Commonalty, as forming the confraternity of St. George, and to the inhabitants of the city, for the benefit of their prayers. The sale of the property was left to William Warmwell, his executor, a citizen of note and substance. Alicia, the widow of Teynterer, married in second nuptials George Meriot, and died in 1406. Warmwell having for several years neglected to fulfill the injunctions of her first husband, she adopted a singular expedient to recal him to a sense of his duty. As all wills and other instruments were publicly read in the Mayor's Court, she directed hers to be written in Latin, the legal language of the period, but in the midst of it she introduced an apostrophe, in English, to Warmwell; which, as if coming from the grave, could not fail to raise against him the horror and indignation of the city." A literal copy of this pungent document then follows. About the period of the building of Ludlow's house the city was honoured with several royal visits. In 1445 all citizens keeping house within the town were ordered to provide a gown of bloodcolour, for the advent of the Queen, under a penalty of 68. 8d. In 1448, also, all the citizens, and all of sufficient substance, were enjoined to provide themselves with a good gown of blood colour, and a red hood, in anticipation of the arrival of the king, under a penalty of 138. 4d. The marriage of Henry VI. with Margaret of Anjou was unpopular, and, together with the reverses of the English arms in France, led to the Cade rebellion. In the following year (1449) turbulent spirits were not wanting in this city to imitate the example in other quarters. Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, whose unfortunate connexion with the Court had already rendered him unpopular, was murdered by a party of miscreants, led by a Salisbury "brewer," at Edington. After the suppression of the rebellion, the remains of Cade were exposed in several places; among them was Salisbury, where the populace had given so sanguinary a proof of an evil disposition. The King appears to have visited Winchester soon after the establishment of order; from thence he came to Clarendon, and during his stay he is reported to have inflicted condign punishment on the wretches concerned in the murder of the late Bishop. The accounts of the expenditure of the Mayor at this period are VOL. XV.-NO. XLV. 2 E curious, and form a striking contrast to the usages of the present day. During the mayoralty of John Hall in 1451, we find : "A gift to our Lord the King, for six large oxen and two smaller ones, and for fifty sheep, £12. 14s. Od. For a hogshead of Wine, six quarters of corn, six pipes of ale, given to the Reverend Father, Richard, Bishop of Sarum, at the time of his installation, £18. 138. 4d. Paid William Swayne and Edmund Penston, citizens of the said city, for the Parliament at Westminster, which terminated at Leicester, £22. Os. Od. For a pipe of wine, given to Mr. John Seymour, Sheriff of Wilts, to conciliate his good offices, 65 shillings." A great deal of curious information concerning the habits and possessions of a citizen of Salisbury during the fifteenth century may be gleaned from Hatcher and Benson's History, already quoted; several elaborate inventories are printed there, giving the most minute account of the contents of a private house of that period, also the details of the furniture and fittings of the George hostelry in 1473, shewing the rough sort of accommodation then afforded to travellers at a good inn. At this time too the citizens of Salisbury must have been excited by the strange and tedious proceedings connected with the canonization of St. Osmund, who died in 1099, but was only inserted in the catalogue of Saints in 1457 by Pope Calixto. It only remains to add, that the original indenture is now preserved in the Salisbury and South Wilts Museum. The Literary Treasures of Longleat. By the Rev. Canon J. E. JACKSON, F.S.A.* WAS invited some time ago by your Secretary to contribute a paper for your meeting at Frome, and with the invitation he suggested a subject on which I was to write. It was a very good one, but in one respect too good, inasmuch as it made it necessary for me to compress into a very small compass and to put into such form as should not weary an audience, halting for half-an-hour on an out-door excursion, material which, properly developed, would really fill a volume and that not a small one. The subject was "The Literary Treasures of Longleat." These treasures are of two kinds-printed, or in MS. The printed treasures fill two very large rooms that which is called the Lower or modern library on the ground floor; and the upper or Old library at the top of the house. The Lower library contains a very fine collection of books, formed chiefly by the grandfather of the present owner of Longleat. There are Greek and Latin classical authors of superb editions; also many of our rarest county histories, all the four earliest editions of Shakespeare,2 and a vast number of "rarities" • Read in the Hall, at Longleat, before the Somersetshire Archæological Society, on Thursday, 12th August, 1875. A few trifling additions have been made to the paper since it was read, but ever in its present form, the reader will kindly