Excerpt from A History of Southampton: Partly From the Ms. Of Dr. Speed, in the Southampton Archives During a residence of several years in the immediate ne1ghbourhood of Southampton free access to the Town Records was given me by the courtesy of the town authorities, of which I availed myself as opportunities offered and towards the close of 1877 it was suggested by the present publishers that I should undertake a history of the town, or at least, on obtaining permission, should edit the ms. Of Dr. Speed's History among the Southampton Archives, continuing the work, and adding such matter as should bring it into conformity with present knowledge. I accepted the latter proposal as the less ambitious task, collated Speed's documents with the originals in View of publishing the texts, but soon found that I could construct no history by a reproduction of Dr. Speed's work without going to a length beyond all warrant, though much had to be cut out as inadequate or faulty. Under these circumstances I felt myself driven to greater freedom, and in the following pages I have produced substantially a new history, while all that is valuable in Dr. Speed's work has been preserved, either in his own words, within quotation marks, or condensed and acknow ledged in the notes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.