EDITORIAL NOTE: Digitised versions of the Royal Commission’s first (1870) and third (1873) reports by Henry Thomas Riley are on the Hathi Trust website. The following text was extracted using the site’s Optical Character Recognition facility. The 15th Report of the Royal Commission (1899) details all the collections surveyed.
The reports were printed in folio volumes, closely typeset, so hard to follow. In this edition they have been re-formatted to assist legibility. A number were dated by regnal years, beginning at the start of a monarch’s reign, so the true years have been added here. Some 160 documents are described and a number are fully transcribed. As will be seen, the chest storing the documents was remarked upon in the Reports. It is now an exhibit at the Blake Museum, Bridgwater:
The Bridgwater historian T. Bruce Dilkes (1866- 1949) devoted many years to studying and transcribing the documents, and at the time of his death had completed them to the end the reign of Elizabeth I, 1603. They were partially published and can be found elsewhere on this site.
Henry Thomas Riley (1816–1878) was an English translator, lexicographer, and antiquary. On the creation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (by royal charter in April 1869), Riley was engaged as an additional inspector for England, and given the task of examining the archives of various municipal corporations, the muniments of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and the documents in the registries of various bishops and chapters.