Although Elizabeth's Navy has been a subject of enduring interest to scholars and the general public over the years, no general selection from the large body of surviving documents has previously been published. The Navy Records Society devoted its first two and another of its earliest volumes to the Armada and subsequent events of the Spanish war, but the nearest to a comprehensive view of Elizabethan naval administration and finance came in the Society's centenary volume. It is therefore appropriate to return to this field, particularly (but not exclusively) in the earlier years of the reign when there was no formal war. Between 1558 and 1585 the Navy was deployed variously in small-scale campaigns (such as those in Scotland in 1560, at Le Havre in 1563, and Smerwick in 1580), in the pursuit of pirates and in making occasional shows of force. Although the present work relates to such operations, its emphasis is primarily on the financial and administrative processes which supported them, covering such aspects as mustering, victualling and demobilisation as well as the repair and maintenance of the ships themselves. The general content is therefore closer to that of another of the Society's pioneering volumes, which presented similar though less detailed evidence from the reign of Henry VII.

This collection is the second of two dealing with Tudor naval administration, the first of which was concerned with the Navy of Edward VI and Mary I, encompassing the first phase under the management instituted by Henry VIII at the end of his reign. The present volume opens with two foundation documents for the Elizabethan Navy – the first ship list, and the first ordinances for the Admiralty officers. The centrepiece is Benjamin Gonson's massive Quarter Book for 1562–63, which covers (among much else) the preparations for the Le Havre campaign. Although we have deliberately chosen not to make any additions to the Society's substantial dossier on the Armada, the discovery of one hitherto unnoticed item from 1590–91 became the basis for a final section illustrating the organisation behind one of the post-Armada operations. The documents are drawn primarily from the Public Record Office, the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and those parts of Pepys's collection which eventually found their way into the Rawlinson MSS at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.