MORYSON, Fynes. An Itinerary. Containing his ten years travel through the twelve dominions of Germany, Boherland, Switzerland, Netherland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland and Ireland. With plates. Four volumes.

Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907. Demy octavo. Red cloth, titled in gilt and medallion in gilt on upper covers. Top edge gilt. A very good set. Scarce.

Fynes Moryson (1566-1614), born in Lincolnshire, obtained a Fellowship at Cambridge and studied Civil Law. His brother, Sir Richard Moryson, Vice-President of Munster was very intimate with Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy and Lord Deputy of Ireland. Through this friendship, Fynes was made chief secretary to Mountjoy, when his predecessor George Cranmer, was killed in the fight at Carlingford. He was present on the field at Kinsale, and also at the submission of Hugh ‘Neill at Mellifont, 1603. He remained in Mountjoy’s service till the latter’s death in 1606. He was a gentleman who remembered the built pastry and the daintinesses of a polite English table, who resented ill-cooked meat, did not regard bad butter as a trifle, chronicled ill-swept lodgings, dirty beds, was one of those for whom especially soap and starch were carried to the field of battle, and delights to tell how the poor Irish having captured such a store, mistook the soap and starch for delicacies of the dinner-table, fell to them greedily, and cursed English daintiness between the teeth in which the soap was sticking. Moryson’s account of his travels throughout Europe was published posthumously in London in 1617. Almost one third of this work was devoted to affairs in Ireland. It is an excellent eye-witness account of the final years of Gaelic Ireland, the rebellion of O’Neill and O’Donnell, culminating in the defeat of Gaelic Ireland at Kinsale.

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