A couple of weeks ago, Iago ab Adam shared a link to a lovely late-period collection of armorial illustrations, indexed by the National Library of Ireland as “Irish Nobility E1.”
This manuscript was produced by and for the office of the Ulster King of Arms, the principal heraldic authority for all of Ireland under English rule, and records the armorial achievements of various barons and viscounts of Ireland; the first 30 pages or so seem to date from around 1585 or so, while the rest of the book is in a different style, and appears to mostly date from around 1685.
The book was scanned and posted on the web site of the National Library of Ireland, using a “click to pan and zoom” interface, but with a bit of coding I was able to extract the files for offline viewing.
You can do the same with the ImageMagick toolkit and my nli_extract.pl Perl script, via these commands:
perl nli_extract.pl 000511023 1-123,125-148 5 14x17,14x18,17x17,18x17 perl nli_extract.pl 000511023 124 5 18x14
(There’s a separate step for page 124 because that page is scanned in landscape mode.)
You can find a compressed-quality PDF here (17.5 MB), or contact me if you need a copy of either the full-quality PDF or a zip file of separate JPEG images (both 217 MB).
