Paginated 17th-century manuscript in secretary hand, bound in 19th-century tooled leather covers and embossed on the spine Historical Notices of the Sexten Family & City of Limerick. Pages 1-15 contain an additional set of pagination, which runs from 47 to 61. The manuscript comprises primarily transcripts made by Edmond Sexten the younger (1595-1636) of letters and petitions (mostly in English, with some items in part or fully in Latin), which his grandfather Edmond Sexten the elder (1486-1555) had collected in order to defend himself against allegations that ‘my service to the kinge majestie is deemed... not to be such as did deserve the bountifull remuneration of his heighnes unto me’ and to prove that ‘my service was freely doone without receavinge wages or hire of the king majestie as others dothe’. In addition to letters and petitions, the transcribed items include a narrative of the costs and charges incurred by Sexton in the King’s service; a list of havens, rivers, creeks, places of importance, territories and lordships with their landlords ‘from Lupes head which is the further land a seaboord by north the river of Limerick as also within the said river’; a declaration of the proportions of Ireland; and King John’s, Queen Elizabeth’s and King James I’s charters to Limerick. To the abovementioned transcripts, Edmond Sexten the younger has added copies of letters and petitions relating to his own disputes with Limerick Corporation, primarily concerning the immunity of the lands of the dissolved abbeys of St. Mary’s and St Francis’s, which had come into his grandfather’s possession in 1537, and whether Sexten alone, or the parish generally, was responsible for the upkeep of the church of St John the Baptist, Limerick, whose tithes were appropriate to St Mary’s. In addition to transcripts of formal documents, the manuscript contains a list of books in the possession of Edmund Sexten the younger, grouped under the headings of 'Divinyty', 'History & other bookes of morallyty', 'Scoole bookes', and 'Lawe bookes'; a list of lord deputies and governors of Ireland, and of the mayors, bailiffs, and high sheriffs of Limerick from 1154 to 1636; and pedigrees of branches of the Sexten family descending from Denis Sexten and Simon Sexten, and of the Golde, Comyn, Mortagh, White, and Arthur families of Limerick. To the list of lord deputies mentioned above has been added a short account dated 22 May 1641 by Edmond Sexten’s son Christopher Sexten relating to the deaths and funerals of his father, daughter Jean (who died of smallpox), and eldest son Stephen, and the burning of his tenements in St Francis’s Abbey in Limerick, all of which events occurred in 1636.