please to understand that it presents a very meagre account of the contents of Longleat Library and Muniment Room. 2 On the fly-leaf, at the end of the first edition of Shakespeare, in the library at Longleat, are the following verses, in an old hand :— "An Epitaph upon Shakespeare. Renouned Chaucer, Lie a thought more nigh A little neerer Spencer, to make roome For Shakespeare in your threefold fourefold tombe. To lie all foure in one bed make a shift, For, untill doomsday hardly will a fift For whom your Curtaines need be drawn againe; suited to the appetite of book-lovers of every species. I say "every,' because there are several varieties of book-lovers. Some like books for the old title-pages, some for the black letter, some for the illustrations, some for the bindings, and now and then a few for the contents. There are some of the most valuable works printed by Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde and other early brethren in the trade : and a very early edition, in black letter, of Chaucer, whose first editor, by the way, was WILLIAM THYNNE, uncle to the builder of the very house in which you are assembled. A little volume called "Thealma " bears the autograph of "Iz. Wa."-Izaac Walton, the fisherman : and another book, a folio edition of Diogenes Laertius, which belonged to Bishop Ken and contains on the fly-leaf a Latin sentence in bis (very rare) handwriting, has been so constantly inquired for and inspected by the good bishop's admirers that the binding is broken with frequent opening. Then there is a very fine copy of a work called "Halstead's Genealogies." This is a "History of the Mordaunt Family," (including that of others, as the Mauduits of Warminster,) printed under a fictitious name, in 1685; a work of which probably not more than twenty-five copies were printed, as only seventeen are known, one of which a few years ago sold for £240. Also a fine copy of Richard Grafton's Bible, 1541. This appears to have been a present from some Royalty to Sir J. Thynne, the builder of Longleat, and in it he has written on the fly-leaves entries of the births, deaths and marriages in his family. Having seen the fine room you will easily understand But if precedency of death doth barre A fourth place in your sacred sepulchre Sleep, rare Tragedian SHAKESPEARE, sleep alone. Below the verses another (also old) hand has written "graphicè scribis." These verses were composed by William Basse, and were very popular, being the earliest Elegy on Shakespeare. It was found in a MS. written after the year 1621, entitled "Basse his Elegie on Poett Shakespeare who died in April, 1616." The lines, somewhat varying from the above, are printed in the Journal of the British Archæological Association, 1862, p. 281: where Mr. J. O. Halliwell, the contributor, observes that W. Basse had probably expected a cenotaph to be erected to Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey. that it is impossible to describe in detail the many beautiful volumes which it contains. So I pass to the Old library. The Old library contains a vast collection of books, of which many of more modern date have been put there merely for convenience sake, but the greater part formed the library of Longleat at the time of the first Lord Weymouth, who died in 1714. These old books were chiefly collected by him, and among them are many curious and rare ones upon almost every subject, but especially Divinity, and still more especially the controversial Divinity of the latter part of the seventeenth century-from 1660. The first Lord Weymouth was, as I need hardly say, the friend and protector of Bishop Ken; and the country being at the time torn to pieces by theological warfare, much connected with the great political changes of the time, Lord Weymouth and Bishop Ken, between them, seem to have entered into these subjects with deep feeling and earnestness, and to have gathered almost everything that was printed during their day. There is a vast number of tracts, answers, rejoinders, and replications, all no doubt in their turn eagerly looked for and read as they came out, but which now stand, in grim rank and file, bound in plain and homely black calf, exhibiting no outward sign of bookbinding vanity. No drawing-room table volumes are these, nor at all likely to be met with at those establishments so fascinating to a large portion of modern readers, the railway bookstalls. Yet in these old dim volumes the controversialists of our day would find that many of the points they are fighting about had been fought about before, over and over again, though we seem to be as far as ever from a harmonious conclusion. It is, I believe, not an uncommon notion among the public tbat all the books in the Old library were Bishop Ken's, the room being often called Bishop Ken's Library. It was no doubt the daily living place of the good bishop, who probably had all his own books there at the time. But the books now there were, for the greater part, the first Lord Weymouth's. The addition made to them by the bishop's last Will was as follows: "I leave and bequeath to the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Weymouth, in case he outlives me, all my books of which his Lordship has not the duplicates, |