NOTES AND QUERIES:
FOR LITERARY MEN, GENERAL READERS, ETC.
EIGHTH SERIES. VOLUME FIRST. JANUARY JUNE 1892.
LONDON: PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICE, BREAM’S BUILDINGS, CHANCERY LANE, EC.
Br JOHN C. FRA.NCIS,
Index Supplement to the Notes and Queries, with Ko. 30, July 23, 1892.
A History of Bridgwater. By Sydney Gardner Jarman.
MR. JARMAN’S book ought to run into more than its present second edition, were it only to spread the fact that the borough of Bridgwater is possessed of a ” most valuable and jealously guarded collection of documents, “forming the archives of the borough, contained in” about a dozen boxes, in which ancient charters, granted and signed by kings, jostle humble leases and indentures and long monkish Latin documents mix with the crude English and prim scholarly calligraphy of the last two centuries.” When this description is analyzed by the reader, it will be found to result in a delicate statemen that the Bridgwater archives are in a state little removed from chaos. Mr. Jarman tells us that “some years since the late Mr. Henry Thomas Riley, a well-known antiquarian expert, was engaged to overhaul and classify the documents”; but from the “confusion” which existed among them when the author of the volume before he was preparing his ‘History’, it is to be feared that Mr Riley’s work was, as our author puts it, “not lasting”. We are glad that Mr. Jarman has devoted a chapter to the muniments of the borough, though we could have wished that he had given us the original of the Latin documents cited, both here and elsewhere in his book. Charters of John and Henry III deserve verbatim reproduction, particularly in a book giving a history of the town to which they were granted. If the Latin thought too learned for a “popular” history, let it at least be given in an appendix. Indeed, the whole series of Bridgwater charters, which seems to be remarkably all, embracing no fewer than twelve grants or confirmations between 1200 and 1684, ought to have a special portion to itself in any full scheme of a ‘History of Bridgwater.’ We should be glad to bear that the borough as woke up to some sense of the value of its muniments since the publication of Mr. Jarman’s useful volume; and, if so, then no small portion of the credit should be given to Mr. Jarman.
Abstracted 18 August 2012