Popery and Publishing in the Restoration Crisis: A Whig Gentry Family’s Credit Account with their London Bookseller, 1680–1683

This article presents a new documentary source for the study of the retail book trade in late seventeenth-century England—a bookseller’s bill detailing seventy-seven purchases made between July 1680 and January 1683 by members of a leading gentry family in Nottinghamshire, the Molyneux of Teversall. The value of this document, stemming from its rarity, is enhanced by its date, since the years it covers fall within one of the most febrile periods in the history of bookselling in England, when the Licensing Act had been allowed to lapse by a parliament divided over the Popish Plot revelations. An additional attraction of the bill arises from the identity of its principal users, Sir John Molyneux (1623–1691) and his London-based heir Francis (1656–1742), who had access to elite Whig circles, including those of Shaftesbury and Monmouth, in the period leading up to the Exclusion Crisis.