University of Pennsylvania Finding Aids

This collection contains 52 assorted English legal documents. Most are brief transactional records attesting to land sales, contracts, or estate settlements. Though mostly unrelated, there are a few small groups of connected documents, such as the five certificates of payment by Captain Roger Martin to various parties executed during December 1685. Beyond these transactional documents are a 1679 record of arguments before the Privy Council as well as a 1770 warrant for the arrest of Nicholas Gwyn, an Ipswich medical doctor.

This collection consists primarily of documents concerning government administration in Ireland during the tenures of Sir Robert Southwell (1635-1702) and his son Edward Southwell (1671-1730) as Secretaries of State for Ireland. The documents here are largely miscellaneous in nature but are clustered around a few themes. Highlights include lists of rents and financial transactions from the period after Cromwell’s invasion and before the Williamite war in Ireland, a 1689 eyewitness letter recounting the battle of Derry, a series of documents related to admiralty, smuggling, and collecting maritime revenue in the first decade of the eighteenth century, an inventory of maps of Ireland, and a substantive series of petitions relating to Richard Blake of Ardfry.