Among the papers of the Strickland-Constable family of Wassand Hall in the East Riding of Yorkshire, now lodged at the East Riding Archives and Local Studies in Beverley, is a modest little booklet measuring only 20 cm x 15 cm, of paper bound in a piece of recycled parchment, which is listed in the ERA catalogue as ‘Sir John Nevile's memoranda book. 1595’.

The booklet, containing only twenty-eight (unnumbered) folios, in fact appears to be a compilation of memoranda and accounts made mainly for the weddings of Sir John Nevile's children in the 1520s and 1530s, prefaced by a pedigree of the family (Nevile of Chevet, West Riding) up to 1595, which occupies the first half of the booklet; the cover is marked ‘H.N.’ for Henry Nevile, the great-grandson of Sir John. It is not immediately clear how this manuscript ended up in the records of the East Riding family of Strickland-Constable, but it is likely that it passed from family to family when Rosamond Estoft, the granddaughter of this Henry Nevile's grandson Sandford Nevile, married Yarburgh Constable of Wassand (1676–1731).

The Nevile family settled in the West Riding on the marriage of Sir John Nevile in the early sixteenth century to a West Riding heiress, the widowed Lady Tempest, née Elizabeth Bosvile, and Sir John seems to have largely rebuilt the family house at Chevet, which his wife had inherited from her own family. They are known also to have owned property at Mile End in Stepney, Middlesex, but Chevet was evidently the family seat, where it is most likely that family celebrations, including the weddings detailed in the Memoranda Book, took place.

The manuscript contains expense accounts for food and clothes for four Nevile weddings between 1526 and 1533: those of Sir John's daughters Elizabeth (to Roger Rockley, 14 January 1526), Anne (to Thomas Drax) and Mary (to Gervase Clifton), and of his son Henry to Dorothy Dawney, as well as notes on his considerable expenses on a number of other special occasions from 1520 to 1529. All these notes are of interest for what they tell us about Sir John and his sense of the lavish output appropriate to his status, and will be discussed later. However, it is an extra note in the account of Elizabeth's wedding that is the most interesting in the context of entertainment.