PREFACE.

While the last volume of the Archives was passing through the
press, the Maryland Historical Society was so fortunate as to discover
two volumes of original Council Records of which no copies are known
to exist, and which are therefore of the highest importance. They had
been removed from Annapolis certainly more than thirty years ago,
and were discovered almost by accident.

Our regular series of Council Records broke off in 1674 (the record
for the three or four previous years having been very fragmentary), after
which there was a void of eighteen years in the original journals. This
void we were partly enabled to fill by the discovery of a copy of a
Council Book for the years 1686-1689 preserved in the Public Record
Office, London, of which the Society had a transcript made, which has
been printed in the Archives. This however still left a gap of twelve
years, which we bridged, imperfectly, but as far as was then in our
power, by copies of papers belonging to that time, preserved in the
English Record Office.

The recent discovery, however, enables us almost completely to
restore the record of those years.

It was not possible to include the contents of both these books,
aggregating 900 closely-written pages, in a single volume of our series;
it has therefore seemed advisable to divide them. The present volume
contains about one-half the entire copy, and is thus, of necessity, smaller
than the preceding volumes.

The following is a calendar of these newly-found books.

COUNCIL BOOKS.

Liber (unnamed). A small folio bound in sheep and paged, con-
taining 351 pp. and 14 pp. index. Forty-three pages are missing at
the beginning (lost before the book was bound) and pp. 48-49 torn out
after binding; otherwise the book is in fair preservation, with the
exception of a few leaves slightly torn at the tops. The writing is a
compact and legible court-hand.

Text, as we have it, begins with a commission to William Burges.