SOUTH CERNEY, UK — The 1555 edition of the Anglica Historia, including four then-contemporary manuscript maps of England and Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and France bound in, was expected to bring £20,000-£30,000 ($26,100-$39,150) as part of the Dominic Winter sale on September 11. The price — £140,000, or $226,000 with buyer’s premium — sets a new house record for the firm. The sale took place at The Saleroom, LiveAuctioneers’ sister firm based in London.
The book was recently discovered in a private collection by Dr. Peter Leech, a specialist in the cultural history of British Catholicism from the 16th century to 1800. It carries the book plate for Francis Fortescue Turvile (1752-1839) and was recorded at the Fortescue family seat, Bosworth Hall in Leicestershire, England, in a late-Victorian catalog of the library.
Fortescue Turvile’s ancestors were Adrian Fortescue (circa 1480-1539) and his second wife Anne Rede of Boarstall, Buckinghamshire, England (1510-1585), who is mentioned among the ladies who attended Mary Tudor as she rode from the Tower to Westminster Abbey on September 30, 1553, the day before her coronation.
The Anglica Historia by Polydore Vergil (d.1555) was an important piece of propaganda for the Tudor monarchy and the beginning of modern English historiography. First published in 1534 and again in 1546, this third edition, printed in Basel, Switzerland by Michael Isingrin, contains an account of the life and reign of Mary’s father Henry VIII.
A stunning addition to this copy — and a key driver of the bidding on September 11 — are four bespoke pen-and-ink and watercolor double-page maps of Anglia, Hibernia, Scotia, and Gallia Belgica bound together at the front. The map of Scotland’s date of 1558 gives a probable date for the volume as a whole. The creator of the maps is currently unclear (the Dutch-born English Protestant printer Reyner Wolfe, who died in 1573, is a candidate) but they are cartographically important. For example, the map of Ireland provides an outline for the whole island that was only to appear in print in 1600. The map of France shows the English flag still flying in the Pale of Calais, although to shock and disbelief, the city had been reconquered by the French in January 1558.
The winning UK bidder is a major map collector who bought it for their personal collection. They outbid five members of the UK book trade.
Only a handful of books survive from Mary I’s library, which was dispersed soon after her death and the succession of Elizabeth I. This example, bound in the original gilt-decorated calf with the royal escutcheon and the monogram ‘MR’, is similar to others in the British Library and the Royal Collection. The bindings are typically attributed to the so-called Medallion Binder, who worked from the end of Henry VIII’s reign through to the early years of Elizabeth I; or the Edward VI and Queen Mary Binder, a London atelier active from circa 1545 until at least 1558.
The previous high for a book sold by Dominic Winter was a John Speed atlas of Great Britain that achieved £92,000 (roughly $120,000) in July 2011. The overall house record is the £190,000 (roughly $247,950) bid in December 2001 for an album of early photographs from the Edinburgh Calotype Club.
