Presentment Bills
Presentment Bills can be hard to read because of old handwriting and abbreviations, idiosyncratic spelling and damage to the documents. The example below shows their standard form and illustrates the different elements of information usually provided.
Presentment Bill from Marnham parish, AN/PB 295/3/42, marked up by Manuscripts staff to show data elements
The Archdeaconry seal, taken from a Citation held in the Archdeaconry archive (AN/C)
The Archdeacon’s seal showed a hand to symbolise fairness, with an eye inside it to represent the Archdeacon as the 'Bishop’s Eye', making sure at a local level that everything was in order.
'The seal of the Archdeaconry of Nottingham' is written in embossed text around the outside.
Versions of this seal (with wording in Latin until 1733) were used from at least the 1630s to authenticate documents produced in the Archdeacon’s Registry.
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