ABSTRACT
In the mid 1630s a young woman named Constance Aston Fowler began compiling a manuscript verse miscellany, now in the Huntington Library. She was the youngest daughter of Walter, Lord Aston, and Baron of Forfar, whose seat was at Tixall in Staffordshire. The Astons were Catholics, and made several marriages with another Catholic family, the Thimelbys of Irnham in Lincolnshire. Constance herself, at some point around, had married Walter Fowler, heir to the neighbouring estate of St Thomas's Priory near Baswich, which was a major centre of Catholic activity in Staffordshire. She was probably only in her early to mid-teens at the time, and continued for several years to live with her mother and sisters at Colton, another Aston house near Tixall, only beginning to cohabit with her husband several years later. Seventeenth-century miscellany culture has often been regarded as the preserve of young male coteries at the universities and the Inns of Court.
