Dear Sir

On Friday last I returned here from Beechwood where I received the most friendly and the most obliging Reception. I took an Opportunity to examine all the M.S.S. more leisurely than before, but found nothing to your present Purpose; what now remains, relates almost all together to Southwales.¹ There is one Volume in f^o. almost full of Drawings, of Monuments, Antiquities, Inscriptions &a. in that Part of the Principality. In some of Lhwyd's Pocket Books I found ā [sic] Account of his Travels in Ireland and Scotland, written almost entirely in Welsh, but I had not sufficient Leisure to compare them to satisfy myself that they are a complete Journal.² I had been given to understand that Lhwyd's MS.S. were at Beechwood, but I found several of his Handwriting in L^d Macclesfield's Collection, besides several Volumes which I presume must have been his Property.³

I rode one Morning to Berkhamsted and called at D^r Jeffreys's but had not the good Fortune to find him at Home, however I had the Pleasure to hear that all the Family were well. I enclose herewith a Frank which I procured at Beechwood agreeably to the Request mentioned in your Favour which I received on my Arrival there. I propose going to L^d Macclesfield's to morrow, and to examine his Lordships's M.S.S. once more. If any thing occurs worth your Attention you may depend upon receiving it with all possible Expedition. I am

Dear Sir
your obliged humble Servant

Jno Jones

Oxford Sept: 21 1779

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Editorial notes

1. Jones's reference to 'what now remains' reflects his knowledge that Sir John Sebright had lent more than twenty Lhuyd manuscripts from his collection at Beechwood to Pennant by the beginning of December 1778. See Thomas Pennant to John Strange, 3 December 1778, British Library, Egerton MS 2001, f. 215. Pennant thanks Sir John Sebright for 'his liberal communication of several of the late Mr. EDWARD LLWYD's Manuscripts' in the 'Advertisement' to A tour in Wales 1770 [1773] (2nd edn., 1784), II, p. ii, and evidence of his consultation of them is noted in footnotes throughout both volumes of the tour. Further on this lending, see Eiluned Rees and Gwyn Walters, 'The Dispersion of the manuscripts of Edward Lhuyd', WHR, vol. 7, no. 2 (1974), 148–80, at 162–3. Pennant's interest in south Wales appears to have waned following his abandonment of a journey there during summer 1776. See his correspondence with John Price, dated 8 September 1776 (1488); and cf. also his avowal that he is uninterested in the south in a letter to Richard Bull during 1784 (1037).
2. Due to the dispersal of the Lhuyd manuscripts, it is not easy to identify the two items mentioned by Jones here. They may possibly have featured among the forty items purchased by Sir Watkin williams Wynn III (1772–1840) at the Sebright sale of 1807. The items included 'Mr. Edward Lhwyd's Notes and Drawings of Antiquities, Monuments, &c. in Wales, as well as material 'Relative to [Lhuyd's] Travels'. These manuscripts were all lost in fires either at the Covent Garden house of the Wynns or at a later fire at Wynnstay in 1858. See Rees and Walters, op. cit., 164, 171–2.
3. Edward Lhuyd's hand in the Macclesfield collection (now NLW, Llanstephan 1–154) is limited to five manuscripts (Llanstephan 4, 84, 137, 145 and 185). Of these, two are compilations of Lhuyd's, a Cornish vocabulary dated c. 1700 (Llanstephan 84), and a pocket field notebook of 1698 (Llanstephan 185). Daniel Huws, A Repertory of Welsh Manuscripts and Scribes (Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, forthcoming).