A folio volume comprising two independent units, foliated as a single series, xii + 246 leaves (plus 12 further blanks).
Both parts containing antiquarian tracts:
ff. 1r-29v, Matters of Combat 1609
, predominantly in a professional secretary hand, with additions in other hands, owned in 1612 by William Crispe (name inscribed in court hand several times) and also by Henry Crispe (inscribed f. 20r-v), one or both also probably responsible for trial exercises in decorative lettering. c.1609-12.
ff. 30r-45v, discourses and copies of Latin documents relating to the offices of Lord Steward, Constable, and Earl Marshal of England, with title-page and (incomplete) list of contents, in the hands of professional scribes: ff. 30r-119v, 132r-45v, 150v-61r, 165v to to half-way down f. 205r in the hand of the Feathery Scribe
; the remainder in two other scribal hands. c.1630s.
Once owned by the Isham family, of Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire. Sotheby's, 17 June 1904 (Library of a Gentleman in the Country
), lot 89, to Quaritch. P.J. and A.E. Dobell, sale catalogue No. 80 (1928), item 719.
Described in Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), p. 255 (No. 88). Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, p. 30.