Welcome to the Norfolk Record Society
Patron: His Royal Highness The Duke of Gloucester, KG, GCVO
President: Sir Timothy Colman, KG, DCL
Chairman: Professor Richard Wilson, BA, PhD, FRHistS
The Norfolk Record Society was founded to encourage the study and preservation of Norfolk records and to publish editions of documents relating to the history of the county. Since 1930 it has published annually a transcript of significant and sometimes unusual manuscripts or collections of manuscripts. The volumes are carefully edited, comprehensively indexed, and include introductions explaining the background of the documents. Well-produced and uniformly bound in hard covers, the series now provides a valuable reference source for topics covering the time span of the twelfth to the twentieth centuries.
In its early days the Society played a key role in the rescue of records and in the establishment of the Norfolk Record Office, where its collection of manuscripts remains one of the largest single holdings.
The Society played a significant part
in representing the views of record holders and users in the development of
Norfolk's new purpose built repository, which opened in 2003. The Society
continues to assist in adding to the Record Office's holdings. For example a rare fifteenth-century swan roll was purchased following an appeal actively supported by the Society, and a more direct and practical part was taken in helping to secure for the Norfolk Record Office the very substantial archive of the Reverend William Gunn (1750-1841) of Irstead and Smallburgh, which was in danger of being purchased by an American University and taken out of the country.
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