Fuller's Worthies

First issued in 1662, this book is a county-by-county gazetteer of notable English men and women rather than a continuous history. Fuller moves through the shires recording saints, scholars, soldiers, writers, and local worthies, with notes on products, proverbs, and sheriffs. Each county becomes a cabinet of short lives and anecdotes, written in his compact, punning prose. He draws on earlier chroniclers and on what he had gathered as a royalist clergyman travelling the kingdom. The work is biographical topography: a survey of English reputation organized by place, compiled in the years after the Civil Wars.

Bound in dark blue cloth with a design in gold by David Eccles. Pale blue endleaves. Pale grey slipcase.