When in 1654 Nathaniel Bacon assembled his great manuscript volume of Ipswich documents, he opened it with a description of a perambulation of the Liberty of Ipswich which he claimed to be of the year 26 Edward III, which is 1352/3. Bacon's copy is the only surviving version of this perambulation, and it has long been taken as authentic. However, the language of this text is modern English, certainly not much earlier than Bacon's time, and it cannot be an accurate copy of a fourteenth-century original. At best, it is a translation from earlier English, or, more probably, French, by Bacon or someone else of an authentic early original. But it might also be entirely spurious, and the present study was motivated by a desire to answer the question of authenticity, which required an examination of all existing versions of the bounds. This revealed the fact that three of the most important manuscript versions are unpublished, so another aim of the work became the production of transcriptions of those documents; these appear below. This study concerns itself only with geography and topography, leaving aside political questions. There exist also documents describing the bounds of Ipswich by water, concerning the jurisdiction of the Orwell estuary; these documents are also not considered here.

@article{SIAH:Briggs:2017,
  author= {Keith Briggs},
  title=  {The bounds of the Liberty of Ipswich},
  journal={Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History},
  volume= {44},
  number= {1},
  pages=  {19--38},
  year=   {2017},
}