ABSTRACT
James Humphrey of Ipswich was a junior clerk in the naval administration, and features most prominently here as a recruiting agent for mariners from East Anglia. Five items from the Humphrey's collection were printed, from the Rawlinson copies, in British Naval Documents. They present a coherent sequence of paperwork, though the examples are from different times and places. For completeness sake these appear again here, though from the earlier and more authoritative texts in the Pepys Library. Pepys's title to his extracts admirably summarises the whole, 'Memorandum that the original manuscript out of which the following collection is extracted seems to be designed for a book of rates, as containing not only divers historical informations but many forms of instructions, warrants, bills, tables of calculations. Humphrey's manuscript was written a decade into Elizabeth's reign and is principally a guide to practice then current, some of his examples are taken from the reigns of Edward VI and Mary.
