Add MS 72858-72864

PETTY PAPERS. VOLS. IX-XV. Letterbooks of Petty and his agents; 1671-1686. These were part of a sequence of volumes once in the collection of William Burton Conyngham, grandson of Mary, wife of Petty's eldest son Charles (d. 1696) by her second marriage. On his death in 1796 they were bought first by the collector Austin Cooper of Dublin (1759-1830), and then by Sir Thomas Phillipps in 1831, becoming first Phillipps MS 6486, and then 14332-14349 (see Slatter, 'Report', I, p. 113). They were purchased by Petty's descendants for restoration to his archive at the Phillipps sale at Sotheby's on 27 April 1911 (see Add. 72905, ff. 118-121, below). Many of the letters concern Petty's estate and business affairs in Ireland, and are used inT. C. Barnard's articles, 'Sir William Petty, Irish Landowner', History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones et al. (London, 1981), pp. 201-221, 'Sir William Petty as Kerry Ironmaster', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 82 C (1982), pp. 1-32, and 'Fishing in Seventeenth-Century Kerry: the Experience of Sir William Petty', Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society, 14 (1981), pp. 14-25.

Seven volumes.