James Bankes kept an intriguing and revealing Memoranda Book concerning his estates at Winstanley and elsewhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here a Lancashire country landowner opens his heart and discloses his mind for mare than any of his fellows have done before or since. In this volume a transcription of the Memoranda Book is accompanied by Bankes's probate inventory and by a complementary set of estate accounds and rentals. Taken together these provide a rich quarry of material for all those interested in the history of England as a whole or of this locality in particular. Economic and social historians especially will find here much that is relevant to the storm over the gentry. But the Memoranda Book is also an intensely personal and human document revealilng Bankes's unusual, original and endearing characted. The editors provide a preface, a map, an explanatory introduction, and an index.
with 4 photgraphic plates and a map
Edited by Joyce Bankes and Eric Kerridge
Hardback with dustcover Very Good condition
Published by the Chetham Society 1973