1620 Punch Letter

[BookofMorten]

I’m currently reading up on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as it was the first truly crowdsourced piece of work ever made at scale. Basically an early day Wikipedia approach!

I came across this reference on page 146 in “The Meaning of Everything” that quotes James Murray (The first editor of OED) when listing some of the daily letters he wrote to verify sources.
He wrote to the editor of The Times requesting a letter from 1620 that was supposedly the earliest mention of “Punch”:

(The quote is originally from Murray’s granddaughter’s biography of him “Caught in the Web of Words” from 1977.)

Now, the very first edition of the OED (when they released them in individual volumes as and when they were ready) from 1909 does not have this 1620 reference. The earliest mention they have caught here is the same one that @Splificator mentions in his book Punch (The 1632 Mr. Cartwright “punch by no allowanc” one).

(The Punch definition begins at bottom of the middle column)

Their current OED website doesn’t carry this 1620 reference either (Although they’ve found “paunche pot” as a reference from the will of Sir Robert Bedingfeild in 1600).

Does anyone know if this 1620 letter exists?
Did Murray never get a response from The Times or was it a dead end from the start?

[Splificator]

I’ve looked through the Times in an attempt to find whatever article it was that set Murray off, but to no avail. As far as I know, the 1620 reference was not picked up. The first unambiguous mention of the drink we know as Punch under that name is still from 1632, although Peter Mundy records the mixture in 1629-1630, as “Charebockhra,” and the “Larkin” loosely described by Pietro Della Valle in 1622 as a spirits-based mixed drink popular in Java and nearby regions is very likely the same thing.

[BookofMorten]

Ahh that’s a shame. Thanks for diving into it and sharing your findings!