Search FNL grants since 1931

This large collection of mountaineering and climbing books is from the estate of Nat Allen, a founder member of the Rock and Ice climbing club. Amongst the collection are a scrapbook and selection of black and white photographs and 35mm slides.

The Monson Papers, an ‘indispensable record of British national life’, has been purchased and incorporated into the collections of Lincolnshire Archives. This extensive archive contains artworks, letters and travel papers spanning around 700 years. The core collection dates from 1221 to 1947 and comprises the estate archive of the Monson family, the Barons Monson of Burton by Lincoln, together with family and personal records and antiquarian papers. The collection also contains important records of domestic life, with everything from receipts for furniture and paintings to family recipes. These records provide a fascinating insight into the everyday lives of people in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Martin Parr is a British photographer, photo-journalist, artist and curator with an international reputation.

The treatise is written in a single neat hand, laid out as if to be ready for the press and preceded by a spiritual autobiography, which identifies the author as ‘an Obedient Daughter and true Member of the Church of England’ and mentions her contacts with the

Lord Byron’s copy of the first Barnes Latin edition of the Poems of Anacreon (Cambridge, 1705) was given as a gift and inscribed to him by Leigh Hunt.

‘Sold to the Griffith Institute!’: on 9 May 2017 the Griffith Institute acquired at auction at Sotheby’ an album of watercolours, drawings and tracings of Egypt by George Lloyd.

Drawn in 1664 by Robert Whi(s)tpaine from a survey of 1659 by Ralph Dowcett, the plan shows a farm in ‘Tollesbury’ (recte Tolleshunt D’Arcy) owned by the Henry Smith Charity. This charity was established in 1628 under the will of Henry Smith and benefitted a large number of parishes in Essex and elsewhere, and the title of this map names in particular the parish of Southover in East Sussex. ERO already holds large numbers of manuscript estate maps. Quite apart from their aesthetic value, they underpin many studies of local history and geography in the early modern period. This is a competent and attractive example, of special interest firstly because little is known of the surveyor, Ralph Dowcett, although he may have come from the Terling area of Essex

A collection of 11 late medieval deeds (1427 to 1574) from Coggeshall. Formerly unknown to historians, the deeds appeared for sale at Sotheby’s on 23 May at an estimate of £3,000 to £5,000 which no doubt reflected the presence in the deeds of members of the Paycocke family, relatives of the famous clothier Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall (d. 1518) who built Paycocke’s House, now in the care of the National Trust. The deeds record the names of a great many other people from Coggeshall and the surrounding towns and villages, including clothworkers, and illustrate a network of economic and social relationships and property holdings associated with the cloth industry.

Ben Jonson, Workes, 2nd edn., 1640, vol. 1, with extensive near-contemporary manuscript annotations to the play, Epicoene or The Silent Woman.
Jonson (1572-1637) Ben Jonson (1572-1637) is arguably the most important writer of the English Renaissance after Shakespeare, having lived and worked in an age of great social change that produced some of the finest works of English literature. This extraordinarily rare volume is the only known example of a document showing how a play by Ben Jonson was prepared for performance. Material that tells us about the performance of pre-Restoration plays is extremely scarce. This volume occupies a unique place among surviving materials because of the nature and range of its annotations to Epicoene, or The Silent Woman – including stage directions, details of props, and textual corrections – which collectively do not fall into any category previously known to scholars of 17th-century theatre. The volume is of outstanding interest to the study of English theatrical history. A product of a period when plays were seen not as finished pieces, but as perpetual works in progress, this volume has the potential to change scholars’ understanding of how plays were transmitted from the page to the stage and back again.

The collection contains 71 lantern slides showing the construction of the lighthouse, from the building of a coffer-dam to retain the sea to the lighthouse-keeper relaxing in his new quarters. The name of the photographer is not known, but it was probably the designer and builder Sir Thomas Matthews (1849-1930). Matthews was born in Penzance, the son of the Borough Surveyor. From 1868 to 1871 he assisted his father in providing drinking water for Penzance and in constructing the sea and harbour defences. For the following two years he practised as an architect and surveyor in Penzance, and in 1874 entered the employment of the United Kingdom's lighthouse service, Trinity House, as an assistant engineer; he succeeded to the office of Engineer-in-Chief in 1892.