 Hello, I'm Glenn Winchester. I am Professor of Early Modern History at Henry's University in Tricholomid, London. I'm also a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. I'm also the author of a book most recently on the Field of Cloth of Gold, about the meeting between Henry Gate of England and Francis I of France. Today I have before me a very important item in the history of Henry's reign. It is collectively the Society of Antiquaries manuscripts number 129a and b, which are collectively the first part of a massive project to record all the possessions which Henry Gate had at his death in 1547. The King died in January that year, and in September his son, over the 6th, and his council commissioned an inquiry to be made into all the possessions of the late King, so that they got a sense of how much the crown estate effectively was worth. It was a huge task. It took something like 18 months to complete, with lots of specialists going out to inventory all the various palaces that Henry had, country houses that he had when he died, he had 55 palaces and manor houses when he died. The principle of which, and where a lot of this stuff was recorded and displayed, was in white wall on the backs of the terms. So the project took 18 months, as I said, and in the end it represented that there was something in the order of 18,000 individual items which had been recorded. So this is the first part of the inventory, which records the King's plate and jewels, the ornaments from the tower and the other forts that he had, the King's ships, and various other parts of the things like the tents and the rebels' departments at the court. The second part of the inventory is actually in the British library, and that has mainly to do with the materials that he has, like clothing, but also tapestries, rich hangings, felw that sort of kind of stuff. So taken together, they represent this huge amount. As I said, the first part, 129A, is mainly concerned with jewellery, plate and things, and the total number of items is in the region about 4,000 items of jewellery and precious metals and like that. So that gives you some indication of the kind of work which Henry Veth very deliberately tried to acquire. The King was by nature ostentatious. He was very showy as a young man, he liked dressing up, he liked having parties, he had a very large and exciting court and always looked the part that was one thing which some of his predecessors were not able to do, but Henry Veth was extremely good at looking the part of an ostentatious, powerful monarch right throughout his reign. He didn't actually have a lot of money, all things considered, in the early part of his reign, partly because he spent a lot of it on his first war against France in 1512-13. But, as a long story short, with the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s and the 1540s, he acquired a huge amount of land and capital from the dissolution, which the proceeds of the sale of went into the acquisition of material possessions, which are recorded in these two inventories and the ones in British Library. The orchard at which the society has probably does not show Henry Veth's most ostentatious and most colorful, but it gives you a sense of the King that we all know and at least some love. So, this inventory in its two parts, the Society of Antiquaries part and the British Museum one, are really a unique document because there is no other inventory of an English King's possessions to this extent, part because no one else had possessions of this extent, and detailed. Whereas other inventories, notoriously for historians, if you get other inventories, they will just note items sometimes don't even give measurements, weights, anything. This is all very meticulously laid out. Measurements of cloth are given within precise degrees, weights of items, lengths of ships, all that kind of stuff is very, very meticulously noted. So, it's an incredibly useful record, probably the most single useful record document from the reign of Henry Veth. For anybody who's interested in just about any aspect of Henry's reign. And fittingly, manuscript 129A begins with the very first item in its 18,000 great long catalogue of possessions that I was talking about is the King's Crown, which was deliberately designed to look magnificent, colourful. We might not almost say glitzy, it is laden with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, pearls, little gold carvings of the kings, fleur de vie, all the emblems of the English monarchy, of which Henry Veth was so proud and was so conscious of projecting the image of power internationally. So, the very first item in the records is the King's Crown, which was later depicted in a painting by Damon Mythens of Charles I, which is an interesting point to raise in that although Henry's often said to have bankrupted the monarchy with his last invasion of France in 1544, in cash terms, and in terms of the coinage, yes, that's probably true, but in terms of the world estate and land side, the actual stuff that they had, he handed on to his son the equivalent of about four years' worth of the world income and successive kings, right down to the stewards, used to trade-off sell bits of the inventory which they'd got from Henry, so he really did endow the monarchy in quite a magnificent way.