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A rare example of an architectural design by Sir James Thornhill (1675-1734), History Painter in Ordinary and Serjeant Painter to George I, and the leading decorative painter of his day. The drawing relates to a little-known commission by Thornhill for which apparently no other drawings survive.

The collection includes a contemporary copyist's manuscript of the Missa de Spiritu Sancto by Samuel Wesley (1766-1837), composed in 1784, with a dedication to Pope Pius VI; a copy of a keyboard fugue in D Major by his daughter Eliza (1819-95); and a copy by her brother, Samuel Sebastian Wes

Two bound volumes containing about 200 autograph letters exchanged between Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Dr Asa Gray (1810-88), a leading American botanist, together with 33 letters from Hooker to his wife, Hyacinth, 35 letters from Hooker to vario

The records comprise a Cost Book, 1846-7; a Petty Cash Book, 1854; a Ledger, 1846-54; and Quarry Receipts, mid-19th cent. They provide a valuable insight into the workings of the poorly documented granite quarrying industry, its costs, materials, labour and transportation

The earliest known record of a religious guild in Nottingham, listing 207 members of the Guild of St Mary, both men and women, from the parishes of SS Mary, Peter and Nicholas, Nottingham, and further afield. even from as far as York.

An outstanding archive of the Aynho estate papers, title deeds, together with personal papers of members of the Cartwright family in public life, including William Ralph Cartwright, MP for Northamptonshire (d.1847); his son Sir Thomas Cartwright, minister in Frankfurt 1830-38 and ambassador to S

The papers are divided into eleven groups, ten of them comprising the accumulations of title deeds and other estate records of the successive families who owned the Aberglasne Estate, beginning with the Rudds, who acquired the estate from the Thomases in the 17th century.

Ralph Radcliffe, a Lancashire gentleman, bought the Carmelite Priory of Hitchin shortly after its surrender in 1539, and the family subsequently amassed a considerable estate in North-West Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire The archive includes over 200 medieval title deeds, court rolls, rentals, su

Gunby Hall, Lincolnshire, the ancestral home of the Massingberd family, housed an interesting library, of which, remarkably, many hundreds still survive in situ.

Wesley's composition was completed in 1799, but it did not receive its first performance until 1826. Some parts are in Wesley's own hand, others are the work of Samuel Coad and another unidentified copyist.