Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney (York Manuscript and Early Print Studies, 3) (Middle English Edition) 9781843845751, 9781800104631, 9781800104648, 184384575X

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I International Perspectives
HOW ENGLISH IS IT?
MIDDLE HIBERNO-ENGLISH POETRY AND THE NASCENT BUREAUCRATIC LITERARY CULTURE OF IRELAND
Part II Identities and Localities
FAMOUS SCRIBE, UNRECOGNISED STINT
THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS AND THE KING’S FRENCH SECRETARIES
SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON
SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED
Part III Scribal Production
SOME CODICOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS ON MANUSCRIPTS OF WALTER HILTON’S SCALE OF PERFECTION
THE FIRST EMERGENCE OF THE RICARDIAN CONFESSIO: MORGAN M. 690
THE ANONYMOUS ‘KINGS OF ENGLAND’ AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ITS MATERIAL FORM
JOHN BENET, SCRIBE AND COMPILER, AND DUBLIN, TRINITY COLLEGE, MS 516
THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK OF TEWKESBURY ABBEY (OXFORD, BODLEIAN LIBRARY, MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2): SCRIPTS AND
Part IV Chaucerian Contexts
WHEN IS A ‘CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT’ NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?
CAMBRIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE, MS R.3.15 AND THE CIRCULATION OF CHAUCERIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SIXTEENT
AFTERWORD: A PERSONAL TRIBUTE
LINNE R. MOONEY: LIST OF PUBLICATIONS
Index of Manuscripts
General Index
TABULA GRATULATORIA
YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS

Citation preview

York Manuscript and Early Print Studies Volume 3

SCRIBAL CULTURES IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2022) Peter Biller, Emeritus (Dept of History): General Editor Tim Ayers (Dept of History of Art): Co-Director, Centre for Medieval Studies Henry Bainton: Private scholar K. P. Clarke (Dept of English and Related Literature) K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology) Shazia Jagot (Dept of English and Related Literature) Holly James-Maddocks (Dept of English and Related Literature) Harry Munt (Dept of History) L. J. Sackville (Dept of History) Elizabeth M. Tyler (Dept of English and Related Literature): Co-Director, Centre for Medieval Studies Hanna Vorholt (Dept of History of Art) Sethina Watson (Dept of History) J. G. Wogan-Browne (English Faculty, Fordham University) Stephanie Wynne-Jones (Dept of Archaeology) All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Academic Editor, York Medieval Press, Department of History, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD (E-mail: [email protected])

York Manuscript and Early Print Studies Series Editors Orietta Da Rold (Cambridge) Holly James-Maddocks (York) A description of the series and a list of published titles may be found at the end of this volume.

SCRIBAL CULTURES IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF LINNE R. MOONEY

Edited by Margaret Connolly, Holly James-Maddocks and Derek Pearsall

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

© Contributors 2022 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2022 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN 978-1-843845-75-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-800104-63-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-800104-64-8 (ePUB) A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.4.20, fol. 89r. Historiated initial of Thebes from John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Cover design: Toni Michelle

CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix List of Contributors xv Acknowledgements xvii Abbreviations xix



Introduction Margaret Connolly



1

I: International Perspectives

1 How English is it?

Martha W. Driver

2 Middle Hiberno-English Poetry and the Nascent

Bureaucratic Literary Culture of Ireland Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

25

45

II: Identities and Localities

3 Famous Scribe, Unrecognised Stint

Ralph Hanna

4 The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks

and the King’s French Secretaries Sebastian Sobecki

67

82

vi

CONTENTS

5 Seeking Scribal Communities in Medieval London

Estelle V. Stubbs

6 Scribes and Booklets: The ‘Trinity Anthologies’

Reconsidered Holly James-Maddocks

125

146

III: Scribal Production

7 Some Codicological Observations on Manuscripts of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection Michael G. Sargent



8 The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio:

Morgan M. 690 Joel Fredell

9 The Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ and the Significance

of its Material Form Margaret Connolly

10 John Benet, Scribe and Compiler, and Dublin, Trinity

College, MS 516 Wendy Scase

183

200

222

241

11 The Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Oxford,

Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. D. 2): Scripts and Transcripts Susan Powell

259

IV: Chaucerian Contexts

12

When is a ‘Canterbury Tales Manuscript’ not Just a Canterbury Tales Manuscript? Daniel W. Mosser

285

vii

CONTENTS

13 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 and the









Circulation of Chaucerian Manuscripts in the Sixteenth Century Simon Horobin

312

Afterword: A Personal Tribute † Derek Pearsall

329

Linne R. Mooney: List of Publications Daryl Green

333

Index of Manuscripts General Index Tabula Gratulatoria

339 346 364

ILLUSTRATIONS ‘How English Is It?’, Martha W. Driver Figure 1 Crucifixion, Flemish with emendation by English hand or hands, Morgan M. 314, Hours for Rome Use, c. 1400, fol. 31v. Figure 2 Annunciation, attributed to the Master of Guillebert de Mets, Morgan M. 46, Hours for Sarum Use, Offices of the Dead for Rome Use, c. 1425, fol. 47v. Figure 3 Angel with Soul in Prayer, English artist, Morgan M. 46, Hours for Sarum Use, Offices of the Dead for Rome Use, c. 1425, fol. 37v. Figure 4 St Erkenwald, English artist, Morgan M. 46, Hours for Sarum Use, Offices of the Dead for Rome Use, c. 1425, fol. 44v. Figure 5 Agony in the Garden, English artist, Morgan M. 46, Hours for Sarum Use, Offices of the Dead for Rome Use, c. 1425, fol. 53v. Figure 6 Johannes in Litany with red highlight. Morgan M. 46, Hours for Sarum Use, Offices of the Dead for Rome Use, c. 1425, fol. 113r. Figure 7 Christine in Her Study with the Goddess Minerva, Christine de Pizan, Le livre des faits d’armes et de chevalrie, English artist, 1434. BL, MS Harley 4605, fol. 3r. Figure 8 Annunciation, Flemish artist, Morgan G. 9, Hours for Sarum Use, c. 1440–1450, fol. 11v. Figure 9 Portrait of Sir William Porter of Lincolnshire with his Guardian Angel. Morgan M. 105, Hours for Sarum Use, c. 1420–1425, fol. 84v.

28 31 32 33 35 37 38 40 42

x

ILLUSTRATIONS

‘Middle Hiberno-English Poetry and the Nascent Bureaucratic Literary Culture of Ireland’, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Figure 1 Dublin Court of Exchequer at work, from the Red Book of the Exchequer, c. 1420 (original destroyed), reproduced from John Gilbert, Facsimiles of the National Manuscripts of Ireland, vol. 3 (London, 1879), plate 37. 49 ‘Famous Scribe, Unrecognised Stint’, Ralph Hanna Map

Aldfield, Knaresborough and vicinity.

74

‘The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King’s French Secretaries’, Sebastian Sobecki Figure 1 TNA C 81/1367/17, signet letter, dated at Windsor, 1 January 1440, in the hand of George Ashby (signed). Figure 2 TNA C 81/1365/18, signet letter, dated at Rouen, 15 April 1420, signed by Thomas Andrew. Figure 3 TNA C 81/1366/9, signet letter, dated at Rouen, 28 February 1419 or 1420, signed by Thomas Andrew. Figure 4 TNA C 81/1375/11, signet letter, dated at Woodstock, 28 July 1458, in the hand of John Ashby (signed). Figure 5 TNA C 81/1371/16, signet letter, dated at Eltham, 25 July 1449, signed by Edmund Blake. Figure 6 TNA C 81/1370/42, signet letter, dated at Bury St Edmunds, 26 February 1447, signed by John Blakeney. Figure 7 TNA C 81/1375/17, warrant, dated at Coventry, 12 August 1459, signed by John Bowdon. Figure 8 TNA C 81/1367/1, signet letter, dated at Abbeville, France, 18 January 1432, signed by William Crosby. Figure 9 TNA C 81/1365/28, signet letter, dated at Weobley, 7 March 1421, signed by John Depeden. Figure 10 TNA C 81/1367/33, signet letter, dated at Eltham, 28 December 1441, signed by William Gedney. Figure 11 TNA C 81/1371/35, signet letter, dated at Reading Abbey, 14 March [1450], signed by Robert Osbern. Figure 12 TNA C 81/1370/33, signet letter, dated at London, 2 June 1446, signed by Robert Repynghale. Figure 13 TNA C 81/1365/1, signet letter, dated at Vernon in France, 6 April 1419, signed by Robert Shiryngton. Figure 14 TNA C 81/1365/10, signet letter, dated at Mantes-la-Jolie in France, 22 July 1419, signed by William Toly. Figure 15 BN, MS français 4054, fol. 60 (detail). Signed letter by Michel de Paris, Henry VI to Charles VII. Dated at Westminster, 2 July 1446. Figure 16 BN, MS français 4054, fol. 33. Signed letter by Michel de Paris, Queen Margaret to Charles VII. Dated at Windsor, 5 May 1446.

87 89 90 95 97 99 100 102 104 105 107 109 110 112 115 116

xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 17 BN, MS français 20327, fol. 150. Signed letter by Jean de Rinel for Cardinal Beaufort. Dated at Rouen, 25 August 1430. Figure 18 BN, MS français 20978, fol. 190. Signed letter by Jean de Rinel for Henry VI. Dated at London, 6 July 1430. Figure 19 BL, MS Royal 15 E.vi, fol. 12v. Figure 20 BN, MS français 4054, fol. 63. Signed letter by Gervais le Vulre, Henry VI to Charles VII. Dated at Westminster, 12 December 1447.

119 120 121 123

‘Seeking Scribal Communities in Medieval London’, Estelle V. Stubbs Figure 1 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 296, p. 288 (Tracts by Wyclif). Change of hand from Scribe 1 to John Marchaunt at the beginning of the Petition. Figure 2 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 296, p. 297 (col. a, ll. 22–35). Article 3 in the Petition, copied by Marchaunt, with Wyclif ’s condemnation of the fat priest. Figure 3 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198, fol. 3r (ll. 23–28). Lines from the description of the Monk in the General Prologue from Oxford, Corpus Christi MS 198 (Canterbury Tales) copied by John Marchaunt. Figure 4 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198, fol. 3v (ll. 13–20).

130 144

145 145

‘Scribes and Booklets: The “Trinity Anthologies” Reconsidered’, Holly James-Maddocks Figure 1 Bodl., MS Douce 322, fol. 18r. Devotional miscellany. Figure 2 Bodl., MS Douce 322, fol. 27r. Devotional miscellany. Figure 3 Bodl., Arch. G f.16, fols. 34v–35r. Horae ad usum Sarum [London: William de Machlinia, about 1484] (ISTC ih00420300). Figure 4 Bristol, Public Library, MS 9, fol. 119v. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Eng. trans. by John Trevisa). Figure 5 Cambridge, St John’s College, MS C.13, fol. 13r. Thomas Littleton, Tenures, etc. Figure 6 Aberdeen UL, Inc. 5, fol. 510r. Avicenna, Canon medicinae [Strassburg: The R-Printer (Adolf Rusch), after Feb. 1473] (ISTC ia01417700). Figure 7 Aberdeen UL, Inc. 5, fol. 525v. Avicenna, Canon medicinae [Strassburg: The R-Printer (Adolf Rusch), after Feb. 1473] (ISTC ia01417700). Figure 8 LPL MS 186, fol. 133v. Psalter. Figure 9 Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Widener 2, fol. 75r. Hours, Sarum use. Figure 10 Bodl., MS Douce 322, fol. 78r. Devotional miscellany.

154 154 155 156 156 157 157 157 158 158

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ILLUSTRATIONS

‘The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio: Morgan M. 690’, Joel Fredell Figure 1 Bodl., MS Fairfax 3, fol. 62r: Confessio 3.2731–2774; 4.1–40. 205 Figure 2 Morgan M. 690, fol. 66r: Confessio 3.2740–2774; 4.1–36. 206 Figure 3 Bodl., MS Fairfax 3, fol. 2r. Opening of Confessio with Dream frontispiece. 207 Figure 4 Morgan M. 690, fol. 4v. Dream Miniature statue embedded in text. 209 Figure 5 BN, MS français 1584, fol. 53v detail. Machaut, Remède de Fortune. 210 Figure 6 BL, MS Additional 59495 (Trentham), fols. 37v–38r, Traitié. 211 Figure 7 Left: Bodl., MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (Vernon), fol. 117ra detail – Hand D; middle: BL, MS Additional 22283 (Simeon), fol. 52ra detail – Hand A; right: Bodl., MS Fairfax 3, fol. 2r detail, c. 1400. 213 Figure 8 Morgan M. 690, fol. 25r detail. 215 Figure 9 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26.A.17 (Stafford), fol. 113r detail. 215 Figure 10 BL, MS Harley 2946, fol. 244r detail. 216 Figure 11 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 67, fol. 2r detail. 216 Figure 12 Oxford, Christ Church, MS 148, fol. 26v detail. 217 Figure 13 Left: BL, MS Egerton 1991, fol. 142v detail; right: BL, MS Harley 7334, fol. 1r detail. 217 Figure 14 Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, fol. 49r detail. 219 Figure 15 Morgan M. 690, fol. 204v detail. Final lines of the Confessio. 220 Figure 16 Quire Structure at the end of Morgan M. 690. 220 ‘The Anonymous “Kings of England” and the Significance of its Material Form’, Margaret Connolly Figure 1 St Andrews MS 38660, section showing Henry III and Edward I. Figure 2 Bodl., Ashmole Rolls 21, section showing Henry III and Edward I. Figure 3 Hertfordshire Archives, Ref. 15857, section showing Henry III and Edward I. Figure 4 Somerset, SHC DD/SF/18/2/3, section showing Henry III and Edward I.

231 235 236 238

‘John Benet, Scribe and Compiler, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516’, Wendy Scase Figure 1 Trinity College, Dublin, MS 516 (E. 5. 10), fol. 118r.

251

xiii

ILLUSTRATIONS

‘The Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. d. 2): Scripts and Transcripts’, Susan Powell Figure Figure Figure Figure Figure

1 2 3 4 5

Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. d. 2, fol. 2r (Hand 1). Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. d. 2, fol. 5r (Hands 1 and 2). Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. d. 2, fol. 6r, the Charter (Hand 3). Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. d. 2, fol. 21r (Hand 4). BL, MS Additional 36985, fols. 22v–23r.

277 278 279 280 281

‘Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 and the Circulation of Chaucerian Manuscripts in the Sixteenth Century’, Simon Horobin Figure 1 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15, fol. 3v.

316

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

CONTRIBUTORS Margaret Connolly Martha W. Driver Joel Fredell Daryl Green Ralph Hanna Simon Horobin Holly James-Maddocks Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Daniel W. Mosser Derek Pearsall Susan Powell Michael G. Sargent Wendy Scase Sebastian Sobecki Estelle Stubbs

University of St Andrews Pace University Southeastern Louisiana University University of Edinburgh University of Oxford (emeritus) University of Oxford University of York University of Notre Dame Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (emeritus) University of York, Harvard University (emeritus) University of Salford (emeritus) Queens College of the City University of New York University of Birmingham (emeritus) University of Groningen University of Sheffield

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

W

e wish to thank the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York for support of the conference held in Linne Mooney’s honour on 23 May 2019, at which many of these papers were first delivered. We also thank the Leavis Fund in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, and the School of English, University of St Andrews, for funding which has aided the publication of this volume. The editors are grateful to Dr Elliot Kendall for producing the map that features in Ralph Hanna’s essay, to Boydell & Brewer for funding the colour illustrations, and to York Medieval Press for the leather-bound presentation copy. For supplying images of manuscripts in their care and granting permission for their reproduction in this volume we are grateful to: Aberdeen University Library; the Bodleian Library; Bristol Reference Library; the British Library; The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; the Master and Fellows of St John’s College Library, Cambridge; the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge; the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies; Lambeth Palace Library; the National Archives; Christ Church, Oxford; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; the University of St Andrews Special Collections; South West Heritage Trust; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Board of Trinity College Dublin; the Houghton Library, University of Harvard; the Huntington Library; the Morgan Library and Museum. We also thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge for permission to use the image from MS R.4.20 on the cover of this book. We owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Peter Biller, General Editor of York Medieval Press, to Dr Orietta Da Rold, Series Editor, and to the readers, Professors Susanna Fein and Daniel Wakelin; also to Caroline Palmer and all the staff of Boydell & Brewer for their meticulous work in producing this volume. The editors and contributors take responsibility for any omissions or errors.

xviii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Derek Pearsall died in October 2021 whilst this volume was in its very final stages; he had read and approved all of its contents, and hoped as do we that its honoree would be pleased with this tribute. Margaret Connolly and Holly James-Maddocks December 2021

ABBREVIATIONS BL BMC

British Library, London Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British (Museum) Library, Parts 1–13 (vols. 1–10, 12, London; vols. 11, 13, ‘t-Goy-Houten, 1908–2007), with two volumes of facsimile plates (vols. 1–8 reprinted with corrections, 1963; vol. 9 reprinted with corrections, 1967) BN Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Bod-Inc A. Coates, K. Jensen, C. Dondi, B. Wagner, and H. Dixon, A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2005); the electronic version is: Bod-Inc Online Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CBMLC Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues CUL Cambridge University Library DIMEV Digital Index of Middle English Verse, ed. L. R. Mooney, D. W. Mosser and E. Solopova, with D. Thorpe, D. H. Radcliffe, and L. Hatfield EETS ES Early English Text Society, Extra Series EETS OS Early English Text Society, Original Series eLALME An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, ed. M Benskin, M. Laing, V. Karaiskos, and K. Williamson (Edinburgh, 2013)

LALME A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, ed. A. McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and M. Benskin (Aberdeen, 1986) LGM K. L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 2 vols., A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 6 (London, 1996) LP linguistic profile (in LALME) LPL Lambeth Palace Library, London Manly and Rickert The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, ed J. M. Manly and E. Rickert, 8 vols. (Chicago, 1940)

xx

ABBREVIATIONS

MED

Middle English Dictionary, ed. R. E. Lewis et al. (Ann Arbor, 1952–2001). Online edition in Middle English Compendium. Ed. Frances McSparran et al. Ann Arbor (2000–18). NIMEV A New Index of Middle English Verse, ed. J. Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (London, 2005) ODNB Online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online MMBL N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1969–92), with I. C. Cunningham and A. G. Watson, Volume V: Index and Addenda (Oxford, 2002) Morgan The Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, New York MS manuscript MSS manuscripts Rawl. Rawlinson STC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, first compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, K. F. Pantzer et al., 3 vols. (London, 1976–91) TNA The National Archives, Kew UL University Library VCH Victoria County History

INTRODUCTION MARGARET CONNOLLY

T

he centrality of the role of the scribe in studies of later medieval English literature has developed inexorably over the past four decades. During this time scholarly interest has shifted from literary texts themselves to the manuscripts in which they survive. It has also broadened from an exclusive focus on the authors whose wit, imagination and learning generated works of literature to a more inclusive consideration of the whole process of writing, and one that acknowledges the craftsmanship of those who physically committed the authors’ words to parchment and paper. Any graduate student embarking on the study of medieval literature in the third decade of the twenty-first century can expect to encounter questions of scribal culture and book production sooner rather than later in their studies, and will find that deeper acquaintance of those major medieval authors and texts that have featured on the syllabus at undergraduate level will be freighted with a searching appreciation of their cultural and historical milieux. Even though graduate students may not actually be expected to read medieval texts from manuscript to any great extent as part of their assessed work they will usually be provided with training in at least the rudiments of palaeography, codicology and textual criticism as part of any taught Masters programme, in anticipation that knowledge of these skills will be necessary for successful further doctoral study as well as for parallel careers in the archival and library sectors. Such training has, of course, been available in the past, especially at locations such as Toronto and York and St Andrews where there have traditionally been significant concentrations of medieval scholars, and at those universities which own or have convenient access to extensive collections of medieval manuscripts. The key difference is the now universal and routine expectation that students of medieval English literature will need such skills; previously training in palaeography and diplomatics was assumed to be essential only for students of medieval history, since their research was always expected to require archival work and the examination of original

2

MARGARET CONNOLLY

medieval documents. This change in approach in the subject of medieval English literature is due to a combination of factors, not all of which are academically driven. One key influence on this direction of travel has certainly been the emergence of interdisciplinarity and the converging of discrete subject areas into Medieval Studies, sometimes as a strategy for survival, especially for specialists of medieval languages; as historians, literary historians and art historians have conversed more with each other there has been greater sharing of research methodologies and a necessary agreement about what skills should be taught collectively at graduate level. Another factor which has bolstered this skills-based approach has been universities’ clearer articulation of the rigour and purpose of their Masters’ programmes, both to justify the fees charged and in response to demands from funding bodies that there be transparent accountability and value for money. And a third, and absolutely fundamental contributing factor has been the increasing availability of manuscripts via facsimile reproduction, first in printed form and through microform, and much more recently through digitisation. These are some of the strongest influences which, in addition to pure research endeavours, have shaped our subject area into its current form. But in a volume of essays assembled to celebrate the distinguished career of one of the major practitioners of the discipline it is appropriate to look back to consider what the scholarly landscape looked like at the very start of her career, not only to situate her achievements, but also to capture a sense of how much the field has changed within this time. After completing her BA at Smith College Linne Mooney moved to the Centre for Medieval Studies at Toronto, first to take an MA and then a doctorate under the supervision of A. George Rigg; she was awarded her Ph.D. in 1981 for a study of Middle English practical didactic texts.1 In the same year the Middle English Dictionary reached the letter ‘O’ (it would not be completed until 2001), having steadily progressed through the letters K–N during the 1970s. During this decade another important project was quietly advancing; this was the Edinburgh Middle English dialect survey, ongoing since the 1950s, though its most substantial output, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, would not appear in print until 1986.2 Another key reference resource, the Index of Middle English Prose, which to date has published twenty-three volumes, was also as yet unborn; its first fruits would not appear until the mid 1980s either, though the project was conceived at a conference in Cambridge in 1978.3 1 ‘Practical Didactic Works in Middle English: edition and analysis of the class of short Middle English works containing useful information’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1981). 2 A. McIntosh, M. Samuels, and M. Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1986). 3 R. Hanna, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist I: The Henry E. Huntington Library (Cambridge, 1984); R. E. Lewis, N. F. Blake, and A. S. G. Edwards, Index of Printed Middle English Prose (New York and London, 1985).

INTRODUCTION

And in that same year another significant publication emerged, not as part of a grand scheme or project, though it was a collaborative effort, and not in a leading journal but in that other type of outlet where highly significant subject-specific publications often surface: a festschrift. This was Ian Doyle’s and Malcolm Parkes’s essay ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, now acknowledged as a seminal development in the study of English medieval scribal culture.4 Their essay was written to honour the distinguished palaeographer Neil Ker, whose Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, catalogue of Oxford binding fragments, and facsimiles of significant manuscripts, had furthered the palaeographical, codicological and textual study of Middle English literature in a variety of ways.5 Ker’s survey of Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries had by this point covered repositories in London and other places beginning with the letters A–K.6 Some other comprehensive modern catalogues of individual collections were also beginning to emerge in a flow that would gather pace over the next decade, but knowledge of medieval manuscripts otherwise largely depended on the much older scholarship of M. R. James and nineteenth-­century catalogues of larger repositories.7 Although these were key resources they were necessarily cursory in coverage, listing major texts but not all individual contents, and offering only broad date ranges for composition; a more specific attempt to put down anchor-holds in terms of the precise dating of manuscripts, the Dated and Datable Manuscripts series, was only just getting underway at the end of the 1970s.8 Manuscript catalogues were of crucial importance in allowing the first editors of medieval texts to locate copies of the texts they were editing, and over time editions of texts in turn became more productive resources for those interested in manuscripts because their introductions routinely 4 A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of The Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essay Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 163–210. 5 Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books (London, 1941; 2nd edn 1964); Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings with a Survey of Oxford Binding 1515–1620 (Oxford, 1954); Facsimile of MS. Bodley 34 (London, 1960) and Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253 (London, 1965), both for the Early English Text Society. Ker had also published significant resources in the field of early English literature, including Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957) and English Manuscripts in the Century After the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1960). 6 Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 1: London (Oxford, 1969), vol. 2 Abbotsford–Keele (Oxford, 1977); remaining volumes published 1983, 1992, and the index in 2002. 7 For example, A. C. de la Mare, Catalogue of the Collection of Medieval Manuscripts Bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by James P. R. Lyell (Oxford, 1971). 8 A. G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 700–1600 in the Department of Manuscripts, the British Library (London, 1979). Volumes covering libraries in Oxford (also by Watson), and Cambridge and London (by Pamela Robinson) appeared in 1984, 1988, and 2003 respectively.

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came to include accounts of all the known manuscripts of the text being edited. G. C. Macaulay’s Clarendon edition of Gower’s works, published in four volumes over 1899–1902, set the highest standard in this regard and his methodology went a good way towards that later codified by Ker whose prescription for manuscript description stipulated sixteen separate elements.9 By the time Doyle and Parkes produced their account of the production of copies of the Canterbury Tales and Confessio Amantis there was much information available in print about the manuscripts of both these works.10 Macaulay had provided ample materials for Gower’s text in his Clarendon edition, and Chaucer’s manuscripts had been described and surveyed by generations of scholars, starting with W. W. Skeat in the 1890s, and continuing through the work of Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Aage Brusendorff and John M. Manly and Edith Rickert.11 A facsimile of the Ellesmere manuscript had been available since 1911 and another was issued in 1979, the same year that a facsimile and transcription of the Hengwrt manuscript appeared.12 Almost all of these endeavours were based on a primary concern with text rather than with the scribes who produced it. The location and description of all the manuscripts of an author’s works were a means to an end, and that end was the establishment of the extent of the canon of an author’s writings and then the recovery of the correct form (that is, the authorially intended form) of those writings. The Lachmannian methodology that guided this process of recovery meant that manuscripts whose readings were judged to be erroneous were discounted in favour of those whose readings were regarded as more correct; as a result attention to ‘good’ manuscripts intensified and interest in ‘bad’ manuscripts quickly waned.13 Editors typically based their editions on a single manuscript whilst citing the readings of others, or a key selection of others in 9 G. C. Macaulay, ed., The Complete Works of John Gower, edited from the manuscripts with introductions, notes, and glossaries, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1899–1902). Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 1: vii–xiii; this list has since been updated to include nineteen items, see Richard Beadle and Ralph Hanna, ‘Describing and Cataloguing Medieval English Manuscripts: A Checklist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts, ed. O. Da Rold and E. Treharne (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 13–38. 10 For example, Kane and Donaldson’s editions of Piers Plowman were not published until 1988. 11 W. W. Skeat, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1894), and Chaucerian and Other Pieces edited from Numerous Manuscripts (Oxford, 1897); E. P. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1933); A. Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford, 1925); J. M. Manly and Edith Rickert, eds, The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago, 1940). 12 A. Egerton, ed., The Ellesmere Chaucer: Reproduced in Facsimile, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1911); R. Hanna, ed., The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Working Facsimile (Cambridge, 1979); P. G. Ruggiers, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript (Norman, OK, 1979). 13 For a brief summary of this approach, also known as recension or stemmatics, see Douglas Moffat with Vincent P. McCarren, ‘A Bibliographical Essay on Editing Methods

INTRODUCTION

the case of a very extensive textual tradition. Accordingly, in the case of fourteenth-century poets such as Chaucer and Gower whose texts were widely taught, certain manuscripts emerged as of pre-eminent importance: Ellesmere and Hengwrt for the Canterbury Tales; Bodl., MS Fairfax 3 for Confessio Amantis. Yet whilst the textual readings offered by these manuscripts were carefully scrutinised, compared with other witnesses, and then accepted or emended, a process which necessarily involved a great deal of close attention to the way that the individual words had been written on the page (and very particular consideration of any obvious areas of interference such as correction, erasure and substitution), editors by and large remained largely uninterested in the scribes who had actually produced this writing. That lack of interest is what made the publication of Doyle’s and Parkes’s essay, with its primary focus on the five scribal hands responsible for Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, so unusual. The attention that Doyle and Parkes drew to the circumstances of later medieval book production would have a profound effect on the future development of Middle English studies. Some scholars, notably Elizabeth Salter, had already recognised the central importance of manuscripts to the study of literature.14 The stream of graduate researchers supervised at York by Salter and Derek Pearsall, and the biennial series of ‘York Manuscripts’ conferences inaugurated in 1981 by the Centre for Medieval Studies, along with the slightly later foundation of the Early Book Society and its own series of conferences and journal, were instrumental in achieving the ‘manuscript turn’ in medieval studies: this was the field that Linne Mooney would subsequently make her own. Yet meanwhile the editing of texts remained a prime concern, both intellectually, as George Kane’s and E. Talbot Donaldson’s editions of Piers Plowman with their different editorial methodology appeared towards the end of the 1980s, but also practically: people just carried on editing. It is hard now to appreciate the sheer centrality that the task of editing held in the profession in this era. Many Middle English texts remained unedited by the last quarter of the twentieth century, and to prepare an edition was regarded – as it still is – as an eminently suitable project for a doctoral student to undertake. The need for more editions, and the willingness of publishers to publish them, can be detected in the foundation of new outlets at this time. The first volumes in the Middle English Texts series, whose remit complemented that of the longer-standing Early English Text Society, appeared in 1975, and the similarly named but differently focussed TEAMS Middle English Texts Series emerged at the end of the 1980s.15 Howell Chickering’s

and Authorial and Scribal Intention’, in A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent McCarren and Douglas Moffat (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), pp. 25–57 (pp. 27–31). 14 Derek Pearsall, ‘Elizabeth Salter: A Memoir’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 14 (1983), 2–3. 15 For an account of the development of Middle English Texts see the introduction to

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review of the first TEAMS volumes tellingly noted that despite the stated pedagogic concern to provide cheap editions of texts for classroom use ‘several newly edited here are in fact the first scholarly editions published in this century’.16 In England the Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies series, co-directed by Marion Glasscoe and Michael J. Swanton, fulfilled a similar need, and by the mid 1980s its scope extended to include Middle English as well as Old English texts.17 It was therefore quite natural for Linne Mooney’s scholarly interests to include editing. One of her earliest publications offered an edition and study of the poem ‘God made all mankynd’, a work that offered instruction on the most auspicious times for bloodletting and the heavenly conjunctions that might influence the outcome of treatment.18 This was the kind of didactic material that had formed the subject matter of her thesis, and several other editions of medical and scientific texts followed.19 The most substantial of these were her editions of John Somer’s Chronicle (undertaken with Jeremy Catto) and his Kalendarium, both of which were complex Latin texts that demonstrated that Somer was one of the leading astrologer/astronomers of his day.20 She also edited The Seven Liberal Arts, a unique prose text that outlined the subjects enshrined in the medieval university curriculum: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.21 It will be apparent that many of her editorial endeavours focussed on abstruse materials that others had avoided (a theme that runs through her critical work as well), and she was therefore an obvious choice to contribute to the section that covered the task of editing works of a technical nature when Vincent McCarren and Douglas Moffat devised their A Guide to Editing Middle English in 1998.22 Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx, ed. M. Connolly and R. Radulescu (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 3–5. 16 Chickering’s review was published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993), 258–63. TEAMS now also produces digital editions through the Robbins Library Project at the University of Rochester, see [accessed 18 August 2020]. 17 Founded in 1975; now published by Liverpool University Press. 18 DIMEV 1570; ‘A Middle English Verse Compendium of Astrological Medicine’, Medical History 28 (1984), 406–19. 19 ‘Diet and Bloodletting: A Monthly Regimen’, in Practical and Popular Science of Medieval England, ed. L. M. Matheson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 245–62; (with M. Green), ‘The Sickness of Women’, in Sex, Aging and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R.14.52, Its Language, Scribe, and Texts, ed. M. T. Tavormina, (Phoenix, AZ, 2006), pp. 455–568. 20 ‘The Chronicle of John Somer, OFM’, Chronology, Conquest and Conflict in Mediaeval England, Camden Miscellany 34 (1998): 197–285; The Kalendarium of John Somer (Athens, GA, 1998); ‘Somer, John (d. in or after 1409), Franciscan friar and astronomer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 21 ‘A Middle English Text on the Seven Liberal Arts’, Speculum 68 (1993), 1027–52. 22 ‘Editing Astrological and Prognostic Texts’, in A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. V. P. McCarren and D. Moffat (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), pp. 123–32. For Linne Mooney’s lucid explanations of complex areas such as the calculation of time, see ‘A Medieval Latin Mnemonic for Finding the Date of Easter’, Notes and Queries 30 (1983), 391–2; ‘The Cock and the Clock: Telling Time in Chaucer’s Day’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993),

INTRODUCTION

Not all of her work as an editor was in this vein however. Her edition and study of the Middle English poems about the kings of England (one by Lydgate, one not) tackled a complex textual situation that involved many manuscript witnesses and took her into the rather different area of fifteenth-century chronicles and verse propaganda.23 In several other articles she offered editions of unrecorded short Middle English poems that were largely of a courtly nature, each one an important addition to the corpus of Middle English verse; some constitute particularly valuable discoveries because they are rare examples authored by women.24 These poems mostly take the form of complaints (against lovers or Fortune), a mode of writing that featured predominantly in the edition of The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems that Linne Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn prepared for TEAMS in 2005.25 The intrinsic value of editing is that its labour brings inaccessible texts into the public domain and expands the limits of the field for all scholars. In the 1970s the literary landscape of Middle English was one in which poetic texts were by far the most visible landmarks, and Linne Mooney’s additions to the known corpus of Middle English verse could be readily demonstrated and recorded because of the existence of the Index of Middle English Verse and its Supplement.26 By comparison the field of Middle English prose was still largely uncharted, and Linne Mooney’s other main contribution to the discipline in the first part of her career was certainly her work indexing the Middle English prose found in the manuscripts of Trinity College Cambridge. The scale of this task should not be underestimated. The Wren Library contains the largest collection of medieval manuscripts of any college in Great Britain, and surveying its holdings for this purpose involved examining more than eight hundred manuscripts, many of them multiple times.27 The resulting volume, the 91–109, and ‘Almanacks from Script to Print’, in Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, ed. J. Scattergood and J. Boffey (Dublin, 1997), pp. 11–25. 23 ‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England” and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’, Viator 20 (1989), 255–89; see further Margaret Connolly’s essay in the present volume. 24 ‘“A Woman’s Reply to her Lover” and Four Other New Courtly Love Lyrics in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19’, Medium Aevum 67 (1998), 235–56. ‘A Late Fifteenth-century Woman’s Revision of Chaucer’s “Against Women Unconstant” and other Poems by the Same Hand’, The Chaucer Review 34 (2000), 344–9; for an earlier note (jointly authored with A. S. G. Edwards) of another discovery within the same early printed book, a copy of Caxton’s Dictes or Sayeingis of the Philosophres in the library of Trinity College Cambridge, see ‘A New Version of a Skelton Lyric’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1994), 507–11. 25 The Kingis Quair and other Prison Poems (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005). 26 The Index of Middle English Verse, ed. C. Brown and R. H. Robbins (New York, 1943) and Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse, ed. R. H. Robbins and J. L. Cutler (Lexington, 1965). 27 Mrs Gabriel Sewell, College Librarian, Christ Church, Oxford, who was a graduate trainee at the Wren Library in the 1990s, recalls the significant labour involved in fetching manuscripts for Linne: ‘Linne did get through heaps of MSS – but she was always very nice so nobody minded!’ (personal communication 12.8.20, cited with permission).

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first to cover any repository in Cambridge, was also the most ambitious in size and scope that the series had produced by that date: its 289 pages itemised well over a thousand texts written in Middle English prose, and brought to light a number of new or unrecorded items.28 Close knowledge of the textual contents of the Trinity collection, both prose and verse, may be perceived in many of Linne Mooney’s publications, several such as the editions mentioned above announcing empirical discoveries. But the enduring legacy of those many hours spent in the Wren Library was a deep familiarity with the nature of medieval books in terms of their appearance, size, shape, weight and feel, and a close acquaintance with their physical components: parchment, paper, ink, decoration, mise-enpage, and above all, script. A pair of manuscripts that Linne Mooney encountered in Cambridge, Trinity R.3.19 and R.3.21, are largely but not wholly the work of the same scribe. Her clear tabulation of the complex booklet construction of these two volumes revealed that the presence of five different scribal hands in R.3.19 was probably a random conjunction possibly arising from its later collation by John Stow. In R.3.21 on the other hand there was some evidence that the main scribe (at first dubbed ‘Scribe A’, later called the ‘Trinity anthologies scribe’) had collaborated with another.29 Identifying instances where scribes worked together had long been an object of interest because of what such collaborations might reveal about the circumstances of later medieval book production. An early investigation into the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ 19.2.1) by Laura Hubbard Loomis had posited the idea that this collection of romances and other texts must have been produced in a ‘bookshop’ where the work of its scribes, decorators and illuminators could have been co-ordinated.30 In their survey of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales John Manly and Edith Rickert also noted ‘signs of shop practice’ and ‘shop style’, and they judged that at least one copy, the Cardigan manuscript, ‘was certainly made in a shop’.31 Documentary evidence that John Shirley’s rental of property at St Bartholomew’s Hospital included four shops was taken as indicative of commercial book production by Hammond and Brusendorff, as also by later scholars, and the romance of the shop has 28 The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist XI: Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1995); details of texts freshly identified at that time are given on p. xiv. 29 ‘Scribes and Booklets of Trinity College, Cambridge, MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. Minnis (York, 2001), pp. 241–66; Holly James-Maddocks’ essay in the present volume builds on this work. 30 L. H. Loomis, ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330–1340’, PMLA 57 (1942), 595–627. 31 Manly and Rickert, eds, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, I, 60, 203, 72, and see other remarks about shop production at 24, 119, 225 and 423; the Cardigan manuscript is now Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center, MS 143.

