When King Henry VIII (1509–1547) wasn’t looking for a new wife or dissolving a monastery, he was commissioning a new ship. He undertook a massive expansion of the Tudor navy. Anthony Anthony, a military administrator, set about to document and illustrate this, and presented Henry with three splendid rolls in 1546, now available in full through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts site.

The Antelope, launched in 1546: Add MS 22047.

The British Library holds the second of Anthony’s rolls, Add MS 22047, ‘The second Rolle declaryng the Nombre of the Kynges Maiestys owne Galliasses’. Galleasses were heavily armed three-masted galleys. The most unusual vessel shown on this roll is the Galley Subtle, highly decorated and built by shipwrights imported from Italy.

The Galley Subtle, the centrepiece of the three rolls: Add MS 22047.

When they were created, the rolls were a fine display of the latest naval technology. They show not only the ships, but name their crews and list their armaments (the text is available on Wikisource, or printed with a commentary). These were of central interest to Anthony, who worked in the ordnance office in the Tower of London. The rolls are a key source for the Tudor navy: after the sunken Mary Rose was salvaged in 1982, the 16th-century depiction was enormously useful in making sense of the archaeological evidence.

The Lyon and The Dragon: Add MS 22047.

The other two rolls show the navy’s warships, pinnaces and ‘roo baergys’ (row barges). King Charles II (1660–1685) gave them to Samuel Pepys, who had them cut up and bound into a volume, now in the Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge. Fortunately, the British Library’s roll is still in its original format.

Andrew Dunning

@BLMedieval/@anjdunning