Sir Henry Neville as Master of the Game, lying in the lodge in Sunninghill Park (E 134/43Eliz/East12, 1601)
Topic: Sir Henry Neville as Master of the Game, lying in the lodge in Sunninghill Park (1601)
Source-Fact Audit — 7 August 2026
The present evidence is the TNA Discovery catalogue abstract for E 134/43Eliz/East12, not the deposition text. The catalogue says Sir Henry Nevell did "lie in the lodge in Sonninghill Park, as mr of the game." It also describes the suit, commission dates, and deponents.
This establishes that the catalogue represents the file in those terms. It does not yet establish exact manuscript spelling, quotation boundaries, the date or duration of Neville's occupancy, the legal nature of the office, or which deponent supplied the statement. The packet title therefore preserves the catalogue wording but must not be cited as a diplomatic manuscript quotation.
The single decisive next action is to order the file, image every relevant interrogatory and deposition, identify the speaker, and transcribe the full question-and-answer context. Forest-office interpretation should follow that documentary work.
Central finding
A Court of Exchequer deposition file of 1601, never before cited in this project, names Sir Henry Neville by name and describes him as having lain in the lodge in Sunninghill Park as master of the game.
The case is Taverner v Lovelace, a dispute over the office of woodwardship of the Queen's woods called Cranbourne Woods in Windsor Forest. Neville is not a party. He is named incidentally, in testimony about who had occupied which forest lodges and taken which allowances — which is precisely what makes the reference useful: it is unmotivated by any interest of his.
This matters for three reasons.
- **"Master of the game" is a title for Neville that appears nowhere else in
- It puts him personally in the Sunninghill lodge. The corpus currently
- Cranbourne Woods appears nowhere in the corpus either.
the corpus.** A search of all 419 packets returns no instance of the phrase.
knows Sunninghill only from a 1607 royal grant recording Windsor Forest offices passing in reversion to his eldest son. This deposition is six years earlier and describes occupancy, not reversion.
Source-Control Position
Everything below rests on the TNA Discovery catalogue description, read directly on 2026-07-24. The deposition file at Kew has not been consulted. The description is an archival abstract, and the words quoted inside it are the cataloguer's selection from the manuscript, not a transcription of it. The quotation marks around "did lie" and "mr of the game" are the cataloguer's own, which suggests the phrases are lifted from the document, but that must be confirmed against the file.
The packet is therefore catalogue_abstract_only. It should not be cited as proof of the wording Neville's contemporaries used until the file is read.
1. Quoted Source Passages
The deposition file naming Neville
- Source: The National Archives, Kew,
E 134/43Eliz/East12; TNA Discovery - Quotation (Discovery catalogue description, in full):
record C3702641; covering dates 1601 Apr 29-1601 May 25. Context: "Exchequer: King's Remembrancer: Depositions taken by Commission. Elizabeth I."
"Short title: Taverner v Lovelace. Plaintiff(s): John Taverner. Defendant(s): Richard Lovelace, woodward or keeper of Her Majesty's woods called Cramborne Woods. Subject of depositions: Office of woodwardship or keeper of Her Majesty's woods called Cramborne Woods, in the forest of Windsor (Berkshire). Alleged waste and spoil of woods by Sir William Fitzwilliam, who \"did lie\" in the Manor House of the Great Park of Windsor as \"mr of the game or keeper there\" and Henry, late Earl of Huntingdon also, and Sir Henry Nevell, knight, did \"lie in the lodge in Sonninghill Park, as mr of the game.\" Allowance of hay, to keepers. Cutting of \"browsewood\" etc. [William Milward, Richard Ward, Sir William Knowles, kt, and Thomas Rolles, keepers of the woods, are mentioned]. County/place: Berkshire. Date of commission: 12 February 1601. Additional information: interrogatories and depositions taken 16 April 1601 at New Windsor. Deponent(s): William Baker (2); William Hatch; Hercules Mountigue; Richard Bedford; Richard Danford; Richard Field; John Havergill; Henry Harris; John Browne; Thomas Lawrence; Richard Powney; Leonard Wase."
- What it proves: That a sworn Exchequer commission of 1601 heard testimony in
- Limits: It proves this of the catalogue description, not yet of the
- Syntactic ambiguity that must not be resolved silently. The clause runs
which Sir Henry Neville was described as having lain in the lodge in Sunninghill Park as master of the game, alongside Sir William Fitzwilliam at the Great Park manor house and the late Earl of Huntingdon.
manuscript. It does not date Neville's occupancy, does not say on whose authority he held the position, and does not state whether "master of the game" was a formal office or a deponent's descriptive usage.
"Alleged waste and spoil of woods by Sir William Fitzwilliam, who ... and Henry, late Earl of Huntingdon also, and Sir Henry Nevell, knight, did 'lie in the lodge...'". Read strictly, by governs a compound list, which would place Neville among those against whom waste and spoil is alleged. Read more loosely, the naming of Huntingdon and Neville is illustrative of who occupied which lodge and in what capacity. The abstract summarises the subject of depositions, not a charge, and in woodward suits deponents were routinely asked whether waste had occurred and answered by reciting lawful allowances of hay and browsewood. Both readings are live. The file decides it; the catalogue does not.
