f [1]
Brother Bunckley as one hopinge of your health, I hartely commend me vnto you Sir Anthony Sherley hath lookt a lonnge time for a chest of vyalls which ar to come downe from London but yet they ar not come and feareth he shal be gone before they come: wherfore my humble sute to you is that you wil send me your chest of vyalls hether that if this fayle we may not be altogether vnprovyded, if his come downe then will I take order that yours shall safly be restored to you agayne also if you wil doe me the favor to lend me your little drum with me to sea, if I live and returne I wil requite al. the newes is hear that the castle of callis holdes out, and my Lord of essex gone with some x thousand to rayse the siege. we only attend a happy wynd, I would it might be my good chance to see you hear ear I goe commend me
'Sir Anthony Sherley' is likely Sir Anthony Shirley (1565–1636?), the second son of Sir Thomas Shirley of Wiston, Sussex. Anthony was knighted by King Henry IV of France in 1593 after serving under the earl of Essex in Normandy. Shirley spent most of his life travelling, wrote a famous account of his visit to Persia, and never returned to England after 1598.
Record title: Letter of Arrington to Bulkeley
Repository:
HRO
Shelfmark: 1M53/1336
Repository location: Winchester
The letter is calendared at the record office as 'A. Frington to Buckley,' but what was taken to be an 'f' may well be a long 'r.' John and Robert Arrington were burgesses of Southampton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, while there is no trace of the name 'Frington' in Hampshire (Robert Arrington served as deputy to the stewards of Southampton from 1547 to 1555; see Butler, Book of Fines, vol 2, pp 9, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 29, 38). The addressee was a member of the Bulkeley family, probably John or William Bulkeley of Burgate, near Fordingbridge. Unfortunately neither Fordingbridge nor Southampton possesses the early registers necessary to trace a family connection here. John Bulkeley was assessed at £30 40s for his lands in Burgate, near Fordingbridge, in the 1586 lay subsidy. William Bulkeley was assessed at £16 16s for lands in Arnwood and Sway, Christchurch Hundred (C.R. Davey (ed), The Hampshire Lay Subsidy Rolls, 1586. With the City of Winchester Assessment of a Fifteenth and a Tenth, 1585, Hampshire Record Series 4 (Southampton, 1981), 87, 96).
The letter was likely written in the spring of 1596, as it
was in April of that year that Robert Devereux, nineteenth earl of Essex, attempted to relieve
Calais, which was under attack by the Spanish.
late 16th–early 17th c.; English; paper; bifolium, writing on f [1] only (no writing inside fold); 307mm x 200mm; good condition, handwriting very poor; originally folded several more times for delivery, remains of seal clinging to back, addressed: 'To my god brother B<..>kl<..> <....> <....>' (the hand becomes an illegible scribble at the end of the address), on the fold below the address: 'Aryngton.'