INTRODUCTION

proved persistent, though roundly dismissed in the case of Shirley by A. I. Doyle in the early 1980s and later by Margaret Connolly.32 The notion of the shop relates to what could be readily understood from modern encounters with the book trade where, until recently, publishing generally took place under one roof and purchasing involved a pleasurable browsing of bookshop shelves. In the surroundings of the imaginary late medieval shop these two commercial activities of production and sale coalesce, and their actual existence on the same site becomes more credible in the context of printing; William Caxton and his successors undoubtedly did operate from such premises, but printing required substantial equipment whereas text-writing did not. Having investigated the network of scribes who inherited John Shirley’s books, and considering the potential commercial uses to which they might have put them, Linne Mooney eventually concluded that there was little evidence for anything other than a bespoke production of English literary manuscripts in London in the fifteenth century and ‘no evidence of book-producing shops’ where members of the various book-crafts (scribes, decorators, illuminators, binders) were all employed.33 This more nuanced approach to the evidence of scribal collaboration reinforced the conclusions reached by Doyle and Parkes who had resisted the assumption that the shared presence of scribal hands in a manuscript must indicate commercially-driven production co-ordinated from the same premises, pointing instead to more ad hoc collaborations that might arise from ‘the proximity of independent practitioners in the neighbourhoods of the metropolis’ where those crafts congregated.34 The ‘other’ scribe with whom the Trinity anthologies scribe briefly collaborated was the ‘Hammond scribe’, named after the early twentieth-century Chaucerian scholar Eleanor Prescott Hammond who first identified his hand in 1905.35 Linne Mooney was able to attribute to his hand another manuscript (Cambridge, Trinity College, O.3.11, a collection of legal documents), adding to other discoveries by A. I. Doyle, Richard Firth Green and Jeremy Griffiths, and increasing understanding of the very wide range of texts copied by a scribe initially pigeonholed as a ‘Chaucer scribe’.36 This scribe has emerged through her research as a complex figure, 32 E. P. Hammond, English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey (London, 1927), p. 191; Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition, pp. 217–18; A. I. Doyle, ‘English Books In and Out of Court’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 163–81 (p. 176); M. Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 2–9, 190–5. 33 ‘John Shirley’s Heirs: The Scribes of Manuscript Literary Miscellanies Produced in London in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003),182–98; ‘Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medieval London’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. M. Connolly and L. R. Mooney (York, 2008), pp. 183–204 (p. 186, her emphasis). 34 Doyle and Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies’, p. 201. 35 E. P. Hammond, ‘Two British Museum Manuscripts (Harley 2251 and Adds. 34360): A Contribution to the Bibliography of John Lydgate’, Anglia 28 (1905), 1–28. 36 ‘More Manuscripts Written by a Chaucer Scribe’, The Chaucer Review 30.4 (1996),

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variously connected with the household of Sir Thomas Cook, to the book trade, and to the offices of the Heralds in the Blackfriars: ‘he may well have worked in all of these milieux during a long career as a London scribe’.37 Matters such as the longevity of working careers, the movement of individuals from place to place or from one type of employment to another, the practice of moonlighting and the ability of trained scribes to produce different styles of writing to suit different purposes, along with other factors such as the likely impact of age or illness on the appearance of an individual’s handwriting, are just some of the complexities which characterise our present understanding of later medieval scribal culture.38 The tendency of scribes to produce multiple copies of the same text was another feature highlighted by Doyle and Parkes, and this ‘specialisation’ is a phenomenon that Linne Mooney has explored further, noting (with Lister Matheson) the five manuscripts of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle copied by the Beryn scribe, and furthering A. I. Doyle’s observations about the scribe of Bodl., MS Selden Supra 53 (the ‘Selden scribe’) to show that he was responsible for two copies of Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum as well as three copies of Lydgate’s Troy Book.39 Detecting the same scribal hands across different manuscripts, whether or not those manuscripts contain copies of the same texts, has been another aspect of her work, often undertaken collaboratively with other scholars; thus, for example, she and Dan Mosser have to date proposed that a total of four manuscripts were written by the ‘Cornhyll’ scribe.40 The factors that may have affected or motivated individual instances of medieval textual production are easier to comprehend if they can be matched to precise historical circumstance and, crucially, if a biographical 82–7; ‘A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Essays in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, R. Hanna, and V. Gillespie (London, 2000), pp. 113–23; and ‘The Scribe’, in Sex, Aging and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R.14.52, Its Language, Scribe, and Texts, ed. T. Tavormina (Phoenix, AZ, 2006), pp. 55–63. 37 ‘The Scribe’, pp. 62–3. 38 On the impact of illness see research by of one of Linne Mooney’s doctoral students, Deborah Thorpe, ‘Tracing Neurological Disorders in the Handwriting of Medieval Scribes: Using the Past to Inform the Future’, Journal of the Early Book Society 18 (2015), 241–8. 39 ‘The Beryn Scribe and his Texts: Evidence for Multiple-Copy Production of Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century England’, The Library, 7th s. 4.4 (2003), 347–70; ‘A Scribe of Lydgate’s Troy Book and London Book Production in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century’, in Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna, ed. S. Horobin and A. Nafde (Turnhout, 2017), pp. 29–42. Convenient summaries of instances of multiple copy production, and of the outputs of individual scribes, are included in her overview of ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and Their Scribes’, in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. A. Gillespie and D. L. Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 192–211. 40 ‘Another Manuscript by the Scribe “Cornhill”’, Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012), 277–87, building on their earlier article ‘The Belvoir Castle (Duke of Rutland) Manuscript of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009), 161–72 and the initial study solely by Mooney, ‘A New Scribe of Chaucer and Gower’, Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), 131–40.

INTRODUCTION

context is available. In their study of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2 Doyle and Parkes were able to use the fifth of their scribes, Scribe E, as the key to unlocking some facts about the manuscript’s date and likely place of production; this was possible because they had recognised his hand as that of Thomas Hoccleve, verifiable from Durham UL, MS Cosin V.iii.9 which Hoccleve had signed as both scribe and author. Hoccleve’s career as a Clerk of the Privy Seal meant that his life was directly documented in the public record and also that other information about his whereabouts and activities at particular times might be inferred from his own copying of official documents. Doyle and Parkes had cited two examples of the latter, and in the facsimile of Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts John Burrow and Doyle noted that ‘there should be more examples in the Public Record Office awaiting recognition than have yet been found’: following this lead Linne Mooney uncovered 150 documents in Hoccleve’s hand at the National Archives.41 Such archival work requires time and effort and diligent searching (Ralph Hanna has aptly characterised Linne as ‘a serious digger’), but the rewards can be rich: the hours spent consulting scrappy documents yielded information that filled in gaps in Hoccleve’s life and allowed the fine tuning of presumptive dates; and Linne has also (with Estelle Stubbs) turned up evidence of Hoccleve’s family background.42 Returning to a consideration of Hoccleve’s literary work she has argued on palaeographical, codicological and linguistic grounds that BL, MS Royal 17 D.xviii, a copy of the Regiment of Princes is in fact a holograph, and further that this manuscript was the one presented to John of Lancaster, later duke of Bedford; and most recently she has detected Hoccleve’s hand in a second manuscript of Confessio Amantis, BL, MS Egerton 913.43 Unfortunately for the study of fifteenth-century English scribal culture, Thomas Hoccleve is the exception rather than the rule, and only a few other scribes can be similarly identified with confidence and linked to their working environments. Like Hoccleve, John Capgrave (1393–1464) produced copies of his own works which included saints’ lives and chronicles written in both English and Latin, and he is visible in historical records because of his rank within the Augustinian order; Peter Lucas has studied Capgrave’s holographs and other manuscripts that contain his revisions, drawing attention to the scriptorium facilities that would 41 Thomas Hoccleve A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, with an Introduction by J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle, EETS SS 19 (Oxford, 2002), p. xxxiv; L. R. Mooney, ‘Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007), 293–340. 42 R. Hanna, Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers (Liverpool, 2013), p. 146; L. R. Mooney and E. Stubbs, ‘A Record Identifying Thomas Hoccleve’s Father’, Journal of the Early Book Society 14 (2011), 233–7. 43 ‘A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), 263–96; ‘Thomas Hoccleve in Another Confessio Amantis Manuscript’, Journal of the Early Book Society 22 (2019), 225–38.

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have been available to him whilst he was prior at Bishop’s Lynn.44 The Carthusian scribe Stephen Dodesham can be located at both Witham and Sheen, though A. I. Doyle cautioned that Dodesham’s long career might have included a spell as a professional scribe before he entered the order, which could explain the occurrence of secular texts (Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe and three copies of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes) amongst the twenty-two manuscripts in his hand.45 There are also other scribes who can be connected to specific locations and contexts. John Shirley lived in the close at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield towards the end of his life, and John Cok (c. 1392–1468), who was a brother there, compiled the hospital’s rental and annotated other manuscripts.46 William Ebesham lived in the Sanctuary at Westminster and copied manuscripts for the abbey though he was not a member of its religious community; he also worked for Sir John Paston and wrote Sir John’s ‘Grete Booke’, BL, MS Lansdowne 285.47 Geoffrey Spirleng, who with his son Thomas finished copying the Canterbury Tales (Glasgow UL, MS Hunter 197) in 1476, was a civic official in Norwich who had worked for Sir John Fastolf.48 These few are not of course the only known scribes: the landscape of later medieval scribal culture is not quite so barren. There are many others whose hands have been recognised across a number of manuscripts but for whom we do not know names. In such instances it is traditional to bestow an alias based on the title of the text, or name of the most significant or first encountered manuscript, or some particularly striking feature of the hand. In this way we have become acquainted with the Beryn scribe (the copyist of the unique Tale of Beryn in Alnwick Castle MS 455) and the Edmund-Fremund scribe, named by Kathleen Scott for his several copies of Lydgate’s Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund;49 we also know the Harley scribe (of the Harley lyrics) because of BL, MS Harley

44 Peter J. Lucas, From Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication (Dublin, 1997). 45 A. I. Doyle, ‘Stephen Dodesham of Witham and Sheen’, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers: Essay Presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. P. R. Robinson and R. Zim (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 94–115; for an updated list of manuscripts see Mooney, ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts’, p. 207 n. 52. 46 M. B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Aldershot, 2008), p. 38. 47 A. I. Doyle, ‘The Work of a Late Fifteenth-Century English Scribe, William Ebesham’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 39 (1957), 298–325, and updated list of manuscripts in Mooney, ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts’, p. 201 n. 38. 48 R. Beadle, ‘Geoffrey Spirleng (c. 1426–c. 1494): A Scribe of The Canterbury Tales in his Time’, in Of the Making of Books, ed. Robinson and Zim, pp. 116–46, and see most recently Ruth Frost, ‘A Brief Note on Geoffrey Spirleng, Co-Scribe of MS Hunter 197 (U.1.1), and His Compilation of the Old Free Book of Norwich, NRO, NCR Case 17c’, Journal of the Early Book Society 19 (2016), 241–8. 49 K. Scott, ‘Lydgate’s Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund: A Newly Located Manuscript in Arundel Castle’, Viator 13 (1982), 335–66.

INTRODUCTION

2253, and the Huntington HM 114 scribe as precisely that;50 and we were introduced to the ‘hooked-g scribe’ by A. S. G. Edwards in 1981.51 Where more than one scribal hand is present within the same manuscript the usual practice is to designate those hands alphabetically in order of first appearance; thus Doyle and Parkes labelled the five scribes of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2 as Scribes A–E, and designated another hand that was ‘remarkably close’ to Scribe D’s as ‘Scribe Delta’.52 We have gradually learned more about some of these scribes and their remits as other researchers have recognised their hands in different manuscripts or contexts. Although the Edmund-Fremund scribe seemed initially to be exclusively concerned with copying Lydgate’s works, Simon Horobin spotted his hand in fragments of a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales and A. I. Doyle noted that he transcribed portions of a Bury Pittancers’ Register, now BL, MS Harley 27.53 The Harley scribe (actually just one of four hands in BL, MS Harley 2253) copied two other manuscripts as well, and Carter Revard uncovered forty-one legal writs by his hand, thereby establishing that he was a legal professional in the Ludlow area.54 Such discoveries have been helpful in shading in details of context, such as the locations where literary scribes were active and the date ranges during which they operated, but despite these very real advances in knowledge one important aspect, the recovery of the actual names of scribes, has proved very difficult to advance. The namelessness of medieval scribes is a feature that particularly affects the textual culture of later medieval England because it was not the custom of English copyists to sign their work. By contrast on the continent French scribes were in the habit of signing their names and providing details about date and place through lengthy colophons: see, for example, the collection of French texts that was owned by John Shirley, Cambridge, UL, MS Ff.1.33, which was signed by its scribe, ‘Lepainteur’, 50 For the Harley scribe see n. 53 below. The Huntington scribe was first noticed by A. I. Doyle, ‘The Manuscripts’, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. D. A. Lawton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 88–100, notes pp. 142–7 (p. 94 and p. 144 n. 23); see also R. Hanna, ‘The Scribe of Huntington Hm 114’, Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989), 120–33, and updated list of manuscripts in Mooney, ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts’, p. 202 n. 39. 51 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Lydgate Manuscripts: Some Directions for Future Research’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 15–26 (p. 19). 52 Doyle and Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies’, pp. 164–85, and on the relationship of D and Delta, pp. 206–8. 53 S. Horobin, ‘The Edmund-Fremund Scribe Copying Chaucer’, Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009), 195–203; A. I. Doyle, Book Production by the Monastic Orders in England (1375–1530), in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. L. L. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills, 1990), pp. 1–19 (p. 7 and p. 18 note 37); and see updated list of manuscripts in Mooney, ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts’, p. 194 n. 38. 54 C. Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. S. Fein (Kalamazoo, 2000), pp. 21–109, and see also other essays in this collection.

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who also states that he copied it at Bourges in May 1420.55 Scottish scribes, whose work may have been influenced more by French than English practices, were also in the habit of identifying themselves: thus we know of Magnus Makculloch, James Gray and John Asloan, all of whom were notaries as well as scribes.56 Knowing a scribe’s name provides the key to unlocking information about their lives and locations; it is the single piece of information that is needed to connect with the biographical and social data encoded within historical records. Even so the task of looking for a named individual may still resemble the search for the needle in the haystack: too many commonly named individuals present themselves, and there are difficulties in distinguishing individuals who share the same first names and surnames, especially across different generations; but without a name the search cannot even be attempted. Not having a name also makes for an awkwardness in referencing, and sometimes an initial alias has proved ill-suited – witness Linne Mooney’s swift relabelling of ‘Scribe A’ of Cambridge, Trinity College, MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21 as the ‘Trinity anthologies’ scribe. With further discoveries, aliases may also start to pile up: after the publication of Doyle’s and Parkes’s 1978 article the Hengwrt/ Ellesmere scribe could also be referred to as the ‘Trinity Gower Scribe B’, or even ‘Doyle’s and Parkes’s Scribe B’. For all the scholarly efforts to understand the circumstances of later medieval book production in England, and for all the attention given to individual manuscripts and their cultural contexts, particularly from the 1980s onwards, by the end of the twentieth century the evidence amassed about professional scribes could still be described as ‘scant and at times seemingly contradictory’.57 In particular the question of personally identifying scribes remained stubbornly unadvanced, and no new discoveries had been made that allowed individual scribes to be known by their real names. This is the particular aspect of the study of Middle English scribal culture for which Linne Mooney has become known, following the publication of her article ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’ in which she gave the HengwrtEllesmere/Trinity Gower Scribe B scribe a name, introducing him as Adam Pinkhurst, a member of the Scriveners’ Company of London.58 The claim rests first and foremost on palaeographical evidence, and on the recognition of the scribal hand of the literary manuscripts in documentary sources, in this instance the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper and Cambridge, UL, MS Ff.1.33; for details see Connolly, John Shirley, p. 120. For details of these scribes see S. Mapstone, ‘The Transmission of Older Scots Literature’, in The International Companion to Scottish Literature 1400–1650, ed. N. Royan (Glasgow, 2018), pp. 38–59. 57 Mooney, ‘Professional Scribes?: Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript’, in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 131–41 (p. 137). 58 ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum 81 (2006), 97–138. 55

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the ‘Petition of the Folk of the Mercerie’, a petition to the King’s Council written on behalf of the Mercers’ Company of London.59 Helpfully, the first of these sources included both names and signatures, since it was the book in which new members of the Scriveners’ Company subscribed to their oaths of loyalty by adding their signatures and (if they had them) notarial marks. In the quest to identify individuals beyond reasonable doubt the signed document is the real jackpot. Regardless of the many documentary sources that refer to John Shirley, the only conclusive proof that the scribe who copied literary manuscripts in London in the first half of the fifteenth century really was the same man who served as secretary to Richard Beauchamp rests on a single letter that was written and signed by Shirley on behalf of the earl; its scribal characteristics are demonstrably the same as those evidenced in his literary anthologies.60 Employing this same methodology in Scribes and the City Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs proposed further scribal identifications: Doyle’s and Parkes’s Scribe D was named as John Marchaunt; the scribe of Huntington HM 114 as Richard Osbarn; and the scribe of the Campsall manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde (Morgan, MS M. 817) and two copies of Confessio Amantis as John Carpenter. All of these men worked at the Guildhall, a centre that employed a number of clerks to record the business of the mayor and aldermen of the city of London, and the importance of this location as a centre for vernacular literary production was now presented as a rival to Westminster, constituting ‘a central London clearing house for Middle English literature’.61 These are significant discoveries, not just because of the novelty of naming some of the actual people who produced copies of well-known Middle English poems, but because of the further inferences that might be drawn from them about the scribes’ relationship with the texts they copied and their potential connections with the authors of those texts. This was true for Adam Pinkhurst most of all: the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts had long been regarded as the most important copies of the Canterbury Tales, arguably the most important work written by certainly the most important and well-known poet of fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer, known to the general public for more than three hundred years as the ‘Father of English Poetry’.62 Added to this was the fact that all students of Chaucer already believed that the Christian name London, Guildhall MS 5370; TNA SC 8/20/997. M. Connolly, ‘A Newly Identified Letter in the Hand of John Shirley’, The Library, 6th s. 19.3 (1997), 242–7. 61 Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375–1425 (York, 2013), p. 132. 62 So designated by John Dryden, Fables ancient and modern translated into verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, and Chaucer, with original poems by Mr Dryden (London, 1700), Preface, sig. B2r. 59

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of his errant scribe was Adam, from the short poem ‘Adam Scriveyn’ in which the author berates his copyist for poor work.63 Not surprisingly the unveiling of Chaucer’s scribe caught the public imagination in the way that probably no other discovery about a medieval scribe ever has or could.64 Not surprisingly too there has been consequent anxiety to verify the suggestion, involving extensive scrutiny of the methodology that led to it and the evidence that underpins it; and as would be expected with any major research development there have been challenges, responses and lively further debate. In Scribes and the City Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs offered more analysis themselves, especially in relation to Adam Pinkhurst’s affiliation with the Guildhall; the chapter devoted to Pinkhurst in this volume re-evaluated previous tentative conclusions about the presence of his hand in the Mercers’ accounts, responded to objections about the use of the ‘Adam Scriveyn’ poem as corroborating evidence, and pieced together a new timeline for the scribe. Whether all the proposed identifications of scribes and hands offered will hold will only be established over time. It is surely unlikely that all details will prove to be one hundred per cent correct; very few scholars who work in complex fields can hope to get everything right all of the time, and publishing corrections to one’s own work – or filtering those corrections and adjustments through the work of others by the generous sharing of information and knowledge – is an honourable modus operandi. Palaeography is an area that is especially prone both to disagreement amongst practitioners and to advances based on collaboration: two or more sets of eyes will frequently see things differently, and are always better than one set. The cumulative knowledge that comes from experience and exposure to large numbers of manuscripts, and from the repeated and increased scrutiny of particular examples of script, also necessitates the regular adjustment of conclusions. Linne Mooney’s own overview of scribal production and the challenges involved in this area is set out in her essay ‘Professional Scribes?: Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript’. This contains a number of cautions about the practice of palaeography and scribal identification, notably the warning that increased access to reproductions of scribal hands (now in fact far more ubiquitous even since this essay’s publication in 2000) has generated ‘a false sense that such identification is now easy’.65 Easy it is not, though conversely initial recognition of a hand may in fact be intuitive, as A. I. Doyle explained:

The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford, 1987), p. 650. The announcement was actually made at the New Chaucer Society Congress, University of Glasgow, July 2004, and was reported on BBC Radio 4’s Today news programme and in The Guardian, ‘The Scrivener’s Tale: how Chaucer’s Sloppy Copyist was Unmasked after 600 Years’, The Guardian (20 July 2004) [accessed 26 August 2020]. 65 In New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 131–41 (p. 139). 63

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There really is no mystique … about recognizing the individuality of a handwriting. Many people do it unanalytically every day at home and at work, identifying the writers of envelopes and unsigned notes just as they do faces and voices. They may make mistakes, but surprisingly rarely. Such ability arises from close acquaintance and it is strengthened by a wider range of experience. Some people have the advantage of sharper eyes, better memories, and a sounder sense of circumstances.66

On this question of the correctness of palaeographical identifications it seems most appropriate to allow Ian Doyle the last word here, and to quote his own wisdom in relation to the scribe who copied the Ellesmere manuscript: The paleographer cannot prove his conjectures with living witnesses. He can only offer his perceptions and arguments for other people, interested and experienced enough in the area under view, to examine and accept, to modify, or to reject.67

* A. I. Doyle’s wise comments above reveal something of the loneliness of the palaeographer’s work, but elsewhere he stressed the vital importance of working collaboratively: It is impossible to pursue manuscript studies nowadays satisfactorily in individual isolation, for one cannot find all one ought to know by oneself and one ought not to keep all one knows to oneself; the jigsaw puzzle we are all working on is so big that it may need the help of every eye to try to fit a piece in it.68

Linne Mooney certainly cannot be accused of keeping things jealously to herself. Her palaeographical studies lay out their underlying data and analysis, usually in lengthy appendices which describe the minutiae of letterforms and graphs, accompanied by images that allow others to check or form their own judgments. Most generously she has shared her own database of medieval scribal hands, built up over many years, through the form of the Late Medieval Scribes website, a resource that has been freely available since 2011, and which has become widely relied upon in the teaching of later medieval palaeography as well as for research.69 The website was one outcome from a large research grant to investigate the 66 A. I. Doyle, ‘The Copyist of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales’, in The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. M. Stevens and D. Woodward (San Marino and Tokyo, 1995), pp. 49–67 (p. 65). 67 Ibid. 68 A. I. Doyle, ‘Retrospect and Prospect’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 142–6 (pp. 145–6). 69 See [accessed 26 August 2020].

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scribes responsible for copying the major works of Middle English literature, a project undertaken jointly with Simon Horobin and Estelle Stubbs; its development was also assisted by Michael Pidd and by Daniel Mosser. Linne Mooney has worked extensively with Horobin, Stubbs and Mosser in investigating these and other scribes, and with Mosser, Elizabeth Solopova, Deborah Thorpe and others in developing DIMEV, an open-access digital edition of the Index of Middle English Verse.70 Work that she has done with other scholars has been extended or corroborated by the further work of other researchers. For example, the conclusion she and A. S. G. Edwards reached in 1991 that the Equatorie of the Planetis was not likely to be by Chaucer (they found evidence of any connection ‘very tenuous indeed’ and ‘alarmingly ambiguous’) has recently been reinforced by Kari Anne Rand’s identification of its author as John Westwyk, a monk at St Albans.71 The typically slow pace of scholarly advance in this area might be noted: Rand’s findings were published exactly sixty years after the appearance of D. J. Price’s edition of the text, and after much intervening debate as to whether the text’s unique manuscript constituted a holograph.72 Similarly gradual advances have been achieved in relation to the study of scribal hands, and sometimes, as with Linne Mooney’s and Daniel Mosser’s investigations of the Beryn scribe and the ‘hooked-g’ scribe, these have offered more nuanced refinements to the initial identification and the suggestion instead that what is involved is not a single figure but a ‘school’ or group of scribes.73 The likelihood that overall impressions and conclusions will need adjustment is honestly acknowledged in the Epilogue to Scribes and the City, which articulates the degree to which it was possible to define the picture at the time of publication: Although we are not as certain of some identifications as of others, together they support one another, forming a substantial body of evidence for the copying of Middle English literature by clerks at the Guildhall. We therefore offer this book as a first step toward recognizing the importance of the Guildhall secretariat in the dissemination of Middle English literature and the introduction of English as the language of commerce and government, and we encourage other scholars in the field to take further steps to complete the journey of discovery.74

See [accessed 26 August 2020]. L. R. Mooney and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Is the “Equatorie of the Planetis” a Chaucer Holograph?’, The Chaucer Review 26.1 (1991), 30–41 (p. 38); K. A. Rand, ‘The Authorship of The Equatorie of the Planetis Revisited’, Studia Neophilologica 87 (2015), 15–35. 72 The Equatorie of the Planetis, ed. D. J. Price (Cambridge, 1955). 73 ‘More Manuscripts by the “Beryn” Scribe and his Cohort’, The Chaucer Review 49.1 (2014), 39–76; ‘The Case of the Hooked-g Scribe(s) and the Production of Middle English Literature c. 1460–c. 1490’, The Chaucer Review 51.2 (2016), 131–50. 74 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, p. 141.

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As well as underscoring the vital need for researchers to collaborate, this statement also reminds us that the fitting together of individual pieces of the puzzle is a self-regulating exercise; ultimately the pieces only fit properly in one way, meaning that subsequent discoveries can confirm or correct previous ones. This methodology, the ‘fit’ technique, is the one that underpins The Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, itself an important tool in research on medieval scribes because of its ability to show where scribes had come from in linguistic terms.75 The recognition that language, as well as script, may prove helpful in determining scribal identity, has been an important strand throughout Linne Mooney’s research and she has increasingly argued for the need to pay attention to elements of decoration, illustration and illumination, and to the nature of interactions between text-writers, border artists and limners.76 Art historians as well as historians, and specialists of medieval language as well as literary scholars, all need to combine efforts to achieve real advances. It is appropriate then that the thirteen new essays collected in this volume in honour of Linne Mooney bring a range of perspectives – dialectal, textual, art historical, as well as palaeographical and codicological – to the study of the manuscript book and the varied environments (professional, administrative, mercantile, ecclesiastical) where books were produced and used during the period 1300–1550. Amongst these essays are studies of manuscripts of those major writers – Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower – who have featured so prominently in Linne Mooney’s own research: Dan Mosser offers a descriptive survey of the other texts that appear in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, and Joel Fredell revisits the puzzle of regnal dedications in manuscripts of Confessio Amantis. Other major fourteenth-century writers and texts are not neglected: Michael Sargent makes a study of the mise-en-page of the manuscripts of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, focussing as does Fredell on codicological features in order to draw out textual and critical implications; and Ralph Hanna returns to the ‘resolutely anonymous’ Speculum Vitae, which he edited for the Early English Text Society, offering here a study of the scribe Thomas Aldfield.77 In this essay Hanna partially retracts his previous suggestion that ecclesiastical individuals and institutions were almost certainly of central importance in the poem’s dissemination, which is an indication of the way in which understanding of any area is accretive and organic, and an important reminder that it is perfectly acceptable for scholars to change

McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin, LALME, I, 23–8. For language see particularly (with S. Horobin), ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe and its Implications for London Standard English’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004), 65–112; on collaboration with artists see especially, ‘A Scribe of Lydgate’s Troy Book’, p. 42. 77 Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. R. Hanna, EETS OS 331 and 332 (Oxford, 2008), p. lx. 75

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their minds as they go along.78 A wide range of shorter works, including lyric poems, chronicles and other historical texts, receives attention in this volume too, principally through the essays of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Wendy Scase, Margaret Connolly and Susan Powell, and both Connolly and Powell pay attention to the format of the roll as well as the codex. Naturally in these essays there is considerable attention to metropolitan scribal culture, and especially to book-making activities in the vicinity of the London Guildhall. Fredell’s essay discusses how the cluster of manuscripts of Confessio Amantis produced in this neighbourhood in the first two decades of the fifteenth century share textual and artistic similarities. Estelle Stubbs focuses squarely on the London scribes she and Linne Mooney have previously named, aiming to integrate the knowledge gained into a larger history of commercial literary manuscript production in the early fifteenth century. Such was always the ultimate ambition of A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, and their pioneering work in that regard has been taken further by both Linne Mooney and Stubbs herself. Textual production outwith London also receives attention: Hanna’s scribe was a papal notary in the York diocese, but his essay explores the possibility that Ripon, or a variety of monastic centres in that vicinity, might have been the actual location where the scribe wrote. The creation of personal miscellanies, notebooks and compilations, which developed from increased levels of wealth and education in the fifteenth century, are also part of the overall picture, and Wendy Scase’s account of Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516 focuses on the kinds of considerations that need to be brought to bear to understand such singular forms of book production. This volume’s focus is ostensibly on the scribal culture of late medieval England but all frontiers are necessarily porous, and books and readers are no respecters of borders: thus the collection’s geographical scope extends in the east to Flanders and specifically to Ghent through Martha Driver’s essay, and in the west to Waterford and the Dublin Pale through Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s study of Middle Hiberno-English texts. The artificiality of borders is especially underlined by Sebastian Sobecki’s analysis of English documents produced in France during the Hundred Years War. Examining the output of the mobile administrative regime during the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI, Sobecki reveals how English scribes ‘went native’ and adopted the French habit of signing their work, a practice which allows him to track and trace the identities of many early fifteenth-century signet clerks. And many of these essays pay some attention to ‘English’ textual production of material in Latin and Anglo-French, and to the documentary materials (letters, charters, writs) that medieval scribes produced alongside literary texts. The chronological coverage of this collection runs from the early fourteenth century to the sixteenth, 78 Hanna’s initial conclusions were published in ‘The Yorkshire Circulation of Speculum Vitae’, in Design and Distribution, ed. Connolly and Mooney, pp. 279–91 (p. 291).

INTRODUCTION

with a rich concentration on scribal production in the fifteenth century, and with concomitant attention to circulation, book use and reader reception extending into the early modern period. Simon Horobin’s study of a late fifteenth-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales tracks annotations amongst its leaves by Stephan Batman, noting overlaps with the textual content of John Stow’s edition of Chaucer’s Works, and providing a snapshot of the continuities in reading and the different types of interest in medieval texts and manuscripts that persisted beyond the watershed of the English Reformation. Susan Powell’s account of the Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey and its analogues and copies considers the inclusion of its main text, the Abbey’s Chronicle, in a volume of antiquarian material collected by Francis Thynne, along with transcriptions by both Thynne himself and his contemporary John Stow. Similar evidence of collaborative, sociable collecting in the early modern period is adduced by Wendy Scase in her codicologically-informed reassessment of the manuscript owned by, but perhaps not compiled by, John Benet, vicar of Harlington in the late fifteenth century. These essays, and others such as that by Holly James-Maddocks, provide valuable indications that the early modern networks of owners and other handlers of late medieval manuscripts were at least as intricate as the complex inter-relations of authors, scribes, artists and patrons that first produced them, and remind us that scribal production and book circulation and reception are all important elements to consider if we are to gain a fuller understanding of the nature of later medieval manuscripts. These essays respond to the distinguished scholarship of Linne Mooney, Emerita Professor of Palaeography at the University of York; they are offered by her former students, collaborators and friends. A wider range of offerings, by a wider range of contributors, was possible at the celebratory event held at King’s Manor in May 2019, and some of the essays included here had their first airing on that occasion. A former student of Linne’s at York, Daryl Green, now Head of Special Collections at the University of Edinburgh, has compiled the list of her publications, and her most esteemed predecessor at York, Derek Pearsall, offers a personal tribute in the form of an Afterword. These essays present brand new scholarship on the scribal cultures of later medieval England, a research field that continues to be vibrant, and one that has been shaped, stimulated and energised by Linne Mooney’s determined digging.

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PART I INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

HOW ENGLISH IS IT? MARTHA W. DRIVER

W

hat makes an English book English in the fifteenth century? In our Index of Images catalogue, Michael Orr and I include a section called ‘Continental Manuscripts Made for the English Market’.1 These manuscripts, containing often extensive illumination and made in France or Flanders, have English features or English texts and, when provenance is known, were made for English owners. Three of these are Books of Hours now in the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, New York. In one Sarum Hours (Morgan M. 46), possibly copied in Ghent, English miniatures have been added to supplement already plentiful Flemish illustration, painted on versos with blank rectos; these are mainly of English saints, lending further appeal for an English reader or owner. Another Book of Hours in the Morgan (M. 314) shows evidence of similar interventions on a less grand scale, while a third, Morgan M. 105, was made for an English patron and painted by a French artist known to have worked for both French and English patrons. This essay examines these three manuscripts as examples of a larger impulse to adopt, adapt or claim books made in France and Flanders by fifteenth-century English readers and patrons, with a special focus on the hybridity or transnational character of such texts. Questions to be raised (if not entirely answered) are: Where were these books made? How were they made? For whom were they made? Morgan M. 314, the first manuscript under consideration, has been little studied. This is an Hours of the Virgin for the use of Rome made in the late fourteenth century, probably in Tournai in Belgium (Flanders). This is unusual in itself, as the majority of Books of Hours made or intended for English readers are for Sarum or Salisbury use, and it is perhaps no coincidence that this little manuscript with its Rome Hours was later bound in seventeenth-century Italian calf and turned up in Naples by the eighteenth

1 M. W. Driver and M. T. Orr, An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII, Fascicle Four, New York City, Columbia University – Union Theological, ed. K. L. Scott (London, 2007), pp. 67–75.

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century.2 The prayers are preceded by a calendar for northern England that was appended later, likely in the fifteenth century. All are copied on vellum. The calendar script mimics that in the main text. The readily identifiable English saints, or saints associated with England, in the calendar are St George (d. c. 303), patron saint of England and patron of the Order of the Garter, and Thomas Becket (1118–70), archbishop and martyr, along with Crispin and Crispinian (d. c. 285), familiar to modern readers from Henry’s famous rousing speech before Agincourt, the fight on their feast day, in William Shakespeare’s Henry V.3 Crispin and Crispinian, though Roman in origin, had an active cult in England centred in Faversham, where, it was said, they lived after fleeing persecution, plying their trade as shoemakers on the grounds of the Swan Inn in Preston Street, a site visited by English and Continental pilgrims through the seventeenth century.4 Other saints included here who are typically found in calendars of Sarum Hours are David, or Dewi, the patron saint of Wales (d. 601 or 589); St Brendan (c. 486–c. 575) the Navigator, who had cults in Durham, Exeter and York, as well as in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany; Remi or Remigius (d. 533), whose translation feast was celebrated by English Benedictine monasteries on October 1; Clement (d. c. 100), pope and martyr; and Milburge, or Milburga (d. 715), an abbess whose ‘feast was common in English calendars from the Bosworth Psalter (c. 1000) onwards’.5 The feast of St Bavo (also called Allowin, d. c. 655), the patron of Ghent and Haarlem in Holland, appears here and is frequently noted in calendars for Rome and Sarum use as well as in Flemish ones. Two mentions are made in this calendar of St Eloi (Eligius, Loy, c. 588–660), bishop of Noyon and Tournai, once on 25 June, the date of his translation, and again on 1 December, for his feast day. He was well known in England (readers of Chaucer recall the Prioress’s daintily swearing ‘by Seint Loy’ in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales).6 Eloi served as counsellor to another saint cited in the calendar of M. 314, Batildis, or Bathild (d. 680), the Anglo-Saxon slave girl who later married Clovis II. Both saints appear in the calendars of French, Flemish and Sarum Books of Hours. Judging from these examples, the calendar is predominantly English, or Sarum, though the Hours in the rest are for the use of Rome, which is 2 Morgan Library & Museum, curatorial description ‘M. 314’ [accessed 6 July 2020]. 3 Act 4, scene 3, ll. 18–67 (see ll. 40, 43, 46, 48, 57): King Henry V, The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series, ed. T. W. Craik (London, 1995), pp. 290–1. For analysis of this speech in later contexts, see M. W. Driver, ‘“We Band of Brothers”: Rousing Speeches from Robin Hood to Black Knight’, in Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, ed. R. Evans, H. Fulton, and D. Matthews (Cardiff, 2006), pp. 91–106 (pp. 91–3; Appendix A, pp. 99–100). 4 D. H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1982), p. 93. 5 Ibid., p. 279. 6 The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson et al., 3rd edn (Oxford, 1987), p. 25 (l. 120).

HOW ENGLISH IS IT?

somewhat unusual. The manuscript is illustrated with five illuminations that are also odd. Framed by Gothic borders typical of Netherlandish work, the scenes of the Crucifixion (fol. 31v), Annunciation to the Shepherds (fol. 73v), Adoration of the Magi (fol. 78v), the Flight into Egypt (fol. 86v) and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (fol. 93v) seem conventional enough in their iconography but peculiar in the overpainting and inking over of several of the faces. These have been given large round rosy cheeks, white skin and piercing eyes, with some modelling of features at a later date. In the first miniature, of the Crucifixion (fol. 31v, Fig. 1), which also introduces the main text, someone has gone in with a pen and emended the face of Christ to ill effect, also adding dabs of blood to the five wounds and inking in details in the faces of Mary and John. The picture looks rubbed or lightly damaged, and the additions may have been a poorly executed attempt at restoration. There is also rubbing or wear elsewhere, notably in the illumination of the Adoration of the Magi (fol. 78v). Saskia van Bergen notes English overpainting of an illumination in a Book of Hours sold at Sotheby’s, in which the original painting of Mary Magdalene has been retouched to represent St Anne; covering over the Magdalene’s ointment jar is a banderole labelled ‘Santa Anna’.7 Van Bergen explains that this was likely a stock leaf added to the volume later and emended to fit the text. In the case of M. 314, the details in the illuminations seem to have been painted or inked over to correct damage as well as to suit a later owner’s taste. As Nicholas Rogers observes, ‘Some stock products of Flemish workshops were personalized soon after their arrival in England’.8 Rogers remarks further that ‘many Flemish books of hours were assembled, with inserted full-page miniatures on singletons with blank versos’.9 In Morgan M. 314, the miniatures all appear on versos of otherwise blank leaves which also seems to indicate that these miniatures were, at some early stage, tipped in. Four of the blank recto sides are faced by ruled leaves without script, as if the scribe left a bit too much room at the end of each of the sections of the book. Only on folio 72v is the text preceding the image almost fully copied out; this is then again followed by a blank recto, with the Annunciation to the Shepherds on the verso. On folio 85v, on the ruled leaf facing the blank leaf, with the Flight into Egypt on the verso, a much later italic hand has contributed a note in Latin (reading 7 S. van Bergen, ‘The Production of Flemish Books of Hours for the English Market: Standardization and Workshop Practices’, in Manuscripts in Transition: Recycling Manuscripts, Texts and Images. Proceedings of the International Congress Held in Brussels (5–9 November 2002), ed. B. Dekeyzer and J. van der Stock (Leuven, 2005), pp. 271–83 (p. 279). 8 N. Rogers, ‘Patrons and Purchasers: Evidence for the Original Owners of Books of Hours Produced in the Low Countries for the English Market’, in ‘Als Ich Can’: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, ed. B. Cardon et al. (Leuven, 2002), pp. 1165–81 (p. 1170). 9 Ibid., p. 1169.

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FIG. 1 CRUCIFIXION, FLEMISH WITH EMENDATION BY ENGLISH HAND OR HANDS, MORGAN M. 314, HOURS FOR ROME USE, C. 1400, FOL. 31V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

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in part, natus est Jesus). On folio 93r, the blank leaf preceding Christ’s Presentation in the Temple, there is an ownership mark that has almost entirely faded (Ex libris Giusephe Rossi), possibly in the same hand that has contributed further information on folio 123r, another blank; this inscription has suffered a very clumsy attempt at restoration that has now almost obliterated it.10 While the Morgan catalogue describes this as ‘a typical example of poor Flemish workmanship of about 1400’, someone liked it well enough in the fifteenth century to add an English calendar and to repaint the miniatures, ‘most likely in England’.11 Later still this book travelled to Italy. This little Book of Hours is a good example of English appropriation or claiming of a work not perhaps initially intended for English use. The book has become English through the intervention of its owners. Like Morgan M. 314, Morgan M. 46 includes prayers for Rome use, in this case, the Offices of the Dead, prefaced by an English calendar. It further contains the Hours of the Virgin for Sarum Use, which suggests English ownership. Ten of the thirty illuminations were painted by an English artist; the remaining twenty miniatures have been attributed to the Master of Guillebert de Mets, who himself is somewhat of a conundrum. M. R. James discerned the hands of both an English and a Flemish scribe; the English scribe appears first on folio 11r in the memoria for St Anne and then intermittently, though discernible particularly in the memoriae, writing on folio 44r to introduce St Erkenwald (on fol. 44r), for example, and again on folio 45r, before the miniature of St Etheldreda (fol. 45v).12 The ink of English script is dark; the hand is upright and spikey, with letters placed close together, giving the impression of compression. The Flemish scribe writes a rounder script with less shading in a lighter ink. This early fifteenth-century manuscript is said to have been written and illuminated in Belgium, possibly in Ghent, about 1420 with additions in England, made also in 1420. What is one to make of this? Morgan M. 46 is best known for its Flemish, not English, illuminations, painted by the Master of Guillebert de Mets. As one of ‘the core group of Books of Hours’ with illuminations by this Master, M. 46 is an important 10 The inscription reads, ‘Dno Francesco / Amoris sui / momento didit / anno 1707 / In Oratino Collegio / Servitani Neapolitani’. Someone later, in a clumsy attempt to restore the page, has painted it over with a substance, perhaps oak gall, once thought to bring up faded ink. Damage wrought by later attempts to sharpen medieval script is seen in a number of manuscripts, for example in London, College of Arms, MS Warwick, the Latin Rous Roll which was censored shortly after the time of its making and damaged still further, likely by a later well-intentioned antiquary. 11 Driver and Orr, Index of Images, p. 74. 12 M. R. James, Catalogue of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books from the Libraries of William Morris, Richard Bennett Bertram Fourth Earl of Ashburnham, and Other Sources. Manuscripts, 4 vols. (London, 1906), IV, 121–3 (item 78). James incorrectly identifies fol. 10r as the start of the memoria for Anne, and notes that the ‘Memoriae are in two sets, one Flemish, one English’ (p. 122).

