Anne Killigrew's Illness and Neville's £12,000 Unton-Land Recognizances, 1598

Anne Killigrew's Illness and the £12,000 Recognizances

Image-controlled facts from Neville's letter

The Hatfield manuscript image of Neville's letter to Robert Cecil is legible on the decisive points. It is dated at Lothbury, 6 May 1598. Neville asks to be excused from immediate attendance because:

“my wife beeing at this instant in great extremitie (as her maties Phisicions who were with her this morning can informe you) and ready to attend the pleasure of god for her last howre, I know not how soone.”

The wife is Anne Killigrew Neville. The letter proves Neville reported a medical crisis and attendance that morning by the Queen's physicians. It does not give the diagnosis, physicians' names, or outcome. The manuscript supports “physicians”; an alternative retained transcript reading Lady Gresham and 19 May is a misreading of this image and should not control the packet.

Neville then links the requested respite to an unfinished land and credit transaction:

“I having sold my land in Sussex and som other places, in effect the cheefe substance of all I have, to bestowe it in Berkshire vppon som land which was Sr Henry Untons.”

He continues that he was:

“entered into Recognizances of aboue twelve thousand pound to be discharged within three moneths, and all reciprocall assurances within that time to be performed.”

He asked to be free at least until Michaelmas, arguing that immediate employment would endanger both transaction and estate.

What the £12,000 figure represents

The letter says “recognizances of above twelve thousand pound.” It does not say that £12,000 was the purchase price, a cash payment already made, or Neville's net debt. A recognizance was an obligation of record; its penal face value could exceed the underlying payment secured. The figure should therefore be entered in the fact base as the aggregate amount Neville stated he had bound himself for, pending recovery of the instruments.

The proposed £9,800 Wadley memorandum belongs to the same Unton-estate setting and a nearby period, but the present letter does not name Wadley. The Berkshire land could include Shellingford or other Unton property. Those possibilities must be tested against conveyances, not merged by chronology alone.

Record programme

The Unton Inventories supplies the succession background, while Oriel College identifies its own estate archive as the record base for Wadley leases. Search should include recognizances in central and local series, including the Close Roll indexes, but no enrolment should be presumed merely because that series can contain recognizances. Sussex sale deeds, Berkshire conveyances, Cecil's response, and the “reciprocal assurances” are required before the transaction can be reconstructed parcel by parcel.

Source Control and Public Sources

The exact medical and financial wording is controlled by direct manuscript-image inspection. The public sources linked above control Unton succession and record routes, not the missing recognizances themselves.