The Dent Transcripts of Nonsuch Palace Documents

Sources for Epsom and Ewell History

The Nonsuch picture from Speed’s Surrey map of 1610
Image courtesy of Bourne Hall Museum

‘Until the summer of 1959 the royal palace of Nonsuch was almost a myth’, wrote John Dent, looking back on the ambitious excavations that year. These had revealed the foundations of courts, gateways and towers in all their splendour, but they lacked the vital interpretation derived from contemporary sources. That was furnished by a team of local historians who set out to research every known document with some bearing on the life of the palace.

It was all done with impressive speed. On ‘a cold windy day’ in January 1958, Dent was still scrabbling over the site of the palace; by the end of the year, he had marshalled transcripts from over a hundred documentary and published sources. He drew on the skills of several experienced historians including Philip Shearman and Charles Titford, with others – ‘many more people than I could hope to acknowledge’ – working as the Nonsuch Palace Excavation Committee. By June 1959, when Martin Biddle was ready to begin digging, the most critical documents for interpretation were available, including the building accounts and the 1650 survey. Next year came a final translation by Colin Ball and Albert Carr of the erudite description by Anthony Watson.

Dent continued gathering material until 1962 when he published his study The Quest for Nonsuch. Following his interests in the long-term history of the site, records began with the earliest history of the village of Cuddington and continued to cover events up to the final demolition of the palace in 1687. These transcripts were eventually bound into five volumes in black binders and stored on the local history shelves at Bourne Hall Library, where they still are today. We have begun digitising these. The contents of the first volume are:

All these documents can be accessed here.

The first volume is preceded by a list of contents, which has been copied with the references updated. The original list included two documents which are no longer to be found in the file itself: TNA CP25/2/42 289 m.48, the 1538 feet of fines entry for the acquisition of Cuddington by Henry VIII, and TNA C65/148 m.36, the Parliamentary Roll for 32 Hy. VIII (1540) noting the annexation of Nonsuch to the manor of Hampton Court.

All the documents are still accessible in public repositories except for the Inventory of Simon de Codynton. The original list of contents refers to this as a ‘document owned by Dr. B. Lawn’, of Station Road, Barnes. Dent worked from a photostat of the original but neither this nor his transcription have been located; we only have the translation.

Readers who are familiar with Dent’s Quest for Nonsuch will recognise several of these sources from its appendix 2, ‘Selected Documents, 1374-1650’. Many others are referenced in the footnotes; probably every document and citation in his book will refer back to the bound volumes of transcripts. Dent and his team worked diligently through the material available at the National Archives (then the Public Record Office), the British Library (then the British Museum) and Surrey History Centre (then the Guildford and Kingston Muniment Rooms, including the Loseley Manuscripts). We have checked all references to documents and updated these where necessary.

With so many people working on the project, there are likely to have been variations in their procedure for copying documents. The key documents, including those transcribed by Dent himself, were evidently copied exactly, word for word. Passages in Latin were transcribed as they stood, except for the Inventory of Simon de Codynton and the Description of Nonsuch by Anthony Watson, which are given in translation only. A few minor documents were calendared or summarised rather than transcribed, and with some (such as the Inventory of the Wardrobe in the Harleian MSS) it’s not entirely clear what is the actual sixteenth-century wording and what is a summary. We have done what we could to make this clear with additions in square brackets, using italics for later comments or summary. Roman text in square brackets is used only for conjectural or supplied readings.

The transcripts organised by Dent (and the versions that he printed in Quest for Nonsuch) replicated the layout of the original documents: for instance, if the original had headings added in the margin, these were typed up on the left with text in a column on the right so that words appeared in the same position on the page as in the document itself. But we have digitised the wording as uninterrupted running text, with marginalia, insertions, bracketed lines, columns and so on incorporated as far as is possible into the body of the document. Wording and spelling are unchanged except that we have standardised the abbreviations for money to £ s d (for Arabic numerals) and li s d (for Roman), and those for area to a r p. The pages, folios or membranes of the original are indicated by /p1/, /f.1r/, /m.1/. To help clarify headings and totals of figures, we have placed some text in bold, but this is for editorial convenience only and is not a feature of the original documents.

Jeremy Harte February 2018
With thanks to Jeanne Wing for her help in transcribing the documents.