provincial

First edition of this codification of the laws governing the Cornish tin industry. The Convocation of Tinners exercised ancient rights of jurisdiction over much of Cornwall; customary rights exercised long before the codification of English law and which had been confirmed by royal charters since the time of Edward I. Stannary law was sanctioned by the crown in recognition of the special responsibilities of the Cornish tinners in providing a valuable raw material. It has been claimed that the right to hold Convocations has never been formally repealed by the English crown, a legal anomaly exploited by the Cornish nationalist movement. A previous codification had been printed in 1725. Goldsmiths’ 8776; Higgs 433; Kress 5279.

First edition. The folding map shows the countries and places mentioned in the New Testament. Wood (1765-1826) was a Manchester-born Wesleyan minister, serving the circuits of the Wesleyan Connexion as an itinerant preacher for 39 years. He published at least six books (including this one) issued at Whitby and Huddersfield. COPAC gives Oxford and Cambrige only. OCLC lists US copies at Arizona, Yale, United Library (Illinois), Fordham and Toronto.

The eighteenth annual report of the Liverpool Catholic Blind Asylum for children (for the year 1862). Includes also the rules and regulations for the government of the Asylum, founded in 1841 by the very reverend Dr Thomas Youens. Evidently scarce with Worldcat and COPAC listing no copies of this or of reports for other years.

A very rare set of Friendly Society regulations, with additonal evidence of their operation in the form of slips and notes of payment to a member. Though the history of this form of co-operative insurance goes back to early times it is considered to have formally begun in England with the Acts encouraging their formation of the late eighteenth-century. Thousands of such societies sprang up at the opening of the nineteenth century. Though initially encouraged, they were also viewed with suspicion in some quarters as hot-beds of political sedition. The Macclesfield rules are notable in this respect, being insistent on the exclusion of all topics of political or religious dispute in meetings, anyone contravening was to be either fined or expelled. Not in COPAC or the BL catalogue.

First edition, containing historical, topographical and contemporary accounts of the city’s religious, civic, educational and cultural buildings and institutions in the early nineteenth century and before.

‘Mackenzie was a strong radical, a secretary of the Northern Political Union, and the leading founder of the Newcastle Mechanics' Institute in 1824. His publications (all from Newcastle) contain much statistical information aimed at providing grounds for local self-improvement. They include An Historical and Descriptive View of the County of Northumberland (2 vols., 1811, revised as ‘historical, topographical and descriptive’ to 2 vols. quarto, 1825); A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and County of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2 vols., 1827); and An Historical, Topographical and Descriptive View of the County Palatine of Durham (1834), which had been completed after Mackenzie's death by Metcalf Ross’ (Oxford DNB).

First edition. Though entitled “the first special report”, no further issues of the series were produced. The work includes an interesting collection of cases of named individuals (“William Ablett, aged 9, at play, ran a fork through the Cornea of the right eye, and punctured the Lens... James Greenow, 20 years of age, of Little Woolton, had the stalk of a tobacco pipe thrust through the Cornea” etc) and gives a peculiarly detailed insight into this aspect of public health in the Victorian industrial city. Neill was an enthusiastic advocate of the use of strychnine in opthalmology. This copy of the Special Report evidently belonged to one of his doctors, who made several small notes at the end of his part in a few of the treatments described in the text.