| Content Description | Title of 'Earl of Clare's private affairs' appears on cover of volume. 'In handwriting of John Holles Second Earl of Clare', also appears but in a different hand.
This volume contains a vast miscellany of information, chiefly accounts, with dates ranging from 1592 to 1662. There are no clearly defined sections, with the result that records of a similar nature crop up at intervals throughout the volume. Much of the information relates to the family's lands in Haughton, Nottinghamshire and Blackwell, Derbyshire.
Much of the early entries concern debts owing by the Earl's father (John Holles, 1st Earl of Clare, 1565-1637) to various merchants and craftsmen, from 1592-1637. This information appears to have been copied from his father's accounts books. There is a considerable amount of similar material for the 2nd Earl, including debts owed to him, along with lists of 'remembrances' from 1592-96, detailing outstanding tasks the Earl needs to accomplish. These often entail legal proceedings, resulting from misdemeanours on the estates.
Lists of, and wages for, servants appear at intervals throughout the volume, as do inventories of stock and farm implements. There are a number of lists of e.g. fish caught/hay harvested/deer found in one year at Haughton. A rather unsual entry is entitled 'A note of English Peeres dead vyolently & otherwise from 1640-1654'.
Pages 128-164 contain, in great detail, 'A note of everydays expense in a year in my house at Haughton whereof my wife and I were but one month there...'. The list runs from October 1656 to October 1657.
Pages 185-200 list Holles' collection of books as of January 1657, and those of his mother as of June 1949. There are separate sections: Greek and Hebrew; Spanish; Italian; French; Latin; English.
A few medicinal recipes appear toward the end of the volume.
Pages 254-262 contain a transcript of the trial proceedings of the Earl of Castlehaven in April 1631, for 'ravishing his wife & committing sodomy on ye body of one Fits patrick...'. Page 262 also contains a copy of the Earl's speech on the scaffold at Tower Hill in May 1631. |