| Content Description | MS commonplace book with general information and profuse commentaries and notes relating to an English printed almanac 'Riders (1706)/ British Merlin:/... ' (title on p 30 of MS); gives details of longitude and latitude of places within Great Britain and Ireland, various observations of year 1706 in general, notes of husbandry and physics, fairs and markets; MS is bound together with printed book, cover made specially, to include additional slips of paper added at foot of printed pages and then annotated; MS ends with a family tree which includes 17th century members of a Smith family.
On p 1 the text commences with classic palindromic word-square 'Sator/ Arepo/ Tenet/ Opera/ Rotas' (i.e. 'Arepo the Sower holds the wheels carefully', see R.G. Collingwood and R.P. Wright, The Roman Inscription of Britain (Alan Sutton Publishing, 1992) vol 2, p 72) |