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Third stage (England, seventeenth century, between 1655 and 1665)

The present binding of parchment over pasteboards evidently constitutes a second (or third) binding, made in England in the seventeenth century as the watermarks of the lower endleaves indicate. It incorporates the separate English manuscript on monetary tables which constitutes Part 2 (folios 73-84). No author’s name is attached to the tables, but an attribution to Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577) is assumed (and disputed) in the attached note at folio 83r by the Oxford mathematician John Greaves (1602-1652). It also appears in early catalogue-entries (see below). The tables are certainly on the same subject and of the same character as Sir Thomas Smith’s “tables of money,” published in an appendix to his Life by John Strype (1820, 263–73), but they are not identical. Furthermore, these tables are more elaborate and contain classical quotations which do not appear in Strype’s printed version. The watermarks and script of Part 2 suggest that it might be early seventeenth-century, somewhat later than Sir Thomas Smith’s own time.