Worcestershire Manuscripts.
THE DINELEY MANUSCRIPTS.
Among the valuable manuscripts in existence relating to this county are the Dineley, Jeffries, and Townsend, besides those of Dr. Prattenton, now in possession of the Society of Antiquaries. To preserve these, with a view to publication, should be an object of solicitude to all literary men of the county. The Dineley Manuscripts (now in the possession of Sir T. E. Winnington, Bart., M.P.) consist of three volumes, written between 1670 and 1680 by Thomas Dineley, Esq., a member of one of the oldest Worcestershire families. One of the volumes contains accounts of his visits to many churches in this county as also to adjacent towns and about a dozen cathedrals; pen and ink sketches of monuments, coats of arms, dresses, &c., many of them exquisitely done; copies of inscriptions, both quaint and curious; tracings of pedigrees, &c.; showing the compiler to have been a gentleman well versed in ecclesiastical antiquities, a classical scholar, acquainted with heraldry, and an accurate draughtsman. The second volume is entitled "Observations in a Voyage in the Kingdom of France, being a collection of several monuments, inscriptions, draughts of towns, &c."—date 1675; and the latter part of this volume is devoted to a similar description of Ireland, with a curious dissertation on the manners and customs of the Irish. The filthy habits of that people in the seventeenth century are treated of in rather broad language, not adapted for the present day. The third volume has the following title: "The Jovrnall of my Traveils through the Low-Countreys, Anno D'ni 1674." It appears that in December, 1671, Mr. Dineley went in the suite of "Sir G. Downing, Knt. and Bart., Ambassador from his most sacred Ma'tie to ye States Generall of the United Provinces." His journal is written in a minute but beautiful caligraphy, and denotes habits of judicious observation. In his notice of the town of Dort, in Holland, he alludes to the great abundance of salmon, and mentions a custom which I had long thought was by no means confined to our own city of Worcester: he observes, "It is sayd that prentices and maid servants, before they enter into service, indent not to be oblig'd to eat salmon above twice a week;" and in his account of the Irish (chapter on Limerick) Mr. Dineley alludes to a "salmon weire, out of town, having a castle without timber or nayle, in the middle of the river," where the custom was "to grant tickets for salmon gratis to all strangers who will eat them upon the place; this the corpora'con is obliged to, though they set it for £200 per ann." In some commonplace notes at the end of the volume is the following entry:
"Hops among other things brought into England 15 Hen. 8. wherefore this rithme—
"Turkeyes, carps, hops, pickerel, and beer,
Came into England all in one year."
There is another of Mr. Dineley's volumes in the collection of the Duke of Beaufort, at Badminton; it describes a tour through Wales with the President of the Marches, an ancestor of the Duke's. It is mentioned in Blakeway's History of Shrewsbury.
THE JEFFRIES MANUSCRIPTS.
Henry Jeffries (who died in 1709), the last heir male and proprietor of the manor of Clifton-on-Teme, was a man of some learning, and left a manuscript memorandum book in which he had jotted down his own observations de omnibus rebus, and generally in so easy and familiar a way as to render them agreeable as well as instructive. This relic likewise belongs to Sir Thomas Winnington, one of whose ancestors married the heiress of the Jeffries family about a century and a half ago. Specimens of its multifarious contents are given in vol. ii of "The Rambler in Worcestershire," from which they appear to be invested with great local interest to the neighbourhood of Clifton, Stanford, and Shelsey, as also to the general antiquary.