Books in the London Record Society series

"Guildhall Library manuscript 197 consists of the minutes of a Whig political club operating within the City of London" -- Introd.

The rulers of London in the late middle ages sought to safeguard the future of their important river crossing by placing its administration in the hands of a specially created institution. By the mid-fourteenth century the "BridgeHouse", as it became known, had been endowed with a large portfolio of properties which provided the bulk of the revenue needed for the frequent, and often urgent, repairs to London Bridge's structure: as many as 130 shops stoodon the bridge itself. As well as providing information on the technicalities of bridge-building or wider issues concerning urban crafts and productive processes, the accounts and rentals from the institution's archive provide useful snapshots of the bridge at various points in its often turbulent history.

A uniquely valuable insight into Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in early modern London.

Records of settlement and bastardy examinations held in the parish of Chelsea in the mid-eighteenth century.

St Andrew was a small and comparatively obscure parish situated in the south-east of the medieval city of London, but its churchwardens' accounts survive in a virtually unbroken series starting in 1454 and continuing into the 1620s. Such complete sets of churchwardens' accounts are rare and particularly so for the period before the Reformation. These accounts reveal much about the practices and priorities of ordinary Londoners and demonstrate how they responded to the often conflicting demands of royal government in the sixteenth century. In addition to the accounts, the editor has also provided the texts of nearly a hundred wills of men and women who lived and died in this smallparish during these years. There is a full index provided to both the accounts and the wills.

The cases presented at the Court of Exchequer contain a wealth of information about many aspects of London history such as commerce, colonial trade, property and social customs.

A unique snapshot of London life as recorded by diarists whose interests range from high politics to housework, childbirth to deathbeds, burglaries to bowel movements.

The unique manorial and household accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.

In British gaols and on hulks, awaiting transportation to New South Wales, prisoners convicted of forged paper currency offences wrote to their influential prosecutor, the Bank of England. This volume comprises several hundred ofsuch letters held in the Bank's archives. Many, mainly those wirtten by or for women, came from the depths of abject misery and poverty, begging help to cope with prison conditions and with the journey to Australia. Others offeredinformation to the Bank about forged note traffickers in the hope of gaining some benefit for themselves. The collection reveals an extraordinary story of a surprising relationship between convicted prisoners and a mighty financial institution.

The imposition in 1695 of a new tax on births, marriages and deaths, in support of England's contribution to the Nine Years' War, led to the creation of a full register of the population of London [as of other counties]. The surviving records offer an unequalled level of information on social, family and household structures. In particular, they enumerate entire households by name and status, including children, servants and lodgers. This volume provides an index ro the surviving manuscript assessments for London's thirteen extramural parishes, and complements David Glass's index of inhabitants within the walls, published by the London Record Society in 1966.