The most important contemporary account of the life of Archbishop Thomas Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 and canonised in April 1173, was written by his closest friend, companion and secretary, Herbert of Bosham (c.1120-c.1194).
Search FNL grants since 1931
Item date: 1185
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £10,000
Item cost: £39,000
Institution: Lambeth Palace Library
Town/City: London
Item date: 1943-77
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £2,500
Item cost: £4,000
Institution: Kingston University
Town/City: London
The acquisition of this exceptional collection of letters from Iris Murdoch to Sir Leo Pliatzky, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Trade and knighted in 1977, will ensure that important documents illustrating the literary, political and philosophical zeitgeist of mid to late twentieth cent
Item date: 1952-54
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £2,000
Item cost: £4,000
Institution: Kingston University
Town/City: London
Iris Murdoch wrote the 9 undated autograph letters to Wallace Robson, together with 11 poems, between March 1952 and March 1954. Murdoch met Robson in 1950 when he was Fellow in English at Lincoln College Oxford.
Item date: 1952-54
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £2,000
Item cost: £4,000
Institution: Kingston University
Town/City: London
Iris Murdoch wrote the 9 undated autograph letters to Wallace Robson, together with 11 poems, between March 1952 and March 1954. Murdoch met Robson in 1950 when he was Fellow in English at Lincoln College Oxford.
Item date: 1964-1993
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £5,000
Item cost: £15,000
Institution: Kingston University
Town/City: London
The sequence of letters to Rachel Fenner comprises about 215 autograph letters, together with 85 autograph postcards and other notes from Iris Murdoch written between 1964 and 1993.
Item date: 1794-1799
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £4,100
Item cost: £41,000
Institution: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester
Town/City: Manchester
County: Lancashire
Hester Lynch Piozzi (formerly Thrale, née Salusbury) is well known as the friend of Dr Samuel Johnson, and the hostess of a brilliant literary circle.
Item date: 14th -15th centuries
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £2,275
Item cost: £2,275
Institution: Bruce Castle Museum, Archives & Local History Service
Town/City: London
Haringey Archive includes a significant collection of manorial documents and court rolls for the Manor of Tottenham.
Item date: 1611
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £4,500 from FNL's B. H. Breslauer Fund
Item cost: £5,500
Institution: Museum of the Home [formerly Geffrye Museum]
Town/City: London
This edition of Delightes is bound with another slim household recipe book, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, which is anonymous but may also be one of Plat’s works--the two certainly were commonly bound together after this 1611 edition. Delightes was probably first published in 1600 and A Closet in 1602, and the two were repeatedly republished through the first three quarters of the seventeenth century. Both are now rare, with the earliest surviving edition of A Closet being that published in 1608.
Item date: 1758
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £4,657
Item cost: £13,970
Institution: Gainsborough's House
Town/City: Sudbury
County: Suffolk
This handwritten receipt by Thomas Gainsborough is for the sum of 15 guineas received for a half-length portrait (which was 50 x 40 inches canvas). The portrait, now lost, was painted during the period he was living in Ipswich in the 1750s.
Item date: 1903-1973
Date acquired: 2013
Grant Value: £2,000
Item cost: £14,820
Institution: Exeter University Library
Town/City: Exeter
County: Devon
Malcolm Elwin was born in 1903, the son of a Nottingham businessman. He was privately educated (possibly on health grounds) and became a student at University College, Oxford, but seems to have left without a degree in order to embark on a literary career. As that career progressed during the 1