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witness in the establishment of the artist’s work.13 Friedrich Winkler first named the Master of Guillebert de Mets after the scribe who copied and signed a manuscript of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5070) for Philip the Good of Burgundy. The scribe lived in Geraardsbergen in east Flanders; the artist, close by in Ghent, supplied about one-third of the miniatures in the Decameron manuscript and is described by Roger Wieck as one ‘of the two leading illuminators in Flanders of the second quarter of the fifteenth century’.14 Lilian Randall identifies this artist as active in Paris and the southern Netherlands from around 1410 to 1445. However, the problem posed by this artist, as with other artists of late medieval manuscripts, is that it is uncertain whether there is one or many. Gregory T. Clark notes the dissimilarities between manuscripts attributed to the Master of Guillebert de Mets, saying that at this point: we cannot responsibly assert there is one or more than one Guillebert Master; that there is one or more than one Guillebert atelier; that the shop or shops were located in this or that center; or that the atelier or ateliers operated during this or that period of time.15

The distribution of English illuminations in the volume is interesting. The Hours opens with an English calendar, followed by the Suffrages to the Trinity, illustrated by thirteen miniatures in the hand (or style) of the Master of Guillebert de Mets; the first is a depiction of the Trinity (fol. 7v). These Flemish illustrations include several English saints, for example, St Edward the Confessor (fol. 15v), St George (fol. 27v) and St Alban (fol. 35v), along with a dramatic scene of the murder of St Thomas Becket at the altar (fol. 25v). There is also a lovely miniature of the Annunciation (fol. 47v, Fig. 2), in which the angel’s wings break the frame as God in heaven looks on and the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. The first miniature in an English hand appears on folio 37v (an angel as seraph standing on a wheel with a soul in prayer, Fig. 3) with a blank recto; the next is a picture of St Erkenwald as a bishop (fol. 44v, Fig. 4), quickly followed by a painting of St Etheldreda (fol. 45v), which suggests 13 L. M. C. Randall et al., Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery. Volume III: Belgium, 1250–1530, 2 parts (Baltimore, 1997), I, 130 (item 231), describing Walters 170, a Book of Hours for the use of Rome, with associations with the Master of Guillebert de Mets. 14 Much has been written about the Master of Guillebert de Mets. See G. T. Clark, Made in Flanders: The Master of the Ghent Privileges and Manuscript Painting in the Southern Netherlands in the Time of Philip the Good (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 54–5; G. T. Clark, ‘The Master of Guillebert de Mets, Philip the Good, and the Breviary of John the Fearless’, in The Limbourg Brothers: Reflections on the Origins and the Legacy of Three Illuminators from Nijmegen, ed. R. Dückers and P. Roelofs (Leiden, 2009), pp. 191–210 (pp. 205–8); R. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1997), p. 111 (item 86). 15 Clark, Made in Flanders, p. 55.

FIG. 2 ANNUNCIATION, ATTRIBUTED TO THE MASTER OF GUILLEBERT DE METS, MORGAN M. 46, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, OFFICES OF THE DEAD FOR ROME USE, C. 1425, FOL. 47V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

FIG. 3 ANGEL WITH SOUL IN PRAYER, ENGLISH ARTIST, MORGAN M. 46, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, OFFICES OF THE DEAD FOR ROME USE, C. 1425, FOL. 37V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

FIG. 4 ST ERKENWALD, ENGLISH ARTIST, MORGAN M. 46, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, OFFICES OF THE DEAD FOR ROME USE, C. 1425, FOL. 44V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

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that the English artist (or artists?) is filling out the rest of the illumination of the Suffrages. Then follows an illumination of the Annunciation (fol. 47v), introducing the text of Matins in the Hours of the Virgin for Sarum use, in the hand, again, of the Master of Guillebert de Mets. On folio 53v, the English artist contributes a Passion sequence that begins with a miniature of the Agony in the Garden (Fig. 5); then Betrayal (fol. 64v), Christ before Pilate (fol. 68v) and Christ bearing the Cross (fol. 71v). The Master of Guillebert de Mets picks up at this point, contributing a Crucifixion (fol. 74v) to introduce None. The English artists produce the next two images, a Deposition (fol. 77v) and Entombment (fol. 80v). The next three images, of the Virgin in Glory (fol. 85v), Christ in Judgment (fol. 99v) and a scene with an angel holding the Arma Christi that introduces the Penitential Psalms (fol. 103v), have been painted by the Master of Guillebert de Mets. These are followed by a representation of the Vigil of the Dead (fol. 119v) painted by the English artist or artists. The last two illuminated folios (fol. 148v, a Pietà, and fol. 156v, St Jerome) have been made by the Master of Guillebert de Mets. So the manuscript is in effect enclosed by Flemish images, with the English illuminations employed to fill out the calendar and interspersed between Flemish ones to illuminate English saints or to introduce sections of text. As in Morgan M. 314, the majority of illuminations are painted on versos with blank rectos; all of the illustrations by the Master of Guillebert de Mets have blank rectos. Four of the ten English illuminations, however (St Erkenwald, Etheldreda, the Agony in the Garden and the Betrayal), have text on their rectos written in the hand of the English scribe that is continuous with the rest. What might that imply? While the Flemish images, with their blank rectos, were likely tipped in or added later, the text on the rectos of the English images could suggest either that the English images were planned as a part of the book’s original program or that the book was put together in parts. The calendar is English, including the feast days of Richard, Cuthbert, Edward, Edmund and other English saints. The suffrages include saints Alban (3rd century), Erkenwald (d. 693), bishop of Lincoln, Etheldreda (d. 679), foundress and abbess of Ely, and Thomas Becket (1118–70). The litany further cites English saints, among them, Sexburga (679–c. 700), abbess of Ely, Milburga (d. 715), abbess and daughter of the king of Mercia, and Osytha (d. c. 700), an Anglo-Saxon princess of Essex. Then there is St Bavo, who appears in the litany (fol. 113v). The Morgan catalogue cites Bavo as one of the two reasons this manuscript has been localised to Ghent (where there was an important Benedictine monastery dedicated to Bavo). However, as we have seen, Bavo appears also in the calendar of M. 314, a Book of Hours with English features which has been localised to Tournai. The other reason for the Ghent localisation is that the spellings of ‘Cypriaen’ (fol. 112v) and ‘Aghata’ (fol. 114r) in the litany are Flemish; since these pages were copied by the Flemish scribe, rather than by the English

FIG. 5 AGONY IN THE GARDEN, ENGLISH ARTIST, MORGAN M. 46, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, OFFICES OF THE DEAD FOR ROME USE, C. 1425, FOL. 53V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

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one, this seems slender evidence on which to localise the production of the manuscript. Like Morgan M. 314, M. 46 also found a later life, this time in Spain, in the sixteenth century, as a flyleaf inscription in Spanish indicates (fol. vr) at the start of the volume. On 4 February 1562, as he notes, Ruy Flores de Herrera, secretary of the Inquisitor, at the Castle of Triana, near Seville, approved this Book of Hours for reading after a few changes had been made. There are, however, no clear marks of earlier ownership. Rogers hypothesises several possible owners: [The] presence of St. Edward may suggest a court connection, while St. Alban may hint at a link with Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who regarded Alban as his special patron.16

Because St Gatian, the first bishop of Tours, appears in the manuscript, Rogers points to another possibility: John Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (d. 1435).17 Fitzalan was lieutenant in the Duke of Bedford’s garrisons in Rouen to 1433, and was captain of Vernon (1431–4), also captain of Verneuil (1432–5); he became duke of Touraine in 1434. He spent most of his career in France and died there after his leg was amputated following the battle to take the fortress of Gerberoy.18 In the text there is subtle addition of red ink to the letter ‘J’ in the name ‘John’ in three instances, with reference to John the Baptist (fol. 18r), John the Evangelist (fol. 22r) and to a ‘Johannes’ in the litany (fol. 113r, Fig. 6), but whether this has any direct bearing on the manuscript’s original owner is unclear. Further, the pages of the manuscript are decorated with French initials and French border work. The Morgan catalogue notes that: Typical of this period in Northern France is the form of the initial I on f. 67 and 145v and the blue and gold ornamental line endings on f. 146, 146v and throughout the Litany.

The catalogue further cites the ‘naturalistic French violets’ in the border on folio 22r and ‘fleur-de lisée backgrounds’ on folios 19v and 21v. So, in this single manuscript, one may observe the work of possibly two English artists, illumination by the Flemish Master of Guillebert de Mets, the writing of English and Flemish scribes, and decoration, borders and initials supplied by French artists. The Morgan catalogue attributes this manuscript’s making to ‘a busy atelier working for the foreign trade with laxity of supervision and a changing staff ’, which seems apt.19 Rogers, ‘Patrons and Purchasers’, p. 1168. Ibid., p. 1168 n. 32. 18 A. Curry, ‘Fitzalan, John, seventh earl of Arundel (1408–1435)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. 19 A letter from the great art historian Erwin Panofsky in the Morgan’s internal file, dated 7 January 1936, identifies M. 46 as Flemish and belonging to ‘a hitherto unknown “Ghent” group’. In his study of M. 46 and related manuscripts, Panofsky is exploring a ‘provincial tradition’ of painting rather than the book’s collation but says in the course 16 17

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FIG. 6 JOHANNES IN LITANY WITH RED HIGHLIGHT. MORGAN M. 46, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, OFFICES OF THE DEAD FOR ROME USE, C. 1425, FOL. 113R. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

Of the English artist or artists at work in Morgan M. 46, Kathleen Scott says that the work of both likely occurs in another contemporary book, the Plantagenet Psalter (London, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Art of his study of M. 46 that ‘the whole thing is even more of a mess than when I started on this job’, an appropriate response to this book’s complexity. See also Morgan Library & Museum, curatorial description ‘M. 46’ [accessed 6 July 2020].

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FIG. 7 CHRISTINE IN HER STUDY WITH THE GODDESS MINERVA, CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, LE LIVRE DES FAITS D’ARMES ET DE CHEVALRIE, ENGLISH ARTIST, 1434. BL, MS HARLEY 4605, FOL. 3R. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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Library, MS Reid 42), made between 1430 and 1440. According to Scott, Reid 42 was made in London and shows: evidence of an active French influence on English book decoration in the second quarter of the century, as well as of actual collaboration in England between French and native craftsmen.20

The main illustrator of Reid 42 is English and ‘to judge from the prime location and original quality of his page, the master or supervising artist in his shop’.21 In Reid 42 he is working with two other English artists, whom Scott names B and C. Artist B may be the same artist, Scott says, who painted the Passion sequence in Morgan M. 46. He (or an artist who paints in a similar style) is also the main hand in another manuscript, BL, MS Harley 4605 (fol. 3r, Fig. 7), which has four large illuminations. Artist C of the Reid manuscript may also have contributed to Morgan M. 46 (Scott suggests on fol. 44v, for example, the illumination of St Erkenwald). Harley 4605, in which appear the illuminations close in style to those of the English artist (Scott’s Artist B), is a copy of Le livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie by Christine de Pizan, which unusually is given a complete colophon. This asks the reader to pray for mosseu peyer Delafita, or Pey de 20 LGM II, 216 (item 73). The Morgan catalogue notes that Scott says the artist of Harley 4605 and Hand B in Reid 42 may be the same that painted the Passion sequence in M. 46, but that Scott mistakenly cites the Passion sequence in M. 46 as being on fols. 37v and 44v. 21 LGM II, 216.

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la Fita, who in 1434 wrote the book that, as he says, was made in London on the fifteenth of May (‘qui a escrivt a quest present livre en lan de nostre senh’r mil.cccc.xxxiiijo Et fut feit a Londres. A xv.de may’; fol. 115r).22 Harley 4605 is thus a manuscript of a work of a French author written in French and copied by a French scribe but illuminated by English artists in England, which complicates the notion of what might constitute an English book. Though both Reid 42 and Harley 4605 have English features, no medieval provenance is known for either manuscript. If English artists working in an English workshop produced both Reid 42 and Harley 4605 in England, how did they become involved in illustrating Morgan M. 46, which is said to have been made in Ghent? Or might it be possible, given the French style of decoration, borders and initials, that M. 46 was produced in several places but finished in France? Perhaps one key to understanding the compilation of Morgan M. 46 might be found in another manuscript in the Morgan Library, MS Glazier 9, firmly described by Scott as English, which returns us to contemplation of the activities of the Master of Guillebert de Mets, or more likely an artist imitating his style. A Flemish artist illuminated Glazier 9, along with a French artist who was known to illustrate books for both French and English patrons; English artists supplied the borders and spray-work. This is a Sarum Hours of the Virgin, sometimes known as the Berkeley Hours, made between 1450 and 1460.23 This manuscript has fourteen illuminations, four of which have been attributed to the Flemish artist (the Annunciation, fol. 11v; the Adoration of the Magi, fol. 45v; the Mass of St Gregory, fol. 67r; and the Commendation of the Soul, fol. 134v); ten other leaves have been illustrated by the French artist, both at the beginning and the end (for example, scenes of the Visitation, fol. 19v, and Nativity, fol. 35r, concluding with paintings of the Man of Sorrows, fol. 149v, and St Jerome, fol. 161r). As the foliation indicates, paintings by both are interspersed throughout the volume, the work of the Flemish artist opening the text, the French artist closing it, but all illuminations are very firmly surrounded (almost engulfed) by English border work. John Plummer first identified the Flemish artist here as one whose ‘style apparently derives from the Master of Guillebert de Mets’.24 Scott picks up this reference, identifying the four illuminations as relating to Guillebert de Mets or by ‘a follower’.25 If one compares, however, the scene of the Annunciation in Morgan M. 46 (Fig. 2) with the Annunciation scene in Glazier 9 (Fig. 8), one finds just a few similar features – the elongated finger 22 See the description of this manuscript in the BL’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts [accessed 19 May 2020]. 23 LGM II, 296–9 (item 108). 24 J. Plummer with G. T. Clark, The Last Flowering: French Painting in Manuscripts, 1420–1530 (New York, 1982), p. 16 (item 23). 25 LGM II, 298 (item 108).

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FIG. 8 ANNUNCIATION, FLEMISH ARTIST, MORGAN G. 9, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, C. 1440–1450, FOL. 11V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

of the Angel Gabriel, the tilted head, hair and delicate features of the Virgin (unfortunately blurred in Glazier 9 from rubbing or possibly kissing of the image). Morgan Glazier 9 was copied by an English scribe, and because of this and its very distinctively English borders and spray-work, Plummer says, ‘this manuscript was clearly made in England to judge from its decoration and script’.26 Following Plummer, Scott elaborates that: 26

Plummer, Last Flowering, p. 16 (item 23). See also J. Plummer, The Glazier Collection

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This Glazier manuscript is an outstanding product of the trend c. 1450 to have Continental illustrators cross the Channel and work on books with native craftsmen. The collaboration here consists of two foreign artists making the miniatures, with native artists doing most of the border- and spray-work. The main pictorial work is by the Master of Sir John Fastolfe [sic].27

In this case, the Flemish artist and the French artist may have been themselves imports to England, or the illuminations were imported, with the main work of writing, compilation and border decoration being carried out in England. For all three of these manuscripts – Morgan M. 46, Reid 42 and Glazier 9 – there are pieces of the story that are missing. It would be useful to have more complete knowledge of the activity of stationers in putting together Books of Hours in England and on the Continent and to better understand just how such books were made. The Fastolf Master, who is the main artist in Glazier 9, was both prolific and peripatetic, beginning his career in Paris, setting up shop in Rouen and possibly traveling to England with the reclamation of Rouen by the French in 1449, though this cannot be said for sure. The artist takes his name from the illuminations in Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 570, a stunning copy of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre d’Othea and the Livres des quatre vertus, dated 1450 and written in French for John Fastolf, the British bibliophile, landowner and campaigner who spent much of his military career in France.28 Catherine Reynolds, among others, has noticed that the Fastolf Master worked first in Paris with the Boucicaut Master (their work of Illuminated Manuscripts (New York, 1968), p. 36 (item 47); J. J. G. Alexander, ‘A Lost Leaf from a Bodleian Book of Hours’, Bodleian Library Record 8.5 (1971), 248–51 (p. 251); K. L. Scott, ‘A Mid-Fifteenth Century English Illuminating Shop and Its Customers’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968), 170–96 (p. 193 n. 130). An unattributed note in the Morgan’s internal file says, ‘The word “rubbed” used … in the Sotheby Catalog requires comment. In the miniature of the Annunciation (fol. 7v) the face of the Virgin suffers from having been kissed’. 27 LGM II, 297 (item 108). A note by William Glazier, the former owner for whom this manuscript is named, dated October 13, 1953, in the Morgan’s internal file says, ‘Mr. James Wardrupp of the Victoria & Albert Museum’ identified the painter as a Frenchman, the script and borders as English, ‘and undoubtedly made in England and therefore, there is no question at all it is an English manuscript’. 28 For more on this artist, see M. W. Driver, ‘“Me fault faire”: French Makers of Manuscripts for English Patrons’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009), pp. 422–33 (pp. 420–7, 440–2); M. W. Driver, ‘More Light on Ricardus Franciscus: Looking Again at Morgan M. 126’, South Atlantic Review 79.3–4 (2014), 20–35 (pp. 20, 29); L. M. C. Randall, assisted by C. Clarkson and J. Krochalis, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery. Volume II: France, 1420–1540 (Baltimore, 1992), item 123; G. T. Clark, Art in a Time of War: The Master of Morgan 453 and Manuscript Illumination in Paris during the English Occupation (1419–1435) (Toronto, 2016), pp. 278–82; J. Stratford, The Sobieski Hours: Windsor Castle, The Royal Library (Lucerne, 2016), pp. 208–10, who comments, ‘There is a considerable body of work in the Fastolf style. It has conventionally been dated from the early 1420s to around 1460. The workshop seems to have originated in Paris, and to have known patterns from the Boucicaut workshop. It was based for a time in Rouen, the centre of a flourishing book trade’ (p. 208).

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FIG 9 PORTRAIT OF SIR WILLIAM PORTER OF LINCOLNSHIRE WITH HIS GUARDIAN ANGEL. MORGAN M. 105, HOURS FOR SARUM USE, C. 1420–1425, FOL. 84V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

is found together in Morgan MS M. 1000, a French Book of Hours made in Paris about 1420).29 Of the twenty-something surviving manuscripts 29 See C. I. Reynolds, ‘The Salisbury Breviary, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Lat. 17294, and Some Related Manuscripts’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art University of London, 1986), in which she describes the work of both the Bedford Master and the Fastolf Master as a style rather than as that of an individual. However, in C. Reynolds, ‘Fastolf Master’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner, 34 vols. (London,

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illuminated by the Fastolf Master, about half were made for or owned contemporaneously by English patrons. This artist’s ‘most ambitious work’ is Morgan M. 105, a Book of Hours for Sarum use, with seventy-nine illuminations; another four are missing.30 Among the English features of M. 105 are a table of contents supplied in English and Latin in a fifteenth-century hand; there are also English annotations throughout, including an indulgence in English on the first page of the calendar. As in the other examples we have seen, English saints predominate in the calendar, memoriae and litany, including Edmund of England (fol. 41r), Dunstan of Canterbury (fol. 50r), John of Beverley (fol. 51r), John of Bridlington (fol. 52r), William of York (fol. 53r), Cuthbert (fol. 54r), Erkenwald (fol. 57r), Alban (fol. 58r), Winifred of Wales (fol. 73r), Etheldreda (fol. 74r) and Frideswide (fol. 80r). And, as in Morgan M. 46, there is a very lively scene of the murder of Thomas Becket (fol. 46r), supplied by the Fastolf Master, along with a portrait of the book’s owner, Sir William Porter of Lincolnshire, who is shown kneeling and supported by his guardian angel (fol. 84v, Fig. 9). This book was made about 1420 to 1425 for Sir William Porter, whose arms are painted in the manuscript’s borders. Porter was knighted at Harfleur in 1415 and spent his military career mainly in France; he took part in the siege of Rouen and fought, with Sir John Fastolf, at Patay. Briefly attendant on Henry VI as a household knight, Porter returned to Rouen with Henry in 1430 but died in England in 1434.31 In most sources this manuscript is localised to Rouen, but in a note in the Morgan file on this manuscript, Jonathan Alexander suggests a more convoluted provenance: ‘done in England or for Engl. Use by Master of Sir John Fastolf ’.32 Given Porter’s long career in France, however, and his connections with Rouen, it seems likely his manuscript was made in France, as were most manuscripts illuminated by the Fastolf Master early on in his career, but it is difficult to know. One might wonder again about Rogers’s notion that Morgan M. 314 may have been made for John Fitzalan, who was also in Rouen in the 1430s, as well as about the city of Rouen itself as a source of books for English owners.33 There are several surviving examples of illuminated Books of Hours made in Rouen for English owners, among them, the 1996), XX, 664, she describes the Fastolf Master as an individual artist who worked first in Paris with the Boucicaut Master, settled in Rouen where he worked for English patrons and ‘definitively allied himself to his English clients and crossed to England’. She cites his work in other manuscripts, including Morgan M. 1000 (incorrectly cited in Reynolds as ‘Morgan M. 100’). 30 Wieck, Painted Prayers, p. 112 (item 87). 31 Ibid.; Driver, ‘Me fault faire’, pp. 425, 439. 32 Morgan Library & Museum, curatorial description ‘M. 105’ (p. 6) [accessed 6 July 2020]. 33 Rogers, ‘Patrons and Purchasers’, p. 1178, focusses mainly on Calais as an important city for the production of English books, but there were many others, both in France and in the Low Countries.

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Playfair Hours, the Yester Hours in Magdalen College, Cambridge, and the Farmor Hours in the Hague.34 The Playfair Hours (which has Scottish saints cited in its calendar) in fact includes ‘the work of seven separate hands or styles for the illumination’; this volume was probably put together in Rouen by a bookseller, or libraire, who acted as ‘“middleman” between customer and the various craftsmen who provided parchment, wrote the text, illuminated the folios and bound the finished product’.35 As an English manuscript likely made in France, M. 105 could be considered analogous to Harley 4605, the copy of Christine’s Le livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie, which might be thought of as a French manuscript written by a French scribe but made in London, presumably for English owners. The books discussed here show that delineating a book’s origins (or nationality, if you will) can be very complicated, especially when looking at examples of composite volumes that incorporate several picture styles or that were made by people of various nationalities, sometimes working together on the same book, whether in the same location or at a distance. Some examples of Books of Hours for the English market, like Morgan M. 314, M. 46, and Glazier 9, were pieced together with inserted images and added calendars or framed by borders that seem to indicate provenance. Others, like Morgan M. 105, may have been made on the Continent. Each book, however, has its own story and must be evaluated on its own terms. In the fifteenth century, the book trade was pan-European, with particular emphasis on the interplay between England, France and Flanders in the making of manuscripts and later printed books. It is well known, for example, that William Caxton based his first type fonts used to publish the first English books on the writing of Colard Mansion, a scribe, printer and bookseller in Bruges, and on the hand of David Aubert, a Burgundian based in Ghent. French and Flemish illustration in printed books provided some of the earliest models for woodcuts in English books. In this multicultural environment, then, what constitutes an English book? Given the case studies briefly examined here, an English book might be said to have been made for or acquired by an English owner or patron, though its first makers themselves might not have been English. The addition of English features also ties books made in other places to an English provenance. While scribes, artists and decorators might be French, English or Flemish (or all three), there is an overall impression that each style complements the other, creating a cosmopolitan as well as transnational style that comes to define Books of Hours made for English owners in the fifteenth century.

34 Rowan Watson, The Playfair Hours. A Late Fifteenth-Century Illuminated MS from Rouen (London, 1984), p. 35. 35 Watson, Playfair Hours, pp. 28, 26.

MIDDLE HIBERNOENGLISH POETRY AND THE NASCENT BUREAUCRATIC LITERARY CULTURE OF IRELAND KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON

CIVIL SERVICE LITERARY CULTURE AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH IN IRELAND: THE BACKGROUND

E

ver since the pioneering work of R. H. Robbins, scholars have known that Franciscan friars were largely responsible for collecting and often composing many of the Early Middle English lyrics recorded 1220–1350.1 For Ireland’s Early Middle Hiberno-English (EMHE) poems, the case for Franciscan agency is even more compelling, indeed, assumed to be nearly absolute, especially since survivals before the famous BL MS Harley 913 lyrics (c. 1330) are scant.2 However, a closer look at pre-Harley EMHE

1 Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (Oxford, 1955). I am grateful to Derek Pearsall for his sage advice on this essay generally, and to Holly JamesMaddocks and Margaret Connolly for their meticulous reading. 2 For a list of all documents in MHE, see LALME, I, 270–9; M. Benskin, ‘Irish Adoptions in the English of Tipperary, ca. 1432’, in Words: for Robert Burchfield’s SixtyFifth Birthday, ed. E. G. Stanley and T. F. Hoad (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 37–67; J. J. Thompson, ‘Mapping Points West of West Midlands Manuscripts and Texts: Irishness(es) and Middle English Literary Culture’, in Essays in Manuscripts Geography, ed. W. Scase (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 113–28; and J. J. Thompson, ‘Books Beyond England’, in The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500, ed. A. Gillespie and D. Wakelin (Cambridge,

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manuscripts changes some of these assumptions.3 In fact, the Franciscans were not alone in their interest in the nascent Hiberno-English lyric, and as I will argue here, some betray bureaucratic or civic origins, either in poetic content, or in scribal treatment, having been recorded in documentary hands. Given the distinguished contributions our honouree, Linne Mooney, has made to present understanding of the role of civic writingoffice culture in Middle English literature, it seems appropriate in tribute to her to bring this lesser known corner of the civic literary world into view. Despite its famous and iron-clad Franciscan credentials, even Harley 913 itself contains lyrics with detailed civic and bureaucratic content. Moreover, in a recent survey of Middle Hiberno-English literary texts, John Thompson quotes M. R. James’s catalogue descriptions of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 405 and London, Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), MS 557, noting that both had lyrics recorded ‘in a charter hand’.4 More recently, I examined these ‘charter hand’ lyrics as part of the corpus of EMHE texts, noting that neither of these manuscripts is Franciscan.5 In Corpus 405, the content of one of the lyrics even relates directly to the documents copied by the same scribe nearby, and may be his own rough composition. In LPL 557, perhaps a diocesan manuscript, the charter hand copied two lyrics of stunning quality. So, this essay takes up the question of what role early bureaucrats might have played in the copying, composing, reading and owning of some of Ireland’s very earliest English lyrics. Oddly, such a question has never been asked of EMHE literature, even though fifteenth-century Ireland is known for its ‘golden age’ of literary Middle Hiberno-English, copied, translated, and composed by bureaucrats. Though the early lyrics may appear in manuscript contexts not immediately associated with writing offices, what I will suggest here is that at least by the late thirteenth century, bureaucrats should also be counted among the unsung heroes who, alongside friars, helped pioneer the first Anglo-Irish writing, some six centuries before W. B. Yeats. Why, one might ask, might a history of EMHE be important? First, because English in the thirteenth century was not the language of the ruling classes – nowhere in Ireland was it the language of choice for literary discourse. It is unclear how early English came to be written at all in Ireland, given that the twelfth-century invaders in 1169 were largely Cambro-Norman speakers of French, a group that also included

2011), pp. 259–75; D. L. Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles: A Cultural Study of BL MS Harley 913 (Turnhout, 2017). 3 For much more detail on all the EMHE manuscripts discussed here and others, see K. Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle Hiberno-English Lyric: Mysteries, Experiments and Survivals before 1330’, Early Middle English 2.2 (2020), 1–26. 4 See Thompson, ‘Books Beyond England’, p. 261. I thank John Thompson for his excellent advice. 5 Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle Hiberno-English Lyric’.

MIDDLE HIBERNO-ENGLISH POETRY

francophones from the continent, Welsh, Flemish, and some Scots.6 As Katherine Simms shows, a roll giving the names of members of the Dublin merchants’ guilds c. 1200 includes surnames from England, Wales, France, and Flanders, and ‘surnames of tenants in rentals and manorial extents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show that the great estates imported from England, Wales and Flanders not only their knights, hereditary free tenants, and burgesses, but artisans and peasant farmers, … some of whose holdings were too small for subsistence’.7 So, she concludes, the ‘English language took root in the towns and among the peasantry’, while Norman French became ‘so well established as a literary language among the upper classes that we have from the thirteenth century a chanson de geste on the invasion of Ireland’. These demographics narrow the social range for writing in Hiberno-English, a dialect which, as Michael Benskin declares, is ‘scarcely known from before the early fourteenth-century, and it is poorly documented until the fifteenth’.8 This is perhaps not surprising given that in the thirteenth century most English-speaking migrants were working for someone else, and often alongside other language groups (French, Gaelic-Irish, and sometimes Welsh or Flemish). What, then, were the issues that motivated the production of English at a time when Latin, French, and in Gaelic communities, Irish were all preferred as written languages? One clue may be that extant EMHE literature comes from, as Thompson reminds us, ‘the obedient shires’ of eastern Ireland, most often from stronghold marcher towns such as Waterford, New Ross and Kildare.9 Franciscans, of course, were important there, but we will look shortly at poets with a passion for civic affairs in these very towns. A further constituency for interest in English lyrics, I’ll suggest, and utterly neglected, was the legal clerks working for religious administrations in such towns (notably, the Knights Hospitallers, and episcopal seats – both had bureaucratic scribes). And, though still understudied, there was also interest in written English among the professional secretariat to the marcher lords, who would have moved back and forth with their magnate employers between their estates in England or Wales and Ireland: the tip of this iceberg may be seen in the accounts found in the binding leaves of the famous lyric collection in BL, MS Harley 2253, discarded from the Roger de Mortimer household in Ardmulghan, c. 1308–30.10 Of course, this essay can but scratch the surface, but the EMHE period deserves attention just as the Early Middle English period does, which, 6 K. Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, Ireland in Medieval French: The Paradox of Two Worlds (Turnhout, 2017), p. 9. 7 K. Simms, ‘The Norman Invasion and the Gaelic Recovery’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, ed. R. F. Foster (Oxford, 1989), pp. 51–103, 61–3, and next quotation, p. 63. 8 Benskin, ‘Irish Adoptions’, p. 38. 9 Thompson, ‘Books Beyond England’, p. 261 and map, Fig. 12.1. 10 Facsimile of British Museum Ms. Harley 2253, intro. N. R. Ker, EETS OS 255 (London, 1965), pp. xxii–xxiii.

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as Dorothy Kim observes, ‘was in fact a time of intense linguistic change, literary experimentation and textual production that juggled regional specificities, genres with process and juggled multilingual interactions with verve’.11 If this is complex for England, it is even more so in Ireland, where indigenous, colonial, regional, and emergent literatures all vied with one another for audiences. And bureaucratic French, too, that most conservative of languages for late medieval Ireland, held on well into the fifteenth century especially among raconteurs of the Irish civil service.12 We know much more about the literary Anglo-Irish bureaucrats of the fifteenth-century, a period of MHE normally, however, separated from the pre-1350 EMHE by an unbridgeable literary-historical chasm. But here we will be able to make a very rare direct historical connection between fifteenth-century sources and EMHE poetry, a topic we will tackle first, since its more fulsome records shed historical light backwards. Bureaucratic Lancastrian Dublin was surprisingly akin to the civic and royal scribal culture of London c. 1400 that Linne Mooney’s work has revealed, in part because England’s governance systems were replicated there. I first stumbled into this less known Anglo-Irish literary terrain by chance some years ago in pursuit of the production team for Bodl., MS Douce 104’s unique illustrated Piers Plowman. Its Piers text had been painstakingly translated into MHE, a project both the scribe-illustrator and corrector evidently took very seriously,13 having gone to great trouble and some expense to recreate Piers in their own dialect, even though most Anglo-Irish settlers (often of Southwest Midlands origin) could have read the original. The illustrative cycle even bore some iconography reflecting Anglo-Irish concerns and prejudices, being a culture distinct from both Gaelic-Ireland’s and England’s, even in dialect.14 Members of this unique, colourful, often paranoid and beleaguered colony called themselves ‘the middle nation’ (media natio).15 The history of MHE literature is fraught, full of unsolved mysteries, and also, as Thompson rightly laments, beset by anachronistic assumptions, and modern political minefields. Among these long-standing mysteries is why and how the highly sophisticated EMHE 11 ‘Building Pleasure and the Digital Archive’, Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. E. Losh and J. Wernimont (Minneapolis, 2018), pp. 230–60 [accessed 25 June 2020]. 12 K. Kerby-Fulton, ‘Competing Archives, Competing Languages: Office Vernaculars, Civil Servant Raconteurs, and the Porous Nature of French during Ireland’s Rise of English’, Speculum 90.3 (2015), 674–700. 13 K. Kerby-Fulton and D. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman (Minneapolis, 1999). 14 The distinction is sometimes lost: e.g. see S. Shepherd, ‘Text-Image Articulation in MS Douce 104’, in ‘Yee? Baw for Bokes’: Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics, ed. M. Calabrese and S. Shepherd (Los Angeles, 2013), pp. 165–201 (p. 196 on ‘Irish’ iconography); see also Karrie Fuller’s insightful comments in ‘Recent Studies on Illustrating Piers Plowman’, in Re-Opening Middle English Manuscripts . 15 Kerby-Fulton, ‘Competing Archives’, pp. 693–4.

FIG. 1 DUBLIN COURT OF EXCHEQUER AT WORK, FROM THE RED BOOK OF THE EXCHEQUER, C. 1420 (ORIGINAL DESTROYED), REPRODUCED FROM JOHN GILBERT, FACSIMILES OF THE NATIONAL MANUSCRIPTS OF IRELAND, VOL. 3 (LONDON, 1879), PLATE 37, COPY HELD BY UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME LIBRARY.

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Harley 913 lyrics emerge c. 1330 from a virtually unknown literary context, and how to connect them with the sudden, largely bureaucratic literary flowering some hundred years later that produced translation projects like the Douce Piers Plowman. The Douce Piers was dated by its regnal year to 1427 in a colophon by its government-trained scribe, relevant to the enlightened political leadership of James Butler, Earl of Ormond, who offered patronage for various works in all four of Ireland’s languages. Dublin notary, James Yonge, created an MHE translation for Ormond from a Waterford HibernoFrench translation of Secreta secretorum, an advice-for-princes genre so replete with colourful, politically-motivated interpolations as to land Yonge in prison for a time when Ormond lost power.16 Theresa O’Byrne, who has called Yonge ‘Dublin’s Hoccleve’, also uncovered a whole school of MHE scribes, one, for instance, responsible for Longleat MS 29, which contains Chaucer, Rolle and newly translated MHE texts. This was literally a ‘school’ in the sense that Yonge even trained apprentice scribes.17 During this period English translations of Gerald of Wales’s pugnacious CambroNorman account of the conquest of Ireland, the Expugnatio Hiberniae, also cemented a sense of Anglo-Irish identity, though much less subtly than these other works – MHE literature had its extremists, but also its moderates. This MHE renaissance began as an ‘Insular’ affair, thanks to the close connection between Henry V and Ormond, the king’s Lieutenant in Ireland. The choice of new material for MHE translation – unlike most of the EMHE lyrics – drew upon England’s literary culture with a conservatism characteristic of many colonial cultures seeking to emulate the metropolitan one, but elements of this fifteenth-century flowering also suggest a growing sense of Anglo-Ireland’s place amidst western insular regions, and also in the international sphere.18 The Lancastrian MHE renaissance was powered by bureaucratic scribecompilers, scribe-translators, scribe-authors and even scribe-­illustrators. The bureaucratic flavour of these works can be epitomised in one lucky survival of a lone leaf from the Dublin Red Book of the Exchequer, a drawing of the Irish Exchequer at work – so very like the Douce illustrations in style and satirical spirit, as to suggest shared training, and likely a shared political faction in the Ormond affinity (see Fig. 1).19 16 Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, pp. 150–67 on the French Secreta; T. O’Byrne, ‘Manuscript Production in Dublin: The Scribe of Bodleian e. Museo MS 232 and Longleat MS 29’, New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. K. Kerby-Fulton, J. Thompson, and S. Baechle (Notre Dame, 2014), p. 273. 17 T. O’Byrne, ‘Notarial Signs and Scribal Training in the Fifteenth Century: The Case of James Yonge and Thomas Baghill’, Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012), 305–18. 18 P. Crooks, ‘Representation and Dissent: “Parliamentarianism” and the Structure of Politics in Colonial Ireland, c. 1370–1420’, English Historical Review 125 (2010), 1–34 (p. 7). 19 K. Kerby-Fulton, ‘Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman’, in New

MIDDLE HIBERNO-ENGLISH POETRY

This fragment offers a rare visual glimpse into civil service satire of the 1420s, showing the participants of the Exchequer court mostly in caricature, excepting the chief recording clerks, and the Chief Baron of the Exchequer. The clerks are nearly alone in being represented as young, intelligent, professional and tastefully witty. The Barons of the Exchequer (judges) appear on the left-hand side of the main table.20 On the top left, one calls out a typical judgement in the language of the court, French: ‘Soient forfez’ (Let them be forfeit), a figure strikingly similar in facial structure to the Sheriff portrayed in Douce 104, while the Chief Baron, his more dignified companion in the bottom left, is facially very similar to Douce 104’s Knight.21 Crucially, unnoticed evidence suggests these Barons can provide a rare direct connection to the most important of the EMHE manuscripts of one hundred years earlier: the Harley 913 manuscript has a Latin ownership inscription (fol. 29r) to John Lombard of Waterford, who was Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1395, and Mayor of Waterford 1406–8. So, rather excitingly, this fragmentary office sketch provides us with something akin to a visual ‘portrait’ of the earliest known medieval owner of Harley 913. Now, what, we might ask, was the Mayor of Waterford and Baron of the Exchequer doing with a trilingual Franciscan manuscript now nearly a hundred years old? We can make some educated guesses, first by pointing out that Harley 913 has some wonderful civic poetry, some of which is similar in verbal satirical tactics to the visual caricature, especially ‘Satire on Sinful Townsfolk’ (discussed next). The clerks who look out from this picture evoke the kinds of voices who speak to us as the narratorial ‘I’, or the third-person narrative observers, of bureaucratic satirical verse. The Irish Exchequer, it turns out, furnishes other literary connections: another Baron of the Irish Exchequer, Walter de Brugges, bequeathed a copy of Piers Plowman in 1396 in Ireland, just a year after John Lombard became Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1395.22 Here is a literary ownership circle apparently well primed to appreciate the combination of satiric wit, reformist impulse and legal critique that both Harley 913 and Piers had to offer.

Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. D. Pearsall (York, 2000), pp. 103–30. 20 Kerby-Fulton, ‘Competing Archives’, pp. 689–91; Simms, ‘The Norman Invasion’, pp. 68–9; and see J. F. Ferguson, ‘The Court of Exchequer in Ireland’, Gentleman’s Magazine n.s. 43 (1855), 37–44, who, however, suggest that slightly the bottom left figure may be the Treasurer, heading up one or more of the Barons on that side. 21 See Kerby-Fulton, ‘Professional Readers’, p. 127, and plates 2d and 2e. 22 On Walter de Brugges, see Kerby-Fulton, ‘Professional Readers’, p. 117.

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EARLY MIDDLE HIBERNO-ENGLISH AND BRIEF GLIMPSES OF LITERARY BUREAUCRATIC CULTURE IN HARLEY 913 Though in the possession c. 1400 of a Baron of the Exchequer and Mayor of Waterford, Harley 913, originally made c. 1330, appears at first glance as no one’s idea of a repository for bureaucratic writing. Though several of its poems differ from the kinds of religious lyrics most often collected into thirteenth-century Franciscan collections,23 there is no doubt about Franciscan involvement in its creation. At least one of its poems, a hymn, was composed by a friar who names himself as Michael of Kildare (whence the collection’s traditional name, ‘The Kildare Lyrics’). And as Michael Benskin notes, signs of strain show in its textura hand because it was done by a scribe clearly more at home in a university cursive (friars were often university educated).24 The scribe’s grasp of written Hiberno-English orthography is bafflingly assured, arguing for a strong tradition of EMHE preceding the manuscript, but he, too, is improvising in spots: e.g., he uses the standard abbreviation for the Latin word ‘autem’ to denote the Middle English word ‘and’.25 The collection is also just mysteriously high quality, a mix of often satirical Latin and superb English lyrics, and fewer French ones. However, many of the lyrics collected in it certainly were not Franciscan preaching compositions.26 No Franciscan would likely have reason to compose, for instance, its civic pieces, such as the ‘Walling of New Ross’, a French poem about citizens and guilds coming together as a community to build a city fortification (discussed below). Nor would a Franciscan have composed ‘Satire on Sinful Townsfolk’, which is as unkind to Franciscans as to all the other religious orders, skewering each in turn.27 What we can say is that it was generous of a Franciscan to collect such poems. ‘Satire’ was likely, I argue here, composed by a trained clerk working in a civic setting, perhaps a writing office – and, given his great wit and understanding of the conventions of Goliardic verse (traditionally composed by university students), possibly an underemployed clerk at that. ‘Satire’ consists of a long list of satirical portraits, one per stanza, of individual saints, religious orders and artisans. The poet’s treatment of St Francis is typical of the strategy: it parodies his famous sermon to the birds rather scathingly by portraying his feathered audience as mainly birds of prey and scavengers: 23 See Poems from MS Harley 913: ‘The Kildare Manuscript’, ed. T. Turville-Petre, EETS OS 345 (Oxford, 2015), pp. xxxvii–xli; M. Harrington, ‘Of Earth You Were Made: Constructing the Bilingual Poem “Erþ” in British Library, MS Harley 913’, Florilegium 31 (2014), 105–37. 24 Harley 913, ed. Turville-Petre, p. 14. 25 For codicological features, see K. Kerby-Fulton, M. Hilmo, and L. Olson, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, 2012), Plate 1. 26 See Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles. 27 See Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography, pp. 39–67, esp. p. 39.

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Hail Seint Franceis wiþ þi mani foulis Kites and crowis, reuenes and oules, Fure* and tuenti wild ges and a poucok!

(four)

Mani bold begger siwiþ þi route*. (ll. 25–8)28

(follows your company)

Scavenger birds, some notorious, lead the list here, along with birds like owls that had largely negative reputations in medieval bestiaries. These include geese, considered heralds of trouble.29 The portrait is punctuated with a sharp blow to the Franciscan ideal of begging, the subject, of course, of much inter-clerical, and even intra-fraternal, controversy. Though the satire is tough on a number of orders and professions, this portrait (from the poem’s fifth stanza) is especially unforgiving, making for an odd juxtaposition with its neighbouring poem, the hymn ‘Of Frere Michel Kyldare’, a serious Franciscan religious lyric. This was an open-minded compiler. More broadly, the stanzas of ‘Satire’ parody in strict social hierarchical order and in the most rollicking terms: the saints themselves (Michael, Christopher, Mary Magdalene, Dominic and Francis), two further orders of friars (Carmelites and Williamites), Benedictine monks, nuns, priests, merchants, artisans (tailors, cobblers, skinners, butchers and bakers) and lastly women artisans (brewers, hucksters and weavers), only in passing wives. Notably absent from this list is any reference to lawyers, scribes, scriveners or bureaucratic clerks, though the poet’s knowledge of the law is evident, especially merchant and civic law: he threatens various groups with the pillory (bakers, for cheating on white flour against ‘Goddes law’ [ll. 93–4]) or with the cucking stool (women brewers for infringements of weights and measures in trading: ‘Beþ iwar of þe coking-stole, þe lak is dep and hori [filthy]’ [l. 100]). Both punishments were standard in civic merchant law, but the poet also likes to show off his knowledge of very specific trade tools, often obscure vocabulary today,30 and colloquialisms (some borrowed from Irish Gaelic).31 The ‘I’-speaker even refers to himself once as having doled out a particular punishment to women wool carders. He curses the wool carders, threatening them first with the ‘tronn’ (as Turville-Petre explains, ‘the public weighing machine, used also for shaming false tradesmen’),32 with gruesome punishments on record:

28 Quotations throughout are from Harley 913, ed. Turville-Petre, pp. 9–13: ‘Satire’ (a.k.a. ‘Satire on Sinful Townsfolk’). 29 It is unclear why there are twenty-four, but see: ‘Goose’, The Medieval Bestiary [accessed 25 June 2020], which cites Pliny and Isidore. 30 See, for example, ll. 73–5 about the extensive toolkit of shoemakers. 31 See, for example, l. 106, the ‘hori tromcheri’ (filthy liver) he accuses the women peddlers of selling, and Turville-Petre’s note to the line. 32 See Turville-Petre’s note to l. 110, p. 104.

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Al þe schindes* of þe tronn an heiȝ opon ȝur sculle

(humiliations)

Ȝe makid me sech a goshorne* ouer al þe wowes*

(loud noise of geese; townwalls)

Þerfor ich makid on of ȝou sit opon a hechil*. (ll. 110–12)

(spiked wool-comb)

These lines are helpfully glossed by Turville-Petre, but remain a brainteaser: after wishing humiliations of the ‘tronn’ upon them, the ‘I’-speaker refers to a past incident in which the women made such a noise over the town walls that he himself made one of them sit ‘opon a hechil’.33 It is hard to know where satire begins and ends, but some of these threats are not really funny (certainly being nailed to ‘þe tronn’ was no laughing matter). And though one is always prepared in medieval poetry for the fictionalised ‘I’-speaker of all genres descended from the French dit, the detailed allusions here to civic trades and punishments for trade infractions are unusually specific, as is his allusion to trade areas in both London and Drogheda. One wants to ask: who was this poet? The knowledge of artisanal life and laws this poet has would certainly be consistent with that of a clerk working in civic government. Moreover, though many of the purposes of Harley 913’s rather irreverent collection also remain obscure, John Thompson insightfully characterises it as having not one but two cultural milieux as ‘a battered relic of a trilingual literary culture that generally reflects an interest in Franciscan practices and Irish marcher culture, particularly in the Kildare and Waterford areas’.34 A poem such as ‘Satire’ is a great example of the kind that needs recovery as poetry about Anglo-Irish marcher culture – in fact, civic culture – as a non-Franciscan poem surviving in a Franciscan collection.35 Even that, however, does not exhaust the complexity of ‘Satire’ as an experimental genre. It is a mix of hymn parody and estates satire, as Deborah Moore has established, rolled up into a comical drinking song genre, yet with strong Goliardic sensibilities. There is also a reformist impulse, legal and clerical. All in all, this is a heady brew that allows the poet to say some really radical things. The word ‘Hail’ occurs at the beginning of each stanza, raising initial expectations of a hymn in the reverent, often Marian, Salutation genre, but these expectations are instantly overturned. St Francis is hailed with his many scavenger birds, just like the ‘bold beggars’ who follow him. St Christopher is hailed for having born Christ over a ‘brod lake’, but the fish who swim around the saint’s feet 33 See Turville-Petre’s notes to ll. 109–12, p. 104; this punishment, as he notes, also comes up in texts about Hell. 34 Thompson, ‘Books beyond England’, pp. 261–2. 35 See Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle-Hiberno English Lyric’.

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(familiar iconography from the wall-paintings of porches of medieval churches) suddenly remind the poet to ask ‘Hou mani hering to peni at West Chep in London?’ (ll. 8–10). In fact, his mind often runs to trade, as here, in the least likely spots. For instance, after ‘hailing’ the Carmelites, he comments unexpectedly that their convent in Drogheda makes ropes (‘Ȝe habbiþ a hus in Drochda war men makiþ ropes’), whereupon he accuses them of stealing the ‘watir-daisseres’ [holywater brushes?] from local churches (ll. 32–4). As Moore writes, ‘the poet sets the audience up for a poem that ironically explores the deceptions of a broad range of supposedly exemplary individuals, institutions or occupational groups’.36 To this I would add that he has a flair for focussing on trade culture, even in many of his portraits of religious figures, and on material culture, which he knows intimately, including the visual religious iconography he exploits. This is a poem in which nothing is sacred, and the glass is always half-empty, but to add further to its complexity, each stanza ends with a couplet of short lines in which the poet always makes himself the subject of impish mock encomiums. In many of these couplets he calls himself a ‘clerk’, and compliments himself on writing fine poetry. Take for instance the stanza about priests, which begins, like all the stanzas, with a mock greeting ‘Hail!’ but soon accuses priests of being unlearned, parsimonious and flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of their vow to keep tonsure. There may even be ambiguity around his attitude toward holybread – ‘ȝiue’ (l. 58) is likely a plural, but it could double as a cheeky imperative: Hail be ȝe prestis wiþ ȝur brode bokes! Þoȝ ȝur crune be ischaue, fair beþ ȝur crokes*.

(curls)

Ȝow and oþer lewid men deleþ bot ahouue*,

(parsimoniously)

Whan ȝe deliþ* holibrede, ȝiue me botte* a litil.

(distribute; only)

Sikirlich* he was a clerk

(truly)

Þat wrochte þis craftilich werke. (ll. 55–60)

As Turville-Petre notes, ‘crokes’ can simply mean ‘curls’, or may mean a false hairpiece to cover tonsure when the priest is out on the town, as clerks in minor orders often were (Chaucer’s later parody of Absolon’s hair and courting springs to mind, in the Miller’s Tale).37 Holybread is blessed but unconsecrated bread distributed to the laity, who had normally not taken communion during mass, and most often distributed by clerics 36 Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles, p. 74. On the drinking song genre, see also Harley 913, ed. Turville-Petre, p. 10. 37 Harley 913, ed. Turville-Petre, note to l. 56.

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further down in rank (like Absolon, who also plays favourites among the laity when carrying out his parochial duties). Note that the ‘Satire’ poet feels superior to those clerks who distribute holybread (‘Ȝow and oþer lewid men deleþ bot ahouue / Whan ȝe deliþ holibrede’ [ll. 57–8]): ‘oþer lewid’, as Turville-Petre rightly notes, refers here to clergy, not laity. Like so much goliardic verse, the writer assumes the superiority of the universityeducated. There is, as Deborah Moore has noted, a powerful goliardic streak in this poem, but it is not written, like most goliardic verse, in the safety of Latin. She writes: the poet parodies Latin hymns to the Virgin (as do many Goliardic works, such as ‘Si linguis angelicis’ from Carmina Burana), while ostensibly praising various saints, orders and tradesmen. Martha Bayless explains that medieval goliardic parody … was directed against generalized and impersonal topics such as [vices] or ‘groups of which the author was presumably not a member,’ yet the goliard poets were clerically trained and their parodies and satires of both religious and secular material were infused with the language and doctrine of the Church.38

As mentioned above, legal and learned clerks, lawyers and bureaucrats (likely the poet’s own group) are not parodied – puzzlingly, since estates satire provides many precedents. And while each stanza ends with a different couplet that compliments the poet or his verse, mostly comically, one hints at the dangerous nature of the poet’s enterprise: Sleilich is þis uers iseid; Hit wer harme* adun ileiid*. (ll. 41–2)

(harmful; written down)

Of course, the verse is written down, so therefore harmful? Despite the recognisable elements of generic estates satire and comic drinking song, the poet manages to say some bitter and startling things; surely, were this not an anonymous piece copied into what we think is a friar’s vade mecum book, it would stand out as more as the rather scandalous poem it really is. Take, for instance, this stanza, which makes an audacious and oblique allusion to Mary Magdalene’s bastard son: Seint Mari bastard, þe Maudeleinis sone*,

(the Magdalene’s son)

To be wel icloþid wel was þi wone.

38 Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles, p. 73, citing M. Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 11–12.

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Þou berrist a box on þi hond ipeintid al of gold. Woned* þou wer to be hend*, ȝiue us sum of þi spicis. (ll. 13–16)

(accustomed; polite)

Deborah Moore reads a reference to radical Templar ideas on Mary Magdalene, though, if so, from exactly what set of medieval sources remains unclear. But the Templars, a very important group in Ireland who shared with the Hospitallers much of the law enforcement, were suppressed in 1308, a very recent event when Harley 913 was made (the subject of another EMHE lyric discussed below). The ‘Satire’ poet’s iconomachia (dislike of images), a stance surprisingly common in Anglo-Irish literature, even in literature that, like this, long pre-dates Wycliffism.39 The poet’s technique here, which is extremely subtle and certainly ‘goliardic’, is to gesture to an iconography of commonly observed saintly attributes, and then undermine it. Though the poem is in English, not Latin, it is worth its salt in the Goliardic tradition, but also now in the genre of evolving civic poetry. The French poem ‘Walling of New Ross’ continues the civic themes in Harley 913. As Lydon noted many years ago, Hiberno-Norman, unlike English or Latin, left a small legacy of primarily secular literature, among which Walling, as Keith Busby’s superb new study shows, is historically important. The poem reminds us that there was often warfare among the colonisers themselves, and frequent alliances between settlers and GaelicIrish – a reminder that modern binary assumptions tend to obscure actual historical complexities. In fact, as the poet tells us, the historical impetus for building the wall in New Ross in 1265 (part of which still survives)40 was local fear of a war being waged between two barons (‘poure avoint de un guerre / Qe fu entre deus’). He adds that he will record here (‘ci escrit’) their names, ‘Sire Morice e Sire Wauter’ (ll. 10–13).41 Maurice FitzGerald and Walter De Burgh were rivals, and their raids and counter-raids upon each other’s holdings in the 1260s are well documented as interNorman feuds involving ‘the quasi-autonom[ous] families of magnates’.42 Walling celebrates the community spirit of New Ross by dramatising how members of every trade guild and profession volunteered to build the town’s reinforcing wall, giving the poet a chance to enumerate each trade, and offer minutely detailed statistics of the town’s military defence forces. Though evincing some gentle estates satire in spots, and sexual innuendo Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography, pp. 26–31. ‘New Ross Town Wall’, Megalithic Ireland [accessed 26 June 2020]. 41 I cite the poem here from Harley 913, ed. Turville-Petre, pp. 76–83, and some translated phrases from Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, pp. 107–27. 42 Ibid., pp. 107–8. 39

40

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in others, the poem’s main purpose appears to be genuine civic propaganda, advertising the city’s strength, a veritable shot across the bow to the warring Norman factions. Though the poem makes vague reference to the wall as a protection against any Gaelic Irishman minded to attack (l. 200), as Moore wisely notes, the motivation for the new walling generally was ‘a primary concern for safety itself, not safety of one group against another’ especially since the town had hired Gaelic-Irish mercenaries as part of its defence team.43 The opening of the poem states its purpose, and the colophon, its specific date, making it ‘occasional’ poetry in the formal sense. Significantly, the poet chose French, Busby argues, as the language of the magnate warring factions, and to ‘underline the aspirations of the townsfolk of New Ross to share the same culture and language as the squabbling aristocracy’.44 Like the ‘Satire’ poet, this poet has a detailed knowledge of every trade working in the city, plus the traditional estates (e.g. soldiers, priests and ‘ladies’). Each group volunteered to build for a particular day of the week, e.g. on Thursdays, bakers, ‘regraters’ (like the women hucksters of ‘Satire’) and day-labourers (l. 118). ‘Regraters’ were ‘small traders who bought goods in order to sell them at a higher price’, a group that often drew the ire of city officials and fell foul of merchant law, and which estates satirists also often denounced, as in ‘Satire’ (and as would Langland later). But ‘Walling’, although it plays light-heartedly on a few standard estates flaws, is less interested in reform or satire than in community pride. Many of the groups arrive with a banner representing their trade, as Busby notes, ‘reflecting the practice of an early form of the guild system’ but also reflecting some of the ‘joy and ebullience of courtly celebration’, however aspirational (l. 118). The guilds are ordered roughly from the more esteemed (e.g. mercers, priests and others appear on Mondays) to the lesser as the week wears on. There is some gentle satire on the fitness of priests for manual labour (their manhood, it is implied, wasted in their regular occupation), and regarding the ladies, the only builders to appear on Sundays (surely lightly parodic as Sunday is the usual day of rest), delivered with sexual innuendo momentarily worthy of Roman de la Rose (‘Bon serreit estre en prisun de dame’ [l. 155]).45 The town’s military, after an impressively long list of statistics, wins out for sheer length of allotted poetic lines (168–91). There is a powerful element of civic propaganda here, reminiscent of what one finds later in the writings of Dublin city scribe-authors such as James Yonge.46 Harley 913 may once have contained even more civic poetry. Sadly, the 43 44 45 46

Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles, p. 273 n. 15. Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, p. 121. Ibid., p. 113. See T. O’Byrne, ‘Centre or Periphery? The Role of Dublin in James Yonge’s Memoriale

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manuscript has suffered losses, but we do know that there were likely other such pieces in the manuscript, since the opening stanza of one, ‘Yung Men of Waterford’, was copied in 1608 by a civil servant, James Ware, into his own collection, now BL, MS Lansdowne 418. Even from the opening one can see that this poem, too, was a call to civic action: Yung men of Waterford lernith now to plei For ȝure mere is* plowis ilad beth awey

(mare’s)

Scure* ȝe ȝur hanfelis* þat lang habith ilei

(scour, burnish; swords?)

And fen ȝou of the pourers* that waltith bi the wey

(le Poers)

Ich rede. (ll. 1–5)47

In the final few lines of the poem, the poet insists that if the young men meet the le Poers (a notorious Norman magnate family)48 singly, they will not survive – but if they band together in a show of strength to defend the town of Waterford, they may. This is, along with ‘Walling’, and ‘Satire’, literature with an overt civic function in marcher culture. The enemies here are rarely the Gaelic Irish (indeed, New Ross depended on Gaelic mercenaries) as other warring colonial factions (here, the powerful Norman le Poer family). And even though these poems were collected into a Franciscan manuscript, it is as yet unclear how the portions that so vividly reflect marcher culture were being used. One important unnoticed clue is the evidence, in many cases faded but still visible in this minimally decorated MS, of coloured markings to aid oral performance (rhyme brackets and rubricated letters) in Harley 913.49 Certainly these poems would not have been performed in a preaching context. If we remember that Harley fairly quickly came into the hands of the mayor of Waterford, and Second Baron of the Exchequer, its link with bureaucratic culture clarifies. And we know that the manuscript itself, Harley 913, so often thought of, and with good reason, in the context of Franciscan collections, escaped whatever Franciscan ownership it might have had by 1407, if not before.

(1412)’, Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature, ed. K. Miller and C. Gibbon (Manchester, 2017) [accessed 26 June 2020]. 47 Harley 913, ed. Turville-Petre, Appendix: Texts from Lansdowne 418 (pp. 93–4). 48 Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles, pp. 294–5. 49 Discussed in Kerby-Fulton et al., Opening Up, Front Plate 1.

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EARLY MIDDLE HIBERNO-ENGLISH LYRICS IN DOCUMENTARY HANDS Among the scarcely known lyric survivals before Harley 913, at least two are not Franciscan manuscripts.50 These two contain EMHE lyrics copied ‘in a charter hand’, both in contexts ‘off the radar’ for modern scholars interested in the employment of documentary scribes. LPL 557 contains two lyrics copied in the late thirteenth century, ‘in a small, rather difficult hand somewhat of the charter type’,51 alongside a Latin poem in the same hand on the Council of Lyon (1274). The early leaves of LPL 557 are missing and its original context is uncertain, but in the later medieval period it is associated with Cashel (the seat of the archbishop, known for high-stakes political involvement in the Irish Parliament).52 The fact that the EMHE verses are localised to Tipperary is unnoticed evidence pointing to an earlier Cashel provenance, an intriguing context since episcopal seats teemed with legal clerks and singing clerks, both groups known to be interested in lyrics.53 Whoever copied the LPL 557 lyrics had exceptionally fine taste: the first is a beautiful, even at times erotic Christ-knight poem, an ‘ecce sto’ lyric (i.e. based on the verse Ecce sto ad hostium et pulso, ‘I stand at the door and knock’, Rev. 3. 20). Beginning ‘Allas allas’, the ecce sto theme is ingeniously blended with the Christ-aslover-knight theme, and then just as ingeniously conflated with the Song of Songs verse, aperi mihi (‘Open to me, my sister, my beloved’, Cant. 5. 2): Allas allas vel* yuel y sped

(well)

For synne jesu fro me ys fled þat lyuely fere At my dore he standes al one And kallys vndo yit, senful* mone54

(sinful man)

on þis manere Vndo my lef my dow[u]e* dere

(dove)

Vndo wy stond sekyn out here 55

50 On these two, LPL 557 and Corpus 405, and also on a third manuscript, BL, MS Harley 3724 (provenance unknown), see Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle Hiberno-English Lyric’, discussed alongside two certain Franciscan manuscripts, Harley 913 and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 347. 51 M. R. James and C. Jenkins, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Lambeth Palace, 5 pt. in 1 vol. (Cambridge, 1930–2), p. 759. 52 Kerby-Fulton, ‘Competing Archives’, p. 686. 53 See Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle Hiberno-English Lyric’, and on cathedral lyrics, see my The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (Philadelphia, 2021), chapters 5 and 6. 54 James’s and Jenkins’s transcription reads ‘rueful mone’. 55 A Selection of Religious Lyrics, ed. D. Gray (Oxford, 1975), p. 39, no. 41, reads ‘y steken’.

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Iyk* am þi make

(I)

Lo my heued and myne lockys Ar al by wevyd* wyt blody dropys

(woven)

For þine sake. (DIMEV 6108, with short refrain lines emphasised.)56

Beating on the door, Christ is portrayed imploring his beloved in the voice of the Canticles to open up (‘Vndo my lef …’), as her spouse (‘Iyk am þi make’). Not only is this ecce sto lyric the very earliest known version in English, but Rosemary Woolf also judged it to be the most original, rising far above the didactic: There is only one poem extant on the ecce sto theme that is more than a sermon verse, being in itself a complete and exceptionally moving complaint: curiously enough, it is both the earliest and the best of the lover-knight complaints.57

Also written in the same documentary hand is the second EMHE poem in the manuscript, equally dramatic and direct in its treatment of the voice of Christ. It begins with the crucified Christ calling out to all who walk or ride by, ‘Alle þat gos and rydys loket opon me’.58 This ten-line poem invites the reader to meditate on the suffering Christ in a conventional way, but it ends less conventionally with Christ’s final direct appeal for the reader’s soul, which, he says, once given, would render his pain as naught – an effective turning of the tables that allows the reader to ‘redeem’ Christ’s suffering: Gyf þou me þat soule þat ys so dere ybouyhte Of all þat I þole* ne ys me þen nouyhte*. (ll. 9–10)

(suffer; naught)

This classic ‘reader-centered’ religious lyric is copied with the first in the same documentary hand as the Latin verses on the Council of Lyon in 56 I have emended DIMEV’s ‘downe’ to ‘dowue’ (dove) in line 7, as do modern editors; see also James and Jenkins, A Descriptive Catalogue, pp. 759–61, where both poems are transcribed from fols. 185v–6r. Language localised to Tipperary, Ireland, see eLALME, I, 118 [accessed 26 June 2020]. See A Selection of Religious Lyrics, ed. Gray, p. 39, no. 41, nn. 124–5 on other versions and parallels, including an Ovidian parallel. 57 R. Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), p. 51. 58 LPL, MS 557, fol. 186r. Cited from DIMEV 368; James and Jenkins, A Descriptive Catalogue, p. 760. See also Woolf, The English Religious Lyric, p. 43.

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1274, a placement that tells us a little more about what interests this scribe. That council made various policies on executing the Crusades, including funding them via tithes. Particularly interesting in an Irish context is the role the Templars played at the Council,59 since the Templars figure largely in Irish colonial history, a topic that brings us to the second manuscript with EMHE lyrics in a charter hand, Corpus 405.60 One very obscure lyric there is about the fall of the Templars, copied amidst documents on their suppression into a large Latin and French composite MS made in Waterford for the military order, the Knights of St John’s Hospitallers, the Templars’ chief rivals.61 Corpus 405 contains three (possibly four) brief and rough English poems copied sometime after 1308,62 rather amateurishly in one long, undifferentiated block, with just a few rhyme brackets to hint at structure.63 Even the DIMEV entries for these poems wisely note uncertainty about where each begins. Only one has been formally edited, the six-line Marian lyric, ‘Heyl, God’, which is, not coincidentally, the only one with a clear beginning and ending.64 This composite manuscript, as Hannah Zdansky notes, contains ‘six different vellum codices from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’.65 Section I, which contains the lyrics,66 begins with documents regarding the transfer of Templar property to the Hospitallers of Kilbarry, Co. Waterford, after their dissolution.67 Unlikely as it seems, this bureaucratic context proves critical for deciphering the most obscure of the EMHE lyrics. The scribe chose to enter his EMHE poems on a leaf (paginated as 22) in Section I following these documents, along with French Merlin prophecies, lists of English kings, schedules for dream interpretation, and Irish geographical information (e.g. ‘Quinque partes Hibernye’, below the last lyric). Unlike the polished lyrics in LPL 557, these are a muddle: the first lyric, ‘Of noman liche makeȝ hap’, is 59 See G. Goyau, ‘Second Council of Lyons (1274)’, The Catholic Encyclopedia [accessed 26 June 2020]. 60 Thompson, ‘Mapping Points West’, p. 115. 61 Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle Hiberno-English Lyric’. 62 Their only modern editor-transcriber, Henry Person, argued that ‘the first two of these translate or paraphrase Latin originals, a common practice’, Cambridge Middle English Lyrics (Seattle, 1962), pp. 70–1. Person does not note their Irish dialect, but nor does he edit much against it (see no. 12, p. 14). 63 As Person, ibid., pp. 70–1, correctly notes. 64 Ibid., no. 12, p. 14. 65 H. Zdansky, ‘And fer ouer þe French flod: A Look at Cotton Nero A.x from an International Perspective’, in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. K. Kerby-Fulton, J. Thompson, and S. Baechle (Notre Dame, 2014), pp. 226–50. 66 See ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 405: Charters, Letters, Bulls, Liturgical Texts, Anglo-Norman Texts, etc.’, Parker Library on the Web [accessed 26 June 2020]. 67 For discussion of the documents copied earlier in Corpus 405 (pp. 1–7), see Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, pp. 146–7.

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so scrambled that the DIMEV treats it as five lines, ‘preceded by a Latin couplet’ (which if counted would make seven lines).68 The poetry’s Hiberno-English dialect encounters a good deal of interference from French and Latin, resulting in spots in a kind of creole. The verses are so difficult now to construe because this scribe was clearly unaccustomed to writing in English, slipping often back into more comfortable French or Latin spellings.69 The scribe also does not understand the principles of dotting to distinguish ‘y’ from thorn, but despite these drawbacks, the bungling and utterly unread little poem is worth the trouble because it is daring: it exults over the Knights Templar as exemplars of fallen hubris, referring to them metonymically by the pride of their Temple (‘Templi’) in Latin, and in English as the Templeis – apparently an inept Anglicisation of the French. Even the Latin is odd, sometimes phonetically spelt (e.g. ‘exsempli’).70 It especially moralises on their condemnation (in 1308) and consequent loss of property, with internal rhyme in most of the English lines (e.g. fette/sette), and also in the Latin one (exsempli/Templi), about how fortune soon calls the rich to account, as exemplified by the overweaning pride of the Temple: Of noman liche* makeȝ hap* in a stound* many Riche

(alike; fate; short time)

Hym can he so fette* weryt* fyrst Hym fond* sone sette

(fetch; [though] defend himself first he tries)

Et res exsempli confusa superbia Templi etc.71 (And the thing an example of the shameful pride of the Temple) Ilk wisman takeȝ forbysne* wat pride maket

(Each wise man takes example)

Of wylum templeis* wyh helde non cyre* til hem pres

(once Templars; wax)

(Corpus 405, fol. 10v, transcription mine; DIMEV 4194).

68 The first English lines are preceded by a proverbial couplet, incipit: ‘Quem fortuna leuis miserum facit esse beatum’ (p. 22), counted only as ‘preceding’ in the DIMEV’s 4194–1. 69 For more detailed discussion, see Kerby-Fulton, ‘Making the Early Middle HibernoEnglish Lyric’. 70 Templum (genitive, Templi) is the word for a Templar temple, which the scribe has capitalised. See also Middle English Dictionary ‘templr (n.(1))’ with variant ‘templārīes’ and the Old French root, ‘templier’: ; and Anglo-Norman Dictionary Online edition [accessed 26 June 2020]. 71 The abbreviated ‘etc.’ here suggests this is a Latin quotation from something longer.

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The last line is especially difficult, but the key lies in its very bureaucratic metaphor of the seal: it suggests that each wise man will take example of how the Templars ‘once withheld no wax till they were pressed’ (?), apparently referring to the sealing of the property transfer process.72 What is exciting about this rough little poem is that it looks like the charter hand that copied it and the documents may also have composed it – making it an extremely early bureaucratic composition in Hiberno-English. While caring for the sick or wounded was ostensibly their mission, the Hospitallers’ primary role in Ireland was also, in modern terms, closer to law enforcement. They wielded extraordinary political power, and their priors often held the highest offices in government.73 Their houses in Ireland were built as castles rather than as conventional monasteries, and they were of early assistance to Henry II in the Norman Conquest itself. No doubt this role, which they shared with the Templars until their suppression, was heightened by the dramatic ethnic tensions of postconquest Ireland – in short, the Hospitallers were a heavy-weight part of the colonial regime. After the Templars’ suppression, the Hospitallers were officially to take over their property, so it is with Schadenfreude that this poet who struggles with written English (which, however, he likely spoke) took up his pen.74 Perhaps it is just exactly within a circumscribed milieu that one would experiment like this with nascent EMHE, a good reminder that functioning trilingual cultures in the thirteenth century and their reading audiences were likely to be circumscribed – with the English share of this trilinguality comprising as yet a minute piece of the linguistic pie. The Corpus and Lambeth poems, radically different in quality as they are, are also a reminder that documentary hands played an unexpected and unnoticed role in recording early EMHE verse – in both cases with quite different agendas than Franciscan compilers had. Looking at all of these EMHE collections together, we get a glimpse of how bureaucratic scribe-poet literary culture evolved alongside, and sometimes even in the employ of, religious institutions. Above all, we have to be grateful to the generosity of Franciscans who collected, sometimes even to their disadvantage, these nascent secular experiments.

72 For images of the Templars’ seals up to 1307, see: ‘The Templars and other Monastic Military Orders’, Medieval Warfare [accessed 26 June 2020]. 73 J. A. Watt, The Church in Medieval Ireland (Dublin,1998), p. 49. See also KerbyFulton, ‘Competing Archives’, p. 681, on the Hospitallers’ prior’s major role in Ireland’s parliamentary crisis of 1418. 74 Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, p. 147.

PART II IDENTITIES AND LOCALITIES

FAMOUS SCRIBE, UNRECOGNISED STINT RALPH HANNA

I

F

or those interested in late medieval English religious culture, one seminal document is the registered copy of ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’. This 1357 promulgation of Archbishop John Thoresby appears, on inserted leaves and in a hand alien to most of the remainder of its manuscript, at University of York, Borthwick Institute, Reg. 11, fols. 295r–8v. These leaves present Thoresby’s Latin command for catechetical instruction throughout his archdiocese, preceded by a slightly differing Middle English version composed by John Gaytryge, a monk of St Mary’s, York.1 With his customary sharpness of eye, Ian Doyle long ago identified other examples of the hand that presents Thoresby’s catechism copying elsewhere in the archbishop’s register.2 These entries again appear on leaves inserted into the register (in one case, at fol. 28r, including a long add-on, originally a separate parchment sheet, now sewn to the foot of

1 For both versions of the text, see The Lay Folks’ Catechism, or, the English and Latin Versions of Archbishop Thoresby’s Instruction for the People, ed. T. F. Simmons and H. E. Nolloth, EETS OS 118 (London, 1901). For Thoresby’s mandate to Gaytryge, see R. N. Swanson, ‘The Origins of the Lay Folks’ Catechism’, Medium Ævum 60 (1991), 92–100. For the standard studies of the Middle English text and its transmission, see A. Hudson, ‘A New Look at the Lay Folks’ Catechism’, Viator 16 (1985), 243–58; and S. Powell, ‘The Transmission and Circulation of The Lay Folks’ Catechism’, in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 67–84. The text looms large in Jonathan Hughes’ exaggerated account of the York archiepiscopal familia’s religious activities, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 1988). 2 See ‘The Manuscripts’, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. D. Lawton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 88–100, 142–7, at 90–1 and particularly 142 n. 6.

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the leaf). In both instances, the writer is identified in his subscription, the repeated ‘ego Thomas de Aldefeld, clericus Ebor’ dioc’, publicus auctoritate apostolica notarius’ (fols. 28r, 113v [twice], 114r, 114v). A third example of his hand and subscription, for which I am grateful to that great student of York, Richard Beadle, and to Helen Watt of the Borthwick Institute, appears in Archbishop Alexander Neville’s register, Borthwick Institute, Reg. 12, fols. 2v–3r. It is worth pausing briefly over Thomas Aldfield’s scribal activity additional to his copy of ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’, pretty standard work for a notarial scribe in an episcopal chancery. The first document (Reg. 11, fols. 27v–8r) is a letter from Bolton Abbey (OSA) concerning their appropriation of the church of Harewood (nine miles south of Harrogate, near Leeds). The abbey chapter promises, from the next vacancy, to provide a fellow canon as vicar and to support him with six secular priests; it sets stipends for them all and promises to provide them with common housing. The letter is dated as from Westminster, 14 March 1353, and Aldfield dates his registering the document here 15 May 1356. The second document (Reg. 11, fols. 113r–14v) is an agreement between the executors of one John de Akum and Byland Abbey (OCist) regarding a perpetual chantry. This was originally to have been established in the parish church of Rillington, now ‘annexed’ to Byland. In place of that location, the document arranges for the chantry to be in St Peter ‘le litell’, York, with Byland providing the stipend for the chaplain in charge.3 From the language of the document, it is clear that the original, given at Byland, 16 November 1358, was a sealed charter, here given official record by being entered in the register. Thomas Aldfield did this relatively immediately, on 25 November, and his record includes a codicil, again subscribed, indicating that Archbishop Thoresby confirmed the arrangement at Cawood on 4 December. The third document, in the Neville register, is scarcely so current. Here Aldfield copies a pair of charters ordering the affairs of the chapel of St Mary and the Holy Angels, York (in the Minster yard). This is to be served by twelve resident clerics plus a sacristan, who is to function as the chapel’s treasurer. The chapel was to draw upon income from nearly a dozen parishes (one again Harewood). Aldfield includes both the document founding and endowing the chapel, an undated mandate of Archbishop Roger de Pont l’Évêque (he was archbishop 1154–81), and the much more detailed instructions of Archbishop Sewal de Bovill, dated 4 May 1258. Aldfield’s usual subscription appears here, dated 26 November 1356, but with the addition, ‘in hac parte scriba Registri prefati Ebor’ archiepiscopi’ (fol. 3r, my emphasis). 3 This church, demolished in the sixteenth century, was in Peter Lane; its parish was amalgamated with All Saints, Pavement.

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From the dates of registering the documents, Thomas of Aldfield would appear to have had a rather short career. All these entries cluster around the date of Thoresby’s ‘Catechism’, in the period 1356–8. But this information is misleading, and the third entry is important in this regard. Thomas Aldfield was appointed a papal notary in York diocese on 11 July 1352; he was to be examined as to his fitness for office by the abbot of St Mary’s.4 The third entry, whatever the date of the subscription, shows him still active in 1374 or 1375 (the dates of entries on the surrounding fols. 2r and 3v). Again, he is writing in a subsidiary role; his entry forms part of a twelvefolio opening to the Neville register entitled ‘Constituciones’. Neville was only installed in York in December 1374, and Aldfield’s recopying here of ancient documents he had already registered elsewhere nearly twenty years previously might be construed as offering the new archbishop some indication of the scope of his office. Although lengthy enough, this is not much of a career. Thomas sounds like one of those jobbing fellows Nigel Ramsay describes, ‘notaries who spent their entire lives in diocesan registries or ecclesiastical courts, acting as little more than high-grade copyists’.5 While he may have contributed some formal knowledge, the binding legal language appropriate to one or another of the actions he documented, he appears generally as a recorder, creating an enduring record of transactions important to one or another participant, or perhaps merely storing away specific legal forms so that they might be used as boilerplate for the next similar action, when it occurred. While his survivals in the registers may be accidental, all of them focus upon – and thus might indicate an expertise in – ‘local service’, provision for chapels and altars within specific churches. Here I would return to a phrase I have highlighted above, the what sounds to me plaintive ‘in hac parte scriba’ that accompanies the two sides Thomas Aldfield contributed to Reg. 12. This suggests to me a stark contrast with an immediately precedent York papal notary, John de Aldefeld. He triumphantly on every occasion signs himself as ‘scriba archiepiscopi’; that is, he was the person who held the office of diocesan registrar, and he was responsible for selecting, ordering and copying the full register, as he did

4 See Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, currently 23 vols. (London, 1893–), III, 471. For the appointment process, see C. R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1972), pp. 72–81; when a notary was invested in office, he was designated ‘per calami, attramenti, et carte tractationem’ (p. 89). 5 N. Ramsay, ‘Scriveners and Notaries as Legal Intermediaries in Later Medieval England’, in Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. J. I. Kermode (Gloucester, 1991), pp. 118–31 (p. 124). See also his ‘The History of the Notary in England’, in Handbuch zur Geschichte des Notariats der Europäischen Traditionen, ed. M. Schmoeckel and W. Schubert (Bonn, 2009), pp. 358–74.

