translated into modern English, and they are eminently suitable for use by undergraduates and postgraduates as well as for academic research. There are full introductions to each of the three sections, three maps, eight pages of photographs, a glossary, bibliography, and index.

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This volume for 1997 contains transcriptions of all the 266 probate inventories that could be traced for the parish of Uffculme, Devon, together with abstracts of the accompanying wills and administrations which have survived. Added to these are 322 further abstracts of wills and administrations under the Salisbury jurisdiction (and now housed at the Wiltshire Record Office in Trowbridge) which have no surviving inventories. These further wills and administrations extend to the end of the year 1800 (with a few in the Dean of Salisbury's list beyond that date). Where possible, notes are included on related burial and marriage entries taken from the Parish Registers. The survivalrate of probate inventories for Devon is poor, as so many perished with the wills when the Exeter Probate Registry was destroyed in the Blitz in 1942. The Uffculme ones escaped because Uffculme was a Peculiar Parish in the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Salisbury and were kept in Salisbury during the war. The publication of this volume will give an insight into the sort of information the historian may gain from this type of document as well as providing aspects of life in Uffculme and farming and woollen cloth-making

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This volume presents early insurance registers kept by the Sun Fire Office, which list and value the goods of cloth manufacturers. The textile industry was an important part of Devon's economy in this period and these documents survive in greater numbers for Devon than for any other area outside London. They tell us much about an important eighteenth-century industry, as well as about economic history and the history of business and insurance.

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John Butter was an early nineteenth-century surgeon and physician who founded the Plymouth Royal Eye Infirmary, one of the earliest eye hospitals in Britain. In his Memoir, Butter tells about his long career in medicine, from his early training to his wide-ranging medical practice and his advanced eye treatments. He also describes his life outside medicine: his work with the South Devon Militia (including their involvement with the Luddites), his travels in France and Italy, his love of dogs and his passion for hunting. Most important of all is the light he sheds on medicine in the early nineteenth century. He arguably introduced the stethoscope to Britain and performed a huge variety of treatments, ranging from a mastectomy without anaesthetic to trepanning, blood-letting, cataract removal and other eye procedures. The Memoir is privately-owned and is now published for the first time, with an Introduction which explains the background to Butter's life and career.

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Exeter's tax assessments from the seventeenth century give an important insight into the population and economy of one of England's principal cities in this period. They tell us about housing, population density, the distributionof wealth across the city, and the incomes of Exeter's citizens. They also show the ways in which the wealth of Exeter's citizens changed during the course of the century. These accounts, edited with an introduction by the well-known Devon historian W. G. Hoskins, will interest historians of early modern towns and society, as well as local historians.

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John Lydford was a fourteenth-century canon lawyer and cleric who acted as an advocate in the church court at Canterbury and held various official positions in the English church. He left a book of notes and documents relating tocanon law, which are edited here with an introduction. Its contents include legal formulas for use in court cases, notes about points of law, and records of particular cases drawn from the church courts of Oxford, Hereford, Winchester and Exeter. John Lydford's book therefore offers an unusual insight into the workings of the medieval English church and its courts.

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The documents printed in this volume comprise parish tax records for eighteen parishes across Devon. These 26 church rates, 1 clerk rate, 13 Easter books, 5 military rates and 21 poor rates not only show the range of taxes payablein the county but also show how differently they were organised from one parish to another. The documents have been drawn from archives in Devon, London and Somerset and have not been previously published. This series will provide details on thousands of Devonians who are otherwise unrecorded.

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This volume and Volume 57 present the Elizabethan wills and inventories collected by the Exeter Orphans' Court between 1560 and c.1602. The court administered the estates of all 'orphans' (the children of wealthy freemen whose fathers were deceased) within the city. They form the most important series of documents relating to the houses, material culture and social history of people living in Exeter during the latter half of the sixteenth century, including the number of rooms in their homes, their furniture, clothes and kitchen equipment, and the pattern of their debts. They are thus an invaluable resource for anyone interested in everyday life and the household in Elizabethan England.

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The documents printed in this volume result from a dispute in the Westminster court of Chancery between two members of the Devon family of Tremayne. At their core is a collection of 85 witness statements describing the activitiesof the lawyer Nicholas Radford on two days in 1438 and 1439. The witnesses range across the social spectrum from the earl of Devon to local labourers. Their detailed testimonies provide a unique insight into their daily lives, and the daily life of the city of Exeter and its hinterland in the first half of the thirteenth century.

