A Cavalier Wayfarer in the Pilgrim Fathers' England. TATE (William Edward) - editor.

THE UNPUBLISHED SIXTEENTH EDITION

Drunken Barnaby's Journal of his Four Journeys to the North of England, 1638. The Sixteenth Edition.

Typed draft on white, yellow and blue paper, with slips, additions and corrections in red and black ink and pencil.

4to. [261 x 204 x 32 mm]. 304ff. Bound in red boards, red cloth spine, the front cover with a typed paper label. (Rubbed).
[Leeds?] 1968.

A final working draft in preparation for printing, with a multitude of instructions, insertions and reluctant removals (for example, the 33ff chapter listing all the public house referred to by Drunken Barnaby has been stapled together with a pencil note "all to cut if we must"). At the front Tate pasted an article that he wrote on Drunken Barnaby's Journal which was published in Notes and Queries in 1948. Twenty years later he dedicated his edition to "Bill, Charlie, and Dennis, who left respectively the shop, the pit, and the school to join me in many joyful alcoholic pilgrimages to many of Barnaby's inns". Sadly he died on 22nd March 1968 and his work was never published.

Written by Richard Brathwaite (1587/8-1673) and originally published in Latin and pseudonymously as Barnabae Itinerarium in c.1636, and in English as Barnabee's Journal in 1638. "This didactic and satirical text described four journeys between Kendal (Brathwaite's home) and London. The route taken is different in each instance. It is a remarkable example for the trend of topographical writings in the 1630s, but in its rollicking style it also prefigures some of the picaresque novels of the eighteenth century" - ODNB.

William Edward Tate (1902-1968) was a school teacher and headmaster until 1945, when he went to study at Oxford and was awarded a research scholarship at All Souls. In 1950 he became a lecturer in the education department at Leeds University and from 1956 he was the first curator of the Museum of the History of Education at Leeds. He retired from the University in 1966 and went to Clare Hall, Cambridge as a visiting fellow. His great passion was for the history of enclosure in England, and it has been said that "what Pevsner is to buildings, Tate is to enclosure acts". Amongst his many published works were The Parish Chest: a Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (1946) and The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (1967). I suspect that Drunken Barnaby's Journal may have been light relief and his editing shows wit as well as wisdom. The last edition to be published was by Penguin in 1932.

Stock no. ebc8060