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for Thoresby’s predecessor, Archbishop William Zouche.6 Poor Thomas appears to have got only the piecework. However, the two are almost certainly related, probably, since both were in orders, as uncle and nephew.7 Both share the cognomen that links them with Aldfield, a place just north of Fountains (OCist) and during the Middle Ages basically an appanage of the abbey.8 There survive a fair number of references to local Aldfields, generally in their dealings with both Fountains and with Ripon Minster, and at least one reference to a literate Aldfield, who could have been John the notary’s stepfather.9 It is possible, since John the scriba had died within six months of Thomas’s appointment as papal notary, that this may have been an arranged, if perhaps not very successful, succession.10 In contrast to his predecessor, for example, I have yet to find a record showing Thomas supported by appointments to sinecure positions. However, there may have been one compelling reason for Thomas’s appearance as the scribe of ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’. Unlike other notaries attached to the Thoresby affinity, customarily engaged with Latin 6 For the title, registrarius/scriba, see Cheney, Notaries, p. 43 (John Aldfield mentioned in n. 2 there). For John’s hand and subscription, see J. S. Purvis, Notarial Signs from the York archiepiscopal records (London, 1957), plate 20; for one of his documents, again with the subscription, see J. Greatrex, ‘The Dispute Between the Carmelite Friars and the Rector of St Crux, York, 1350’, in The Church in Medieval York: Records Edited in honour of Professor Barrie Dobson, ed. D. M. Smith, Borthwick Texts and Calendars 24 (York, 1999), pp. 69–73 (p. 73). 7 On notarial families, see Cheney, Notaries, pp. 45–6, 88. 8 I suspect the surname is responsible for LALME’s scribal placement of Thoresby’s registered catechism (LP 116, grid 426/469): ‘Language clearly not of York, but plausibly of Ripon. Aldfield is 7 m WSW of Ripon’. All references to LALME are to the online edition [accessed 19 May 2020]. 9 Around 1320, a Robert de Aldefeld, ‘vi[r] literat[u]s Eboracensis diocesis’ witnessed a document concerning properties damaged in the Scottish invasions (J. R. Walbran, Memorials of the Abbey of St Mary of Fountains, Surtees Society 42 [Durham, 1863], p. 205). In 1344, William de Aldefeld, ‘dominu[s] de Aldefeld’, with his wife Thesancia established a chapel in Aldfield with reversion to Ripon Minster chapter on their deaths (J. T. Fowler, Memorials of the Church of SS Peter and Wilfrid, Ripon, 4 vols., Surtees Society 74, 78, 81, 115 [Durham, 1882–1908], IV, 19–20); he was dead by the time of my next example, when his wife Thesancia was married to John de Clotherum (a place in Ripon parish, later seat of the Pigots). In 1355/6, the person who must have been William’s heir, John de Aldefeld, granted the full manor (including the reversion of Thesancia’s dower-lands) to Fountains (TNA C 143/317/18); this transaction answers an entry of 12 March 1356 granting John de Aldefeld license to alienate in mortmain land in Aldfield to Fountains; see Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Edward III, 16 vols. (London, 1891–1916), X, 353. 10 John the scribe was only called ‘de Aldefeld’ and was illegitimate; his father was Hugh of (either Kirk or Green) Hammerton, ten miles west of York (and his mother presumably an Aldfield woman). He was supported in part by a canonry in the chapel whose documents Thomas later copied, St Mary and the Angels, as well as by the rectorship of Croft-on-Tees. See Papal Registers, III, 352, 370. (On the style of his nomenclature in the first document, patronymic + place of origin, see Cheney, Notaries, pp. 28–9, 103, 107.) John was dead by 16 January 1353, when the king, sede vacante, granted ‘the prebend which Master John de Aldefeld held, in the chapel of St Mary and the Holy Angels, York’ to a royal clerk; see Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, IX, 382.

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documents, he may have had an unusual skill, experience in dealing with Middle English. If he weren’t a wild success in the notarial line, supplementing his day job by copying for private clients may have recommended him for this entry in the register. The evidence for this moonlighting, pointed out to me by Ian Doyle, is certainly later than the stint in the Thoresby register. But it is profuse: 101 mostly double-column folios, something approaching 17,000 lines of Middle English verse, the copy of Speculum Vitae at the head of BL, MS Additional 33995.11 At this point, I simply offer references to readily available images of the two stints and allow readers to judge for themselves.12 I decline the opportunity to argue out the identity of the hand responsible for the two stints, which I would describe as reasonably obvious to a trained eye. In taking this tack, I follow the conversational dicta of the two finest palaeographers I have known, Malcolm Parkes and Ian Doyle: Hold them up at arm’s length and see just how similar they appear [Parkes]. It’s just like getting a letter in the post. You look at the address on the envelope, and you know who sent it to you [Doyle].

Appeals narrower than this attention to ‘general visual aspect’ (or ‘ductus’, the ongoing flow of script) persistently tend to confuse features generic to a script with features individual to a hand. Moreover, they often mistake attention to detail as a way of justifying an identification, rather than what such scrutiny is supposed to explain, the contribution of script detail to a unique visual effect.13 The most convincing examples of identity are not those sought, but those fortuitously discovered – just as when Ian 11 Since they have no place in the Common Law (and still today are pontifically licensed, since the Reformation by the archbishop of Canterbury), English notaries seldom appear in accounts of vernacular copying. Such, however, is not the case in Scotland, with a different legal system; see S. Mapstone, ‘The Transmission of Older Scots Literature’, in The International Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. N. Royan (Glasgow, 2018), pp. 38–59, 283–9 (pp. 58–9 and nn). For a description of Additional 33995, see Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. R. Hanna, 2 vols., EETS OS 331 and 332 (Oxford, 2008), I, xxxiii–iv. 12 For Thomas Aldfield copying ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’, see York’s Archbishops’ Registers Revealed. [accessed 19 May 2020] (showing Borthwick Institute, Reg. 11, fol. 295r); and for a full-size image of (part of a leaf from) Additional 33995, see Speculum Vitae, ed. Hanna, I, frontispiece. 13 Cf. my discussion, ‘Dan Michel of Northgate and His Books’, in Medieval Manuscripts, Their Makers and Users: A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 213–24. I suspect that, ironically enough, Doyle and Parkes themselves are responsible for such misguided industry; at the dawn of scribal studies, in their effort to convince the uninitiated of the identity of Hengwrt and Ellesmere scribes, they produced – as their many other publications show, quite against their usual bent – a full conspectus of the scribe’s letter-forms. See their ‘Paleographical Introduction’ in The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, ed. P. G. Ruggiers (Norman OK, 1979), pp. xix–xlix (pp. xxxv–xxxvii).

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handed me an image of Thoresby’s register and said to me, ‘You may find this interesting’, or before the announcement of her discovery to the New Chaucer Society, when Linne showed me Adam Pinkhurst’s oath in the Scriveners’ Company Common Paper. My response in both cases was the same, ‘OMG. Congratulations’. The Additional manuscript is the work of two scribes, each copying in a separate run of quires.14 However, the two hands are probably engaged with working on two long texts simultaneously; their stints meet at a folio-boundary in the single oddly-shaped quire within the manuscript. This quire is also partly given over to what appears bridging ‘filler texts’ and features a cancelled leaf that produces a clean join with the second scribe’s material in subsequent quires. The last feature implies that he had performed some (inexact) ‘casting off ’ and had begun his copying at the opening of the following quire at a point within the text. He assumed that Thomas Aldfield would leave him enough space to copy in the head of The Prick of Conscience, once he had finished copying in the preceding quire. This is a seminal book, although one strangely isolated. Here Thomas Aldfield copies that surviving version of Speculum Vitae (DIMEV 423) most proximate to the author’s papers; his companion, in turn, gives that version of The Prick of Conscience (DIMEV 5398) most nearly resembling what the author wrote.15 Although both poems are widely disseminated, neither textual version on offer here has any purchase on the general transmission; as I will show, only two other Speculum Vitae scribes appear to have had full access to the same materials as Aldfield (two others to conflated partial versions), and but a single other copyist, among the droves who copied The Prick of Conscience, could access scribe 2’s version of that poem.16 Given what we know of Aldfield’s professional work, I would suppose that the volume could well have been prepared in York. In England’s second city, the metropolis of the North, alien scribes might well have retained for their Middle English copying their home written dialects. However, such a tentative placement would speak neither to the two 14 LALME (unconvincingly) places scribe 2 in the Hawes area, upper Wensleydale (LP 468). 15 DIMEV, of course, represents yet another of our honoree’s salient contributions, even in its incompletion more accurate and authoritative than any competing account. 16 For The Prick of Conscience, the only comparable version appears in Wellesley College (MA), MS 8, described in Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text, ed. R. Hanna and S. Wood, EETS OS 342 (Oxford, 2013), pp. xxiv–xxvi: probably of the 1420s, in language of the southern Vale of York, later at Byland Abbey (NRY, OCist) and in Skeeby, Richmondshire in 1534. In addition to the copy of this poem, the Wellesley MS includes: a bit of ‘The Book of Shrift’ (DIMEV 1155), also in two Ripon copies of The Prick of Conscience, BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix, and Bodl., MS Rawl. poet. 175; the ‘Stimulus consciencie minor’ (DIMEV 422), also in Additional 33995 (where it forms part of Thomas Aldfield’s stint – as well as in Bodl., MS Rawl. A. 389, copied in Lichfield from imported Yorkshire exemplars); and a poem (DIMEV 1954) known elsewhere only from Robert Thornton’s Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91.

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scribes’ clients/patrons/employers, nor to the source of their exemplar materials, likely provided by those persons. The isolated quality of Additional 33995’s texts imply that these reflect materials from private stashes, not ones available in general scribal culture. II These perceptions lead me to consider broader issues, cultural and historical. Without some form of cultural background narrative, often only a probable (or just plausible?) one, identifying hands is largely a dead-end exercise.17 In pursuing such interests, I follow up a move that has marked Linne’s discussions from her earliest engagement with scribes, as the inheritor of the preliminary lists of scribes whose work appears in more than one manuscript assembled by the brilliant Jeremy Griffiths.18 Here I choose to address the issue: What difference does it make? What, if anything, does one gain by identifying Thomas Aldfield as the copyist of the most authoritative surviving version of Speculum Vitae, apparently on the basis of a ‘private copy’ generally unavailable in a thriving circulation? I begin by returning to an essay inspired by the muse of Linne, ‘The Yorkshire Circulation of Speculum Vitae’.19 There I argued that, in spite of its broad circulation, Yorkshire copies of the poem were genetically unique. Manuscripts produced by scribes in the Midlands, as well as in southern Yorkshire, are more textually various and only a pair of them clearly related to any representatives of the Yorkshire transmission. Particularly central to the transmissional tradition examined was ‘the Wensleydale version’, a group of copies all written in languages associated with the area around Masham and Middleham.20 I concluded, views I will here partially retract, ‘Further study of the poem 17 In what follows, I refer to two essays centred around my particular site of interest, ‘Yorkshire Writers’ (2003) and ‘Some North Yorkshire Scribes and Their Context’ (2008), both reprinted in Patient Reading/Reading Patience: Oxford Essays on Medieval English Literature (Liverpool, 2017), pp. 161–81 and 182–208, respectively. 18 In her article, ‘A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe: Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards et al. (London, 2000), pp. 113–23. Of course, the fullest extension of her customary practice appears, not uncontroversially, in her and Estelle Stubbs’ Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York, 2013). 19 In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. M. Connolly and L. R. Mooney (York, 2008), pp. 279–91. The volume, in the main, joins papers delivered at a York Manuscripts conference I was unable to attend, owing to teaching commitments; Linne commissioned me to write something to bulk the book up a little. 20 These include CUL, MSS Gg.1.7, Gg.1.14 and Additional 2823; BL, MSS Additional 22558 and Royal 17 C.viii; and Bodl., MS Lyell 28. To them, one could add an exiguous fragment, described in R. Hanna, ‘Two New Manuscript Fragments of Speculum Vitae’, Journal of the Early Book Society 16 (2013), 221–6.

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IMAGE CREDIT: DR

AND VICINITY.

KNARESBOROUGH

FIG. 1 ALDFIELD,

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should consider more carefully what mechanisms (and so far as ascertainable, what individuals), almost certainly ecclesiastical, might have been responsible for this process [of transmission]’. Any attentive reader of that study will have noted a substantial geographical gap in the account of transmission there offered. I distinguished the poem’s Wensleydale and south Yorkshire circulation, but, quite deliberately, provided no account of what lay between them. The identification of Thomas de Aldefeld as the scribe responsible for the best manuscript now provokes some further thoughts. The gap in the earlier account ignores the issue of textual quality, and with it, five manuscripts, all variously close to the poem’s authorial version, but, like that in Additional 33995 (as well as that manuscript’s Prick of Conscience) basically isolated within the textual history of Speculum Vitae. These core copies are: A = BL, MS Additional 33995 The published edition of the poem reports simply the opinion of the printed LALME: ‘north-west Yorkshire’ (LALME, I, 101), unmapped by the editors. This fudge was provided largely to cloak my own indecision; my notes place the scribal language somewhere north of Leeds in an elongated north-south swath of the Vale of York. Although this might include Thomas’s Aldfield (and the Ripon area generally), associated by the electronic LALME with the language of his ‘Lay Folks’ Catechism’ (see n. 8 above), the area covered was scarcely so confined.21 (See the map, ‘Thomas Aldfield’s Yorkshire’, for locations mentioned in this essay.) E = Bodl., MS Eng. poet. d. 522 The edition similarly reports the opinion of the printed LALME: ‘northern’ and unmapped (LALME, I, 148). At the conclusion, the scribe signs, ‘per Iohannem Kylyngwyke’. I remain particularly grateful to the late local historian Robert Bank of Colne (Lancs.), who in December 2014 told me he had found a John de Killingwick associated with Knaresborough. I am further grateful to John Bank, who has supplied me with some of his brother Robert’s files. From these, it is evident that Robert based his identification upon a pair of bequests in the voluminous 1402 will of Sir John Depeden of Healaugh (about fifteen miles south-east of Knaresborough): 21 LALME’s report of Aldfield’s language corresponds only broadly to that ascribed to the poem’s author in Speculum Vitae, ed. Hanna, I, lxvii–lxx; it is more northerly, the extreme limit in this regard associated with S below. Equally, it is a good deal more southerly than the language of the scribal community ascribed to Ripon in ‘Some North Yorkshire Scribes’, typified by Rawl. poet. 175 (LP 174). This I construe to be, not the language of Ripon, but a scribal Schriftsprache, predicated on North Riding conventions and imposed on all the group’s copying. 22 The hand illustrated in Speculum Vitae, ed. Hanna, II, frontispiece.

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Et do et lego domui Sancti Roberti juxta Knaresburgh v. marcas. Et do et lego patri Iohanni de Kylnewik ad usum suum proprium xiij s. iiij d.

As the honorific ‘patri’ suggests, John Killingwick was the ‘minister’ of the tiny Trinitarian house devoted to cultivating the memory of the local holy man St Robert Flower, probably for the last twenty years of the fourteenth century.23 John’s cognomen indicates that he came from a place apparently far afield, Kilnwick in the East Riding, between Beverley and Driffield. However, the distance is only apparent. Certainly among the most prominent local residents was Sir William Plumpton (1404–80), in his time both steward of the local Percy baronry of Spofforth and steward, castellan and forester of the Duchy of Lancaster Honour of Knaresborough. While Plumpton had an extensive local coterie of friends and acquaintance, his intimates also included the Normanvilles of Kilnwick. I would suppose that such connections might lead to a promising youth being recommended for a clerical employment associated with a family friend; certainly, with their three endowed chantries, the Plumptons had ample opportunities to extend support to priests.24 S = BL, MS Stowe 951 LALME LP 526, from the Pateley Bridge area, the south-west corner of Ripon parish. This is about fifteen miles north-west of Knaresborough, eleven miles south-west of Ripon (the modern road connecting them runs just north of Aldfield, three to four miles outside Ripon). L = Liverpool UL, MS F.4.9 LALME says of this manuscript, ‘The language of the Speculum Vitae is strikingly like that of [S], though the hands are different and the texts appear not to be closely related’. But conversely my edition shows that the two manuscripts are very closely related, indeed a genetic pair.25 However, the relationship has been obscured by conflation in L, from a copy closely resembling Royal 17 C.viii, a representative of ‘the Wensleydale version’. As I have already noted, these two Pateley Bridge copies are provocative, See Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. J. Raine [jr], Surtees Society 4 (Durham, 1836), 297; and D. M. Smith, The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, 1377–1540 (Cambridge, 2008), p. 611 (the only explicit record, in 1388, is Papal Registers, V, 51–2); and ‘Friaries: The Trinitarian friars of Knaresborough’, in A History of the County of York: Volume 3, ed. William Page (London, 1974), pp. 296–300. British History Online [accessed 20 May 2020]. 24 See J. W. Kirby, ‘A Northern Knightly Family in the Waning Middle Ages’, Northern History 31 (1995), 86–107 (pp. 86–7, 90). In addition to the Normanvilles, among the Plumptons’ East Riding acquaintances were the Stapletons of Carlton-by-Snaith; for this family’s extensive involvement in book-culture, see Hanna, Patient Reading, pp. 204–7. 25 Speculum Vitae, ed. Hanna, I, lxxxii–lxxxiii. 23

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since their language is placed at the extreme northern edge of the area to which one might ascribe the authorial dialect. P = Princeton UL, MS Taylor 11 The single oddball, LALME LP 598, placed in the Sedbergh area, where one comes over the ‘hals’ from Wensleydale into Lancashire, and perhaps later at Bolton (WRY, OSA). The text here is again conflated, most likely from a south Yorkshire exemplar that also provided materials underlying the Lichfield Vernon and Simeon manuscripts. One here addresses the issue of proximity and of Linne’s notion, which, following Clifford Geertz, I might designate as one of ‘thick production’.26 Excepting P, the core manuscripts cluster in a relatively small area. Here new information – Thomas Aldfield’s association, both with that village in Ripon parish and with A, conjoined with Robert Bank’s identification of John Killingwick – points toward a confined central area where something closely resembling an authorial version of Speculum Vitae was available. This centre of production, somewhere in the vicinity of Ripon and Knaresborough, needs to be associated with a single place, where at least one exemplar was available for repeated local copying. One plausible focus emerges from my earlier discussions. Thomas de Aldefeld came from a place nearly entirely the property of Fountains; at least one potential Wensleydale centre might have been Jervaulx (‘Ure-River-valley’); and the single copy of The Prick of Conscience related to that of Additional 33995 belonged to Byland (although removed, certainly within the compositional ambit of that poem).27 All these are Cistercian houses, and ordinal transmission might well be worth considering. The difficulty, of course, although I floated this possibility in my earlier study, is the absence of evidence for any Cistercian interest in pursuing such a programme. There’s but a single relevant book, the Fountains copy of The Prick of Conscience, BL, MS Additional 24203, but here with the text in an advanced deviant version. Moreover, this is at least two centuries past the period when one expects monastic copying to be a significant force, although it remains possible that such places could have held exemplars that might be made available to clerkly scribes attached to local adherents. Yet there is no sign that this diffusion reflects any central direction, only the same or very similar exemplars in dispersed circulation. Unlike those books I have previously described and associated with Ripon Minster vicars choral, joined by repeated scribes and decorators,28 these books are remarkably diverse, in varying sizes, formats and notions of textual presentation. 26 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), chapter 1: ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, pp. 3–30. 27 For which, see Richard Morris, ed. Hanna and Wood, pp. xxxix–xlvi. 28 See Patient Reading, pp. 162–7.

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I am afraid I am going to justify Vincent Gillespie’s derision, that I am ‘fast approaching the point of claiming that all the best Middle English writing actually comes from Ripon, or a few miles either side of it’.29 I do this without embarrassment, however, since, first of all, as I demonstrated in earlier studies, neither Speculum Vitae nor The Prick of Conscience are likely to have been composed in Ripon (or indeed, in the same place at all), only transmitted there. Second, the locale clearly harbours more than one transmissional centre. After all, the non-Thomas Aldfield-copied Prick in Additional 33995 and Wellesley 8 cannot derive from the same source as the three Prick-manuscripts whose production I previously ascribed to Ripon. Conversely, the severely edited Speculum Vitae turned out by one of those Ripon book-producers, in BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E.vii, was predicated on the ‘Wensleydale version’ of the poem, not an exemplar like that used in the five central copies listed above. However, there is good reason for seeing Ripon and the area immediately to the south, a dozen miles down the modern A61 to Knaresborough and Harrogate, as a particularly provocative locale. (The southern edge of medieval Ripon parish/the archiepiscopal peculiar Ripshire is at Ripley, three to four miles north of both places.) While to many who view themselves as metropolitan the North may seem just wildly uncouth, this is a particularly rich environment. The area forms the greater part of Claro wapentake, at this period the second most populous such division in the West Riding. Moreover, the area was exceedingly prosperous – not from the customary field-agriculture, but from industrialised wool-production. (What came off the backs of those million Fountains sheep had to be processed somewhere nearby.) Moreover, there were ‘particularly dense clusters of knightly residences in the districts of Ripon and Knaresborough’, precisely the kind of institutions that one imagines sustain medieval cultural production of all sorts.30 All recent studies insist that, unlike the south, Yorkshire lacked a ‘county community’.31 The place is simply too large and diverse – and, one might add, institutionally variegated – to support such. This culture is typified by 29 ‘Foreword’, in Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna, ed. S. Horobin and A. Nafde (Turnhout, 2017), pp. xi–xviii (p. xv). 30 See M. C. Punshon, ‘Government and Political Society in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1399–1461’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, 2002), p. 17 for Claro (mapped at p. 10); p. 55 for the knightly houses (the source of my citation; mapped at p. 56). These residences belonged to that local audience described in Hanna, Patient Reading, pp. 193–204. To my account there, one might add Sir William Tempest (c. 1390–c. 1440) of Studley, whose estate eventually passed to the Nortons and Mallorys. And one might minimise somewhat the potential local impact of the Scropes of Masham, whose favoured residence at this time was at Foxflete, outside Driffield in the East Riding – although, yet another local connection, proximate to the Normanvilles’ Kilnwick. See C. D. Ross, ‘The Yorkshire Baronage, 1399–1435’ (unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1951 [MS D.Phil. d.790]), pp. 171–2. 31 The emphatically reiterated thesis of both Punshon’s study and that of A. J. Pollard, ‘The Richmondshire Community of Gentry during the Wars of the Roses’, in Patronage,

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an intense localism (a version of what I consider Linne’s persistent interest in ‘territorial proximity’) in which people are bound to local lordships and their centres. The Ripon area offers one example of the vicissitudes of institutional variegation, places where the king’s writ did not run and local administration and law were in the hands of private parties, local lords and their adherents. Ripon was the archbishop’s peculiar, but equally, Knaresborough (partially) was an ‘honour’, in this case of the Duchy of Lancaster (from 1399, the kings of England). So too, and running down Wensleydale so far as Masham, was Richmondshire, the North Riding Honour of Richmond, dominated by the Nevilles’ caput at Middleham and including, as parts of the North Riding wapentakes of Gilling and Hang, Wensleydale and Swaledale. Lordships interacted, on occasion fractiously, in Knaresborough; although a major Lancastrian centre, it was also within the ambit of the Percy baronry of Spofforth.32 But while local, such people are not bound within specific geographical foci. All of them own and administer variously dispersed estates and are travellers, perhaps in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, particularly on military and legal affairs. As textual disseminators, potential owners of exemplar materials for the possible use of others, one might particularly look for people whose interests join diverse political/ affinity communities. Here there is no dearth of candidates. One might consider, not Ripon but the northerly Honour of Richmond, the centre of ‘the Wensleydale version’ of Speculum Vitae, beginning in the late fourteenth century. The major landholders here are all figures who will be familiar from my earlier studies of Ripon: the Nevilles (their estate centred on Middleham),33 the Scropes of Bolton, the Fitzhughs and the Scropes of Masham. Yet equally, Pollard draws attention to ‘lesser families’ with Richmondshire holdings; ‘lesser’ here should be measured against the fact that these lands alone pull in something like £200 a year. These include figures also associated with Punshon’s Ripon area residences: the Ingilbys, Markenfields, Nortons and Pigots.34 The provenances of the five central manuscripts of Speculum Vitae indicate that there must have been at least one exceptionally good copy Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. C. D. Ross (Gloucester, 1979), pp. 37–59. 32 See R. Wilcock, ‘Local Disorder in the Honour of Knaresborough, c. 1438–61 and the National Context’, Northern History 41 (2004), 39–80. 33 It may be only accidental, but Catterick, usually taken to be the place indicated by the sobriquet ‘Gaytryge’ of Thoresby’s translator, is just outside Richmond and formed part of the Middleham estate. 34 See Pollard, ‘Richmondshire Community’, with a map of the honour at p. 39 and of manorial holdings at p. 40; for ‘lesser families’, see p. 44, and for a sequence of references to Pigot connections to the area, pp. 49, 50, 51, 59. As Pollard notes (p. 51), direct connections between Richmondshire and Knaresborough are, in contrast to those with Ripon, attenuated.

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somewhere in Ripon parish or immediately south. This one should imagine as likely in lay hands, quite apart from, but at least tangentially aware of the Ripon copying community I have elsewhere described.35 Wherever it was held, its custodian was in a position to export it – or what comes to the same thing, to loan it for export – to York, and to a perhaps known professional writer of local origins with time to produce a copy. This does very little to narrow a field marked by people active in military, business and legal affairs. However, the last vocation would underwrite knowledge of a notary, a legal scribe – conceivably one known through his expertise in legislating special arrangements in parish churches (not to mention his apparent facility with Middle English). Such a custodian, or his descendants in the generation after Thomas Aldfield’s work, would also be in that dual position the evidence requires. This person not only sustained local copying and use but allowed what the transmissional evidence shows, production of what would become the Richmondshire ‘master-copy’, the source underlying all those related representatives of the ‘Wensleydale version’. In these circumstances, one might suspect most strongly a member of one of the two well-employed legal families, either Pigot or Norton.36 Yet equally likely, and equally engaged in the law, is a figure considerably more august, Henry, 3rd lord Fitzhugh (c. 1363–1425).37 From 1387, he was lord of West Tanfield, jure uxoris, six miles up the road from Ripon. He was lord of the Honour of Richmond 1388–99, when it was granted to the Nevilles for their support of the Lancastrian usurpation. Continuously in residence in Richmond 1403–13, he was simultaneously the archbishop’s justice of the peace in Ripon peculiar on several occasions.38 He is also a known figure of devotion through his efforts at founding a Brigittine house (eventually Syon Abbey) in the North. That later in his career he was one of Henry V’s war-companions and leading 35 Cf. the recurrence of Ripon texts in the Wellesley manuscript (n. 16). Another example appears in conjunction with a copy of ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’ with a text better even than Thomas Aldfield’s, in Bodl., MS Don. c.13 (LALME LP 412, from just south of the Tees, near Darlington, conceivably John de Aldefeld’s Croft, certainly in ‘Fitzhugh country’). Here later additions to the (expurgated) Wycliffite sermons that fill nearly the full manuscript include DIMEV 201+3387, a juxtaposition unique to Cotton Galba E.ix (the poems separated in Rawl. poet. 175), both from the group I ascribed to Ripon. 36 See Ross, ‘Yorkshire Baronage’, pp. 344–5 and nn. on the prodigious local connections of the lawyer Richard Norton of Norton Conyers, eventually chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas (1413–20, his death). Provocatively enough, among his clients were both the Gascoignes (the lawyer father of the well-known Oxford figure Thomas) and Redmans of Harewood, a place within the area where Speculum Vitae was composed and its church a party in two of Thomas Aldfield’s registry entries. 37 For A. C. Reeves’s biography, a good deal too brief and under-detailed, see ‘Fitzhugh, Henry, third Baron Fitzhugh (1363?–1425)’, ODNB Online [accessed 20 May 2020]. 38 For the lordship of Richmond and residence there, see Ross, ‘Yorkshire Baronage’, pp. 10–15, 215; for appointments in Ripshire, the archbishop’s peculiar, Punshon, ‘Government’, p. 235.

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officials certainly does no harm to believing in his potential interest in vernacular devotional material. An inscription in the Royal manuscript of Speculum Vitae, probably the second best of the Wensleydale strain (I’m slightly more taken with Lyell 28) and produced at least near his North Riding seat of Ravensworth might further re-enforce a belief in his interest.39 There is, then, a good deal of mileage in Linne’s ‘proximity studies’. Indeed, they may offer more provocative materials in ‘provincial’ locales than in the more cluttered metropolitan central book-trade. As pursuing the example of Thomas Aldfield shows, the abundant local historical record to which Robert Bank directed me may be particularly revealing of individuals, their affiliations and their cultural interests.

39 The colophon, part or all copied from the scribe’s exemplar, identifies the copyist as ‘Rokeby’, with the date 1418. Rokeby is a village about six miles north-west of Ravensworth.

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iterary scholars have had little reason to think of Signet clerks or the French secretaries who crafted missives for Lancastrian kings and their consorts. A notable exception is George Ashby (d. 1475), the author of three substantial poems, including the Active Policy of a Prince and A Prisoner’s Reflections. I have recently identified Ashby’s hand, attributing to him eleven documents as well as CUL, MS Mm.4.42, the holograph text of Active Policy of a Prince.1 This essay will introduce and identify the handwriting of a number of Lancastrian Signet clerks and French secretaries of Henry V and Henry VI. As such, this will be the first discussion not only of their hands, but also of the scripts used by these two closely coordinated offices.2 Together with its companion piece, ‘The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks’,3 this essay will help to

1 S. Sobecki, Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2019), pp. 159–91. 2 In many ways, the An Anthology of Chancery English, ed. J. H. Fisher, M. Richardson, and J. L. Fisher (Knoxville TN, 1984), is a lost opportunity in this context. As Michael Benskin has shown (‘Chancery Standard’, in New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics, ed. C. Kay, C. Hough, and I. Wotherspoon (Glasgow, 2004), pp. 1–39), the foundations of this book are so fundamentally flawed that it can be ignored for the present undertaking. Fisher et al. offer no palaeographical methodology, conflate secretary and anglicana scripts as ‘chancery’, and consistently confuse privy seal and signet records. 3 S. Sobecki, ‘The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal and Council Clerks’, The Review of English Studies 72 (2021), 253–79 .

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delineate the use of the secretary family of scripts in the four main writing offices that relied on it in England’s central government: the privy seal secretary, which was also in use in the Council during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V; the lettre-courante-based secretary script of the Signet; and the French lettre courante deployed by the king’s French secretaries. I. SIGNET CLERKS In the course of the fourteenth century, the Privy Seal, which used to serve the monarch’s personal communication, became increasingly involved in general government and inter-office communication. The Privy Seal developed into a clearing-house for government business with a wide remit, from conducting foreign correspondence to issuing warrants for the Great Seal.4 With the Privy Seal ceasing to function solely or predominantly as the king’s private seal, a third seal began to assume such functions. This seal was initially called the ‘secret’ seal, but towards the end of Edward III’s reign the keeper of this seal was called the king’s secretary, and the seal itself became known as the Signet.5 Unlike the other writing offices, such as Chancery, Exchequer, or Privy Seal, which were based in Westminster, the Signet was headquartered in Windsor Castle, although its clerks were mobile, constantly accompanying the king and his secretary.6 With time, individual clerks were not only assigned to queens consort but also to other members of the royal family when they assumed the role of regent. Ashby, for instance, served Duke Humphrey and Henry VI, before being assigned to Queen Margaret’s service. It has been argued that there was ‘a clear customary division of work between offices’, but during the prolonged military campaigns in France under Henry V and Henry VI clerks from the Privy Seal and the Signet were sometimes deployed across such boundaries. For instance, the Signet clerk John Offord moved to the Privy Seal, while John Hethe, a Privy Seal clerk, was seconded to the Signet while in France and even produced two treaty exemplars for the Chancellor.7 It was actually the high degree of flexibility among the sections of the writing offices deployed to France that has permitted me to identify many clerks who would otherwise have remained unknown: in France, English clerks often adopted the custom of French chanceries by systematically signing their missives.8 This phenomenon has not previously been connected to the deployment of 4 A. L. Brown, The Governance of Late Medieval England 1272–1461 (London, 1989), pp. 43–60. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33). 5 Brown, The Governance of Late Medieval England, p. 47. 6 The best account of the Signet office and its clerks remains J. Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary and the Signet Office in the XV Century (Cambridge, 1939). 7 Sobecki, ‘Privy Seal and Council Clerks’; Sobecki, Last Words, p. 67. 8 Sobecki, ‘Privy Seal and Council Clerks’.

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government clerks to France, and scholarship has remained unclear on this point: J. Otway-Ruthven thought that signet letters began to carry signatures only in 1437, a point repeated by Gwilym Dodd.9 John Kirby, when calendaring signet letters, came altogether closer to the actual date, when he notes that the custom of signing signet letters was ‘revived’ in ‘January 1419’, but he does not offer a reason or explain why almost all signet letters during the last four years of Henry V’s reign were signed in contrast to occasional signatures in earlier periods.10 Of course, a clerk’s signature does not always mean that the document was written by the same clerk. Signatures were often endorsements by overseeing clerks.11 To identify individual clerks’ hands, I rely on private letters and other records in their hands, in addition to biographical information on their career stage, the likelihood of underclerks available to them, and comparisons with fellow clerks. Where I am less confident, I say so clearly. This chapter is the product of a close examination of the writing produced by government clerks and royal secretaries for itinerant English chanceries in France during the Hundred Years War. Henry V’s campaigns and Henry VI’s French administrations have left behind government records, personal letters and treaty documents, many of which were signed by clerks who would not have done so in England. Having examined British and continental accounts, rolls and archives alongside signed writing in different grades and for different purposes, I can now identify the handwriting of a number of government clerks. The specific conditions of Lancastrian France make it possible for the first time to identify with confidence the hands of Signet clerks and the king’s French secretaries, in addition to Privy Seal and Council clerks. The Signet Secretary Script While there was some degree of overlap in France between the usually clearly delineated functions of the Privy Seal, the Signet and Chancery, each writing office developed its distinctive script or types of scripts. Four main functional groups of government clerks came to rely on versions of the secretary script, imported from France in the second half of the fourteenth century: the Privy Seal, the Council, the Signet and the king’s French secretaries. Because much of its correspondence was with foreign 9 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 26–7; G. Dodd, ‘Trilingualism in the Medieval English Bureaucracy: The Use – and Disuse – of Languages in the FifteenthCentury Privy Seal Office’, The Journal of British Studies 51 (2012), 253–83 (p. 264 n. 29). 10 J. L. Kirby, Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399–1422) (London, 1978), p. 4. 11 Elizabeth Danbury offers the most recent discussion in ‘The Study of Illuminated Charters, Past, Present and Future: Some Thoughts from England’, in Illuminierte Urkunden: Beiträge aus Diplomatik, Kunstgeschichte und Digital Humanities, ed. G. Bartz and M. Gneiss (Cologne, 2018), pp. 259–80 (270–4). See also Dodd, ‘Trilingualism’, 265–6.

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powers and overwhelmingly in French (as Gwilym Dodd has shown), in the Privy Seal a legible yet quickly executable secretary script evolved.12 Its main hallmark is the smaller module, suitable for often narrow strips of parchment, and the use of a few standardised bookhand graphs, especially for letters common in English, this includes the complex W and, in its informal cursive grades, a round-w, which resembles a circle with a B or 2 lodged inside it, and y with a tail that moves up through the x-height. In addition, the choice of g usually depended on whether English or French was used. The privy seal secretary script is usually upright, angular and composed of broken strokes, with individual hands rarely tilting below 80° for the shafts of f and long-s. My research has shown that the writing angle of these two letters emerges as a distinguishing factor that can be quantified and measured irrespective of the scaling of an image. More importantly, the preferred writing angle, certainly for professional secretary scribes, remains consistent across time, script grade and type of document. For the sake of consistency, all measurements have been made from the writing line (0°) using a Gima orthopaedic goniometer (model 27340). This script, consistently employed by all Privy Seal clerks, remained fairly stable during the first half of the fifteenth century.13 Because during the first quarter of the fifteenth century Council clerks were appointed from the Privy Seal and relied on their colleagues for assistance, Council minutes and related documents match the privy seal’s secretary script until the appointment in 1421 of Richard Caudray, the king’s former secretary. By contrast, the secretary script used by Signet clerks more closely shadows the French lettre courante, a simplified and smaller cousin of lettre bâtarde.14 Malcolm Parkes has drawn attention to the influence of this script on commercial scribes working in England,15 and my research has shown that all letters produced under the signets of Henry VI and Queen Margaret are modelled on this script rather than on insular secretary varieties. Parkes’s description of lettre courante in the hands of English scribes also holds true for all signet hands: The angle of the exaggerated tapering descenders of f and long s, was balanced by the angle in the opposite direction in the stems of c, e and r, and in the broader segment of the broken strokes forming the lobes of letters (especially a). The splay also accentuated the difference between the broad strokes traced

On the use of French in the Privy Seal, see Dodd, ‘Trilingualism’. For a fuller discussion of secretary varieties and the hands of Privy Seal clerks, see Sobecki, ‘Privy Seal and Council Clerks’. 14 The specimen book of Robert of Tours (BN, MS latin 8685) offers a model lettre courante on fols. 39r–v and 41r–v, viewable on Gallica [accessed 18 May 2020]. 15 M. B. Parkes, Their Hands before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 117–19. 12 13

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with the full width of the nib and the hairline strokes traced with the edge, thus altering the profiles of letters.16

In addition – and in contrast to lettre bâtarde – lettre courante features a smaller module, consistent biting and simpler letter forms, especially of d, where in its plain, non-lobed form (Fig. 1, ‘god’, l. 1) lettre courante does not feature the lobed-ascenders common to many lettre bâtarde hands. Signet secretary scribes, however, often employ both forms concurrently. There is a considerable amount of shading, though it is much less pronounced than in lettre bâtarde hands. Forms of w in minuscule and majuscule are consistently expressed as an upright or cursive double-v in the manner of French scribes unaccustomed with this letter (Fig. 1, ‘Windesore’, penultimate line; ‘withoute’, l. 2). There are no coat hanger or elaborate tails on g; instead, Signet clerks use the jagged z-shaped secretary tail of the lettre courante g (Fig. 1, ‘damages’, l. 3). Similarly, y is simple, though at times with an exaggerated tail in final lines (Fig. 1, ‘likly’, l. 6; ‘Yeven’, penultimate line). In line with lettre courante, Signet clerks tend to use simpler letter forms where Privy Seal clerks incorporate English adjustments. Signet hands have a generally less angular or spiky aspect than their privy seal equivalents, though displaying a greater tilt, with the shafts of f and long-s set at an angle between 68° and 82°. I will discuss the characteristics of signet secretary using George Ashby’s hand as an example. Each of Ashby’s letters contains three grades of the script. Neither in Ashby’s hand nor in any of the surviving signet letters I have examined are there any anglicana forms and, unlike the secretary varieties used in some privy seal documents, there are no instances of two-compartment g or the more elaborate forms of majuscule and minuscule w characteristic of insular hands. The basic set of the script, a quickly written yet angular cursive secretary only slightly inflected by allographs typical for the target language, is used for the body of each missive. Ashby’s confident yet swift duct executes a fluent signet script, with an upright appearance setting his descenders consistently at an angle of 78°. Despite the cursive aspect and frequent biting, Ashby follows lettre courante in its angular appearance. This is the result of a pointed pen and horned letter forms for a, e and E, among others. Typical letter forms in the basic grade signet secretary/lettre courante are horned a and e, secretary g with a counterclockwise descender, both the lobed and simple allographs of d and h, where h can also feature an extended limb that points counterclockwise (for a lobed h with this feature, see Fig. 1, ‘the first’, last line). Signet clerks use various forms of the tironian sign, both modern and z-shaped r (Fig. 1, ‘trew’, l. 6; ‘or’, l. 9), kidney-shaped and long-s (‘persounes’, l. 4) and two basic forms of w: a plain angular secretary version in French texts, though in Latin 16

Parkes, Their Hands before Our Eyes, p. 118.

