3 - The Text of the Entring Book

Summary

The manuscript and its composition

THE title at the front of Roger Morrice's chronicle is The Entring Book : Being an Historical Register of Occurrences from April an. 1677 to April 1691. The subtitle may be the work of a later librarian, but we can be sure that the main title is Morrice's own, because in another of his manuscripts, written in 1695, he provides a cross-reference to the ‘Publick Entering Book’. The word ‘public’ points not to the availability of the text but to the fact that it was a chronicle of political, rather than private and personal, events. The word ‘entering’ is spelt in full in the cross-reference but is elided on the title page of the text. It also appears in elided form in Morrice's own index, where he refers to the ‘Great Entring Bookes’. Such elision was commonplace in the seventeenth century and has been retained for the title of this edition. The subtitle is not quite accurate, for the chronicle begins in March, not April, 1677.

The text is contained in three large folio volumes, Morrice MSS P, Q, and R. Volume P measures 374 × 250 × 70 mm; Q, 363 × 248 × 72 mm; and R, 370 × 248 × 40 mm. R is thus a considerably slimmer volume than the others, and it contains only fifteen per cent of the text. The text is continuous, with no natural breaks between volumes. Volume P ends with the entry for 13 November 1686 and Volume Q in the middle of the entry for 23 November 1689. The four volumes of the text in this edition do not therefore coincide with the three manuscript volumes. In the first volume of the manuscript, preceding the chronicle proper, there is a transcription of ‘Mr Oates his Diary, Being an Abstract of the Plot’. This is a version of Titus Oates's narrative of the Popish Plot, and it is included in the present edition.