The Coffin Letters
The letters are between members of the Coffin family in England between 1600's and 2002.
Compiled by Susan Pine-Coffin
The book has reproductions of letters discovered in the archives. They detail Coffin family history and its connections with the branch of the family in the U.S.A.
They cover the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, and the horrific methods of dealing with the rebels.
Much is anecdotal, including advice on medicines, game shooting, care of dogs and sick children. One young man, who went to Oxford in 1698, is writing home asking for money saying, “I promise I will not ask again.”
The books are hand blocked and hand gilded and come in hard-back with 300 pages.
The book is available directly from Susan Pine-Coffin: £20.00 + postage and any bank charges.
Author's Notes
Susan began the first mock-up of the book from the Coffin letters which were already in her possession and went through a variety of ideas of the publishing of them.
“On one visit to the Pubic Records Office in Exeter, I came across a whole pile of letters which necessitated scrapping the original ideas for publication and beginning again as the dates overlapped with the ones I already had.”
Susan enlisted the help of a photographer who took photographs of each letter and put them all onto a disk so that she could view them on her computer. Even when magnified, some of these letters proved very difficult to read and Susan found that she could only transcribe one letter each day.
“After a while I began to understand the peculiarities of the writers and was able to recognise them more easily – they used little whirls under shortened words which became recognisable, and the long 's' and other 'loops and whirls' became more easily transcribed.”
Even so, there remain still some letters which Susan was not able to transcribe well enough for publication, there would be too many gaps. Susan would be happy to make these letters available to anyone interested enough to struggle with them. These are all in the section to do with The Monmouth Rebellion.
Gradually the book began to take shape and after many visits to the small printers and binders in the area progress was made.
All this eventually took three years.
Coffin Portraits
Above:
Anne Coffin (b.1665) was the third wife of Richard Coffin High Sheriff of Devon. She was born Anne Prideaux of Prideaux Place in Padstow, Cornwall where the family still live. She was there over the time of the Monmouth Rebellion. Richard Coffin was High Sheriff with Judge Jeffreys in Assizes at Exeter. Anne was sister to Humphrey Prideaux, Dean of Norwich.
Below:
Elizabeth Coffin (b. 1625) daughter of Henry Harding of Somerset. She married John Coffin, son of Richard Coffin, High Sheriff of Devon. She later married Hugh Prust of Gorven after John Coffin died. The portrait was painted in 1649 when she was 24.
