Of Plymouth Plantation - History of The Manuscript

History of The Manuscript

In the years following his death, the manuscript was referenced by several New England historians, including Bradford's nephew Nathaniel Morton. After remaining in the hands of the Bradford family for nearly a century, the manuscript passed to the Reverend Thomas Prince who used it in his writing of Chronological History in 1736.

After Prince's death, the manuscript was left in the tower of the Old South Meeting House in Boston. During the Revolutionary War, British troops occupied the church and the manuscript was lost for another century. After quotes from the missing book appeared in Samuel Wilberforce's A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, in the 1850s it was discovered in the Bishop of London's library at Fulham Palace, and was published in print in 1856. Formal proposals to return the manuscript were not successful until the 1897 initiative of the Hon. George Hoar, United States Senator from Massachusetts, supported by the Pilgrim Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the New England Society of New York.

When Bishop of London Frederick Temple learned of the importance of the book, he thought it should be returned. But because the book was being held by the Church of England, approval from the Archbishop of Canterbury was needed in order to return it. By the time the formal request from Hoar's group reached England, the Archbishop was Frederick Temple. The bishop's Consistorial and Episcopal Court of London observed that although how the book got there was not known, the marriage and birth registry in the back of the book should have been deposited with the Church, that this library was the proper place for it, thus the book was a church document and the Diocese of London had proper control of it. The court went on to observe that when the Colony declared independence in 1776, the Diocese of London was no longer the proper place because London's registry was no longer the proper repository for such a registry. The bishop's court ordered that a photographic copy of the document be made for the court, and the original be delivered to the Governor of Massachusetts.

The Bradford journal was presented to the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts during a joint session of the legislature on May 26, 1897. It is on deposit in the State Library of Massachusetts in the State House in Boston. In June 1897 the state legislature ordered publication of the history with copies of the documents associated with the return. In 1912, the Massachusetts Historical Society published a "final" authorized version of the text.

Early in the 16th century, rag-based paper replaced parchment book pages. Both parchment and rag paper are very durable. Documents from the 17th century usually outlast those written on the highly acidic 19th and 20th century wood pulp-based paper. William Bradford's manuscript journal is a vellum-bound volume measuring 11½" by 7¾." There are 270 pages, numbered (sometimes inaccurately) by Bradford himself. The ink is slightly faded and has turned brown with age, but it is still completely legible. The pages are somewhat foxed but otherwise the almost 400-year-old document is in remarkably good condition.

Page 243 is missing, with a note from Thomas Prince that it was missing when he got the document.