ARCHIVES (UK).

FIG. 1 TNA C 81/1367/17, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT WINDSOR, 1 JANUARY 1440, IN THE HAND OF GEORGE ASHBY (SIGNED). THE NATIONAL

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and English documents this form is sometimes preceded by straight or curved approach strokes; the second allograph is the curved double-v shaped w (Fig. 1, ‘warde’, l. 7), a peculiarity this script shares not only with the scribe of Oxford, New College, MS 314 and Bodl., MS Dugdale 45,17 but also with Henry’s French secretaries when they attempt to write out English place-names such as ‘Woodstock’, ‘Westminster’, or ‘Windsor’. This feature is common among French and French-trained scribes working in an English context. It also appears in Hand 1 in Durham UL, MS Cosin V.ii.13, whereas Henry’s French secretaries Michel de Paris and Jean Rinel use a double straight-fronted v, for instance (BN, MS français 4054, fol. 38, bottom line, ‘Wyndesore’, for de Paris; BN, MS Dupuy 760, fol. 161, and BN, MS Baluze 11, fol. 25, bottom line in both manuscripts, ‘Westminstre’, for Rinel). The next grade of signet secretary is reserved for the address on the dorse of letters, select words in the first line and specific letters in the bottom line (for an example of first-line usage, see Fig. 1, ‘We grete’). In this middle grade the minuscules are slightly larger than in his basic grade, and there is only little biting. Horned forms of a, e and g are traced with precision, while descenders in the last line and especially ascenders in the first line receive flourishes and loops (most of Ashby’s signet missives have looped ornamental ascenders on h on the dorse and in first lines). The third and highest grade of the script consists of engrossed forms of majuscules borrowed from lettre bâtarde and other French display varieties. This grade is also reserved for certain letters in the addresses on the dorse, the opening lines and some of the bottom lines. Various calligraphic forms of capital letters, especially A, M, N, P, R and W belong to this grade. Within this grade there exist additional tiers for particularly extravagant initial letters and paraphs common to lettre courante and lettre bâtarde scripts; these can be found in specimen and exercise books such as BN, MS latin 8685 (perhaps Robert of Tours) or the opening folios of Bodl., MS Ashmole 789, sometimes attributed to Richard Franceys.18 Thomas Andrew J. Otway-Ruthven states that Thomas Andrew was probably a Privy Seal clerk who only wrote one signet letter, in 1422, but his signature appears under two Chancery warrants written under the Signet and dated at Rouen: TNA C 81/1365/18 (Fig. 2), 15 April 1420, and C 81/1366/9 (Fig. 3), 17 Stephen Partridge has demonstrated that these two manuscripts were written by the same scribe; ‘A Newly Identified Manuscript by the Scribe of the New College Canterbury Tales’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 6 (1997), 229–36. 18 Franceys was first proposed as the scribe behind Ashmole 789 by O. Pächt and J. J. G. Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1973), III, no. 1138, plate CVI. Many of the attributions to Franceys, including this one, have proved contentious.

FIG. 2 TNA C 81/1365/18, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT ROUEN, 15 APRIL 1420, SIGNED BY THOMAS ANDREW. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

FIG. 3 TNA C 81/1366/9, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT ROUEN, 28 FEBRUARY 1419 OR 1420, SIGNED BY THOMAS ANDREW. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

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28 February 1419 or 1420 (the second authorises an annuity payment to John Hethe, the Privy Seal clerk seconded to the Signet in France).19 John Kirby, in his calendar of the signet letters of Henry IV and Henry V, counts Andrew among the regular Signet clerks.20 Both documents are written by the same hand, though they belong to slightly different grades of signet secretary. C 81/1365/18 is more hastily written, whereas individual letters in C 81/1366/9 are carefully traced, with horns on e and a. Both letters show the same pronounced forward tilt of 70°, with thick shafts on f and long-s throughout. The second arm of W curls to the right, unlike the first arm (Fig. 2, ‘We’, l. 3; Fig. 3, ‘Welbeloued’, l. 1). The signature is identical in both missives, with the grade of C 81/1366/9 matching that of the signature. The most characteristic letter of this hand, which in all likelihood is Andrew’s, is the tail on the flat-topped g: the tail curves to the left, before it loops underneath to connect with the body of the letter, forming an 8 tilted at 45° (Fig. 2, ‘signet’, final line; Fig. 3, ‘granted’, l. 3). Further characteristics include flat-topped A (Fig. 2, ‘Abbot’, l. 2; Fig. 3, ‘Allocate’, l. 2); d with a large lobe and triangular body (Fig. 2, ‘god’, l. 1; Fig. 3, ‘and’, l. 1); h without a tail (Fig. 2, ‘haue’, l. 1; Fig. 3, ‘charge’, l. 1); v that resembles a b with a closed upper lobe (Fig. 2, ‘vnto’, l. 4; Fig. 3, ‘vnto’, l. 4); and, in the faster register, a w that resembles two bs (Fig. 2, ‘welbeloued’, l. 1). George Ashby George Ashby was a poet and royal Signet clerk during the reign of Henry VI.21 He is known for three works: the Chaucerian complaint A Prisoner’s Reflections (henceforth: Reflections) and two combined poems dedicated to Edward of Westminster, the mirror for princes The Active Policy of a Prince (henceforth: Active Policy) and translations of classical epigraphs and political maxims, the Dicta et opiniones diversorum philosophorum (henceforth: Dicta), which is usually considered to be an unfinished component of the Active Policy of a Prince.22 Ashby’s poems 19 They have been calendared by Kirby, Calendar of Signet Letters, as items 894 and 857, respectively. 20 Kirby, Calendar of Signet Letters, p. 4. 21 The section on Ashby is an adapted version of parts of chapter 5 of Sobecki, Last Words. 22 J. Scattergood, ‘Ashby, George (b. before 1385?, d. 1475), Administrator and Poet’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]; J. Scattergood, ‘Peter Idley and George Ashby’, in A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and J. Boffey (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 113–25; Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 120, 132, 135, 185; R. Meyer-Lee, ‘Laureates and Beggars in Fifteenth-Century English Poetry: The Case of George Ashby’, Speculum 79.3 (2004), 688–726; and Sobecki, Last Words, pp. 159–91. A Prisoner’s Reflections has been edited by L. R. Mooney and M.-J. Arn, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems (Kalamazoo, 2005). For the Active Policy,

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survive in two fifteenth-century manuscripts: Reflections is preserved in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, whereas the other two poems make up CUL, MS Mm.4.42, which I have argued to be a holograph entirely in Ashby’s hand.23 In Reflections Ashby sums up four decades of a career during which he performed Signet duties first for Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, then for Henry VI and, finally, for Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s queen consort: I gan remembre and revolve in mynde My bryngyng up from chyldhod hedyrto In the hyghest court that I coude fynd With the kyng, quene, and theyre uncle also, The duk of Gloucetre, God hem rest do! With whom I have be cherysshed ryght well In all that was to me nedefull every dell Wrytyng to theyre sygnet full fourty yere As well beyond the see as on thys syde, Doyng my servyce as well there as here, Nat sparyng for to go ne for to ryde, Havyng pen and inke evyr at my syde, As truly as I coude to theyre entent Redy to acomplysshe theyre commandment. (57–70)24

Some of this information is confirmed in the Latin proem to Active Policy: ‘nuper Clericum Signeti Suppreme domine nostre Margarete, dei gratia Regine Anglie, etc.’ (lately clerk of the Signet of our supreme lady Margaret, by grace of God Queen of England etc.).25 The twelve records that I have identified to be in Ashby’s hand, gathered from three archives, span the years 1420 to 1447, and confirm his self-description as having written successively for the Signets of Duke Humphrey, Henry VI and Queen Margaret. (For a detailed discussion of the features of Ashby’s hand, see my chapter on Ashby in Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author.) I have established Ashby’s autograph hand based on five extant documents I discovered that contain his scribal signature, and I have identified six additional documents written in his hand. This, in turn, has allowed me to show that CUL Mm.4.42, which contains the sole copy of Active Policy, appears to be a holograph. BN, MS français 4054 (formerly Ancien 9037(7), olim Baluze 474) contains three instances of Ashby’s signature and letters, in addition to see George Ashby’s Poems: From the Fifteenth-Century MSS at Cambridge, ed. M. Bateson, EETS ES 76 (London, 1899). 23 Sobecki, Last Words, pp. 159–91. 24 All references to this poem are to The Kingis Quair, ed. Mooney and Arn. 25 The Latin proem has been printed and translated in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, ed. J. Wogan-Browne, N. Watson, A. Taylor, and R. Evans (University Park PA, 1999), pp. 56–8.

THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS

the scribal signatures of Henry’s French secretaries Michel de Paris and Gervais le Vulre (discussed below), among other important signatures.26 MS français 4054 contains five letters close and one set of instructions by Margaret of Anjou, each of which is signed with her sign manual.27 All five letters were written in French between 1445 and 1447, and all are addressed to Charles VII of France. These are the only known original letters of Margaret to Charles to have survived. All five conform in their physical shape and textual layout to signet letters,28 even though only the last three have been written under the queen’s Signet. These three bear George Ashby’s signature and are written in his hand: fol. 94, Margaret of Anjou to Charles VII, dated at Sheen, 10 December 1446; fol. 79, Margaret of Anjou to Charles VII, dated at Windsor, 20 December 1446; and fol. 76, Margaret of Anjou to Charles VII, dated at Pleasance, 28 July 1447.29 I have subsequently discovered two further signed letters by Ashby, this time written in English for Henry VI in January 1440. Both are in the National Archives: TNA C 81/1367/17 (Fig. 1), Henry VI to Chancellor John Stafford, dated at Windsor, 1 January 1440; and TNA C 81/1367/18, Henry VI, dated at Reading Abbey, 20 January 1440. In addition to the three letters in MS français 4054 and the two specimens in TNA C 81/1367, I have identified Ashby’s hand in six further documents. Only one of Margaret of Anjou’s English signet letters is known to have survived in the original. TNA SC 1/44/13 is addressed to the chancellor, John Stafford, and is dated at Windsor, 8 January (1446/7).30 The bottom of the letter is damaged and torn, so no scribal signature is visible. The duct and overall angular aspect are the same as that of the three French letters in MS français 4054, with the basic grade of signet secretary being employed for the body of the letter. Three further signet letters, the first of which was written for Henry between 1440 and 1443, share the above characteristics and, although unsigned, have also been written by Ashby: they are TNA C 81/1367/20 and C 81/1368/20; C 81/1371/5 is a later undated letter.31 Ashby’s hand not only appears in the five English signet letters for Henry (two of which are signed) but also in one of Henry’s Latin signet letters. 26 The manuscript also contains the signatures of Queen Margaret and Sir John Fortescue, as well as a holograph letter by Prince Edward: Sobecki, Last Words, p. 163. 27 The five letters have been calendared in Chronique de Mathieu d’Escouchy. Vol. 3: Pièces justificatives, ed. G. L. E. du Fresne de Beaucourt (Paris, 1864), items 32, 56, 71, 76 and 100. 28 P. Chaplais, English Royal Documents: King John–Henry VI, 1199–1461 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 34–8. 29 Ashby’s three letters have been discussed by H. E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 36–7. 30 The letter has been printed by An Anthology of Chancery English, ed. Fisher, Richardson, and Fisher, p. 185. The date is corroborated by contemporary documents referring to the matter raised by this letter. The references are given at the foot of p. 185. 31 C 81/1371/5 is not dated but is part of a cache of letters from 1448–9.

93

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The letter, Urkunde Kurköln no 1927, is preserved in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, and has been reproduced and transcribed by Pierre Chaplais.32 It is addressed to Dietrich, archbishop of Cologne, and is dated at Windsor, 15 July 1438. Again, the duct and aspect are characteristic of Ashby, and all his minuscule and majuscule letter forms make an appearance, including the lobed Ashby-A and I with a hairline stroke (bottom line, ‘Iulij’, ‘Anno’). I have also located a document dating from the earlier part of Ashby’s career that confirms his role as a Signet clerk for Duke Humphrey. This signet letter, TNA C 81/1537/4, was written in French and is dated at York, 8 August 1420. It is addressed to the chancellor, Thomas Langley. This letter has also been printed and transcribed by Chaplais.33 Finally, as I have argued elsewhere, CUL Mm.4.42, the sole copy of Ashby’s Active Policy/Dicta, is a holograph manuscript written entirely by him. Ashby may also have been responsible for the first 220 folios of the Canterbury Tales in BL, MS Additional 5140. He died on 20 February 1475, having reached the advanced age of over 90. John Ashby John Ashby was George Ashby’s son. A number of records survive from the 1460s and 1470s showing that the poet had a son named John, and the dates of John Ashby’s Signet activity (1452–9) confirm this hypothesis.34 John Ashby was one of the executors of the will of the Signet clerk William Crosby.35 In addition, George Ashby had a grandson, also named George, who was a Signet clerk under Henry VIII.36 The younger Ashby’s hand resembles that of his father, but he writes a cleaner, more angular signet secretary with an upright duct, at 82°, and a more acute left-leaning angle on his ascenders and approach strokes (Fig. 4). Unlike his father, John prefers wider letter spacing, and the stems of his letters are straighter than George’s often half-moon shaped b, l or v. John’s A is similar to his father’s; he even prefers the same form for his signature. He employs both plain and lobed forms of d, with an often exaggerated size to the latter (Fig. 4, ‘and’, ‘said’, ll. 3 and 4). His W is simple, and he adds long initial strokes to certain instances of v in initial position. Other characteristics of his hand include flat-topped g without curls or hooked tails (Fig. 4, ‘Regne’, last line), h with a small lobe and 32 A facsimile of the letter and address on the dorse are printed in P. Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice: Part II, Plates (London, 1975), plates 54a and 54b, with a description on pp. 19–20. The entire letter has been transcribed and edited in P. Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice: Part I, Documents and Interpretation, 2 vols. (London, 1982), I, 41–3. 33 Chaplais, English Royal Documents, plate 22b. The transcription is on p. 75. 34 Sobecki, Last Words, p. 191. 35 TNA PROB 11/4/334. 36 Scattergood, ‘Ashby, George’.

ARCHIVES (UK).

FIG. 4 TNA C 81/1375/11, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT WOODSTOCK, 28 JULY 1458, IN THE HAND OF JOHN ASHBY (SIGNED). THE NATIONAL

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short descender (Fig. 4, ‘thees’, l. 5), a tail on y that curls up to the bottom of the x-height (Fig. 4, ‘you’, l. 4) and B with an arched bottom (Fig. 4, ‘Brother’, l. 2). Particularly noteworthy is that the second ascender in ff and long-ss does not curl but remains open (Fig. 4, ‘suffisaunt’, l. 5; ‘Asseby’, signature on bottom right). The similarities in the hands of father and son strongly suggest that George instructed John. I have furthermore argued that George also taught Prince Edward of Westminster how to write, not least because a holograph letter sent by the prince at the age of 10 shows features of Ashby’s signet secretary hand.37 Documents in John Ashby’s hand are TNA C 81/1375/11 and 15 (both signed), and there are a number of unsigned letters in his hand in TNA C 81/1376. There is also a signet letter, given at Sheen on 4 June 1452, from Henry VI to Thomas Goldstone III, prior of Canterbury Cathedral Priory (Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, Dean and Chapter Archive, Chartae antiquae, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/K/4). The letter is unsigned but has been written by John Ashby. The address on the dorse contains further characteristic features of John Ashby’s hand, including the exaggerated lobes on d. Edmund Blake Edmund Blake, a Signet clerk during the reign of Henry VI, was active between 1449 and 1452, and he received corrodies, offices and various benefices.38 TNA C 81/1371/11, C 81/1371/16 (Fig. 5), C 81/1371/44 and C 81/1372/1 are signet letters signed by Blake. He writes at a particularly sharp angle of 68°, with thick shafts on f and long-s, and with dense, almost overlapping letters. A is flat-topped and follows signet secretary conventions (Fig. 5, ‘And’, l. 5), W is simple (‘wol’, l. 3), g is flat-topped and hooked (‘god’, l. 1) and the leg of h does not descend below the x-height (‘hym’, l. 4). Blake’s most characteristic letterforms are d and v: whereas d has a plain ascender with a tip that points upward to tilt backward (‘god’, l. 1; ‘grauntid’, l. 2’), v is ear-shaped, with a small circle placed in an almost closed oval (‘vnto’, l. 4; ‘vndir’, l. 5). John Blakeney In October 1443, John Blakeney received a grant of 10 marks annually for life in return for his long service as a Signet clerk, and Otway-Ruthven marks him possibly active as late as 1471.39 Grants continued to be made

37 38 39

Sobecki, Last Words, pp. 186–7. Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 158, 187. Ibid., pp. 158, 186.

FIG. 5 TNA C 81/1371/16, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT ELTHAM, 25 JULY 1449, SIGNED BY EDMUND BLAKE. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

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to him certainly in 1468.40 In 1451, the parliamentary Commons suspected him and Gervais le Vulre, the French secretary, of biased royalism and called for his removal from the king’s presence.41 Blakeney can be identified with certainty because of his notarial attestation in C 81/1371/21, which opens with ‘Et ego Iohannes Blakeney clericus’ and features an engrossed version of his paraph. Blakeney’s hand is very cursive in aspect, with flattened letters, and thick shafts on f and long-s. At 65°, the writing angle is particularly sharp. His most characteristic letterform is a drooping lobed d with a thick ascender and a thin stroke completing the inside of the lobe (Fig. 6, l. 3, ‘approued’). A is flat-topped, as is g, the latter written either with a hook or simple tail (Fig. 6, l. 1, ‘god’; l. 3, ‘graunt’). Minuscule w, though sometimes also the majuscule form, is usually a double-6 (Fig. 6, l. 8, ‘wherfore’) and the leg of h does drop below the x-height (Fig. 6, l. 4, ‘Duchie’). He uses this hasty grade of script for a number of letters, including TNA C 81/1370/10 (signed), C 81/1370/28 (signed), C 81/1370/31 (signed) and C 81/1370/42 (signed; Fig. 6). C 81/1370/57 is signed by Robert Osbern but is written in Blakeney’s hand. A further document (C 81/1371/3) is signed by him, however, the hand is not Blakeney’s, though his signature at the bottom as well as the standalone dating clause (Eltham, 12 December 1448) are in his hand. C 81/1370/44, which is also signed by Blakeney, maintains the same writing angle of 65° and letterforms (e.g. double-6 w in l. 4, ‘William’), although this hand is executed with greater care and angularity and may not necessarily be Blakeney’s. John Bowdon John Bowdon was a Signet clerk from 1452 to 1459, and he appears to have been a priest since he was granted a benefice in 1453.42 In 1458, he received a pension from Athelney Abbey.43 Bowdon, together with John Ashby, was one of two executors of the will of his fellow Signet clerk William Crosby (7 February 1459).44 Bowdon writes a regular signet secretary marked by a penchant for exaggerated ascenders and a characteristic curl or loop on the first stroke of v (Fig. 7, l. 10, ‘vestro’). His hand is set at an angle of 78°, which is relatively upright for a Signet clerk’s hand. Except for the shafts of f and long-s, Bowdon rarely uses straight strokes, and even his minims are Ibid., p. 186. S. Walker, ‘Between Church and Crown: Master Richard Andrew, King’s Clerk’, Speculum 74 (1999), 956–91 (p. 975). 42 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 129. 43 Calendar of the Close Rolls, Henry VI: Vol. 6, 1454–1461, ed. C. T. Flower (London, 1947), p. 310. 44 TNA PROB 11/4/334. 40 41

FIG. 6 TNA C 81/1370/42, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT BURY ST EDMUNDS, 26 FEBRUARY 1447, SIGNED BY JOHN BLAKENEY. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

FIG. 7 TNA C 81/1375/17, WARRANT, DATED AT COVENTRY, 12 AUGUST 1459, SIGNED BY JOHN BOWDON. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS

curved to the right. A has a large lower lobe and a triangular top (Fig. 7, l. 3, ‘Abbatis’); d is diamond-shaped with a large drooping lobed ascender (Fig. 7, last line, ‘die’). W is simple, whereas g features a very long tail that reaches into the next writing line and sometimes curls (Fig. 7, l. 5, ‘elegerunt’; l. 10, ‘signeto’). Records signed by Bowdon and written in his hand include TNA C 81/1371/51, C 81/1375/12, C 81/1375/17 (Fig. 7) and C 81/1375/18. William Crosby Otway-Ruthven gives 1437 to 1459 as the years during which William Crosby was active as a clerk of the Signet, and I can now confirm the date of his will as 7 February 1459.45 In the will Crosby lists his fellow Signet clerks John Ashby and John Bowdon among his executors, whereas the entire will is overseen by Thomas Manning, the king’s secretary and head of the Signet office.46 Following Crosby’s death, Thomas Est was involved in a long Chancery dispute to claim lands that were given to him by Crosby. Various testimonies spoke of ill-feeling between the two and ‘of Crosby’s determination that Est should have neither a “fote of his lyvelode ne londe”’, but Crosby’s will clearly states that ‘Thos. Est’ should be one of the ‘cofeffees of my landes and te[neme]nts’.47 If TNA C 81/1367/1 is indeed in Crosby’s hand, then he must have accompanied Henry VI in France at the time. Crosby’s hand cannot be identified with certainty because I have only been able to examine two records signed by him (TNA C 81/1367/1 and C 81/1370/34), though the second item is the hand of Robert Repynghale. C 81/1367/1 (Fig. 8) is dated 18 January 1432. Crosby’s hand is relatively upright, with shafts of f and long-s usually set at 78°. The hand follows the pattern of signet secretary, though in a hastier variant (C 81/1367/1, Fig. 8). Individual strokes have a pronounced tapered effect, starting relatively broad at the top. A has a flat top consisting of two loops (Fig. 8, last line, ‘Abbeuille’); d features long ascenders that can be either lobed (l. 1, ‘wellbeloued’) or simple (l. 4, ‘vndre’); g is flat-topped and usually hooked (l. 2, ‘grace’). The tail on Crosby’s y sometimes turns up to the x-height (l. 5, ‘sayde’), whereas the forward-curling exaggerated stem of b is Crosby’s most characteristic letterform (l. 4, ‘being’; last line, ‘Abbeuille’).

Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 130. TNA PROB 11/4/334. TNA PROB 11/4/334. 47 For the legal case, see L. S. Woodger, ‘Est, Thomas, of London’, in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1386–1421, ed. J. S. Roskell, L. Clark, and C. Rawcliffe, 4 vols. (Woodbridge, 1993), II, 34–5. 45

46

101

FIG. 8 TNA C 81/1367/1, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT ABBEVILLE, FRANCE, 18 JANUARY 1432, SIGNED BY WILLIAM CROSBY. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS

John Depeden John Depeden was active around 1421–22, and he was certainly still alive in 1425.48 Given his residence at Windsor Castle as a Signet clerk, he may have been the same John Depeden who was canon of Windsor from 1430 until his death in 1460.49 The documents signed by him, including TNA C 81/1365/28 (Fig. 9), C 81/1365/31 and C 81/1365/32, are all written in a neat, small hand with well-formed individual letters.50 The upright angle of the hand (87° for f and long-s), the careful execution and the presence of abbreviations rarely employed in signet missives, suggest that Depeden did not receive his training in the Signet office but probably came from a clerical background and was taught to write ecclesiastical Latin. Depeden’s signature, consisting of his surname inside a rectangle, is unusual among Signet scribes. Depeden’s d is kidney-shaped, giving a slightly compressed impression (Fig. 9, l. 2, ‘and’); W is complex and heart-shaped (last line, ‘Webley’); g is flat-topped and hooked, with the second stroke of the lobe higher than the first (l. 2, ‘patronage’; last line, ‘signet’); initial v is sometimes b-shaped, with a fully developed upper lobe (l. 1, ‘mevyng’; last line, ‘vnder’); and y has a long right-curling tail (penultimate line, ‘yow’). William Gedney A number of records situate William Gedney in the Signet office during the period 1437 to 1444, though he remained in royal service at least until 1452.51 In addition to various grants and payments made out to him, in 1444 Gedney was sent by Henry VI to locate a copy of Henry V’s will, first to William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln and former keeper of the Privy Seal, then to the feoffees of the will, Lord Hungerford and finally to Thomas Beckington, bishop of Bath and Wells, who possessed a copy. Gedney clearly enjoyed Henry’s, or his secretary’s, trust in order to be tasked with recovering this important document. The identification of Gedney’s hand is far from certain. I have only located one record signed by him, TNA C 81/1367/33 (Fig. 10), but the hand of the signature does not match that of the letter. In this case, I will Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 132, 185. For canon Depeden, see S. L. Ollard, Fasti Wyndesorienses: The Deans and Canons of Windsor (Windsor, 1950), p. 167. 50 All three have been calendared in Kirby, Calendar of Signet Letters, items 903, 907 and 908. The letters have been printed in An Anthology of Chancery English, ed. Fisher, Richardson and Fisher, items 90, 94 and 95. Fisher et al. note that a fourth letter, E 101/188/10/2 (item 96), signed by Depeden, is also in his hand, but I have not been able to inspect this letter. Given the unreliability of palaeographical observations in their book, this attribution cannot be confirmed. 51 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 131, 135, 158, 185, 186. 48 49

103

FIG. 9 TNA C 81/1365/28, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT WEOBLEY, 7 MARCH 1421, SIGNED BY JOHN DEPEDEN. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

FIG. 10 TNA C 81/1367/33, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT ELTHAM, 28 DECEMBER 1441, SIGNED BY WILLIAM GEDNEY. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

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cautiously assume that this is not Gedney’s hand, though for the benefit of the doubt and because this handwriting differs from that of the other identified signet clerks I will describe the hand of C 81/1367/33. With a writing angle of 56° for f and long-s, the hand of C 81/1367/33 is by far the most cursive of all known fifteenth-century Signet clerks. The clerk writes a slanted, compact signet secretary script with thick curved strokes, suggesting a broad nib. Letterforms are plain and generally unremarkable: d is simple, as is w; g is flat-topped and hooked, whereas h has a short often barely visible tail. The descender on y curves to the right. Robert Osbern Robert Osbern is documented as having written for the Signet between 1437 and 1458, and archival records confirm his payments.52 In 1450, he was involved in a dispute surrounding a house and garden he leased from the Abbey of Barking.53 The matter erupted when the abbess, Catherine de la Pole, ‘complained of having been thrown down in a scuffle about the lock and key’.54 This incident led to a commission, the result of which remains unknown. However, in 1454 Queen Margaret wrote to the abbess urging her to show Osbern and his wife ‘tendre binevolence’.55 The queen’s letter is particularly revealing because in 1440 he had been granted for life the alien priory of Allerton Mauleverer in Yorkshire, which suggests that he had been a cleric at the time. In 1446, he was paid £100 in recompense for his priory, which returned into the king’s hands.56 But the reference to Osbern’s wife in Margaret’s missive suggests that he returned the priory because he married in or shortly after 1446. I have located three signet letters signed by Osbern: TNA C 81/1370/51, C 81/1370/58 and C 81/1371/35 (Fig. 11). C 81/1370/58 shows a different hand, but the other two documents are written in the same signet secretary, and all three signatures agree with it. Osbern writes a typical signet secretary hand, with large curved ascenders and long tapered descenders; f and long-s are set at an angle of 71–2°. Osbern’s letterforms match those in use by Signet clerks in the 1440s and 1450s, with sometimes plain though mostly lobed d (l. 1, ‘Reuerendissime’; last line, ‘apud’); lobed h with a short tail; and, perhaps most characteristically for his hand, flat-topped g with a thin curled tail (ll. 8 and 9, ‘Regnum’). Ibid., pp. 131, 132, 158, 185, 186. ‘Houses of Benedictine nuns: Abbey of Barking’, in A History of the County of Essex: Volume 2, ed. W. Page and J. Horace Round (London, 1907), pp. 115–22. British History Online [accessed 24 April 2020]. 54 ‘Houses of Benedictine nuns’, ed. Page and Horace Round. 55 Letters of Queen Margaret of Anjou and Bishop Beckington and Others, ed. C. Monro (London, 1863), p. 103. 56 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 185. 52 53

FIG. 11 TNA C 81/1371/35, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT READING ABBEY, 14 MARCH [1450], SIGNED BY ROBERT OSBERN. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

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Robert Repynghale Another Signet clerk who wrote under Henry VI is Robert Repynghale. His activity in the Signet is documented between 1443 and 1452.57 Not much is known about Repynghale in addition to the payments listed by Otway-Ruthven. Thomas Beckington notes in his diary entry for 22 February 1442 that Repyngale and Blakeney were sent by the king that day to the Lord Treasurer Ralph Cromwell at his manor in Deepham, near Edmonton (now in north London).58 A number of signet letters signed by him have survived, including TNA C 81/1370/33 (Fig. 12), C 81/1370/64, C 81/1370/70, C 81/1371/20 and C 81/1371/22. These documents span a few years and are all written in the same hand, agreeing with his signature. It is therefore likely that these records are in his hand. Repynghale’s hand is spiky in appearance, with pronounced horns on e (Fig. 12, l. 2, ‘towarde’; ‘Rome’). The writing angle of f and long-s is 70°. A is written with a triangular upper lobe that remains open to the left (l. 4, ‘And’); d is mostly unlobed, with a bent tip to the descender (l. 1, ‘and’; final line, ‘day’); W is simple; g is flat-topped and v-shaped, with a curling tail; and v is 6-shaped (final line, ‘vnder’. Characteristic for Repynghale’s hand are ch and th ligatures, where the lobe of h connects with the upper stroke of c and the crossbar of t (l. 3, ‘charge’; ‘that’). Robert Shiryngton The Signet clerk Robert Shiryngton may have been the brother or perhaps father or son of his contemporary Signet colleague Walter Shiryngton, who rose to become chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and died in 1449.59 Their active dates overlap, and Walter succeeded Robert in three of his prebends.60 Robert was deployed to France during the early 1420s, and most of his signed letters date from this period. His documented active period was 1414–22. There appear to have survived more letters signed by Shiryngton than by any other Signet clerk. These include TNA C 81/1365/1 (Fig. 13), 2–3, 5–6, 8, 11, 15, 20, 25, 27, 29–30 and 36; C 81/1366/1 and 13; E 101/188/10/1; SC 1/43/160; and BL, MS Cotton Galba B.i, fol. 157. In addition, C 81/1365/4, 9, 16–17 and 34 are unsigned but clearly in his hand.61 Ibid., pp. 131, 158, 186. A Journal by One of the Suite of T. Beckington, ed. N. H. Nicolas (London, 1828), p. 95. 59 On the Shiryngtons see Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 182–3, and E. B. Fryde et al., Handbook of British Chronology (London, 1961), p. 150. The Shiryngtons are sometimes confused with one another since both could hardly have been chancellors of the Duchy of Lancaster at the same time, as Otway-Ruthven reports (The King’s Secretary, pp. 182–3). 60 Ibid., p. 184. 61 All of Shiryngton’s letters are calendared in Kirby, Calendar of Signet Letters, and 57

58

FIG. 12 TNA C 81/1370/33, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT LONDON, 2 JUNE 1446, SIGNED BY ROBERT REPYNGHALE. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

FIG. 13 TNA C 81/1365/1, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT VERNON IN FRANCE, 6 APRIL 1419, SIGNED BY ROBERT SHIRYNGTON. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS

Shiryngton’s writing angle is generally upright, with the majority of f and long-s set at 80°, but his angle moves to 84° as his hand progresses along the writing surface, which suggests that he shifted the angle of his elbow during each line of text. Majuscule A, especially in opening lines, features an upper lobe shaped as a sail (Fig. 13, l. 1, ‘And’); d usually has a lobed drooping ascender (l. 1, final word, ‘and’); w is heart-shaped, consisting of three lobes, with the middle lobe placed highest (l. 1, ‘welbeloued’); g is flat-topped with a backward-curling tail (last line, ‘keping’); h has a low forward-sloping ascender that extends to the right beyond the leg of the letter (l. 2, ‘whiche’); v is 6-shaped (last line, ‘vnder’); and b has a straight back and is rarely lobed (l. 3, ‘by’). William Toly Toly wrote for the Signet office in France between 1419 and 1422.62 After his stint at the Signet, he became Cardinal Beaufort’s secretary.63 Toly could hold particular interest for literary studies if Roberto Weiss is correct in identifying him with ‘Toby’, Poggio Bracciolini’s English friend, to whom the humanist Richard Petworth showed a copy of the De varietate fortunae.64 In July 1434, Toly borrowed from the royal library Hegessipus’s Historia de Bello Iudaico and Liber de observantiis Papae, returning them (late) in January 1435, only to take them out again, but this time for a year and a half.65 In 1443, Toly was recalled to the Signet office for part of the year as acting secretary to induct the new king’s secretary, Richard Andrew.66 A number of signed signet letters by William Toly have survived: TNA C 81/1365/10 (Fig. 14), 19, 21–3, 26, 33, 35 and 37; C 81/1366/5, 8, 10 and 12; SC 1/43/159; and E 28/33/5.67 Toly’s hand is cursive, with f and long-s set

printed in An Anthology of Chancery English, ed. Fisher, Richardson, and Fisher. For a discussion of his language and orthography, see Benskin, ‘Chancery Standard’, pp. 18–21. 62 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 157, 184. 63 Ibid., p. 14 n. 1; R. Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1957), p. 21 n. 1. 64 Weiss, Humanism in England, p. 21 n. 1. 65 J. Stratford, ‘The Royal Library in England before the Reign of Edward IV’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. N. Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval Studies New Series 4 (Stamford, 1994), pp. 187–97 (p. 196). This chapter was revised and printed as J. Stratford, ‘The Early Royal Collections and the Royal Library to 1461’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 3: 1400–1557, ed. J. B. Trapp and L. Hellinga (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 255–66 (p. 265). The original entry with Toly’s borrowing record is printed in The Antient Kalendars and Inventories of the Treasury of His Majesty’s Exchequer, ed. F. Palgrave, 3 vols. (London, 1836), II, 152–3. 66 Walker, ‘Between Church and Crown’, p. 964 n. 36; Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 154. 67 All these letters are calendared in Kirby, Calendar of Signet Letters, and printed in An Anthology of Chancery English, ed. Fisher, Richardson, and Fisher. Toly’s language is discussed by Benskin, ‘Chancery Standard’, pp. 19–21.

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FIG. 14 TNA C 81/1365/10, SIGNET LETTER, DATED AT MANTES-LA-JOLIE IN FRANCE, 22 JULY 1419, SIGNED BY WILLIAM TOLY. THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (UK).

THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS

at an angle of 67°, with exaggerated roundish ascenders. The upper lobe of A is shaped like a harp (Fig. 14, l. 1, ‘And’); d is lobed and 8-shaped (l. 1, ‘And’); v is 6-shaped, giving some forms of w and W the appearance of the number 66 (l. 2, ‘Westsmythfeld’), but other forms of w are complex or even overlapping (l. 1, ‘wol’); g is flat-topped with a long looped leftcurling tail – this is perhaps Toly’s most characteristic letterform (l. 3, ‘granted’; l. 9, ‘greet’). Also unusual is Toly’s h, which has a long upwardcurling tail that connects with the ascender (l. 6, ‘hit’); y follows a similar pattern (l. 1, ‘ye wyte’). II. FRENCH SECRETARIES The office of the French secretary emerged under Henry VI and continued into the sixteenth century.68 At the beginning, these clerks transferred from the French to the English authorities as a result of administrative expediency, and Jean de Rinel offers a well-documented example of this group of clerks.69 Their tasks, derived from the broad administrative remit of French government clerks, were to liaise between England and France and to assist in the administration of England’s French possessions.70 But starting with Gervais le Vulre, the formal office of the king’s French secretary, also called ‘the secretary of France’ among other terms, was born.71 Their function was largely restricted to conducting diplomatic correspondence on behalf of the king of England and his queen consort. I have not been able to trace the hands of other French secretaries, though the now lost originals of Henry VI’s letters in BN, MS latin 8838, fol. 95r–v and fols. 284r–5r were written by Laurence Calot.72 This manuscript contains documents related to the trial of Joan of Arc, and Calot, who was present during the recantation in 1431, is said to have played a prominent part in the proceedings.73 The Secretary Script of the French Secretaries The hands of the three identified French secretaries – Michel de Paris, Jean de Rinel and Gervais le Vulre – consistently follow the lettre courante script in use in French chanceries at the time. This form of secretary is generally cursive with often calligraphically formed letters and horns. The most characteristic letterform, shared by all three though rarely found in the hands of English clerks, is majuscule D consistently employed as initial 68 69 70 71 72 73

On this office, see Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 89–105. On Rinel, see below. Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 89–93. Ibid., pp. 93–100. Given as active between 1427 and 1444 (Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 156). Ibid., p. 94.

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minuscule d, using an exaggerated triangular bottom lobe. The French secretaries tend to use a broader nib and show less variation between thick and thin strokes. In comparison to their Signet counterparts, the king’s French secretaries have more personal signatures. Gervais le Vulre’s features an exaggerated majuscule G, whereas in de Paris’s signature (Fig. 15) the name ‘Paris’ is followed by a paraph with a ballooning heart flourish, similar to the fashionable heart-shaped ascenders of d often found in the opening lines of documents and folios in the work of mid fifteenth-century French and French-trained scribes.74 In addition to the three named secretaries, there are at least four surviving letters written by clerks trained in France that I have not been able to identify. All four are in BN, MS français 4054.75 The same manuscript also contains a further signet letter close on fols. 11r–v, signed, on the obverse, by the French secretary Jean Milet,76 but as this is the only such letter his handwriting cannot be verified. The angular and horned appearance of the letters points to the broken strokes characteristic of the English secretary script and, in this case, to a Privy Seal clerk.77 Michel de Paris Michel de Paris came from the province of Nivernais in central France.78 De Paris first appears in English records in 1443, when he receives recompense for having had his French possessions confiscated.79 He received further payments to recover his losses in Rouen in the following year. Although he spent time in England, he was never domiciled there, with his service initially covering a wider range of activities, similar to those of Jean de Rinel, before becoming Gervais le Vulre’s assistant between 1446 and 1449.80 However, even during this period he wrote at least one letter that was signed by de Rinel in 1447 (BN, MS Dupuy 760, fol. 161). 74 Richard Franceys (Ricardus Franciscus) uses this feature frequently (e.g. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 932, fol. 13v, signature), as does Scribe 1 in Durham UL, MS Cosin V. ii. 13, fol. 27r, or the French scribe in BL, MS Royal 16 F.vii, fol. 16r. See also Bodl., MS Ashmole 764, fols. 100v and 114r. The ballooning heart was so common that the modern calligrapher Marc Drogin even provides a four-step demonstration on how to draw it (Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique [New York, 1980], p. 160, Fig. 38). 75 They are on fols. 93, 96, 97 and 176. The letter on fol. 97 is signed by Michel de Paris but is not written in his hand. None of the four is a signet letter. 76 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 156. 77 The letter closes with a French rather than English administrative formula, used elsewhere by Milet: ‘seellé de nostre seel ordonné en l’absence du grant’. Documents issued in France by the Duke of Bedford also follow French diplomatic patterns. 78 Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry VI, 1422–1461, 6 vols. (London, 1901–10), IV, 194. 79 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 100; R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461 (Berkeley, 1981), p. 552. 80 Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 100–1.

