Biographical Dictionary

Summary

INTRODUCTION

MORRICE's Entring Book contains a total of about 70,000 mentions of more than 6300 men and women. These people range from the most prominent public figures to the most obscure private individuals. There are more than 500 appearances each for James II and William III, and there are a handful of prominent men in church and state who appear more than 100 times in the text. On the other hand, thousands of men and women appear only once or twice. So, for example, Mr Ambrose of Lancashire (P442), Mr Bowles of the Temple (Q71), and Mr Jenkins of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (Q613), make only the most fleeting of appearances. By the same token, there is another sub-set of more than 1000 individuals who appear on several occasions, or perhaps at most a dozen times, throughout the text. The sheer number of people mentioned in the manuscript, their dramatically different public profiles and social statuses, and the eccentricities of Morrice's record, have created serious problems for any attempt to publish an edition of the Entring Book.

In order to make best use of the Entring Book, readers will want relevant biographical information about as many people who appear in the text as possible. Yet there are obvious constraints in providing it. These include the difficulty of striking a balance between providing readers with easy access to information and the need to avoid a text that is unduly cluttered with footnotes, cross-references, or other apparatus. It was decided at an early stage that the bulk of the biographical information would be presented in this Biographical Dictionary rather than in textual footnotes. Further dilemmas present themselves too. Should research time be focussed on providing lengthy accounts of the major players in the text, or on recovering at least a minimal identification of as many people as possible? The major players are, for the most part, already known as leading figures of their era, and information about them is accessible in existing sources. On the other hand, in practice it proved impossible to delve into manuscript archives to search for obscure individuals, evidence for whom might turn out to have survived scarcely at all.