Add MS 4783-4801

MILLES COLLECTION. Vols. XXX-XLVIII. Collections of the Irish historian Sir James Ware (d. 1666), relating mainly to Irish history from fabulous times to the seventeenth century. English, Latin and Irish. The material consists of notes and copies made by Ware and his assistants, taken mainly from Irish annals, lives of saints, ecclesiastical, public and municipal records, and printed works. Also included are some original documents which are listed in the descriptions below. For other MSS. from the collection of Sir James Ware see Add. MSS. 4821, 4822, 33991-33994, and Lansdowne MS. 418. For an early printed catalogue of Ware's manuscript collection see Librorum Manuscriptorum in Bibliotheca Jacobi Waraei ... Catalogus, Dublin, 1648. Ware's manuscripts were obtained by Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon, possibly while Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (Jan. 1686-Feb. 1687) and deposited by him in the Library of Dr. Thomas Tenison in London, where they were catalogued by Edmund Gibson, Catalogus Librorum MSS. in Bibliotheca Tenisoniana. This catalogue, printed in 1692/3, is almost identical with that of the manuscripts of the 2nd Earl of Clarendon in Edward Bernard's Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, Oxford, 1697. In 1709 Clarendon's library was purchased by James Brydges, later 1st Duke of Chandos (see sale catalogue: A Catalogue of the Library of a Person ofhonour by Christopher Bateman, circ. 1709; Bodleian Library Record, vi, 1960, pp. 586-7; and C. H. C. and M. J. Baker, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, Oxford, 1949, pp. 65-66). The MSS. were dispersed in the sale of the Chandos Library, March 1746/7 (sale catalogue by Cock), Add. MSS. 4783-4801 being purchased by Jeremiah Milles. A major portion of the collection was bought by Richard Rawlinson and is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.