Morrice's Manuscripts

THE Morrice manuscripts at Dr Williams's Library (sometimes referred to as MSS 33) comprise twenty-three volumes, of which eighteen are bound books (seventeen folio and one quarto) and five are parcels of loose items. They are numbered A to X. A twenty-fourth volume, N, has long been missing. In 1856–62 the Baptist minister and antiquary William Henry Black prepared a catalogue of the Library's manuscripts. This has not been published, and the Library's working catalogue is a typescript copy of Black's list. Black's section on Morrice's manuscripts fills forty pages, while the published summary available in Kenneth Twinn's Guide to the Manuscripts (1969) is only one page long. There is a partial listing, with notes on other collections, in HMC, Third Report, pp. 365–8. General descriptions of the collection can also be found in Peter Lorimer, John Knox and the Church of England (1875), pp. 245–50 ; Albert Peel, A Seconde Parte of a Register (2 vols., Cambridge, 1915), Introduction ; and R. G. Usher, The Presbyterian Movement (1905), II, 391–2. The following list is a compromise between Black's bulk and Twinn's brevity. It is based on Black's catalogue, omitting much of his detail on sixteenth-century documents, and updated with more recent information. Handwriting attributions are Black's. At the end is a separate list of Morrice materials that have found their way into Richard Baxter's papers. All of the Morrice manuscripts, except Vol. X, appear to be listed in the earliest catalogue of the library, John Palmer's of c.1800, which in turn is a copy of a catalogue of c.1740 (MS 24.55). Morrice himself listed several of his manuscripts in his own catalogue of his library (MS M, no. 13), e.g. ‘Papers about Mr Baxter's Bookes - catalogue & receipts’, which is MS X.

A–C. Puritan Controversies under Queen Elizabeth I

Three thick folio volumes containing materials frequently used by historians of Tudor Puritanism. They are calendared in Peel, Seconde Parte of a Register, where the relationship between the volumes is explained. Peel also indicates which documents had previously been printed. See also Chap. 7 above.