The Correspondence of the Reverend Francis Blomefield, 1702-1752

Description

The Blomefield Correspondence

The 294 letters transcribed in this volume were written by, to, or in a few cases, to others on behalf of Francis Blomefield, the rector of Fersfield in Norfolk, historian, and private printer.  They fall into three distinct groups.  The 177 letters in the largest group were written between June 1733 and April 1737 and are to be found , together with other matter (such as accounts, memoranda, and lists of subscribers) in Blomefield’s Journal and letter-book.  This manuscript has been well known to Norfolk historiographers for a century and a half, and quotations from a few of the letters have already been published.  A second group of 59 letters written between August 1737 and January 1939 was recently discovered by the editor in an unbound second letter book among boxes of largely uncatalogued papers in the Norfolk Record Office.  The final group of 58 includes a variety of letters surviving from between 1726 and 1751, which are preserved in a number of repositories.

Only those in the third group are the originals as sent: the remainder are either Blomefield’s drafts of letters to be sent, or else copies, transcribed by him, of letters he had received.  The drafts in particular are very interesting as they contain various deletions and insertions clearly illustrating Blomefield’s original and often immoderate reactions to events, which were subsequently tempered by his second and more considered thoughts.  The third group also contains a number of printed letters.  These either appear as open letters in the contemporary Norwich press, were pro-forma letters printed by Blomefield, or else are the published transcripts of manuscript letters, the originals of which have since been lost.  During the compilation of this volume, a number of hitherto unrecorded letters have come to light, and it may be that others are yet to be discovered among the several, largely uncatalogued collections of papers from the collections of Blomefield, Peter Le Neve and Thomas Martin.