Excerpt from The Maire of Bristowe Is Kalendar The Corporation of Bristol possess in their Archives several valuable manuscript volumes. Among them one of the most prized is The Mayor's Register or Mayor's Kalendar, an evidence of the worthy design of a Town Clerk, 400 years ago, to collect together for the benefit of his fellow citizens some account of the history of their town, their privileges and liberties, their local and social customs, and of the municipal laws of London which they made their exemplar. The work was compiled by Robert Ricart, as he himself tells us in his Introduction, at the instance of the Mayor, William Spencer, in whose time he was elected Town Clerk, 18 Edw. IV. A.D. 1479. Some doubt hangs over the accounts of him: we have no record of his birth or of his death, nor does it seem certain whether or not he belonged to any fraternity. The chief incidents of his life are, that he probably was a brother of the Gild of Kalendars, that he seems to have filled some official capacity towards the church of All Saints (perhaps Vestry Clerk), and to have kept the Parish Book there for twelve years, and that he was then chosen Town Clerk, the duties of which office he exercised for at least twenty-seven years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This volume deals with political, military, social, architectural, and literary aspects of fifteenth-century England. The essays contained in the volume range across the century from some of the leading scholars currently working in the period. With contributions by Mark Arvanigian, Kelly DeVries, Sharon Michalove, Harry Schnitker, Charlotte Bauer-Smith, Candace Gregory, Helen Maurer, Karen Bezella-Bond, E. Kay Harris, Daniel Thiery, John Leland, Peter Fleming, Virginia K. Henderson.