Short View of the History and Antiquities of Winterton

Autograph manuscript of Abraham de la Pryme's history of Winterton in Lincolnshire. Entitled: A Short View of ye History & Antiquities of Winterton, Att ye Request of Thomas Place Gent of ye sayd Town, collected by A.P. Min: of Thorn 1703. Appended is a note by G. Steven (?) on the discovery of Roman mosaic pavements and other Roman remains at Winterton, Lincolnshire, in 1748.

Abraham de la Pryme (1671-1704), antiquary, was born on 15 January 1671 in the parish of Hatfield, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. He was educated by William Eratt, the Church of England incumbent at Hatfield. In childhood he began to keep a diary in which he recorded contemporary political chatter and his own antiquarian activities. In adult life this became a more regular activity, supplemented by letters received and sent, with other free-standing insertions, but there are large gaps in the early years and parts of it were clearly written up later. Published by the Surtees Society in 1870, it constitutes an interesting record of his studies, with much entertaining anecdotal detail, although it is not greatly informative about his major projects.

In 1690 Pryme was admitted as a pensioner at St John's College, Cambridge; he became Cardinal Morton scholar on 7 November following and graduating BA in January 1694. He was ordained a deacon in September 1694, and the following June was appointed curate of Broughton near Brigg, in Lincolnshire. Apart from a rather weak history of the nearby parish of Winterton, dated 1703 (and published in 1866), he produced several papers on the antiquities and natural phenomena of the area that later appeared in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. Pryme resigned his curacy in November 1697 and returned to Hatfield, to write a history of the town. His Historia universalis oppidi et parochiae Hatfieldensis, is a substantial work in thematic sections (see British Library, Lansdowne MS 897 ).

In September 1698 Pryme was ordained a priest and appointed curate and reader at Holy Trinity Church, Kingston upon Hull. Compiling a detailed analytical index of the records of the city corporation and applying the method already used for Hatfield, he produced the History, antiquities and description of the town and county of Kingston upon Hull. This work survives in various manuscript copies, both in Hull and in the British Library. On 1 September 1701 he was presented to the living of Thorne, near Hatfield, by the Duke of Devonshire, and in 1702 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He died on 12 or 13 June 1704, and was buried at Hatfield church.

Source: C.E.A. Cheesman, 'Pryme, Abraham (1671-1704)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22852.

Published as 'The history of Winterton, in the county of Lincoln...: communicated to the Society of Antiquaries, with an introduction by Edward Peacock,' Archaeologia, vol. 40 (1866), pp. 225-41.