The Tudor and Stuart New Year's gift exchange rolls were prepared every year. The manuscripts were kept in the Jewel House as an audit and accounting record of the inventory and were removed when the contents of the Jewel House were dispersed in 1649. A total of thirty-five rolls of the Tudor and Stuart exchanges are known to be extant. Between the mid-seventeenth century and the present time these manuscripts were held in private muniment collections, sold at auctions and intermittently studied by dilettantes. Individuals purchased the rolls for personal study and as curiosities. Antiquarians and Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London were interested in and recognised the value of these gift rolls. Antiquarian book dealers and autograph collectors enhanced the rarity of royal signatures and emphasised the rarity of these manuscripts. Sale catalogues of various bookdealers and auction houses record the path of the gift rolls from and/or into private collections and archives. Presently, while they should be included with the other state papers, these manuscripts are in the custody of eleven different archival locations in three countries. This paper tracks the preservation of these manuscripts through their ownership journeys and the records related to their locations.

2026 sees the centenary of the publication of Mill Stephenson’s List of Monumental Brasses in the British Isles, a work that is still the sole complete inventory of all British monumental brasses. Stephenson was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and it was the Society’s own collection of brass rubbings that provided the essential foundation for his work. Stephenson’s project was a collaborative one that drew heavily on the endeavours of other like-minded antiquaries, and the Society’s Inner Library was the nerve-centre of his operation. Stephenson published extensively, and he left many of his papers and collections to the Society. Together, these sources allow us to build a picture of his working methods and the stages from which the List was to emerge. The article will look afresh at Stephenson’s career, about which hitherto little has been written, looking especially at his private life and the range of his acquaintances, his List and the role of the Society in its creation. It will further attempt an evaluation of his scholarly achievement, considering both his strengths and weaknesses as a scholar, and it will conclude with some reflections on how the listing of brasses has evolved since his time.

As an antiquarian at the beginning of the age of professional scholarship, Francis Douce (1737–1834) has enjoyed a mixed reputation, exemplified by Meg Twycross’s account of his influence on beliefs regarding the origins of the Towneley Plays. Widely-read and embedded in a network of like-minded enthusiasts, Douce does not appear to have recorded his insights for publication, but he nevertheless participated in what might be considered scholarly exchange. This article will pay attention to the annotations that Douce made in the margins of – and on sheets tipped into – French-language books published before 1600. It will look at what sort of features attracted Douce’s attention (primarily bibliographical, but also some relating to the content of the books he was reading). It will consider where Douce was getting his information about the works he collected and will note instances where Douce revisited and revised his opinions, evaluating the extent to which he was up-to-date with contemporary advances. Where Douce expresses his own opinion, this article will examine whether this opinion has been supported by later scholars. In short, what do the annotations tell us about the state of scholarship in the first decades of the nineteenth century?