What is the Patricia-Ann Lee Collection?
The Patricia-Ann Lee Collection in Scribner Library’s Special Collections at Skidmore College is made up of thirty-six manuscripts, all of which have been digitized and are available to consult online.
Handwritten between 1567 and 1758, these legal documents include a 1655 will by an English gentlemen from the prominent Wentworth family of York and a cluster of late seventeenth-century land use documents from lowland Scotland not far from Linlithgow and about twenty miles to Edinburgh.
Written primarily in secretary hand, the documents are as short as five lines on a scrap of paper or parchment to as long as parchment rolls totalling more than 100 lines.
In Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, ten students and one professor transcribed the Wentworth will, one of the few English documents, and nine Scottish acts of sasine.
Click here to see learn more about each one.
How did the Patricia-Ann Lee Collection come to Skidmore?
How do 36 seventeenth- and eighteenth- century English and Scottish legal documents end up in upstate New York, in the special collections of a liberal arts college? You might think they crossed the Atlantic with settlers who took over the area around Saratoga Springs in the early 1700s, or when more arrived around the time of the American Revolution. But their connection is more recent than that.
Instead of traveling at or near the time they were written, the documents were purchased in the late twentieth century by History Professor Patricia-Ann Lee as teaching tools for her classes in British history, and took a more mundane journey.
I was in England doing research and I used to pick up my mail at the university of London — and next to the mailboxes was a bulletin board. And one day there was a notice saying some guy whose name I have forgotten had a shoebox full of old property documents for sale — and I bought them for I forget how much but probably not much and in due course they arrived by mail and that was it.
Patricia-Ann Lee, personal communication, November 22, 2022
