While working on a chapter about the nineteenth-century reception of the Towneley Plays manuscript for the forthcoming book of essays, I stumbled across something that, if it does not solve the problem of the manuscript's provenance, at least complicates it very pleasingly. The full tale will emerge in the book, but this sketch of it, which is about perception and reception, seemed a suitable offering to John. It points a (sympathetic) finger at the scholar and antiquary Francis Douce for the muddle we find ourselves in today. What was the provenance of the manuscript? How did it manage to escape being catalogued with the rest of the Towneley Hall library in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Was it a Lancashire heirloom, hidden as religious dynamite by the recusant family at the Hall ever since it was written down for them in the 1550s? Or was it an unregarded incomer, probably from Wakefield, casually handed over as a mild curiosity by some visiting Yorkshire antiquarian, possibly in the late seventeenth century, and equally casually forgotten? The scholarly world has taken up arms on both sides, and Douce unwittingly managed to provide ammunition for both of them.

The first printed record of the existence of the manuscript of The Towneley Plays is an entry in the 1814 catalogue of the sale by auction of the ‘BIBLIOTHECA TOWNELEIANA … the curious and extensive library of the late John Towneley, Esq.’ on ‘WEDNESDAY June 8th, and Six following Days (Sunday excepted) at Twelve o'Clock’. Among the highlights advertised on the title page is ‘A Manuscript Collection of ENGLISH MYSTERIES, more curious and ancient than the celebrated Chester and Coventry Mysteries’.

Peregrine Edward Towneley (1762–1846) was selling off a large part of the library he had inherited from his father John (1731–1813) in order to raise the money to repair and improve the fabric of Towneley Hall, to which he had just succeeded. The contents of this library were partly inherited from Peregrine's much older cousin Charles (1737–1805), who though born at Towneley, was also largely London-based. We need to be introduced to these two older men, because they play a part in the story. Moreover their reputations had an effect on the prestige of the sale, and hence of its individual items. Both John and Charles had been noted collectors and bibliophiles.