Excerpt from The Crawford Collection of Early Charters and Documents: Now in the Bodleian Library The collection of Mss. of which these charters form a part was purchased by the Curators of the Bodleian Library at the sale of the library of W. H. Crawford, of Lakelands, county Cork, by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, on March 14, 1891. The charters are inserted in a large oblong scrap book, bound in Russia leather, now numbered 'MS. Eng. hist. a. 2, ' kept as 'Arch, F. a. 3.' The remainder of the collection, which has been removed from this volume and transferred to other classes in the Bodleian, comprises fifty-one later charters, thirty-six of which relate to Surrey, from c. 1230 to 1537; a fragment of a Walsingham abbey chartulary (MS. Top. Norf. b. I); an early-eleventh cent. fragment of St. John's Gospel ii. 6-iii. 34 and vi. 19-vii. 10 in Old English (MS. Eng. Bib. c. 2), printed by A. S. Napier in the Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen vol 87, p. 255; and fragments of Persius, the Achilleis of Statius, Avianus, and the Carmen Paschale of Sedulius (MS. Lat. class. d. 7). Other fragments, mainly Latin, have the following Press Marks: Gr. liturg. c. 2; Lat. Bib. c. I; Lat. liturg. d. 3; Lat. th. c. 3; Lat. misc. c. 7; Eng. poet. f. I (fragment of a seventeenth century transcript of an English chronicle); Fr. b. I. Little is known of the history of this collection. The volume containing them bears no owner's name except that of Mr. Crawford, to whom the collection was sold by Mr. Quaritch some twenty years ago. The binding appears to be about a hundred years old, and as No. VI was in possession of Robert Austen, F. S. A., of Shalford Hall, co. Surrey, in 1791, it is probable that the collection was made or completed by him. This suggestion will account for the number of Surrey deeds in the collection. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."