ABSTRACT
Roger Morrice was a reclusive, curmudgeonly cleric who was born in Staffordshire in 1628, was ejected from the Established Church in 1662, lived the rest of his adult life in London, and died in obscurity in 1702. He played no active role in civic or national politics and was entirely unknown to the editors of the original Dictionary of National Biography. Morrice’s anonymity was largely due to the fact that he spent much of the last half of his life quietly compiling the raw materials for a projected history of Britain since the Reformation, a history which he never actually wrote due to a combination of ill health and an equally debilitating inability to stop researching and start writing. In the course of this obsessive collecting and compiling he amassed an enormous amount of historical sources, manuscripts, books and papers. An unknown quantity of this material was burnt after his death, but we are fortunate that 26 volumes of his papers have survived and are housed in Dr Williams’s Library in Gordon Square, London. Three of these volumes are of particular interest for an understanding of late seventeenth-century Britain because they consist of a massive, almost one million-word, ‘Register of Historical Occurrences’ which serves as a narrative of events in the turbulent years between 1677 and 1691. Morrice referred to this colossus as his ‘Entring Book’, because he entered news, information and gossip into it on a regular basis for almost a decade and a half.
