Although the manuscript from which the ensuing Miracle–play is printed is not, perhaps, earlier than the reign of Henry VI., there is ground for believing, from the character of the speeches, and from the extreme simplicity of its construction, that, if not the oldest, it is one of the oldest dramas existing in our language. In this respect it may rival “The Harrowing of Hell,” the MS. of which (Harl. 2253) carries us back to the reign of Edward III.It is not now printed for the first time. It was discovered many years ago “amongst the Archives at Guildhall, York,” and was published by Mr. J. Croft, E.S.A. in his “Excerpta Antiqua,” which came out in 1797. Ancient records were not then read with so much facility as at present; the manuscript itself is in various places scarcely legible, and the then editor, without being at all to blame, committed serious errors which we have endeavoured to remedy. The valuable original is now the property of John Sykes, Esq. M.D. of Doncaster, who has kindly permitted the Camden Society to make use of it.

From a love of his sovereign, and a full conviction of the justness of his cause, Dr. Edward Lake, laying aside the gown, took up the sword, and followed his royal master to the battle of Edge-hill. In this engagement he received sixteen wounds; and having lost the use of his left hand by a shot, he placed his horse's bridle between his teeth, and held out the combat, fighting with his sword in his right hand, till the armies parted by the coming of night.

This interesting little legend, preserved in a volume in the Harleian Collection of MSS. in the British Museum, calendared as “Poems by Chaucer, Dan Lydgate, and others,” can hardly be said to have escaped the notice of our antiquaries, since Ritson, in his Bibliographia Poetica, p. 71, mentions it, and gives its authorship to Lydgate.

The following pages contain particulars of the Accounts of Thomas Walmysley, one of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas, from 1589 to 1612, on his riding the Western Circuit with Edward Fenner, one of the Judges of the Queen's Bench, at the autumn and spring assizes, in every year, from July 1596 to March 1601; and also the account of Thomas Walmysley on his riding the Oxford Circuit with Peter Warburton, another Justice of the Common Pleas, in the autumn of the year 1601. On Sir Thomas Walmysley's monument at Blackburn it was recorded, that during the twenty-three years of his tenure of office he went “all the cercuets of England, except Norfolk and Suffolk.”