Page:A litil boke the whiche traytied and reherced many gode thinges necessaries for the infirmite a grete sekeness called Pestilence.djvu/32

 manuscript foliation in the book may have been added by the same person. At the beginning of the last century the copy was in the possession of the bookseller Robert Triphook, when it was seen by Dibdin. Triphook sold it to the Marquis of Blandford, and on the sale of this nobleman's library in 1819 (White Knights Library—Cat. no. 331) it was purchased (for £9) by Triphook again for a collector, who has prefixed to the copy a note to this effect, subscribed "I. B." It was afterwards in the Ashburnham library, and on the dispersal of that collection was acquired in June 1897 (Cat. no. 158) for the John Rylands Library at a cost of £147.

The facts known about the writer of this treatise are so few in number, and depend so much for their interpretation on our knowledge of the general history of Sweden at that period, that to appreciate their real significance it is necessary to pass in review very briefly the history of that country from the close of the fourteenth century, when Sweden began to be subject to the supremacy of Denmark.

Margaret, the daughter of Waldemar IV of Denmark, had married Haakon, king of Norway, the son of Magnus Smek of Sweden, who was dispossessed of his throne by Albert of Mecklenburg. Their only son Olaf, born in 1370, succeeded his grandfather Waldemar as king of Denmark in 1375, and five years later, on the death of his father, he became in addition sovereign of Norway. On account of Olaf's youth the task of ruling the two