Written by hand with brown ink on good quality paper, marked as 'Copia', a copy. 32 x 20 cm. Two quires sewn together. 48 p., of which 5 are blank. 33-35 lines per page. Excellent condition. Beautifully written manuscript, the report of a court martial case where an officer Borkensteijn accused the elderly custos (verger) of the Broederkerk in Nijmegen that he had pointed to his pants to entice him to sodomy. In the end, the officer and an accomplice were demoted and dismissed from service, their swords broken, before being handed over to a civil court. The verger was cleared of all blame, released and given his money back. This extensive account of 42 handwritten pages largely corresponds to a printed article in the Nieuwe Nederlandsche Jaerboeken by Martinus Stuart (Vol. VII/2 (August 1753), p. 699-724). Incidentally, the court martial contains a nice detectivelike passage where the paleness of ink leads to the discovery that some notes were not written at the same instance. The lawyer response brings life’s details very close: ‘Voor redenen van de verandering van inckt geevende: off de verandering van pen, off het te diep instippen, en meerdere of mindere swaere hand, ofte oock het omroeren, off niet omroeren van den inckt, om dat er ook boomwoll in de kooker soude zijn geweest’: For reasons given for the change of ink: either the change of pen, or putting it in the ink too deeply, and a more or less heavy hand, or also the stirring, or not stirring of the ink, because there would also have been cotton in the inkwell. (p. 18 in the written text, p. 711 in the printed one).