EEBO Henry/Henrie Neville Variant Sweep

Topic: EEBO Henry/Henrie Neville Variant Sweep

Notes: Stile / Galis Pamphlets

• The older adjacent-name sweep undercounted the elder Sir Henry Neville material. A12973 and A72130 are direct 1579 EEBO/TCP witnesses for Sir Henry Neville of Billingbear (d. 1593) in the Windsor witchcraft case.
• A12973 has one substantive Sir Henry Neuell passage; A72130 has ten Neville-form occurrences (Syr Henry Neuell, Sir Henry Neuel, Sir Henry Neuelles, Sir Henry Neuell).
• Identity class: direct elder Billingbear witness, not the ambassador and not an Abergavenny/cousin hit.
• Full extracted text and the all-Shakespeare screen are now in windsor witch trials and merry wives of windsor.

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• A phrase-level EEBO sweep on the local FTS corpus for adjacent Henry/Henrie/Henrye plus Neville-family spellings produced 45 unique TCP hits.
• The search was run against the EEBO FTS database with adjacent-name phrases only.
• A new public EarlyPrint BlackLab sweep used the broader regular-expression sequence [reg="henry|henrie|henrye"][reg="nevill|neville|nevil|nevile|neuill|neuell|nevyl|nevyll"]. It returned 284 occurrences in 130 documents in the public corpus through 1649. The first 200 hit windows and metadata for all 130 documents are preserved as earlyprint public henry neville hits and earlyprint public henry neville docs.
• The larger count does not mean 130 references to the Billingbear ambassador. It includes repeat occurrences, historical and genealogical Nevilles, the Abergavenny line, the elder Billingbear Neville, the ambassador, his son, and unrelated people. The table below preserves the earlier 45 local adjacent-name hits and adds the newly recovered B12208, for 46 rows; it is not silently relabelled as the new public result.
• The most important addition missed by the older table is TCP B12208, the original 1584 Leicester's Commonwealth. It prints the Windsor-terrace passage later repeated in A50030 (1641). Both passages concern the elder Sir Henry Neville (d. 1593), not the ambassador: in 1584 the man is already styled Sir and is described as exercising the Windsor constableship as Leicester's deputy, whereas the ambassador was not knighted until 1599.
• These hits include:
• direct Billingbear Henry Neville witnesses
• direct Henry Neville III witnesses
• Abergavenny collateral Neville-family witnesses
• medieval Latimer / Warwick / Westmorland Nevilles
• older Tudor or otherwise non-project Henry Nevilles
• unrelated administrative or clerical Henry Nevills
• The Florio / Montaigne Abergavenny dedication does not fall inside this adjacent-name hit set, because the dedication is to Lady Mary Neville and Henry appears inside her identification rather than as the direct adjacent-name phrase searched here.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• No Ken Feinstein Twitter/blog material is isolated in this packet at present.

3. Quoted Source Text

Direct Billingbear / project-line witnesses

• B12208 (1584, elder): “The wordes also of Sir Thomas Layton, to Sir Henrie Neuile, walking vpon the Tarresse at Windsore are knowen”
• A18639: “M. Henry Neuill Esquier and maistresse Anne Neuill his wife”
• A01216: “sir Henry Neuil that serued her maiestie as ligier ambassadour with the french king”
• A19903: “to the noble discreete and wellbeloved knight sir Henry Nevill”
• A14521: “sir henry neuill of barkshire”
• A12461: “sir henry neuill of barkshire”
• A17832: “Billingsbere the inhabitation of sir Henry Nevill”
• A50030 (1641 reprint of the elder-Neville passage): “sir thomas layton to sir henry nevile walking upon the taresse at windsor”
• A25601: “sir Henry Nevill by name”
• A80650: “sir Henry Nevil Knight, the Queen of Englands embassadour”

Direct son / heir witnesses

• A06207: “to the right worshipfvll and worthie knight sir Henrie Nevill”
• A15075: “sr henry nevill of pillingbere in berks” — see anthony white truth and error 1628 henry neville iii

Abergavenny collateral witnesses

• A02836: “sir Henry Neuil sonne and heire to the lord of aberguenny”
• A10215: “henry nevill baron of abergaveny”
• A00529: “henry lord abergavenny”

Florio / Montaigne collateral witness

• Florio, Essayes: “Ladie Marie Nevill”
• Florio, Essayes: “wife to Sir Henrie Nevill of Abergevenny.”

4. Citations

• Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership corpus analysis, searched through:
• [local source path removed]
• [local source path removed]
• Florio, John, translator. The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo. Michaell de Montaigne. 1603. “Florio’s Epistle Dedicatorie,” Renascence Editions, University of Oregon, https://pages.uoregon.edu/rbear/montaigne/book3.html.
• Anonymous. The copie of a leter... [Leicester's Commonwealth]. 1584. STC 5742.9; ESTC S108682; TCP B12208, page B12208-050-b, printed p. 97. Folger catalogue record and human-verification-gated digital item.
• British Library, Add MS 33739, manuscript copy and copy-census note for Leicester's Commonwealth: https://searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/040-002024635.

5. Notes on Access

• Search phrases used in the local FTS pass combined Henry, Henrie, and Henrye with the surname spellings Nevil, Nevill, Nevile, Neville, Neuil, Neuill, Nevyll, and Nevyl, with and without Sir.
• This packet is a search audit, not a claim that all 45 hits concern the same man.
• Classification wording in the hit list distinguishes identity from lifetime status. Entries dated after Neville's death on 10 July 1615 may still refer to Henry Neville (1563-1615), but they are retrospective or posthumous references, not direct references to a living officeholder.

6. Hit List