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This volume presents the second half of the survey conducted of manors in the Duchy of Cornwall in 1650, covering thirty-seven manors across the Duchy. It gives much information about the spread of population and the Duchy's tenants, and is of particular interest to economic, social and family historians, as well as for the study of Cornish place names. The second and final volume of the survey is published as DCRS new series, vol. 27.

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This volume presents the second half of the survey conducted of manors in the Duchy of Cornwall in 1650, covering twenty-seven manors in Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly, and west Devon. It gives much information about the spread ofpopulation and the Duchy's tenants, and is of particular interest to economic, social and family historians, as well as for the study of Cornish place names. The first volume of the Parliamentary Survey is published as DCRS newseries, vol. 25.

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The Exeter Cathedral Fabric Accounts document the history of Exeter Cathedral during a period when it was being extensively rebuilt by a series of active bishops. They show how the rebuilding was financed and give a detailed account of what was involved in a medieval building project, listing workers' wages, the cost of materials, and they show how building materials were transported to Exeter from Devon and from other parts of England. This informationtells us much not only about the history of Exeter Cathedral and its bishops, but also about the relationship between the Cathedral and the surrounding area, and the economic history of the region. This volume presents the accounts from 1279 to 1326, and Volume Two (new series 26) presents the accounts from 1328 to 1353.

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This volume presents eight tax returns for the city of Exeter dating from the Tudor period. It includes the assessment of 1522, which also lists men with few assets and so offers one of the most detailed surveys of population surviving from the period. It will interest family historians, economic and social historians working on the history of towns, and historians of Tudor government.

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112 tax lists for Devon for the period from 1500 to 1650. Tax lists are a key means of understanding parish life in the 1500s and early 1600s. This collection of 112 records for towns and villages such as Crediton and Dartmouth is published here for the first time. It reveals those individuals who were the bedrock of their societies and helps us in understanding how local society worked in this period. It is through the study of these documents that we can unravel how differently each parish was organised in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and see how people took part in parish life. The name lists also provide rich material for family and local historians.

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The Exeter Assembly was founded in 1691 as a meeting place for Nonconformist ministers in Devon and Cornwall. Its Minutes, edited here with an introduction, provide evidence of Nonconformist activity in the two counties in their most active period. They include information about the education and ordination of potential ministers, church finances, and religious controversies. They will interest historians of religion in the period, and particularly Nonconformity, as well as scholars interested in the history of Devon and Cornwall.

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The Letter Book of Thomas Hill forms one of the most significant survivals of English merchant papers for the seventeenth century. It provides fascinating insights into the world of English merchants at the time of the Restorationof Charles II. It shows not just the importance of family relationships to commerce within the South West of England, but also how these relationships were crucial to conducting trade with continental Europe and across the Atlantic. Thomas Hill's acquaintances included not only other merchants but also well-known men such as Samuel Pepys.

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This comprises the household accounts of the only noble family then resident in Devon. Remarkable for their richness and diversity, the collection of documents has not been previously published and will considerably add to our understanding of the county's social history in the seventeenth century. The rare survival of parallel London and provincial accounts allows invaluable comparisons and analysis which will be of wide appeal. The accounts recorded thehousehold's very fabric from the servants' financial particulars (including their wages, clothing and diet) to minute details of such purchases as furniture, silver, musical instruments and pictures. There are also recurring entries for the planting of the extensive terraced garden and unusual entries such as the purchase of an organ from Gloucester and the construction of the Great Coach. The continual movement of the Earl and Countess between Devon and London is shown and this is of added significance given that the Earl was the county's leading Royalist and the accounts cover the entire Civil War period. There are accounts for the Earl's diet in 1642 while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and the volume also includes the Countess' personal account book in which she recorded their Civil War involvement.

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These records, of three gentry families from east, west and south Devon, are remarkable for their richness and diversity and provide a unique insight into seventeenth-century life. They illustrate every aspect of the running of the household including the duties of the servants, payments to visiting musicians, purchases of clothing, building accounts and consumption of provisions. In particular the volume includes the kitchen account for Sydenham detailingthe gentry diet, including the importing of wine, the making of venison, woodcock, salmon, quince, lumber and turkey pies, and the purchase of all provisions. The seasons of the year are clearly seen in the accounts including lists of guests for meals at Christmas through Twelfth Night.

