Search FNL grants since 1931

In 1768 Thomas Paine (1737-1809) became an excise officer in Lewes, where he lodged at Bull House with the nonconformist grocer Samuel Ollive, whose daughter Elizabeth he married in 1771. In 1774 the marriage broke up, Paine's business failed and he was dismissed from the excise service.

Most of the deeds and papers, filling fifteen archive boxes, date from 1666-1927, when the Melton estate belonged to the Fountayne family, and from 1826 the Montagu family, following a change of name.

An original court-book for Brough and Winton, 1705-1839, and transcripts of custumals, including indentured agreements between Philip, Lord Wharton, and his customary tenants of the manor of Ravenstonedale, 1579/80.

50 deeds and documents, 15-16th cent,, relating to Mascy property, including deeds relating to the establishment and dissolution of the Hollinfare chantry chapel, and a court roll of the manor of Glazebrook, 15th cent. The collection supplements the Mascy deeds bought with FNL help in 2008

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.

Siegfried's son George Sassoon sold many of his father's papers, some of which were acquired by Cambridge University Library; the 'Remaining Archive' of papers in his possession at his death in 2006 include a series of war diaries and notebooks, 1915-19, containing journal entries, poems, prose compositions (including drafts of the celebrated 1917 statement against the continuance of the War), transcripts of other writers' works, pen-and-ink sketches and lists of casualties. The Archive also includes a larger set of post-war journals, largely unpublished, recording Sassoon's life to 1959; notebooks of fair copies of his own verse; notebooks recording his conversations with Thomas Hardy; notebooks and loose papers containing drafts of his autobiographical trilogy; and letters addressed to him, and his letters to Hester Gatty, whom he married in 1933.

Papers mostly relating to the 17th-century Fen Drainage Project accumulated by Sir Miles Sandys, 1st Bart. (1563-1645), his son Sir Miles Sandys and the elder Sir Miles's great-nephew, Col Samuel Sandys (d.1685).

RSM Barlow's letters give a detailed account of the Waterloo campaign and of the battle itself, 18 June 1815.

Robert Dobson, following a multifaceted career as a soldier-poet, employee of the Ministry of Information in New York, Professor of English at Tokyo Imperial University and literary adviser to Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

About 450 letters from Lord Kelvin, the mathematician and physicist, to his brother James; his business partner, Fleeming Jenkin; his aunt, Mrs Gall; and his nephew James. There are also incoming letters from these correspondents, and drafts or copies of outgoing letters.