'MS Ashmole 1138 (= MS Cons. Res. C 27) is a very fragile volume containing 144 leaves. Red wax sealings are affixed to a number of the pages, usually leaving 3–4 blank pages in between, as a sort of buffer between them.209 Although f.1 is entitled ‘The Impressions of severall Pieces of gold belonging to his Maties Cabinet King Charles the 2nd’, the volume also includes sealings of many of the gems in the royal collection. In addition much of the later part of the volume is, in fact, devoted to sealings of contemporary personal seals, whose annotations indicate that they had been gathered by Ashmole on his travels around the country, and they are mostly arranged by county. These personal seals are often accompanied by dates, and the dates recorded indicate that they were mostly made in 1663–5, but two other items are dated 1670 and 1673. This suggests that the volume began as a record of those royal coins of which, for some reason, Ashmole wished to make an exact copy, but that he went on to use the same volume as the container for the sealings he later made elsewhere. He sensibly kept the same sort of medium in the same place.' (Burnett 2020b, pp. 342-3)