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The Redvers earls of Devon were one of the leading families of southern England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with large estates in Devon, Dorset, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Over 200 charters have survived before1217 which relate to them, fully edited for the first time in this volume. The charters record the family's history, its part in national politics, and its estates. They also tell us about the religious houses, towns, economy andpeople of the region. There is a full introduction followed by an edition of the charters, with a summary of each one in English, a careful Latin text, and scholarly apparatus and notes. There are three maps, a genealogical table, a glossary of technical terms and a detailed index.

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Exeter possesses the best series of local customs accounts from medieval England, beginning in 1266 and surviving for almost 70 per cent of the years up to 1498. They are also far more complete than other local accounts: listing ships' names, home ports, shipmasters and dates of arrival, as well as the importers and their cargoes. Equally remarkable is their focus on coastal as well as overseas traffic, unlike the better known national customs accounts which recorded only overseas trade. From the Exeter accounts we can follow the movements of foreign and domestic shipping, grain imports during the great Famine of 1315-17, and the identity of the merchants, shipmasters and marinerswho carried on the various kinds of trade. Dr Kowaleski's introduction provides the first detailed account of the port of Exeter and its activities during this period, followed by a complete translation of the surviving accounts from 1266 to 1321. The book also includes a specimen Latin account, a glossary of weights and measures, map, and full indexes.

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This volume contains all the surviving early-Stuart surveys of Mariners and Shipping for Devon and Cornwall, including a hitherto unknown one of south Devon discovered in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College Cambridge. From parish to parish, all along the coasts of the two counties and in some cases far inland, the seafaring population is delineated. There are about 6000 names in all, a source for social and maritime historians and especially valuable for family historians in the two counties. Nearly unique in its time as an 'occupation census', the information provides rare glimpses into local life. Included in the Introduction is an analysis of contemporary ships' names.

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Beavis Wood (d. 1814) was the Town Clerk of Tiverton for over forty years, from 1765 to 1806. This volume presents a selection of his letters to Nathaniel Ryder, MP for Tiverton for much of this period, and to other correspondents. They give a colourful account of the society, local politics, and economy of Tiverton, and tell us much about urban society and politics in the period.

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This volume lists proceedings from the royal court of chancery relating to shipping and seafaring activities in Devon and Cornwall in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They include a variety of complaints and requests, manyrelating to the taking of ships and their cargoes during periods of warfare between England and France. They tell us much about medieval maritime history, as well as about the importance of shipping in Devon and Cornwall.

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Spanning the period 1512-78, the High Cross churchwardens' accounts of Stratton, in Cornwall, are unusually complete and informative. Written mostly in English, they are among only eighteen surviving sets of Pre-Reformation churchwardens' accounts which cover the whole period 1535-70, when most Reformation change took place. Spanning the period 1512-78, the High Cross churchwardens' accounts of Stratton, in Cornwall, are unusually complete and informative. Written mostly in English, they are among only eighteen surviving sets of Pre-Reformation churchwardens' accounts which cover the whole period 1535-70, when most Reformation change took place. These accounts allow us to track the progress of the Reformation in a single parish and its impact on the lives of ordinary people.Stratton, in addition, has a partial set of general receivers' or stock wardens' accounts, which give much additional information about the parish at this time. They show how much has been lost from other parishes, shed light on the 1548-9 Cornish rebellions and enable a more narrative approach to be taken than is usually possible with churchwardens' accounts, often dismissed as mere lists. The volume also makes extensive use of the Blanchminster Charity records at the Cornwall Record Office, including deeds and leases of church lands, and an Elizabethan court case with rare pictorial plans showing Stratton's church, church house and market place. Together, these documents give a rounded picture of life in one parish in a period of important religious change. JOANNA MATTINGLY is a freelance researcher and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Based in Cornwall, she has written books and articles on Mousehole and Newlyn, Cornish church architecture and medieval guilds, and church houses.

