1788 WT Jones met slave women & C Summerland at late S Bowers’s house affidavit

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1788 WT Jones met slave women & C Summerland at late S Bowers’s house affidavit
1788 Affidavit of William Townsend Jones sworn before Sir William Jones (original signature) saith that he met some slave women and a European named Charles Summerland upon his arrival at the house of Samuel Bowers deceased wherein Samuel Bowers expressed his desire in front of Charles Summerland and the slave women, instructed him to draw his Last Will to bequeath his properties to his sister in Europe and to appoint William Hill as the sole executor of his Last Will and asked  William Townsend Jones to come next day to take further instructions. William Townsend Jones came next day and several subsequent days. Samuel Bowers became weaker day by day and could not give any further instructions before his demise.
Sir William Jones
(28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was an Anglo-Welsh Philologist, a puisne judge in the
Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal
and a scholar of ancient
India
particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a close relationship of sorts among the
Indo-European languages.
He, along with
Henry Thomas Colebrooke
and
Nathaniel Halhead
founded the
Asiatic Society of Bengal
in 1784, and started a journal called Asiatic Researches. William Jones was born in London at Beaufort Buildings,
Westminister;
his father (also named William
Jones
) was a mathematician from Anglesey in Wales, noted for devising the use of the symbol pi. The young William Jones was a linguistic prodigy, learning Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic and Urdu and the basics of Chinese writing at an early age. By the end of his life he knew thirteen languages thoroughly and another twenty-eight reasonably well, making him a hyperpolyglot. Jones' father died when he was aged three. His mother Mary Nix Jones raised him. Jones attended Harrow in September 1753 and then went on to Oxford University. He graduated from University College, Oxford in 1768 and became M.A. in 1773. Too poor, even with his award, to pay the fees, he gained a job tutoring the seven-year-old Lord Althrop son of Earl Spencer He embarked on a career as a tutor and translator for the next six years. During this time he published Histoire de Nader Chah (1770), a French translation of a work originally written in Persian by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi. This was done at the request of King Christian VIII of Denmark, who had visited Jones – who by the age of 24 had already acquired a reputation as an Orientalist. This would be the first of numerous works on Persia Turkey and the Middle East in general. In 1770, he joined the Middle Temple and studied law for three years, which would eventually lead him to his life-work in India. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 30 April 1772. After a spell as a Circuit Judge in Wales, and a fruitless attempt to resolve the
issues of the American Colonies
in concert with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, he was appointed puisne judge to the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal on 4 March 1783, and on 20 March he was knighted. In April 1783 he married Anna Maria Shipley, the eldest daughter of Dr Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of Landaff and Bishop of St Asaph. Anna Maria used her artistic skills to help Jones document life in India. On 25 September 1783 he arrived in
Calcutta.
Jones was a radical political thinker, a friend of American independence. His work The principles of government; in a dialogue between a scholar and a peasant : printed and distributed gratis by the Society for Constitutional Information, 1783 was the subject of a trial for seditious libel after it was reprinted by his brother-in-law William Shipley. In the Subcontinent he was entranced by
Indian Culture
, an as-yet untouched field in European scholarship, and on 15 January 1784 he founded the Asiatic Society in Bengal. Over the next ten years he would produce a flood of works on India, launching the modern study of the subcontinent in virtually every social science. He also wrote on the local laws, music, literature, botany, and geography, and made the first English translations of several important works of Indian literature. He died in Calcutta on 27 April 1794 at the age of 47 and is buried in South Park Street Cemetery.
Water Mark: C Taylor and ancient Britannia
Item Condition: Acceptable stable despite wear at the periphery and small wear holes minute splits at fold of back leaf, given protective cover