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FIG. 15 BN, MS FRANÇAIS 4054, FOL. 60 (DETAIL). SIGNED LETTER BY MICHEL DE PARIS, HENRY VI TO CHARLES VII. DATED AT WESTMINSTER, 2 JULY 1446. SOURCE: HTTPS://GALLICA.BNF.FR.

De Paris’s handwriting survives in two unsigned and six signed letters, seven of which are in BN, MS français 4054: written on behalf of Henry VI (fols. 38, 60, 77, 145 and 146, all signed) and of Queen Margaret (fol. 33 [Fig. 16], signed; fol. 37, unsigned but in his hand). A further letter, written for Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset (fol. 97), is signed by de Paris with his ballooning heart signature but is not written in this hand. To this should be added BN, MS Dupuy 760, fol. 161, which carries de Rinel’s signature but is in de Paris’s hand.81 De Paris’s lettre courante is angular, with little interlinear spacing, making the text look crowded (Fig. 16). Of the three French secretaries discussed here, his hand is the most angular, with f and long-s consistently set at 64°. The shafts of f and long-s are thick, and g is flat-topped with a curved left stroke and a tail that often slopes and loops to the left (Fig. 16, final line, ‘vingt’). Other forms include a shorter tail (l. 13, ‘aggreables’). C is written using a minuscule with a superimposed thick and untapered vertical stroke (final line, ‘Chastel’; W consists of two sometimes overlapping ladle-shaped vs, with only slightly bent ascenders (final line, ‘Wyndesore’). Initial and medial d follow the lettre-courante pattern of using a majuscule form with an oval or triangular bottom lobe (l. 10, ‘de cordiale’).

81 The majority of the surviving letters by de Paris, de Rinel and le Vulre have been printed. For an overview of their availability in printed editions, see Chaplais, Part I, Documents and Interpretation, I, 41–2.

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FIG. 16 BN, MS FRANÇAIS 4054, FOL. 33. SIGNED LETTER BY MICHEL DE PARIS, QUEEN MARGARET TO CHARLES VII. DATED AT WINDSOR, 5 MAY 1446. SOURCE: HTTPS://

THE HANDWRITING OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SIGNET CLERKS

Jean de Rinel Jean de Rinel is the best documented of the French secretaries. He came from Reynel, in the diocese of Toul, in France’s Champagne region.82 He married the niece of Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, who presided over the trial of Joan of Arc.83 De Rinel was not only present at the trial (together with Laurence Calot, another of Henry’s French secretaries) but he also wrote Henry’s letter of assurance, addressed to Cauchon, for all involved in the trial.84 Philippe Contamine notes that de Rinel’s hometown was only 30km away from Domrémy-la-Pucelle, where Joan of Arc was born.85 De Rinel studied in Paris, where he is listed as a master of arts in 1403, and Contamine speculates that a copy of Terence’s Comedies that bears his signature, now Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plutei. 38.20, may have been written by him.86 The faintly visible signature at the bottom of fol. 116v is indeed Rinel’s, but the hand in the manuscript is not his. The entire manuscript was written in a single hand that resembles an English Privy Seal clerk. The writing angle, aspect and letterforms – including the Hocclevean coat hanger g – match those of John Hethe, who was in France in the early 1420s, overlapping at the Rouen chancery with Jean de Rinel. By 1407, de Rinel was secretary to the duke of Gueyenne, and he first appears in English royal service in 1420.87 De Rinel’s work was much in demand on both sides of the Channel. In 1435, he wrote a tract in his own name – Scriptum magistri Johannis Rinell contra ducem Burgundie – to refute allegations by the French that the Treaty of Troyes was invalid.88 A number of his missives and documents survive in contemporary and early modern copies. In addition to the records mentioned above, I have located copies of two documents originally signed by him: 1. Brussels, Archives de l’État en Belgique, mss. divers 1972 (olim mss. divers 5523–7 olim 18735) item 88, fol. 175, contains a copy of a letter by Henry VI, dated to 1429, capturing the original’s 82 P. Contamine, ‘Maître Jean de Rinel (vers 1380–1449), notaire et secrétaire de Charles VI puis de Henry [VI] pour son royaume de France, l’une des “plumes” de l’ “union des deux couronnes”’, Cahier des Annales de Normandie 35.1 (2009), 115–34 (p. 116). 83 Ibid., 115. 84 For an edition see Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, ed. P. Champion, 2 vols. (Paris, 1920), I, 13–15. This important letter is translated in C. Taylor, Joan of Arc: La Pucelle (Manchester, 2006), pp. 135–6. 85 Contamine, ‘Maître Jean de Rinel’, p. 116. 86 Ibid. 87 C. Taylor, ‘“La querelle anglaise”: Diplomatic and Legal Debate during the Hundred Years’ War’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1998), p. 53; OtwayRuthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 91. 88 A. Bossuat, ‘La littérature de propagande au xve siècle. Le mémoire de Jean de Rinel, secrétaire du roi d’Angleterre, contre le duc de Bourgogne, 1435’, Cahiers d’histoire 1 (1956), 131–46. The document has been edited by Chaplais, Part I, Documents and Interpretation, II, 648–52.

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signature as ‘J. de Rinel’ at the end; and 2. Dijon, Archives de la Cote d’Or, 12 B 11898, a copy of a 1432 letter for Henry VI originally signed by de Rinel. Among the surviving original documents signed and written by de Rinel are five records: a charter from Henry VI written by de Rinel in 1430 at the Rouen chancery, preserved in BN, MS français 5964, fols. 205v–9v; a letter for Henry VI, dated 22 July 1447, in BN, MS Baluze 11, fol. 25; two letters for Cardinal Beaufort in BN, MS français 20327, one dated at Calais, 14 July 1430 (fol. 149), the other at Rouen, 25 August 1430 (fol. 150, Fig. 17); and, finally, another letter for Henry, in BN, MS français 20978, fol. 190 (Fig. 18), dated at London, 6 July 1434 (Henry VI is mis­labelled as ‘Henri IV’ in the catalogue description). As mentioned above, BN, MS Dupuy 760 contains a 1447 letter for Henry VI that is signed by de Rinel but written by de Paris. Unlike de Paris and le Vulre, de Rinel writes an elegant lettre courante with elements borrowed from the French lettre curialle, or littera curialis, notably d with sharply hooked horizontal ascender (Fig. 17, l. 1, ‘de dieu’ and passim). His hand shows ample spacing between words and vertically between lines, almost always setting the shafts of f and long-s at angle of 74–6°. Minuscule g is flat-topped and either hooked (l. 1, ‘dangleterre’) or features a long flat tail to the left (final line, ‘grace’). Occasionally, he writes a coat hanger g, especially in the closing formula (bottom, above signature ‘grant’). Ascenders and descenders frequently reach into the preceding and following lines. Initial lines have elaborate and sometimes looped flourishes (l. 1, ‘Henry par la Grace’), as do the final lines (final line, ‘Jour’; Fig. 18, final line, ‘Jour de Juillet’). The main hand in the celebrated Talbot Shrewsbury Book, BL, MS Royal 15 E.vi, which was produced at Rouen and presented to Queen Margaret some time in 1444 or 1445, shares many features with de Rinel’s hand.89 The codex, one of the most sumptuous ever produced for an English patron, is written in an elegant lettre bâtarde that agrees in aspect and letterforms with de Rinel’s preferences. The shafts of f and long-s are written at an angle of 75° (Fig. 19), and although the lineation generates a more crowded layout than de Rinel’s missives all his preferred letterforms are present, including d with an angular top and looped ascenders as well as descenders. In the absence of surviving specimens of de Rinel’s lettre bâtarde hand, it is ultimately difficult to prove that the main scribe was de Rinel, but he was Henry’s most trusted French scribe at the time, constantly moving between England and Rouen.

89 Much has been written on this manuscript, but it receives the most sustained attention in a cluster of essays in Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe, ed. K. L. Fresco and A. D. Hedeman (Columbus OH, 2011).

HTTPS://GALLICA.BNF.FR.

FIG. 17 BN, MS FRANÇAIS 20327, FOL. 150. SIGNED LETTER BY JEAN DE RINEL FOR CARDINAL BEAUFORT. DATED AT ROUEN, 25 AUGUST 1430. SOURCE:

GALLICA.BNF.FR.

FIG. 18 BN, MS FRANÇAIS 20978, FOL. 190. SIGNED LETTER BY JEAN DE RINEL FOR HENRY VI. DATED AT LONDON, 6 JULY 1430. SOURCE: HTTPS://

FIG

FIG. 19 BL, MS ROYAL 15 E.VI, FOL. 12V. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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Gervais le Vulre Gervais le Vulre was the main French secretary during Henry’s reign, active between 1421 and 1463.90 Unlike de Rinel, le Vulre’s tasks appear to have consisted solely of writing missives for the king, and he even comments on his office in some of his petitions, none of which are written in his own hand.91 In 1451, le Vulre earned the ire of the parliamentary Commons who suspected him and the Signet clerk John Blakeney of biased royalism.92 In a petition of 1461, in a parallel gesture to George Ashby’s contemporary A Prisoner’s Reflections, he speaks of more than forty years of service for the king on both sides of the Channel. There are five extant letters in his hand, three of which are signed. All were written for Henry VI and are found in BN, MS français 4054: fols. 59, 62, 63 (Fig. 20) (all three signed), 78 and 80 (both unsigned). Le Vulre writes a typical lettre courante script with features similar to those of de Paris, who was probably his assistant for some of the time. Le Vulre’s hand is more upright than de Paris’s, setting the shafts of f and long-s at 74°. He prefers flat-topped g with a plain curled tail (Fig. 20, final line, ‘garde’) and simple W written as one letter, with a large first v, followed by smaller second v (final line, ‘Westminstre’). Initial d follows de Paris by using a majuscule form, but le Vulre uses a hairstroke for the inside of the bottom lobe (final line, ‘De Decembre’). This overview of the handwriting of Signet clerks and the French secretaries is part of a first attempt to study the scripts and usages of royal clerks across all the departments of the central administration. Together with my discussion of Privy Seal and Council clerks, this study continues to cement the observation that the royal writing offices were compartmentalised by script family and document type – no documents in anglicana are known to have been issued by any of these four departments after the establishment of secretary in these writing offices around 1380 (the French secretaries are of course a fifteenth-century creation). This functional separation of secretary and anglicana in the national writing offices and courts remains a feature of later medieval administrative culture.93 Close inspection of these document classes does not support the idea of a long or unregulated transitional period or the use of both scripts by the

Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, p. 156. For le Vulre’s petitions, see A. F. Sutton, ‘The Merchant Adventurers of England: Their Origins and the Mercers’ Company of London’, Historical Research 75 (2002), 25–46; Otway-Ruthven, The King’s Secretary, pp. 95–100. 92 Walker, ‘Between Church and Crown’, p. 975. 93 On the separation of anglicana and secretary in the central writing offices, and the inability of royal clerks to write in both scripts after 1390, see Sebastian Sobecki, ‘Communities of Practice: Thomas Hoccleve, London Clerks, and Literary Production’, Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2022), 61–114. 90 91

1447. SOURCE: HTTPS://GALLICA.BNF.FR.

FIG. 20 BN, MS FRANÇAIS 4054, FOL. 63. SIGNED LETTER BY GERVAIS LE VULRE, HENRY VI TO CHARLES VII. DATED AT WESTMINSTER, 12 DECEMBER

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clerks in a single office.94 As soon as the Privy Seal and Signet had adopted secretary, and certainly by the early 1380s, anglicana was banished from these offices for good. Before the end of the fourteenth century, clerks working for the Privy Seal, Signet, and Council only wrote in secretary scripts, whereas those employed by the other government offices and the central courts never did so: all of the tens of thousands of membranes of the Court of Common Pleas or King’s Bench rolls are written in anglicana. The script of enrolment, and thus of record, was always the old court letter – anglicana. By contrast, secretary was the script of choice for letters, both close and patent, and for the writs and warrants that coordinated the operations of the central writing offices. Some 30,000–40,000 letters and writs were issued each year by the offices of the Chancery, Privy Seal, and Signet, with the secretary-using Privy Seal and Signet Offices responsible for perhaps half of this volume, despite their much smaller combined workforce of perhaps not more than forty clerks and under-clerks. This small group of professional scribes required a rapid, elegant, and versatile script that could be deployed across the expansive Lancastrian empire. The main administrative language of this empire was not English or Latin but French, which is why those central offices that oversaw the coordination of the Lancastrian dominions on both sides of the Channel adopted the script that had become synonymous with the diplomacy of the francophone chanceries of France, Burgundy, Brittany, and Navarre.

94 Many document classes contain inter-office communication, but the format, layout, formulae, and dating clauses allow for easy identification of the source department.

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON ESTELLE V. STUBBS

A

manuscript in the Parker Library, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 296 [Corpus 296] ‘contains a late fourteenth-century (after 1383?) collection of lollard tracts and sermons written in Middle English’.1 The description of the manuscript by M. R. James quotes the opinion of Nasmith: ‘Several treatises written by Wickliff. In this booke be gathered together all the sharpe treatises concernynge the erroures and defaults which John Wickliff did fynde in his tyme specially in the clergie and religiouse and in other estates of the worlde’.2 Although the thirty separate items were originally thought to be by Wyclif himself, it is now generally accepted that a number of unknown authors probably contributed to the collection. Of the tracts copied, twenty-nine are in the same scribal hand, but the final item, a Petition from Wyclif to the King, Parliament and John of Gaunt is in a second hand which I believe to be that of a scribe of the London Guildhall. He was formerly known to literary scholars as Scribe D, but has now been named as John Marchaunt, chamber clerk or financial controller of the city of London from 1380 and its common clerk from 1400–17 when he retired, to be succeeded by John Carpenter.3 1 ‘MS 296’, Parker Library on the Web [accessed 22 June 2020]. 2 M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1912), II, 74; citing J. Nasmith, Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum quos Collegio Corporis Christi et B. Mariæ Virginis in Academia Cantabrigiensi legauit reverendissimus Matthæus Parker, archiepiscopus Cantuariensis (Cambridge, 1777), p. 328. See also Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869–71), III, xiii. 3 As the fourth of five scribes contributing to Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, he was labelled Scribe D by Doyle and Parkes. He was known by that name until his

5

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A second manuscript, Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 (C.3.12) [TCD 244] is, according to Ralph Hanna, the ‘partial twin’ of the Corpus book.4 It contains many of the same tracts found in Corpus 296, with blocks of items copied in the same order and with many texts quite clearly sharing the same exemplar. A number of scholars have contributed articles on various subjects relating to these two important manuscripts, either singly or as a pair. Their studies cover an analysis of the form, features and type of subject matter,5 the ‘common lawyer’ as a supporter of many lollard activities,6 the codicology of the two manuscripts and location of copying, with the suggestion that each set of scribes may have been ‘attached to some center of Lollard copying and, through that association, in a borrower-lender relationship with other Lollard writers and copyists’,7 and a tentative identification of one of the scribal hands in TCD 244 as that of Adam Pinkhurst, Chaucer’s scribe.8 Thus this new discovery of the hand of John Marchaunt, civic clerk of the Guildhall, lawyer and colleague of Pinkhurst’s, in Corpus 296, a manuscript containing texts with Wycliffite connections, requires further investigation. Recent scholarship has identified several named clerks employed by, or connected with, the London Guildhall, whose activities included making copies of petitions, guild documents, legal and literary texts and translations, as well as copying items into civic custumals, all in the English

identification by Mooney and Stubbs as John Marchaunt, chamber clerk and common clerk of the city of London between 1380 and 1417. For this recent identification see L. R. Mooney and E. Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York, 2013). Dr Ian Doyle kindly examined Corpus 296 and agreed with Stubbs’s identification. 4 R. Hanna, ‘Two Lollard Codices and Lollard Book-Production’, Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990), 49–62 (p. 51). 5 Matti Peikola considers the two codices to be representative of the ‘Catalogue’, a subcategory of lollard ‘genres’ itemised by Steven Justice in his essay on lollard writings: M. Peikola, ‘The Catalogue: a late Middle English Lollard genre’, in Discourse Perspectives on English, ed. R. Hiltunen and J. Skaffari (Philadelphia, 2003), pp. 105–35; S. Justice, ‘Lollardy’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. D. Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 662–89. 6 Maureen Jurkowski suggests that many of the supporters of lollardy were in fact common lawyers. She specifically cites two tracts on the subject which appear only in Corpus 296 and TCD 244 and one unique tract found only in Corpus, The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned, which is the penultimate article in Corpus immediately followed by the Petition copied by Marchaunt: ‘Lawyers and Lollardy in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, ed. M. Aston and C. Richmond (Stroud, 1997), pp. 155–82 (pp. 155, 171 n. 2). 7 Hanna, ‘Two Lollard Codices’, p. 57. 8 Scribe B of Doyle’s and Parkes’s 1978 article was eventually identified by Linne Mooney in 2006 as Adam Pinkhurst: L. R. Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum 81 (2006), 97–138. For the possible identification of Pinkhurst in the Dublin manuscript see A. J. Fletcher, ‘The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 244, Some Early Copies of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Canon of Adam Pynkhurst Manuscripts’, The Review of English Studies 58 (2007), 597–632 (p. 597).

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

language.9 I now add to that the coincidence of two manuscripts in English, using material from a shared exemplar, with the identification of one, perhaps two Guildhall scribes, who at least at some time in their careers appear to have made contributions to manuscripts containing texts later to be considered as heretical. We know that Adam Pinkhurst and John Marchaunt did collaborate in whatever fashion in another manuscript on at least one other occasion, so it is worthwhile exploring the possibility that they may also have had shared access to lollard material.10 The motivation of these clerks in copying this material is not immediately evident, but the connection between civic clerks and the copying of texts of doubtful orthodoxy is striking and reflects the adventurous culture of documentary production in London at this time. Nevertheless, the connection between civic clerks and heretical texts, however tangential, is perhaps surprising given the explosive atmosphere surrounding the type of document production enabled by those same clerks in the last quarter of the fourteenth century.11 They were involved in what Sheila Lindenbaum refers to as ‘a period of discursive experimentation … the by-product of political reform and instability within documentary culture’.12 From a twenty-firstcentury perspective, one might presume a non-partisan approach for civic clerks but that is not necessarily the case. Marchaunt worked as chamber clerk for both sides in the factional mayoral disputes of the late 1370s and throughout the 1380s, first for John of Northampton then for Nicholas Brembre. Pinkhurst was the chosen clerk who fashioned the ‘Petition of the Folk of the Mercerie’ in English, with its damning pun on the name Brembre.13 Negotiating the conflict between the political expectations of civic dignitaries as well as the widespread suspicion aroused among the populace at large against those involved in the production and dissemination of documentary materials must have required particular skills, powerful patronage, or both. But by ‘crossing discursive boundaries … between the official languages and English and between legal and literary forms’,14 these clerks seemingly managed to manipulate the permeable confines of the language of both literary and political texts. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City. The hands of Scribes B (Pinkhurst) and D (Marchaunt) are both to be found in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, Gower’s Confessio Amantis. A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of The Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 163–210. 11 I am thinking here of the attack on documentary culture reflected in the institutions of public law and administration, on the misuse and abuse of the written record in civic government, complaints against the religious orders and the Church, all highlighted in the numerous petitions presented to the Good Parliament of 1376. 12 S. Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. D. Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 284–309 (p. 285). 13 M. Turner, ‘Conflict’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. P. Strohm (Oxford, 2007), pp. 258–73 (p. 264). 14 Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, p. 286. 9

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But there are other reasons for a re-examination of the circumstances around the making of these two manuscripts containing Wycliffite materials, apart from the possible involvement of two Guildhall scribes. Another close work-colleague of John Marchaunt at the Guildhall was Ralph Strode, friend, Merton colleague and intellectual sparring partner of John Wyclif.15 Such an association may provide a link between the work and ideas of Wyclif and collections of Wycliffite materials in a civic location – Hanna’s ‘center of Lollard copying’, perhaps. From 1373–82 Ralph Strode was the city’s Common Serjeant or public prosecutor and although the Guildhall should not be seen as a central storehouse for Wycliffite texts, Strode was in active, but apparently amicable dispute with Wyclif ’s ideas in De civili dominio which dates from 1375–6 and to which Strode must have had access.16 It would not be unusual then for Wyclif ’s works to be disputed and read by similarly literate London clerks who were privy to the location of a repository of lollard materials and a copying or collection centre in the close vicinity to which they may have had access. An investigation into the shared networks of these men with Guildhall affinities could provide further information. Networks of influence in the late medieval period are not necessarily transparent, but this web of association does appear to radiate out from a central locale. Shared patronage or employers provide a communal link as do family connections and loyalties to colleagues. Men who were educated at the same institution, were trained in a similar way or belonged to communities united by religious and guild fellowship must also have produced groups of like-minded individuals. All the ‘clerks’ mentioned above had received an education which involved some kind of legal training and they all devoted a considerable amount of time to the production of documentary material as well as to literary and religious works in the English language. Individuals connected by means of sympathetic ideologies, shared beliefs and communal benefits may have formed networks which were in a process of constant but gradual change as each pursued his own specific but mutually inclusive agenda for what may have been perceived at that time as ‘the common good’. PROBLEMS IN THE CORPUS AND DUBLIN MANUSCRIPTS There are ‘problems’ with the Corpus manuscript, which were first identified by F. D. Matthew and Thomas Arnold and further examined by Ralph Hanna. Corpus 296 is the work of two scribes. TCD 244 has two, possibly three scribes. However, the behaviour of the four or five scribes involved in the two manuscripts suggests a number of interesting features A. Hudson and A. Kenny, ‘Wyclif [Wycliffe], John [called Doctor Evangelicus] (d. 1384)’, ODNB Online [accessed 22 June 2020]. 16 Wyclif ’s four replies to Strode are discussed in J. D. North, ‘Strode, Ralph (d. 1387)’, ODNB Online [accessed 22 June 2020]. 15

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

identified by Hanna which include: an awareness of each other’s work; a common exemplar for blocks of text with many items identical in the two manuscripts; the ability to access other unique lollard texts of choice from a range of materials with similar subject matter, perhaps reflecting the individual choice of the compiler or patron; and finally, all scribes can be seen to ‘alternate and finish one another’s work’, a sign of cooperative work on specific types of book production.17 The Corpus manuscript is of vellum, paginated not foliated, with each leaf now separately mounted and measuring c. 269 x 200 mm. There are three initial fly-leaves, then the book is in regular quires of eight from ‘a–r’ with quire ‘s’ of ten leaves and quire ‘t’, the final quire, of four. The text is copied in double columns of forty lines to the end of quire ‘s’, but in the final quire ‘t’ of four folios (eight pages) only, the text is copied with 37–8 lines to the page. The change of hand occurs on the penultimate folio of quire ‘s’, page 288 (Fig. 1). In this 298-page manuscript the contribution of John Marchaunt is limited to just the final item in the codex, the Petition (the thirtieth item, pages 288–98). This final tract is described in the margin of page 288 in a sixteenth-century hand as A Complainte to the King and Parliament. Nasmith’s eighteenth-century title for this item is Articles presented to the King and Parliament, a title also adopted by M. R. James. The present Corpus Christi College description of the same item is recorded as A Petition to the King and Parliament, the title given to the piece in 1871 by Thomas Arnold who believed that the Petition was almost certainly the work of Wyclif himself. Some time after the first scribe had finished all his copying in Corpus 296, the second scribe John Marchaunt began his work a third of the way down column ‘a’ on page 288, the verso of the ninth folio of the ten-leaf quire ‘s’. To the naked eye there is no change in ink-colour, suggesting perhaps that the two scribes sourced their ink from the same supply. On page 289, the first scribe has added four lines missed by Marchaunt in the lower margin in a black ink, distinctive against the brown ink used by both scribes for the main copy. Minor corrections of single missing words, plus appropriate caret marks and re-inking of faded letters, appear sparsely on almost every folio to the end of the manuscript. The conclusion must be that the first scribe ‘read through’ the addition of the Petition by Marchaunt. The Petition continues through the final folio of quire ‘s’ and on into the four-leaf quire ‘t’ with the apparent ending of the text two thirds of the way down column ‘b’ of the final page (298). The situation in TCD 244 is somewhat different. The text of the Petition follows immediately after a tract called Of Feigned Contemplatif Life, appearing as items 14 and 15 on folios 136–41v and 141v–8v. The Petition

17

Hanna, ‘Two Lollard Codices’, p. 57.

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FIG. 1 CAMBRIDGE, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, MS 296, P. 288 (TRACTS BY WYCLIF). CHANGE OF HAND FROM SCRIBE 1 TO JOHN MARCHAUNT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PETITION. WITH PERMISSION OF THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

is now atelous with the loss of a single leaf (the last leaf of the quire), followed by an entire missing quire, presumably containing other texts. The first scribe of Corpus had already copied the text Of Feigned Contemplatif Life earlier in the manuscript on page 165 (col. a) continuing correctly down to page 170 (col. a, l. 34). However, at that point, mid-line, with no hesitation and in the same scribal hand, the actual text copied is the

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

final portion of the Petition. The Petition proper, copied by John Marchaunt begins on page 288 (col. a) and continues to page 297 (col. b, l. 20) where again, mid-line, and still in the hand of the second scribe (Marchaunt), what is actually copied is the final piece of text from Contemplatif Life. The texts of Contemplatif Life and the Petition do not occur in close proximity in the Corpus manuscript, being separated in fact by more than 100 pages. There is nothing unusual in the script, ink-colour or any marginal annotation at the ‘blunder’ points, the texts connect mid-line and mid-page. The portion of text from the end of the Petition mistakenly copied by the first scribe as the end of Contemplatif Life amounted to almost four columns of text. That would equate to a single folio recto and verso. The ending of the Petition as copied into Corpus was actually the end of Contemplatif Life. It was copied by the second scribe (Marchaunt) and amounted to almost two columns, or a single side of a leaf. Hanna argues that the two scribes of Corpus must each have used the same exemplar to make their copy, given the cogency of the textual fits, but that at the same time they were separable textual units. There may be several reasons for this. First, it is possible that if the Petition started life as an actual petition which Wyclif intended for presentation to the King, Parliament and John of Gaunt, it may have been prepared as a legal document copied by a scrivener, an attorney, or someone qualified in law working for the civic government. This might mean that in its original form it was not intended as a tract for inclusion in a collection of sermons and religious tracts. There is no evidence that Wyclif ’s Petition was ever presented but petitions identified in the hands of Adam Pinkhurst and Richard Osbarn, Marchaunt’s under-clerk, were presented to Parliament which suggests that it was not unusual for a highly qualified Guildhall employee to undertake such a task.18 It is possible that Marchaunt himself made the original copy of the Petition for Wyclif with a copy kept at the Guildhall along with other private material. Marchaunt had an in-depth knowledge of the legal process and experience in the city’s courts as an attorney and the city’s legal representative. Access to Guildhall records and documents was strictly controlled and as Caroline Barron observes, permission to view such documents was required from either the chamber clerk or the common clerk. When permission was granted then ‘the chamber clerk 18 H. Killick, ‘Treason, felony and Lollardy: A common petition in the hand of Richard Osbarn, clerk of the chamber of the Guildhall, 1400–c.1437’, Historical Research 89 (2016), 227–45. Killick argues (pp. 229–30) that ‘Parliamentary petitions were drawn up by professional scribes, who acted as intermediaries between the petitioner and the Crown by framing their complaint within the forms and rhetoric of petitionary discourse’, and that ‘the identification of these individuals as the authors of petitions suggests the existence of a small group of late medieval metropolitan scribes, well-versed in the forms and conventions of official and legal documents, who were employed in both bureaucratic and literary contexts’.

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would show [the person] the records and provide a copy as required, for a fee’.19 Prior to 1380, Marchaunt was almost certainly working as a clerk for the Chamberlain. In 1380 he was promoted to the position of chamber clerk itself, in clerkly terms, a position second only to the common clerk. In both cases, he would have been allowed access to the Petition if indeed it did exist as a legal document. A second explanation could be as follows: the Corpus manuscript is dated to the early 1380s, partly because of references in the text of The Grete Sentence, the tract which precedes the Petition, to events which occurred in 1382–3. This is a text unique to Corpus and may have been included by the first scribe as his final tract instead of a copy of the Petition which he did not have. However, if we examine the subject matter of the Petition it is possible that this text may have been prepared before 1382, and kept to one side for presentation or dissemination when appropriate. At the end of the 1370s, Wyclif was beginning to broadcast his views on the eucharist. In 1377 and 1378, Wyclif ’s appearances in London involved accusations of seditious preaching and in 1381 an Oxford committee condemned the dissemination of heretical views regarding the eucharist by members of the University (who remained unidentified). Wyclif appealed for help first to the King and then to John of Gaunt, both of whom are addressed in the Petition. Gaunt apparently went to Oxford to advise and silence Wyclif. This event took place in May of 1381, a month before the outbreak of hostilities in the Peasants’ Revolt. Later that year, Wyclif finally accepted that his position in Oxford was no longer tenable and he retired to Lutterworth, perhaps with the encouragement and advice of his patron and supporter, John of Gaunt. However, in May 1382, Wyclif was again summoned to London, this time by Archbishop Courtenay, to attend the Blackfriars (Earthquake) Council. Wyclif ’s teaching on the eucharist was pronounced heretical and at the Parliament later in the same month, a statute was issued which ordered the imprisonment of those preaching on the condemned subjects. Of the twenty-four conclusions assembled for condemnation at that same Blackfriars Council the first three, all considered to be heretical, related to Wyclif ’s preaching on the eucharist. In the Petition in the Corpus manuscript copied by Marchaunt, Article four (pp. 297–8) supposedly deals with Wyclif ’s views on the eucharist. The textual spread of this final portion from beginning to end comprises a mere four columns, which is a single folio, recto and verso. The first three Articles, copied in double columns, equate to four and a half folios, so the entire copy of the Petition could originally have been contained in a fascicle of six folios with a little space left at the end. Thus it is the text of the fourth Article which began on the final folio, and it is this text, containing Wyclif ’s thoughts on the eucharist, which constitutes the misplaced portion of the 19 C. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), p. 181.

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

Petition, which has now been transposed as the ending to Contemplatif Life. In Corpus 296, ten lines into the fourth Article and just before getting into the full swing of the eucharist debate, the text of the Petition stops and is replaced by the final misplaced portion of Contemplatif Life. The amount of text missing would equate to four columns or one leaf. At the same point of the Petition in TCD 244, the text breaks off at almost exactly the same place and there is then a missing folio, the last leaf of the quire which should have contained the disputed eucharist text. It is perhaps worth speculating that the text of the fourth Article, the argument on the eucharist to be set before the King and John of Gaunt was initially written before 1382 when the Blackfriars Council and the label of heresy was attached to the ideas expressed therein. The outcome may have been that heretical material which manifested itself as the last ‘Article’ of Wyclif ’s Petition was no longer acceptable and needed to be removed. As such, the original copies of Wyclif ’s Petition may have been purged, with heretical material removed or held apart. After 1382 there would anyway have been no point in presenting a Petition to the king which contained material which had been ordered to be suppressed by statute. But the early attempt at such an appeal may have been kept in a secure place at Guildhall, able to be released briefly by Marchaunt or Strode on specific request to trusted clerks working under them.20 It is equally possible that with a date of composition of 1381–2, Wyclif ’s illness or death a year or two later intervened before the Petition could be presented or whilst it was being prepared. Hanna remarks that the booklet containing the Petition ‘represents a separate piece of production’. It must have been ‘mobile’ and probably ‘detachable’ from the texts it sometimes travelled with. That could also mean, as Hanna implies, that it was stored separately. How does all this relate to the copy of the same tracts in TCD 244? It should be emphasised that the Petition is unique to the Corpus and Trinity manuscripts. It occurs in no other manuscript of Wycliffite materials although other items in each manuscript are copied elsewhere. If, as Hanna suggested, the copying of the Petition ‘occurred in a locale removed from the central place where the body of the exemplar was retained’,21 and that ‘removed’ locale were the Guildhall, or involved Guildhall clerks, then the Petition becomes an item of special access to a limited few and makes involvement by Marchaunt and Pinkhurst possible. In fact the Petition is not one of the tracts thought to be copied by Pinkhurst into the Trinity manuscript but clearly the scribes of both manuscripts had similar access to exemplar supply. More evidence is obviously needed, but if, in the future, Pinkhurst’s consistent employment at the Guildhall pre-1400 can be established with certainty, we may be looking at a group of like-minded 20 21

For internal dating evidence see Select English Works, ed. Arnold, III, 267. Hanna, ‘Two Lollard Codices’, p. 56.

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civic scribes experimenting with expanding the boundaries of the legal complaint which ‘allowed the aggrieved party to express indignation in the relatively safe context of a legal procedure’.22 With such complicated to-ings and fro-ings of the scribes involved in heretical text production it is perhaps not surprising that occasionally portions of text went awry. Perhaps Wyclif ’s death meant that the Petition had no validity in the sense that it could never be presented in any format once its author had died. This may have meant that some kind of legal copy, already made, could travel as a separate entity in quasi-legal format, and needed to be adapted if it were to be added to a collection of Wycliffite materials. It is also possible that the thinking behind its inclusion may have been a later decision arrived at by sympathetic clerks who wished to preserve whatever they had relating to Wyclif ’s thoughts, even after the death of the originator. THE SCRIBAL COMMUNITY AT THE GUILDHALL Seeking scribal communities in London has been a focus of researchers trying to situate the copying environment for the manuscripts of major authors, whether Chaucer, Gower, Langland or Wyclif.23 Recent scholarship has encouraged us to adopt a wider perspective. Rather than seeking out individual workshops, Andrew Prescott has emphasised the fact that the scribes involved in document production for both government and civic communities were probably those same scribes whose services were then enlisted to copy manuscripts of literary texts.24 If many of the scribes were peripatetic, moving between Westminster and the City, guild houses or the households of noble citizens, then it seems unlikely that they had a single place of work. As such, it is the communities of scribes themselves which need to be investigated, rather than just trying to establish the workshops of individual book-sellers. Writing before any of the Guildhall scribes were identified, Sheila Lindenbaum focuses on civic writing as a much-neglected area of literate practice. She sees the citizenry and its writing representatives as pivotal in the gradual authorisation of the English language as an accepted norm in the reform of political, literary and documentary culture. Prophetically she actually named two of the most prominent members of that civic secretariat as John Marchaunt and Ralph Strode, men whose careers are

Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, p. 289. The complicated stemmas of the remaining manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales suggest collections of quires as well as copies of individual tales in various copying centres: guilds, homes, institutions, fraternities, shops and noble households. 24 A. Prescott, ‘Administrative Records and the Scribal Achievement of Medieval England’, English Manuscript Studies 17 (2012), 173–99 (p. 190). 22 23

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central to the argument in this article.25 Lindenbaum also saw the ‘cultivation of a professional and scribal obscurity’ practised by the authors Gower, Chaucer and Langland as similar to that adopted by the clerk who penned the Mercers’ Petition.26 Although Lindenbaum was equally unaware of that clerk’s identity, he was finally unmasked as Adam Pinkhurst by Linne Mooney in 2006, and tentatively included in the Guildhall clerical community at least in a part-time capacity in Scribes and the City.27 The work of other scholars has also proved prescient. Marion Turner emphasises the ‘political and textual conflict’ in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, reiterating Lindenbaum’s description of ‘discursive turbulence’. The Peasants’ Revolt, mercantile and mayoral friction in the city involving the King, the spread of lollard thinking and the ultimate usurpation of Richard II were all part and parcel of that political conflict. As examples of textual conflict in the city, Turner lists the burning of books and records in the Peasants’ Revolt, the burning of the Jubilee Book by Mayor Exton, the petition to Parliament penned on behalf of the Mercers, the bill-posting at Westminster and St Paul’s and the English translations of the Bible.28 All these individual ‘conflicts’ were incitements to controversy in the climate of the time, and several of them involved events in and around the Guildhall itself perhaps for fairly obvious reasons. The Guildhall was the location at the heart of the city’s government, the seat of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs, men who would have been well placed to afford the luxury of book-ownership. The commercial and administrative business of the city and its guilds was conducted at the Guildhall, taxes were paid, customs documents prepared, apprentice fees collected, and city revenues were gathered. The Guildhall was the place where fines were levied and deeds, wills and charters were copied and registered in exchange for a fee. Civic meetings were held in the Guildhall as well as the activities and proceedings of the city’s many courts including the Courts of Husting and the Courts of the Mayor and Sheriffs. These activities were all the subject of written record. The Guildhall clerks therefore must have had a wide but mixed network of both wealthy and ordinary citizens who relied on their literate skills, all of which were in high demand. But the Guildhall was also the scene for oral presentations and public proclamations. From the 1370s the Common Council met regularly at the Guildhall and the great hall was sufficiently spacious to accommodate civic meetings of huge numbers of citizens. The Guildhall therefore was the place where the populace rubbed shoulders with the dignitaries, with wealthy merchants, noble lords and occasionally, royalty and where oral as well as written material was presented. The Guildhall was, in essence, 25 26 27 28

Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, p. 287. Ibid., p. 291. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, pp. 66–85. Turner, ‘Conflict’, p. 258.