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This volume and Volume 56 present the Elizabethan wills and inventories collected by the Exeter Orphans' Court between 1560 and c.1602. The court administered the estates of all 'orphans' (the children of wealthy freemen whose fathers were deceased) within the city. They form the most important series of documents relating to the houses, material culture and social history of people living in Exeter during the latter half of the sixteenth century, including the number of rooms in their homes, their furniture, clothes and kitchen equipment, and the pattern of their debts. They are thus an invaluable resource for anyone interested in everyday life and the household in Elizabethan England.

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This volume edits the correspondence of Sir Francis and Lady Acland of Killerton, Devon. It brings together a unique collection of written sources for politics in the early twentieth century, ranging from the administrative worldof high politics to constituency electioneering in Cornwall and Devon. The Aclands made a prominent contribution to Liberal party politics in this period and their correspondence covers topics such as the pre-war campaign for female suffrage, the key events of the First World War and the party divisions that followed the fall of Asquith. These letters therefore offer fresh insight into the changing fortunes of Liberalism in this period. They also challenge the assumption that the South West of Britain was a political backwater, covering the remarkable rise and fall of Labour in Cornwall and the tensions generated in rural Devon by Lloyd George's land campaign in the mid-1920s. Notions of family tradition, territorial politics and constituency representation were played out against the competing influences of Devon, Cornwall and Westminster.

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From at least the mid-thirteenth century, the Earl of Cornwall, the wealthiest and most politically powerful lord in the county, employed a special official - called the havener - to supervise the administration of his maritime profits in the county. When the Duchy of Cornwall was created in 1337, the havener's duties were expanded, and he was made a permanent salaried official. The office of havener, for which there was no parallel in medieval Britain, allowed the duchy to manage and exploit its maritime properties and prerogatives in a particularly efficient manner. The accounts of the havener record this management, and survive in summary from the late thirteenth century, but inmore detailed, separate accounts from the early fourteenth century. In focusing on the seventy years from 1287 to 1356, this edition allows readers to trace the impact on Cornwall of such major events as the Hundred Years War (begun in 1337) and the devastating plague of the Black Death in 1348-9. The annual accounts of the havener also offer a wealth of information on the development and prosperity of individual ports, including Plymouth, on fishing andthe fish trade, on piracy and privateering, on shipwrecks and 'royal' fish such as whale and porpoise, and on the overseas trade in wine, tin, hides and other goods. Particularly fascinating are the glimpses we can see of the Spanish, French, Irish and English traders, shipmasters, and fishers who visited Cornish shores, and the insights we gain about the people of medieval Cornwall - merchants, fishers, mariners, wreckers, pirates and even peasants - whomade their living from the sea.

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Between 1832 and 1885 West Cornwall was highly unusual in the British electoral system. Throughout the period the division was never contested at a general election, and the Liberals maintained a stranglehold on both parliamentaryseats. Yet this apparent stability disguised an often turbulent reality of party manoeuvring and personal rivalries. Dr Jaggard's book uncovers much that has been so far unknown about this phenomenon. The introduction surveysWest Cornwall politics between the First and Third Reform Acts, suggesting how the Liberals' hegemony was established and maintained. Both the numerical strength of Methodism in the division, together with corrosive rivalries among the county's Conservatives, played a part, but the papers suggest other factors at work too. Prominent among them immediately after 1867 was the Liberal party's organisation, and the prominence within it of men of new wealth such as the miner-banker J M Williams. As a snapshot of the mid-Victorian electoral system in action the papers widen our understanding of local and national politics, particularly reasons for the electoral success of the Gladstonian Liberal party.

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Exeter has one of the best-preserved medieval city archives in England, and the receivers' accounts are unusually early of their kind. First extant in 1304, they list the income and expenditure of the city corporation each year, thereby throwing light on Exeter before, during, and after the Black Death. The topography of the city, property holding and the economy are all featured, as are city government, law and order and civic entertainments. Important people are mentioned visiting Exeter: judges, bishops, noblemen and royalty such as Princess Joan and the duchess of Brittany. Altogether there is a detailed and delightful picture of life in a medieval city. This edition provides a full translation of the first eleven accounts with an introduction and index, together with specimens of four other early accounts from the 14th century: a city rental, a murage account relating to the city walls, an account of the wardens of the Exe bridge, and the first surviving receiver's account from Barnstaple.

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