Transcribing Walter Yonge's notes on proceedings in the House of Commons between 1642 and 1645 again

Between 1967 and 1973 when I was a postgraduate at the University of Oxford and just afterwards, I transcribed the notes kept by Walter Yonge, the Member of Parliament for Honiton in Devon on proceedings in the House of Commons between 1642 and 1645. There were four volumes of these notes in what was then the British Museum’s Manuscript Department (Additional Mss. 18,777-18780). I had been asked to do so by Hugh Trevor-Roper, at that time Regius Professor of Modern History, to assist Dr Valerie Pearl of Somerville College, Oxford in preparing an edition of Yonge’s notes for publication by the Oxford University Press. The Board of the Faculty of Modern History had granted her £1,500 for this purpose and I was paid £600 for my work in transcribing the volumes. Reading The Times Higher Education Supplement in 1975 alerted to me to the fact that Dr Pearl’s edition would shortly be forthcoming according to an interview she had given. In fact, nothing ever appeared. To my surprise, in 1990 and 1991, two articles appeared, one in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society for the former year and a second in The Review of English Studies for the latter, in which Valerie Pearl and her husband, Morris Pearl, claimed that Yonge’s diaries were then being “transcribed and edited by the authors” for publication by the Oxford University Press. The truth, however, was that Dr Pearl had my transcripts in her possession, transcripts that Mark Kishlansky had borrowed and copied whilst visiting Cambridge. Whatever work had been done subsequent to the completion of my transcripts was probably done by Dr Pearl rather than by her husband given the minuscule hand employed by Walter Yonge and his use of symbols the meaning of which changed over time. But nothing ever appeared in print from the Oxford University Press or any other publisher.