The Diary of Henry Machyn
A day-by-day record of public events in London from 1550 to 1563, kept by a citizen who supplied funeral trappings. It notes proclamations, executions, burnings and changes of religion under Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I as they happened.
Machyn was a London merchant-taylor whose trade, as the editor of the diary shows from its contents, was the furnishing of funerals. His book began as a list of the funerals he supplied and grew into a chronicle of what was seen in the streets of London: processions, sermons at Paul’s Cross, proclamations, hangings and burnings. He writes in the spelling of the time and gives dates by the day of the month.
He is a witness from the time and place, with no argument to make about the burnings he records, and that is his value beside Acts and Monuments. Two cautions apply. He was not always present at what he reports, and his dates sometimes differ by a day or two from those in other records. And the manuscript was badly damaged in the fire of the Cotton library in 1731: where the edition prints words in square brackets, they are the editor’s restorations from an earlier transcript or from the context, not surviving text.
Cited in
- 1555 to 1558, firm date
- 1559, firm date