The Goldsmiths’ Company Register of Deeds contains a vast array of documents dealing mainly with their property holdings, written over the course of two and a half centuries from 1417 onwards, but containing many documents from an earlier period also, copied up from originals then in the Goldsmiths’ possession, now alas lost. With the loss of the earlier manuscripts, the Register has become the sole original evidence that the Goldsmiths’ Company holds for many of its acquisitions of property from the earliest times up until the seventeenth century. But beyond this it is a wonderful repository of property deeds relating not just to the company but to many other people and institutions too. This has come about because when the company acquired a property, by whatever means (purchase, bequest, or other), they were given by the previous holder all deeds in his/her possession, and these would date back in reverse succession from one previous holder to the next until the earliest still kept. This was necessary, to prove a legally valid chain ensuring that no claim of rights to the property could be made by anyone else. The earliest deeds copied in the Register date from the reign of King Richard I (1189–99); there are many more from the thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, leading to the position of 1417–20, when the Register was started and all the known and recoverable deeds relating in any way to any of the properties then held by the company could be found, and recorded here for posterity. A glance at the “List of Contents” will show this progression, as the first main scribe organised his material before doing the writing-up work, and thus for a property in Friday Street, for instance, he placed first a grant by the chapter of Christ Church, Canterbury, to a Robert de Burewelle in about 1239–40; followed by a grant of about 1271–72 by a Stephen de Burwell, the son and heir of Robert; and then onwards through a number of grantees, including the very necessary quitclaims renouncing all claims to this property by those who might in any way have had some, heirs and widows in particular.