The unique copy of a work by William Smith (1769-1839), the pre-eminent English geologist of his time, long believed lost.
Search FNL grants since 1931
Item date: 1807
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £3,000
Item cost: £24,500
Institution: Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Town/City: Oxford
County: Oxfordshire
Item date: 1660
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £500
Item cost: £2,500
Institution: Milton's Cottage Trust
Town/City: Chalfont St Giles
County: Buckinghamshire
The Royal Proclamation of 13 August 1660 requiring persons possessing the 'wicked and traitorous' books of John Milton and John Goodwin to deliver them to the county sheriffs to be publicly burnt by the hangman at the next assizes.
Item date: 12th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £4,680
Item cost: £31,200
Institution: Lambeth Palace Library
Town/City: London
Robert Pullen (d.1146) was an outstanding English churchman, one of the first recorded lecturers in the University of Oxford and the first English cardinal. Archbishop Bancroft bequeathed one of the three surviving MSS of his sermons to Lambeth Palace Library in 1610.
Item date: 20th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £5,000 (Philip Larkin Fund)
Item cost: £10,000
Institution: Kingston University
Town/City: London
About 180 letters written over four decades by Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher to the writer and philosopher Denis Paul, her Oxford contemporary and lifelong friend.
Item date: 19th century
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £7,500
Item cost: £45,000
Institution: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester
Town/City: Manchester
County: Lancashire
Correspondence and papers of the Green Family of Knutsford, Cheshire, including 16 letters from Elizabeth Gaskell to Mary Green. Her husband, Henry Green, was from 1827-72 Minister of Brook Street Unitarian Chapel, Knutsford, the town immortalised by Mrs Gaskell as 'Cranford'.
Item date: 1754
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £1,500
Item cost: £15,000
Institution: Hounslow Local Studies Service
Town/City: London
Hogarth wrote to John Kirby on 7 June 1754 advising him on handling a controversy about perspective, a subject on which Kirby, an artist, architect and topographical draughtsman, was an expert. Autograph letters of Hogarth are extremely rare.
Item date: 1263-1944
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £10,000
Item cost: £150,000
Institution: Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies
Town/City: Hertford
County: Hertfordshire
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
Item date: c.1670
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £4,000
Item cost: £85,000
Institution: Bodleian Libraries
Town/City: Oxford
County: Oxfordshire
Piero Cavalli was the foremost Italian opera composer of the mid-17th century, and Erismena was first performed in Venice in 1655. The present MS, dating from c.1670 and in its original goatskin binding, contains the text in English translation.
Item date: 1539-40
Date acquired: 2008
Grant Value: £4,000
Item cost: £63,000
Institution: Bodleian Libraries
Town/City: Oxford
County: Oxfordshire
A 'particular book' of James Nedeham, Clerk and Surveyor of the King's Works, 1539-40, recording detailed accounts for works at Greenwich, Westminster Hall, Windsor Castle, Woking Palace and elsewhere.
Item date: 1831
Date acquired: 2007
Grant Value: £500
Item cost: £974
Institution: Tyne and Wear Archives
Town/City: Newcastle-upon-Tyne
County: Tyne and Wear
In 1831 a recently formed Union of Northumberland Miners struck for a wage increase and a shortening of their working hours of 17-18 a day. The present papers mainly comprise letters to the Clerk of the Peace for Northumberland, Mr Thorpe, from Thomas Turnbull, his Deputy Clerk.