Peterhouse : Garter Statutes

Wren, Matthew, 1585 1667

Peterhouse

<p style='text-align: justify;'>A scribal transcript of Matthew Wren’s 1631 annotated Statutes of the Order of the Garter [St George’s Chapel Archives and Chapter Library, Windsor: X.10 (NRA 38539)]</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>[Cf. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Ashmolean 1128 (VIII)]</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>“...In the month of December 1666 the Right Reverend ... Matthew Wren, late Lord Bishop of Ely, shewed me a manuscript compiled by himself, about the year 1631, being at that time Register of this most Noble Order: wherein by way of Comment upon King Henry the Eighth’s Statutes, he briefly shews (out of the Statutes and Annals of the Order) what alteration there hath been in the Law of the Garter, both before and since. It is a work composed with a great deal of Judgment, and exceeding useful...” (Elias Ashmole, <i>History of the Garter</i>, p.193, as quoted at the front of the volume in a later hand)</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This extract from Ashmole is printed in the <i>Parentalia</i> (1750) of Christopher Wren (1675-1747), p. 63, where it is stated that it appears also in John Anstis’s edition of the <i>Niger Liber</i>, 2 vols. 1724, p. 294.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>“THE Original of these was ordain’d to be kept with∣in the Treasury of the College of Windsor, but hath long since wholly perish’d; yet a Transcript of them is recorded in the Reign of King Henry V. in an old Book call’d Registrum Ordinis Chartaceum. Two more ancient Exemplars of this Body of Statutes are also in being; the one in the Library of the Lord Hatton, and the other in the Black Book of the Order; and comparing them together, I shall here give from the Latin the Heads they consist of....” (Ashmole, <i>History of the Garter</i>, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004894364.0001.000/1:10?rgn=div1;view=fulltext'>p.133</a>)</p>