The House of Lyme - From Its Foundation to the End of the Eighteenth Century #224585

The idea of writing the history of this wonderful old house and its owners came to me after the discovery which I made some years ago of a large quantity of papers tied up in bundles labelled Old Letters in a fireproof cupboard, the existence of which was unknown or had been forgotten. The letters were arranged in no sort of order or sequence, and although they had evidently been examined after a fashion, they had lain where I found them for upwards of forty years. Many of them were almost undecipherable from damp, much of the paper had been gnawed by rats or mice and occasionally, as I untied the bundles, the contents fell to pieces in my hands. I was then unfamiliar with Court hand, consequently many of the letters were quite unintelligible to me, but with patience and a certain amount of wear and tear of eyesight, I mastered the difficulties of Elizabethan writing until I found it as easy to read as that of the present day. It took me many months of work to sort out and classify these letters, and to arrange them chronologically, and then I began the even longer task of copying. I have done this almost entirely with my own hand as I found copyists inaccurate, and the amount of time and patience required for the work could, I felt, only be given by some one as deeply interested in the letters as I was myself. The writing was so faint as to be often almost illegible, and it took me sometimes half an hour, using a strong magnifying glass, to decipher a single word.