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The tables illustrate the comparative value of Roman and Greek monetary standards against their English and French equivalents of the later sixteenth century. The headings are in English and English silver of 1563 is mentioned in the first table (folios 73v-74r).

Each of the nine tables was written across a single large sheet; the first six are numbered 1-6 in early ink in the lower right corner. The tables were then folded and pasted together, as below, to form a clumsy booklet within a narrow fold of parchment. A note about the tables, on a smaller bifolium (folios 83-4 with no watermark), was kept with them; in this note, John Greaves questions whether, in view of their errors, the tables were really those created by Sir Thomas Smith praised in Camden’s Elizabeth.

Chart 19. Part 2 (folios 73-85): Monetary tables and lower endpapers

Codex Mendoza: Summary reconstruction of binding history3

First stage (1540s-1560s?)

Jerónimo López reported having seen a volume “with covers of parchment”, similar to and perhaps identifiable as the Codex Mendoza in the home of the Indian master-painter Francisco Gualpuyogualcal around 1541 (Nicholson 1992a, 1–2).4 However, the identification of that book as the Codex Mendoza is disputed. The Codex Mendoza itself offers no physical evidence for the existence of a binding in the first three decades or so of its existence (before and immediately after its passage from Mexico to France), but instead may rather contain some clues indicating that it had survived in a disbound condition.