page_title: Anthony Roll
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Anthony Roll / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Display of second ship of the second roll of the Anthony Roll. The illustration is of the galleass Anne Gallant and the text above it is the inventory for the Grand Mistress (partially hidden). Svenska: En bild på det andra skeppet i den andra rullen av Anthonyrullen, sammanställd och presenterad för kung Henrik VIII 1546. Illustrationen är av galeasen Anne Gallant och texten ovanför är inventarielistan för Grand Mistress (delvis skymd).
context_page_description: The Anthony Roll is a paper record of ships of the English Tudor navy of the 1540s, named after its creator, Anthony Anthony. It originally consisted of three rolls of vellum, depicting 58 naval vessels along with information on their size, crew, armament, and basic equipment. The rolls were presented to King Henry VIII in 1546, and were kept in the royal library. In 1680 King Charles II gave two of the rolls to Samuel Pepys, who had them cut up and bound as a single volume book, which is now in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The third roll remained in the royal collection until it was given by King William IV to his daughter Lady Mary Fox, who sold it to the British Museum in 1858; it is now owned by the British Library.
  The Anthony Roll is the only known fully illustrated inventory of ships of the English navy in the Tudor period. As the work of a successful state official in 16th century England, the artistic value of the Anthony Roll has been described as being characterised by "naive draughtsmanship and conformity to a pattern" though its artistic aspects display "a decent amateur grasp of form and colour".
context_section_description: The Anthony Roll was originally a set of three separate vellum rolls. It exists today in the form of a bound volume containing the first and third rolls while the second roll is preserved in its original form. The three original rolls were made up out of a total of 17 individual membranes glued to the back of the next membrane. The membranes were of a width of 27 ¹⁄₂ inches (70 cm) and a height varying from 31 to 37 ³⁄₄ inches (79 to 96 cm). After receiving the first and third rolls Pepys had his clerks cut the rolls up and bound in a single volume as a book, now known as Pepys 2991. The transformation of the two rolls created a horizontal page structure, and some of the ornamentation that was cut in process was copied into the volume by hand. Pepys also inserted abstracts between the two rolls and a summarizing table that was not Anthony's, but pre-dated Pepys' binding of the rolls. This radical treatment of the original document has damaged some of the illustrations and is today deprecated. The first three illustrations of the Henry Grace à Dieu, Mary Rose and Peter Pomegranate were all too large to fit on one page and were therefore converted to two-page spreads. The resulting bend down the centre of the illustrations led to noticeable loss of detail. Despite this, there are no plans to attempt a recreation of the original structure of the first and third rolls. The second roll, British Library Add MS 22047, is still in its original condition with the exception of a written endorsement by Mary Fox from 1857 and some damage caused by an application of chemicals to reveal faded writing.
  The three rolls list 58 ships divided into classes based roughly on size and construction. Each ship is presented along with its name, tonnage, crew size and, in Anthony's own words, "the ordenaunce, artillery, munitions and habillimentes for warre". The first roll lists the carracks and one pinnace, beginning with the largest ship Henry Grace à Dieu. The second roll lists galleasses, a hybrid of oar-powered and sailing vessels, and one galley. Finally, the third roll is reserved for pinnaces and "rowbarges", both basically smaller versions of galleasses.
caption: A view of the second roll of the Anthony Roll, showing the layout used throughout the document. The information for each vessel is displayed in columns directly below its illustration, here with the text for the Grand Mistress (seen only partially above the text) and a full view of the illustration of the galleass Anne Gallant.
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