2. Chronological context — and a correction carried into this packet
The commission issued 12 February 1601, four days after the Essex rising of 8 February. Testimony was taken at New Windsor on 16 April 1601.
On that date Neville was in supervised custody at Chelsea, not in the Tower. The Dover interception and custody packet establishes the sequence from public sources: Zachary Lok wrote Cecil from Chelsea on 6 March 1601 describing controlled access to Neville's visitors, papers, cipher, and servants; the Tower officer's note records that on 1 May 1601 Neville "was brought to the Tower."
An earlier version of this packet placed him in the Tower in April 1601. That was wrong, and it came from a row in the timeline packet reading February 1601–April 1603 / Tower confinement, which flattened the custody sequence. That row has been corrected as part of this pass. The custody packet already warned against exactly this error.
The correct statement is narrower but sharper: while Neville was under official supervision at Chelsea, and two weeks before he was moved to the Tower, sworn deponents at New Windsor were describing his occupancy of a royal forest lodge in the past tense. Whether the commission's timing relates to his disgrace at all is an open question and must not be assumed; woodwardship disputes ran on their own calendar, and the commission issued before Neville's own examination had concluded.
3. Why the Taverner identification matters
The plaintiff is John Taverner. The corpus already carries a packet on John Taverner, Crown woods surveyor, documenting his Sonning activity in 1605–1606. This 1601 case shows a John Taverner litigating over the office of woodwardship in Windsor Forest four years earlier.
That is a lead, not an identification. John Taverner is not a rare name, and the corpus's own genealogy policy requires offices, dates, and places to travel with a name before two records are merged. What can be said now is that the 1601 plaintiff and the 1605–06 Crown woods surveyor share a name, a region, and a subject matter, and that the question is worth settling from the file.
4. The deponent list
Twelve deponents are named: William Baker (twice), William Hatch, Hercules Mountigue, Richard Bedford, Richard Danford, Richard Field, John Havergill, Henry Harris, John Browne, Thomas Lawrence, Richard Powney, Leonard Wase.
This is an unusually valuable roster. These are men who could testify from memory about who occupied Windsor Forest lodges and what allowances keepers took — i.e. exactly the local knowledge the existing Windsor packets reconstruct from office lists. Powney is a known Windsor-area surname.
On "Richard Field": the probable reading is a local man. The corpus warns that the name is "unusually dangerous" because Dr Richard Field the cleric (prebendary of Windsor, d. 1616) and Richard Field the Stratford-born London printer (d. 1624) were both born in 1561. A third possibility — an ordinary Windsor-area deponent unrelated to either — is by far the most likely here, given the company he is listed in. Nothing should be built on this name unless the file itself supplies an occupation, residence, or age.
5. Notes on Access
Captured source witnesses
Both are retained locally, catalogued in SOURCE NOTES:
| Witness | Form |
|---|---|
| discovery C3702641 api response 2026 07 24 | Verbatim JSON from TNA's public Discovery API, with the full scopeContent |
| discovery C3702641 displayed record 2026 07 24 | The same record as rendered to a browser and read off the page |
The two agree word for word, which is the check that the quoted sentence is the catalogue's own wording and not an artefact of one retrieval route.
There is no page image, and no manuscript image. Discovery states: "This record has not been digitised and cannot be downloaded." A headless-browser render of the catalogue page returned TNA's "Restricted" notice rather than the record; that file was deleted rather than filed, and no bot-detection workaround was attempted. The JSON API is TNA's sanctioned machine route to the same public data.
Catalogue text is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0; that credit must survive into any derivative.
Ordering
- Discovery record: <https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3702641>
- The file is not digitised. Reading it requires a visit to Kew or a copying
- When ordered, the priorities are: the interrogatory that produced the Neville
- Series context and the wider register of unmined Exchequer records are in
order. This is the single action that would move the packet from catalogue_abstract_only to a document-level witness.
answer; which deponent gave it; whether the manuscript reads "master of the game"; and any dating of Neville's occupancy.
6. Citations
- The National Archives, Kew.
E 134/43Eliz/East12, Taverner v Lovelace, - Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury, vol. 11, p. 110
- Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1601-1603, p. 91 (Tower
Exchequer, King's Remembrancer: Depositions taken by Commission, 29 April – 25 May 1601. Discovery record C3702641. <https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3702641>
(Zachary Lok to Cecil from Chelsea, 6 March 1601), cited here at second hand from the custody packet, which carries the public scan link.
officer's note, 1 May 1601), likewise cited from the custody packet.
7. What this does not show
- It does not show that Neville held a formal Crown office called master of the
- It does not connect Neville to the alleged waste and spoil at issue.
- It does not bear on the authorship question, and should not be recruited to
game. The phrase may be the deponent's description of a function.
it. Its value is biographical and topographical: it places Neville in a named royal lodge in a named park, in the words of sworn local witnesses.