Lisle Papers

The Lisle Papers are the correspondence received in Calais between 1533 and 1540 by

Sir John Bassett (d.1529) of Umberleigh in Devon), from several servants, courtiers

, royal officials, friends, children and other relatives. They are an important source of information on domestic life in the Tudor age and of life at the court of Henry VIII.

Although long available as transcriptions in the

Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, they were first published as an annotated collection in 1981 as a six-volume edition, titled "The Lisle Letters", and an abridged selection in one volume was published in 1983, both edited by Muriel St. Clare Byrne

.

Description

The entire collection, now housed within the State Papers of the United Kingdom at the

Lord Deputy of Calais. The correspondence is between Lord and Lady Lisle and their family, acquaintances at court, retainers, and servants. The main correspondent was John Husee, Lord Lisle's London agent.^[1]

Physical location

Following Lisle's arrest for alleged treason in 1540, as was usual in such cases, all his papers in the Staple Inn in Calais, his official residence, were confiscated and placed in the

National Archives. ^[3]

They are held today at the National Archives in the category "State Papers Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, SP3, Lisle Papers"

Editions

Summaries of The Lisle Letters were published between 1862 and 1930 scattered within the 33 volumes of the "Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of Henry VIII"[4] edited by J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R H Brodie (London 1862-1930). In the early 1930s, Muriel St. Clare Byrne, then a young student of Tudor England, started an exhaustive study of the approximately 3,000 original documents then at the Public Record Office comprising the Lisle Papers. Her work in transcribing, annotating and arranging the letters lasted several decades and was not published until 1981.^[5] Two editions have been published as follows: