The completion of Dr Knighton's edition of the first chapter minute book of Westminster Abbey records in detail Elizabeth I's refoundation of the collegiate church, including regulatio for preaching, the school and the library; the chapter's own housing is a continuing issue. Predominantly, however, the acts document the chapter's estate management: lease particulars shed light on the population of early modern Westminster and London. Favours sought by queen and courtiers are recorded, the exercise of the dean and chapter's ecclesiastical patronage is registered. At the end of the period the...

This volume completes the edition of the two earliest manuscript Chapter Act books of Westminster Abbey, which is now the first cathedral or collegiate church to have all its Chapter Acts fully in print from the Reformation to the Civil War. It records the formal decisions of the Abbey's governing authority, many involving grants of office and leases of the Abbey's large and widely-scattered estate, principally in the midlands and the south-east, and especially in Westminster itself. A full introduction brings out the value of the documents in placing the Abbey in the tumultuous history of...

Pepys's library has been, as he directed, preserved intact at his old Cambridge college since 1724. Between 1978 and 1994 a complete catalogue was published for the first time. The present title, essential to all users of the first volume in that series, N.A. Smith's Printed Books, vastly enhances the range of information available. The short-title arrangement of Printed Books is replaced by a numerical listing which follows the library's shelf-order; many entries have been extended, and where possible updated with reference to new scholarship; the location of MSS and other material treated...

This book is the first volume in a new venture, the Westminster Abbey Record Series, which aims to publish documents, calendars, lists and indexes from the Abbey's large and continuous archive of over a thousand years, making its contents available both to scholars and to a wider interested public. This edition of the earliest Chapter Act Book of the Dean and Chapter is an essential source for the impact of the Reformation at Westminster. The years covered in this volume show the business of setting up a reformed cathedral; the administration of the Abbey's large estate is also well...