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a discourse community entire unto itself, one of the writing centres of medieval London, with its trained clerks capable of ‘crossing discursive boundaries – particularly the barriers between the official languages and English and between legal and literary forms – and using discursive conventions in markedly improvisatory and tactical ways’.29 Given the concentration of named civic clerks in a single location, clerks who were previously only known for their literary output, it would appear that the Guildhall itself was a text repository or text exchange centre for a huge variety of written materials. Although pure speculation at the moment, it is possible that Guildhall clerks made for themselves, or were able to retain, portions of exemplars of their key texts and were thus able to control the lending out of exemplar pieces. Easy access to exemplars would mean that the clerks could earn extra money, either by copying for clients, or by hiring out appropriate pieces, a quasi-­commercial venture similar to the pecia system employed by the universities. Known authors may have deposited copies of some of their work in an institution to which they may have been tangentially connected perhaps, in the hope that its collection of trained clerks would be able to circulate an author’s work after death. Some of the guilds must have had their own collections of books and perhaps at a time before the guilds acquired their own halls, precious books were retained at the central Guildhall.30 The guilds certainly lodged copies of their valuable documents there, so it is possible that some texts, perhaps used for guild entertainments or for personal enjoyment, were lodged with precious guild documents in a safe place, the Guildhall.31 The question then arises as to why civic clerks would be in any way interested or involved in copying texts known to be controversial. The Guildhall officials so far identified were civic servants who worked at the Guildhall between the 1370s and the 1420s, precisely the years which see the drive towards the use of the English language as a tool in political, commercial and religious debate. Three Guildhall employees, Ralph Strode, John Marchaunt and Adam Pinkhurst, were colleagues from the mid 1370s or early 1380s. They were joined by Richard Osbarn, the HM 114 scribe, from about 1390 and he was Marchaunt’s successor as chamber clerk in 1399. He remained in office until 1438. By at least 1400 and possibly earlier, John Carpenter was working as Marchaunt’s under-clerk in the courts and also at the Guildhall itself. He was Marchaunt’s successor as common clerk in 1417 and served until 1439, dying in 1442. So this group of men had the laws, customs and finances of the city of London at the heart of their Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts’, p. 286. C. Welch, ‘The Guildhall Library and Museum’, The Library, 2nd s. 4 (1903), 68–84. 31 Earlier in the fourteenth century, the Guildhall Chapel is known to have housed the Puy, which was a guild formed to encourage music and poetry in the form of a competition. It is a possibility therefore that copies of material made for entertainment at the Puy were then housed at the Guildhall for safe-keeping. 29

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working lives for an overlapping period of some sixty to seventy years, years which began when events in the city have been described variously as ‘turbulent’ and ‘a maelstrom’.32 All these men must have been qualified in the law, though to what level we do not know. In his own will, John Carpenter refers to his predecessor, John Marchaunt as ‘Magister’, a title which according to Tout was coveted, and which denoted ‘the attainment of a full University degree in any faculty’.33 Networks of lollard book-owners and producers both in London and elsewhere in the country at the end of the fourteenth and well into the fifteenth century have been investigated at length by Maureen Jurkowski.34 According to Jurkowski, many of the men involved with and interested in lollardy, whether patrons, makers or owners, were in some way associated with the law or the legal profession. Specifically citing two tracts which occur in both Corpus 296 and TCD 244, and which target the ‘False men of lawe’, Jurkowski expresses her initial surprise that so many of the ‘gentry’ supporters of lollardy were in fact lawyers.35 However, she provides a definition of the common lawyer in late medieval times, and observes that there is an identifiable ‘layer of lawyers’ about whose remit very little is known. These were the men who could work as attorneys at Westminster if occasion demanded but who were mainly concerned with local courts, working with the ordinary man as well as with the merchant oligarchies in large towns.36 The continuing laicisation of the civil service brought the opportunity to widen the scope of individual career enhancement by undertaking a variety of clerical assignments for a multiplicity of masters and this appears to be precisely the profile of several of London’s leading clerks including Strode, Marchaunt and Pinkhurst whose affiliations to the Guildhall are already known. A note attached to Jurkowski’s argument about lawyers at this point suggests that ‘the drafting of the increasing numbers of petitions to the King and Parliament was largely the work of lawyers operating at this level’.37 So it should come as no surprise that petitions drafted by Guildhall clerks, perhaps also the Petition for John Wyclif, should take their place alongside writs, records and literary texts, as the products of a civic elite. Whether any of the Guildhall clerks received legal training in London is still not known. Mooney and I argued that Adam Pinkhurst, possibly in his role as a qualified legal scrivener, served as the clerk of the Recorder,

R. Bird, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949); Turner, ‘Conflict’, p. 258. John Carpenter’s will is TNA, C 146/9532. T. F. Tout, ‘Literature and Learning in the English Civil Service in the fourteenth century’, Speculum 4 (1929), 365–89 (p. 368). Tout goes on to say that such a title was the equivalent of ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’. 34 Jurkowski, ‘Lawyers and Lollardy’, pp. 155–82. 35 Ibid., p. 152. 36 Ibid., p. 156. 37 Ibid., p. 171. 32 33

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the Mayor, or the Common Council, but again this is still speculative.38 In that position, he would have been one of the foremost clerks of the City of London. Pinkhurst’s hand may be seen in Letter Book I (begun in 1399) continuing periodically until 1410. In addition, a hand very similar to Pinkhurst’s was copying the same type of material into Letter Book H (1376–99) and may be seen in the records as early as 1378. This identification is still not confirmed but it would not be surprising to find Pinkhurst attached to the Guildhall in some capacity, perhaps on a part-time basis, at least from the early 1380s and perhaps from the late 1370s.39 The last member of this literate Guildhall ensemble in the late fourteenth century, Ralph Strode, was the most highly qualified of all, a Fellow of Merton College who began work in the Guildhall as Common Serjeant in 1373, giving up that position in 1382 to become public prosecutor for the City. Strode’s presence at the Guildhall, his acquaintance with Chaucer, Marchaunt and Wyclif, and his role in civic government in the last decades of the fourteenth century has not yet been adequately considered in the light of recent discoveries. Strode died in 1387. WYCLIF, RALPH STRODE AND OTHER CONNECTIONS WITH THE GUILDHALL NETWORK Although a probationary fellow of Merton College in 1356, Wyclif is recorded as Master of Balliol College in 1360.40 It is in this connection that in 1360, John Wyclif, ‘Master of the House of the Scholars of the Hall called “Le Baillolhalle” in Oxford’, was accused of the unlawful seizure of a property in St Lawrence Jewry in London by a man called Nicholas Marchaunt. The case, which was answered in the Court of Husting of Common Pleas, which met in the Guildhall, appears to have gone against Marchaunt and he was forced to pay arrears.41 Several strands from this piece of information are of relevance to the present research. Balliol College owned a number of tenements in St Lawrence Jewry, actually within the Guildhall Close and in 1360, as Master of Balliol, John Wyclif was actively pursuing rents from those properties. This situates Wyclif in Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, p. 77. Ibid., pp. 75–7. 40 Information on the life of Wyclif has mainly been taken from: Hudson and Kenny, ‘Wyclif [Wycliffe], John’. 41 The English Works of Wyclif, ed. F. D. Matthew, EETS OS 74 (London, 1880). Matthew quotes from: Fourth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Part I: Report and appendix, 2 vols. (London, 1874), I, 448. See ‘Documents relating to St Lawrence Jewry, London’, Balliol College Archives and Manuscripts [accessed 23 June 2020], where the description of record E.7. 14. states: ‘Parker described this item as: “… John de Wyclyf attached to answer Nicholas Marchaunt. 1360” but a note in 16a by a Miss Faith gives it as “Memorandum of a suit in the Court of Common Pleas brought against John de Wyclif for unlawful destraint on a tenement in St. Lawrence Jewry, London. 1360”’. 38 39

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

London, close to the Guildhall at an early stage in his career. Nicholas Marchaunt also owned a family property in St Lawrence Jewry, willed by an ancestor, Adam de Forsham. Nicholas’s son, John Marchaunt (Scribe D), although probably only in his teens, may have been aware of the property dispute.42 Balliol College continued to maintain property interests in the Guildhall Close until the end of the eighteenth century. Throughout his service as common clerk, at least from 1400 until his death in 1421, John Marchaunt occupied ‘a mansion, situate above the middle gate at the entrance to the Guildhall’, adjacent to the Balliol properties.43 It is possible that this house was the family property and the Marchaunt’s home, since Forsham’s will specifically cites a property ‘opposite’ the Guildhall and next to St Lawrence Jewry. Marchaunt could have been in residence there from as early as his appointment as Chamber Clerk in 1380.44 Certainly on Richard Osbarn’s appointment as Chamber Clerk in 1399, Osbarn had a house built for him in the Guildhall Close.45 That Wyclif should be involved in the collection of rents for an Oxford college may not be too surprising. There is a great deal of evidence assembled by Jurkowski, that in the early 1390s a group of Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, travelled the country to collect rents, hold courts and administer the accounts of many of the college’s endowments, with the usual length of stay in each place between four and six weeks. They were also called upon from time to time to undertake business on the college’s behalf in London.46 In 1395, in London, each of the four travelling Fellows from Merton were labelled ‘persons called Lollards’, taken into custody and imprisoned in Beaumaris Castle in Anglesey, as far away as possible from any trouble.47 They remained there until September 1399 when they were released on the accession of the new King, Henry IV. One of the four Merton Fellows taken into custody in 1395 was one Thomas Lucas. Finally expelled by Merton in 1409, Lucas then concentrated on a career as a common lawyer. Jurkowski compares Lucas with his Merton predecessor, 42 In the will of Adam de Forsham (1321–2), a house in St Lawrence Jewry is left to John Marchaunt and wife Letitia (Forsham’s daughter). I believe that this particular John Marchaunt is the uncle of Nicholas whose own father may have been Christian Marchaunt. ‘Wills: 15 Edward II (1321–2)’, in Calendar of wills proved and enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, A.D. 1258–A.D.1688, ed. R. R. Sharpe, 2 vols. (London, 1889–90), I, 289–95 (Roll 50 [60]). The property passed down in the Marchaunt family. 43 ‘Folios cxci–cc: Dec 1416–’, in Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London A–L, ed. R. R. Sharpe, 11 vols. (London, 1899–1912), IX, 175–86 (Letter Book I, fol. 194v). 44 It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the Corporation attempted to buy the freehold of the land from Balliol. This was complicated because of doubts about the boundaries of the property but in 1792 an agreement was secured whereby the Guildhall paid a rent half-yearly to the college. This agreement still continues today. 45 Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, p. 183 and n. 76, citing Calendar of LetterBooks, ed. Sharpe, IX, 6–7, 10–11. The text of this concession is on fol. ii of Letter Book I. See also C. Barron, The Medieval Guildhall of London (London, 1974), p. 57. 46 M. Jurkowski, ‘Heresy and Factionalism at Merton College in the Early Fifteenth Century’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997), 658–81. 47 Ibid., p. 662.

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Ralph Strode, defining both as men capable of straddling the worlds of the ‘academic, legal and … literary spheres’, with a career in common law ‘which relied more on ability than patronage’.48 Ralph Strode, whose origins are at present unknown, but who may have been a member of the Strode family of Strood in Kent, received his training in law at Merton College, Oxford, possibly as early as 1355; he was a Fellow in 1359–60 and it was at Oxford that he became acquainted with John Wyclif.49 Merton was founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, bishop of Rochester, with Strood in Kent under his jurisdiction. De Merton’s original intention for the college was to provide training for secular clergy. Thus its scholars were prohibited from joining any of the regular religious orders and any contravention resulted in the loss of their scholarship. Philosophy and the liberal arts were studied as well as theology and Chaucer’s reference to his friend Ralph Strode as the ‘philosophical Strode’ might be a description which perhaps reflected his original educational qualifications. More than all other Oxford colleges, Merton made special provision for the education of needy and orphan children ‘pueri de genere fundatoris’ and for ‘poor secondary scholars’, a duty which was also a major feature of the work of the Common Serjeant of London (Strode) aided by the Chamberlain (Marchaunt) and a duty which was to become a central feature in Strode’s life after 1373.50 If Strode began his city career at the Guildhall in 1373 then without doubt he must have had some further legal training, possibly at the London Inns of Court, and he would have been working with John Marchaunt for at least a part of his tenure. Precedent suggests that Marchaunt would have served an apprenticeship of at least ten years before his preferment to higher office and that would take us back to around 1370.51 If Marchaunt were working at the Guildhall in 1373 he would have been working with Ralph Strode on an almost daily basis until Strode left office in 1382. 48 Ibid., p. 680. Thomas Lucas was a Fellow of Merton College by 1391. Strode died in 1387. The will of Strode’s widow Emma was proved in May 1394 in the Commissary Court of London (cf. Liber Albus, and Letter Book H, 11). Her executors were her son Ralph, and Margery, wife of a Thomas Lucas, citizen and mercer of London. 49 Families of Strodes and also Marchaunts are recorded in the Kent Lay Subsidy for 1335 as resident in Strood in Kent: ‘The Kent Lay Subsidy Roll of 1334/5’, Kent Archaeological Society [accessed 23 June 2020]. It may be that the families of Marchaunts and Strodes were known to each other. 50 The Foundation Statutes of Merton College, Oxford, 1270, ed. E. F. Percival (London, 1847). Walter Merton ended his long career as bishop of Rochester and is buried in Rochester Cathedral. Now a suburb of Rochester, the former village of Strood was owned by the Rochester monastery from the 18th year of Edward III’s reign (1345) until the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. Whether or not there is any connection between Rochester Cathedral and scholarships to Merton College for the local youth is at present unknown. 51 There is evidence that Richard Osbarn, Marchaunt’s successor in office in 1399, was working from the Guildhall for the city’s courts and with access to city records throughout the 1390s, a ten-year apprenticeship.

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

In 1374 Ralph Strode stood surety for a Merton colleague along with John Wyclif, so it seems reasonable to assume that Wyclif and Strode were in contact at that time.52 Wyclif ’s patronage by John of Gaunt is well documented and Wyclif ’s presence in London in the 1370s is recorded, possibly as peculiaris regis clericus from 1371–4.53 Wyclif appeared before the King’s Council in 1376 at Gaunt’s request and in 1377 he was summoned from Oxford to appear at St Paul’s, charged with the preaching of heresy. At the St Paul’s meeting with Archbishop Simon Sudbury, Wyclif had the support of the Duke of Lancaster, but the meeting was abandoned in chaos with the anger aroused largely directed towards John of Gaunt and Henry, Lord Percy. In 1378, Wyclif was again in London and appears to have been preparing material ‘to defend the invasion of sanctuary’ for the King and the duke of Lancaster.54 It is surely inconceivable that the furore attendant on Wyclif and his work was not known and debated in the Guildhall community of the 1370s and the early 1380s, the possible date of Wyclif ’s original Petition to Parliament. The Petition is an interesting document. Addressed not only to the King, but also to the ‘noble duk of Lancastre’, it was presumably originally penned when John of Gaunt was still an influence in affairs of state on behalf of his nephew. The entry for Ralph Strode in the ODNB states the following: ‘While his own views are known only through the veil of Wyclif ’s texts, it is clear that Strode experienced many of the ecclesiastical and political uncertainties of the age’. It may be that Strode’s ‘uncertainties’ were debated with, and also applied to, the highly literate clerks who worked alongside him. The influence of Ralph Strode on employing the language of the common man to communicate a city’s laws, customs and perhaps even religious texts to the ordinary citizens of a major city may have been more significant than has been realised. Caroline Barron, eminent historian of medieval London, describes ‘a remarkable event’ which occurred at the Guildhall in 1387.55 In March of that year, the mayor, Nicholas Exton called a special meeting of the Mayor, Sheriffs and Aldermen as well as the entire Common Council of the city. The purpose of the gathering, on advice from the previous Mayor, Nicholas Brembre, was to discuss what 52 Calendar of the Close Rolls, Edward III, 1327–1377, ed. H. C. Maxwell Lyte, 14 vols. (London, 1896–1913), XIV, 94 (membrane 15d). 53 See Hudson and Kenny, ‘Wyclif [Wycliffe], John’. 54 Ibid., apparently ‘incorporated into his De ecclesia from chapter 7 onwards. Wyclif comments that he writes “at the order of the lord king … in my treatise”, though later he also describes “the decision of my lord, the lord duke [of Lancaster]” (Wyclif, De ecclesia, 266)’. 55 C. M. Barron, ‘The Burning of the Jubilee Book, 1376–1387’, a paper read 17 June 2002 to the Guildhall Historical Association [accessed 23 June 2020]. See The London Jubilee Book 1376–1387: An edition of Trinity College Cambridge MS O.3.11, folios 133–157, ed. C. M. Barron and L. Wright, London Record Society 55 (London, 2021).

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should happen to a Guildhall custumal, a book called Jubilee, so-named because it was begun in 1376, the year of the Jubilee of Edward III. The Jubilee Book was completed in 1378. It was the result of two years of concentrated work by a select committee of London citizens to establish wide-reaching reforms in the city’s governance and to record them, according to Barron, in the English language.56 Barron is keen to focus on the creation of the Jubilee Book as what she sees as a ‘developing concern for the common good’ by some members of the civic secretariat. In her opinion the ‘moving spirit’ behind the Jubilee Book, written in English, and the most likely candidate for its development, would have been the Common Serjeant of the city, Ralph Strode, friend of Chaucer, academic disputant with Wyclif, colleague of Marchaunt and possibly also of Pinkhurst.57 In Scribes and the City, Mooney and I argue that some of the scribes of the city secretariat whose lives we traced were willing participants in the drive towards adopting English as a national language and promoting its use in government and commerce as well as in literature.58 We also argue that Marchaunt and Pinkhurst must have been acquainted with some of the authors – Gower, Chaucer and Langland – whose work they copied repeatedly. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility to learn that Marchaunt and Pinkhurst were similarly acquainted with the ideas and ideals of John Wyclif, perhaps through the association with their colleague, Ralph Strode and that the Guildhall community of clerks had some involvement in the dissemination of his life’s work. Another pivotal node in this expanding network is John of Gaunt, brother-in-law and patron of Geoffrey Chaucer, patron and protector of both John Wyclif as well as John of Northampton, one of the city’s controversial mayors (1381–3). John Marchaunt was one of Northampton’s clerks, named in Thomas Usk’s ‘Appeal of Thomas Usk against John Northampton’ (1384) as intimately involved in meetings with Northampton and with the affairs of the Guildhall.59 Northampton, along with Strode, was also one of the initiators of the Jubilee Book project, driving the struggles for constitutional reform in the late 1370s. Since Marchaunt was a senior clerk at the Guildhall, then he also would have been involved and may have been sympathetic to the more forceful representations of his senior colleagues for producing material in the English language. Northampton’s efforts 56 See Barron, ‘The Burning of the Jubilee Book’, for her argument that the second section of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.3.11 is a late fifteenth-century copy of a late fourteenth century book which in Barron’s opinion was the English ‘Jubilee Book’. She suggests that more than one copy was made, so although the original Guildhall book was burnt in 1387, another copy may have been in existence, perhaps in a private household or even in the possession of Ralph Strode. 57 Ibid. 58 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, p. 137. 59 A Book of London English, 1384–1425, ed. R. Chambers and M. Daunt, with M. M. Weale (Oxford, 1931), p. 24. For more information see also Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, p. 57.

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

were largely neutralised after 1383 when Nicholas Brembre replaced him as Mayor, but John of Gaunt continued to be involved in the protection of Northampton into the 1390s. Wyclif ’s Petition is addressed not only to the King, but also to the ‘noble duk of Lancastre’ as well as to members of Parliament. In the Petition, Wyclif lays before Parliament his usual complaints against prelates holding secular positions, curates who do not follow the rules of their office or lead by example, and the false belief of cursed hypocrites and heretics who are ignorant of God’s law. In Wyclif ’s third article for consideration, he focuses on the worldly prelate and provides a lengthy catalogue of his sins: pomp, pride, covetousness, envy, gluttony, drunkenness, lechery, simony and heresy. This is followed by Wyclif ’s condemnation of the fat priest who rides ‘with fatte hors & o iolye & gaye sadeles & bridelis ryngynge be the weye & hi(m)self in costy clothes and pelure’ (Fig. 2).60 This passage is strikingly similar to Chaucer’s description of the Monk in the General Prologue, ‘a lorde ful fat’, whose bridle men heard ‘Gynglen in a whistlynge wynd’, whose sleeves were ‘purfiled at the hond / With grys, (expensive squirrel fur) and that the fyneste in the lond’ (Figs. 3 and 4).61 Of course bells on bridles were fashionable at the time and not an unusual feature on the bridles of Canterbury pilgrims, and fat prelates were a common source of ridicule, but bearing in mind the Guildhall network and the fact that Marchaunt copied both Wyclif ’s petition and two early copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Adam Pinkhurst was copying Troilus and Criseyde dedicated to the ‘philosophical Strode’ in the middle of the 1380s, it is not impossible that Chaucer may have had access to collections of Wyclif ’s writings, including the Petition, through his Guildhall connections. There is no doubt that Mooney’s identification of Adam Pinkhurst in 2006 was of great significance for several reasons. It has led to an ongoing investigation into the work of civic clerks connected in some way with the London Guildhall who appear to have been open to attempts to promote the English language as the relevant expression of a language for a community and to demonstrate their proficiency in the linguistic arena. It has also encouraged an exploration of the various different groups of scribes and promoted an awareness of the interconnections between manuscript scribes as well as those copying documents and charters for royalty, civic dignitaries, legal representatives and religious or guild communities. It is perhaps significant that a group of scribes of high regard (most still unnamed but identifiable by their scribal hands) were employed across the different categories and may be seen to collaborate and cooperate with

60 Corpus 296, p. 297(a), ll. 22–35 and Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198, fol. 3r, ll. 23–8 and fol. 3v, ll. 13–20 (image online: Digital Bodleian [accessed 23 June 2020]). For Arnold’s observations of the similarities see Select English Works, ed. Arnold, III, 520, n. a. 61 These lines are from Oxford, Corpus Christi MS 198 also copied by Marchaunt.

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FIG. 2 CAMBRIDGE, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, MS 296, P. 297 (COL. A, LL. 22–35). ARTICLE 3 IN THE PETITION, COPIED BY MARCHAUNT, WITH WYCLIF’S CONDEMNATION OF THE FAT PRIEST. WITH PERMISSION OF THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

colleagues. Several of these clerks were highly literate, probably qualified in some legal capacity, shared similar ideologies and were thus a community. Given the broad spectrum of the copying expertise of these clerks and their engagement with all levels of the society of the time, it would not be beyond the realms of possibility to suggest that John Marchaunt, a civic scribe, was responsible for the copy of the Petition in Corpus 296 and

SEEKING SCRIBAL COMMUNITIES IN MEDIEVAL LONDON

145

FIG. 3 OXFORD, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, MS 198, FOL. 3R (LL. 23–28). LINES FROM THE DESCRIPTION OF THE MONK IN THE GENERAL PROLOGUE FROM OXFORD, CORPUS CHRISTI MS 198 (CANTERBURY TALES) COPIED BY JOHN MARCHAUNT. BY PERMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.

FIG. 4 OXFORD, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, MS 198, FOL. 3V (LL. 13–20). BY PERMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.

that Adam Pinkhurst, a scrivener, could have been involved in the making of TCD 244. Thus many texts, whether defined by twentieth/twenty-firstcentury scholars as ‘religious’, ‘literary’ or ‘documentary’, were prepared by a scribal community which may have been centred on the London Guildhall.

6

SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED HOLLY JAMES-MADDOCKS

T

rinity College, Cambridge [TCC], MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21 are bookletconstructed anthologies of shorter pieces in Middle English – secular and religious works in poetry and prose – with much of them ascribed to John Lydgate. Most of the booklets in both volumes were copied by a single scribe, but their separate foliation and grubby outer leaves indicate that the booklets existed as discrete units for some time. Linne Mooney’s exemplary study of the division of scribal labour by booklet (Tables 1 and 2) detailed the stints of four late fifteenth-century copyists (scribes A, C, D and the ‘Hammond scribe’) and two sixteenth-century copyists (Scribe B and John Stow).1 She concluded that the fifteenth-century booklets were separately-produced as well as separately-used, with Scribe A’s activity assigned to the 1460s and 1470s: ‘Perhaps by 1480, the exemplar booklets had passed to Caxton and from him to de Worde to serve as copytexts for their prints of English vernacular poetry and prose’. Again, more recently, Mooney viewed print’s arrival as a mid-point in the timeline: Scribe A’s 1 ‘Scribes and Booklets of Trinity College, Cambridge, Manuscripts R.3.19 and R.3.21’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. J. Minnis (York, 2001), pp. 241–66. Both manuscripts are available online: The Wren Digital Library [accessed 26 April 2021]. I am grateful to Margaret Connolly, Orietta Da Rold and Derek Pearsall for their expert advice, and I alone am responsible for any error or omission.

SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED

booklets ‘remained in the London book trade up to the introduction of print’, while ‘later booklets’ by scribes C and D were ‘joined’ to those written by A (and possibly by Stow).2 The important consideration that underpins the earlier chronological placement of Scribe A’s work is his same-booklet collaboration with the London-based Hammond scribe – and Mooney (like Eleanor Hammond before her) recognised the potential of such cooperation for what it might reveal about the circumstances of metropolitan book production on the advent of printing. Scribe A’s relationship to the other producers of the Trinity booklets will be my focus, but I approach the subject via the illuminators and printers who were also certainly part of the wider environment in which these booklets were produced. An unusually large volume of scholarship is associated with this group of unnamed fifteenth-century scribes, and with one of them in particular. The Hammond scribe (fl. c. 1458–80) is best known for preserving the shorter poems of Lydgate and Chaucer, and in copies derived in part from the manuscripts of his famous predecessor – the scribe, book collector, and man of business – John Shirley (d. 1456). Books written by both copyists were in turn handled by the printer, John Stow (d. 1605).3 The ‘Shirley to Stow’ trajectory created an impression of the Hammond scribe as ‘a stable center in the maze of crisscrossing fifteenth-century texts’, and scholars have since identified his hand in fifteen manuscripts of medical, heraldic, legal and literary material.4 Hammond’s explanation for the stability – ‘a 2 ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 265; ‘Vernacular literary manuscripts and their scribes’, in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. A. Gillespie and D. Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 192–211 (p. 209 and n. 61). 3 The Hammond scribe was first identified in E. P. Hammond, ‘Two British Museum Manuscripts (Harley 2251 and Adds. 34360): A Contribution to the Bibliography of John Lydgate’, Anglia 28 (1905), 1–28; with her final statement in ‘A Scribe of Chaucer’, Modern Philology 27 (1929), 27–33; see also A. Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (London, 1925), pp. 181–2, 191. As Shirley’s ‘successor’ see M. Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1998), chapter 8; and L. R. Mooney, ‘John Shirley’s Heirs’, The Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), 182–98. For books that Stow used see John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (London, 2004). 4 E. P. Hammond, ‘The Nine-Syllabled Pentameter Line in Some Post-Chaucerian Manuscripts’, Modern Philology 23 (1925), 129–52 (p. 130). The list comprises: two copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (BL, MS Royal 17 D.xv, fols. 167r–301v; London, Royal College of Physicians, MS 388); two of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (BL, MSS Arundel 59 [with Lydgate/Burgh’s Secrees of old Philisoffres] and Harley 372, fols. 71r–112r); three primarily Lydgatian miscellanies (BL, MSS Add. 34360 and Harley 2251; TCC, MS R.3.21, fols. 34r–49v); three collections of Middle English prose: medical-scientific (TCC, MS R.14.52), London civic and legal documents (TCC, MS O.3.11), and religious, incl. Richard Rolle and William Flete (Worcester Cathedral, MS F.172); heraldic tracts in Latin and French (BL, MS Add. 29901); Nova Statuta to 18 Henry VI (BL, MS Harley 4999); Fortescue’s Governance of England (BL, MS Cotton Claudius A.viii, fols. 175r–97v); a single leaf of Piers the Plowman’s Creed (BL, MS Harley 78, fol. 3r), and another of the English prose Merlin (Bodl., MS Rawl. D. 913, fol. 43r–v). See L. R. Mooney, ‘A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards et al. (London, 2000), pp. 113–23.

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TABLE 1: BOOKLETS AND CONTENTS OF CAMBRIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE MS R.3.19 (REPRODUCED FROM MOONEY, ‘SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS’, P. 242, UPDATED WITH ‘SCRIBE F’)

Booklet

Folios

Medieval fols.

I

1–8

1–8

154–169

9–23

67–97

1–31

9–16

32–39

16v

‘Churl and Bird’, fables

III

17–25

1–9

25v

Parliament of Fowls

A

IV

26–48

1–23

46r–48v

‘Guiscardo & Guismonda’, Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections

A&F

V

49–54

1–6

53v–54v

‘Seasons and Complexions’

B

VI

55–66

1–12

66r–v

Assembly of Ladies

A

VII

98–113

1–16

111v–113v

‘Belle Dame sans Merci’,

A

II

Blanks 169v

Contents

Scribe

lyrics,

A

‘Craft of Lovers’ Assembly of Gods,

A

‘Commandments of Love’, ‘Nine Ladies Worthy’ VIII

114–153

1–40

153r–v

Legend of Good Women,

A

‘Complaint unto Pity’ IX

170–204

1–35

170r, 202v–204v

extracts from Fall of Princes and Monk’s Prol. and Tale

X

205–216

1–14

213v–216v

verses on mortality and ‘How the A Wise Man…’ and ‘…Good Wife Taught…’

XI

217–239

1–23

234v

‘Court of Love’

C

236v–239v

Lydgate’s fables

Stow

XII

240–246

1–7

245r–246v

Piers of Fulham

D

XIII

247–254

2–9

251v–254v

‘Pettigrew of England’

C

A

scriptorium or a publishing business where many codices were in stock’ – brilliantly encapsulates the evidence for the Shirley-derived exemplars used in the Hammond scribe’s copying of three Lygatian miscellanies, including TCC, MS R.3.21.5 Mooney’s study of the Trinity booklets added significant detail to this picture: some booklets were sold to customers (such as the three booklets sold to Roger Thorney, c. 1450–1515, Mercer), while others served as ‘shop copies’.6 These were the ‘unembellished book5 6

Hammond, ‘A Scribe of Chaucer’, p. 29. See Table 2 (IV, VI, IX): William Middleton married Thorney’s widow. Mooney’s

SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED

lets’, Mooney speculated, used as ‘exemplars’ and possibly as examination copies for ‘prospective buyers’. In this reconstruction, ‘stock’ is viewed as both booklets ready-for-supply and ready-for-copying, together with the possibility that customers might fashion their own codex from elements of both – a usage that would indeed necessitate a workshop-bookshop environment. (The question of ‘stock’, and how we imagine the physical spaces in which it was created and subsequently used, will be discussed below.) Rather less is known about any of the other producers of the Trinity booklets. Mooney’s major contribution to the topic was to provide the palaeographical evidence that Scribe A copied yet another bookletconstructed collection of Middle English devotional poetry and prose in Bodl., MS Douce 322, a collection that shares three texts with MS R.3.21.7 Douce was compiled for William Baron, a teller of the exchequer (d. c. 1484), who donated the book to the Dartford Priory.8 Scribe A, like the Hammond scribe, was almost certainly London-based. Scribe C and the illustrator of seven Trinity booklets (Table 2) have been similarly localised by their probable contribution to a remarkable assemblage of printed and manuscript books known as the ‘Thorney Sammelband’ (Oxford, St John’s College [SJO], b.2.21/MS 266).9 The volume’s frontispiece, a full-page tinted pen-drawing depicting a scene from Chaucer’s Trolius and Criseyde, announces the first of three Caxton editions printed around 1483 – Troilus, the Canterbury Tales, and the Quattuor sermones – and these are combined with a manuscript of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, copied by Scribe C.10 This hybrid book belonged to Roger Thorney, the owner of at least three Trinity booklets, but exactly when he acquired any of these items before 1515 is unknown. Indeed the presumptive dating of all three compilations – in the Trinity and Douce miscellanies, and Thorney Sammelband – affects most aspects of their origin and provenance. What is clear is that many texts in MS R.3.19 served as copy for printers from at least as early as Wynkyn de Worde (who took over the lease of Caxton’s shop in 1492).11 In c. 1494, for example, de Worde used both the Assembly of Gods in MS R.3.19 (Scribe A) and argument overturned a long-held view that both volumes were made for Thorney (‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 247. The quotation that follows is from pp. 264–5). 7 Discussed below. The scribal oeuvre was later increased in J. Dresvina, ‘A Note on a Hitherto Unpublished Life of St Margaret of Antioch from MS Eng. th. e. 18: its Scribe and its Source’, JEBS 10 (2007), 217–31. 8 Baron was buried in London Charterhouse c. 1484 (arms on fols. 10r, 78ra, ex dono on fol. i recto): see A. I. Doyle, ‘A Text Attributed to Ruusbroec Circulating in England’, in Dr. L. Reypens-Album: Opstellen aangeboden aan L. Reypens, ed. A. Ampe, Studiën en Tekstuitgaven van Ons Geestelijk Erf 16 (Antwerp, 1964), pp. 153–71 (p. 160). 9 Manuscript Trinity R.3.19: A Facsimile, intro. B. Y. Fletcher (Norman OK, 1987), p. xxviii; LGM II, 337–9. 10 STC 5094 [1483]; STC 5083 [1483]; STC 17957 [1482–3]; and DIMEV 6276. 11 BMC XI, 11–12.

149

TABLE 2: BOOKLETS AND CONTENTS OF CAMBRIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE MS R.3.21 (REPRODUCED FROM MOONEY, ‘SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS’, P. 243, WITH ADDITIONAL COLUMN ON PARATEXTUAL FEATURES)

Booklet

Folios

Medieval fols.

I

1–32

1–32

II

33–50

1–18

33r

‘Earth upon Earth’ ‘Parce michi’, ‘Pety Job’

Hammond &A

fols. 34–38: illustration, borders, scrolls; fols. 33v, 39–50: spaces for initials

III

51–84

1–33

83v–84v

Curia Sapientie

A

illustration, penflourished initials, scrolls, paraphs

IV

85–156

1–72

Life of Our Lady fol. 85r:‘Iste liber constat Willelmi Meddilton’

A

spaces for illustration and initials

V

157–172

1–16

Marian lyrics

A

spaces for illustration and initials

VI

173–180

1–8

178r–180v

‘Joys…’ & ‘Sorrows of the Virgin’, ‘Psalmi Passionis’ fol. 175r: ‘Iste liber constat W M’

A

spaces for illustration and initials

VII

181–204

1–24

181r–v, 191v–193r, 201v–204v

devotional lyrics, complaints, by Lydgate and William of Lichfield

A

illustration (fol. 182r only); spaces for illustration and initials

VIII

205–220 1–16

217r–220v

‘Interpretatio Misse’ or ‘Virtue of the Mass’

A

spaces for initials

IX

221–248

230v–232v

‘Life of St Anne’, religious lyrics, political lyrics, ‘Kings’, ‘Galaunt’ fol. 221r: ‘Iste liber constat Willelmi Middilton’ fol. 245v: ‘[E]xplicit quod Rogerus Thorney’

A

fols. 238–243: illustration, initials, scrolls, paraphs; fols. 221–237, 244–248: spaces for illustration and initials, one paraph (fol. 244v), scroll (fol. 245v, an addition)

1–28

Blanks

Contents

Scribe

A religious didactic prose, incl. ‘Craft of dying’ (fols. 17-32) fol. 1:‘John Stowe’; ‘Thomas Griffith 1650’

Paratextual features fols. 1–16: illustration, initials, scrolls, paraphs; fols. 17–32: spaces for initials

151

SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED

TABLE 2 (CONCLUDED)

Booklet

Folios

Medieval Blanks fols.

Contents

Scribe

Meta-textual features

X

249–256

1–8

prose life of Adam

A

illustration, border, penflourished initials, scroll, paraphs

XI

257–273

1–16

273v

prose life of St. Anthony

A

illustration, penflourished initials, paraphs

XII

274–304

1–31

284v 302r–304v

verse prayers & devotional verse, ‘Danse Macabre’, ‘Pageant of Knowledge’, moral advice

A

scrolls; spaces for initials

XIII

305–320

1–16

Guy of Warwick, ‘Legend of St George’, verse prayers, ‘Kings of England’ fol. 320v: ‘John Stowes boke’, ‘John Stowe honor of this boke and many mo, benedicamus domino’

A

spaces for illustration and initials

the Siege of Thebes in the Sammelband (Scribe C) as setting copy for his first editions (STC 17007 [1494?]; STC 17031 [1494?]).12 The connections between the producers of the Trinity booklets and the early printed book trade highlight the wider potential of Hammond’s theory: ‘a scriptorium or a publishing business where many codices were in stock’.13 How feasible is it that the Caxton business was rather more significant than a midpoint in the provenance history of the earliest booklets (Scribe A’s)? A simpler narrative is tempting – that they were made for Caxton, that they were among the ‘many diuerse paunflettis’ of his study – but it is not something I can demonstrate.14 Instead, in what follows, I suggest refinements to Mooney’s dating of Scribe A’s booklets that would align them 12 G. Bone, ‘Extant Manuscripts Printed from by W. de Worde with Notes on the Owner, Roger Thorney’, The Library, 4th s. 12 (1931–2), 284–309 (pp. 286–95, 303). For the dating see BMC XI, 192–3. 13 Hammond, ‘A Scribe of Chaucer’, p. 29 (my emphasis). 14 Prologue to ‘The Boke of Eneydos’ [1490] (STC 24796; BMC XI, 174–5). On Caxton as inheritor, see Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 266.

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HOLLY JAMES-MADDOCKS

with the post-print booklets written by scribes C and D. I reprise the question of date in light of new information regarding the illuminators with whom Scribe A collaborated. The important lead is Mooney’s identification of Scribe A in Douce 322, the manuscript related to MS R.3.21 in its duplicated texts, and whose illuminator has not been the subject of previous study (appendix; figs. 1–10). Though separable as originally written, the three booklets of Douce show the same illuminator in different sections, thus paralleling the situation in MS R.3.21 where a single illustrator worked in pen and ink to decorate seven separate booklets (all Scribe A’s). Scribe A’s two known illuminators – his collaborators in the construction of booklet-based miscellanies – connect a wider circle of books to the milieu of the anthologies’ scribes. The narrower sense of time and space afforded by these books, as I will show, assigns a greater significance to the fragmentary indications for the anthologies’ early print shop connections. In the final section I reflect on the Trinity booklets’ status as ‘stock’, looking again at the clues for stages of execution and collaborative practice, to reassess what kinds of conclusions can be drawn about the environments in which they were made and used. THE ILLUMINATOR OF MS DOUCE 322: COLLABORATORS AND CONTEXT Two striking factors emerge from the list of books attributable to the Douce Limner (fl. c. 1470–90): the first is his decoration of printed books; the second is that he and the illustrator of MS R.3.21 were associates independent of Scribe A. They may even have been regular collaborators, a factor that is important because it puts them in the same milieu. Two finely-illustrated liturgical books, a psalter in Lambeth Palace Library MS 186 and a book of hours in Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Widener 2, demonstrate a collaborative arrangement whereby the Douce Limner supplied the gold spray initials and the illustrator provided the sequence of miniatures (appx, nos. 3, 5; figs. 8–9). The Douce Limner employed a range of gold and colour motifs on green vinework with a notable combination of idiosyncrasies: ‘c’-shaped hooks on gold pinecones and gold clasps, added as part of the ink outlining process; a gold crescent; a combined crescent/pinecone shape in gold; and a double elaboration of the gold ball whereby its three lobes are ‘fanned’ by pen squiggles.15 There is a preference for parti-coloured rose or blue lobes on gold balls rather than the usual green lobes (Figs. 1–9). This choice shows the influence of French and Flemish borderwork as, indeed, does the interchangeable use of a secondary style of feathering with squiggly black penwork, 15 For terminology I follow Scott, Dated & Datable English Manuscript Borders c. 1395– 1499 (London, 2002). See, for example, p. 68, where the double elaboration of the gold ball is regarded as ‘unusual’ among limners.

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which occur within the same books as the more expected green-lobed feathering (Fig. 10). Sources of Continental influence were close at hand. The illustrator of MS R.3.21, designated by Kathleen Scott as ‘Illustrator B of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56’, was a French artist who worked on several metropolitan manuscripts produced between c. 1470 and c. 1490.16 Scott associates his style with Rouen and suggests that an early example of his work can be identified in a non-English hours for the English market (Malibu, Getty Museum MS 5), decorated in collaboration with the French Fastolf Master, who also worked in England.17 His ‘masterwork’, the Heller Hours, is notable for its ‘early (?)De Worde binding using the Caxton trade-mark’, one of many fragments of circumstantial evidence for a connection between the anthologies’ illustrator and the Caxton business.18 Scott’s important work identified the illustrator’s fine miniatures in three different media – in pigments, in grisaille, and in pen-and-ink – but he is better known for the books with tinted pen-drawings associated with Thorney: the frontispiece to Caxton’s Troilus, and – in addition to the illustrations – the tinted pen-drawn scrolls in six of the Trinity booklets, as well as in another Thorney manuscript (Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 557, Siege of Thebes).19 The Sammelband, Thorney’s hybrid-book, offers the clearest evidence for a connection between producers of the Trinity booklets and the early printed book trade. The incorporation of Scribe C’s and the illustrator’s manuscript materials may follow a pattern of direct engagement by Caxton, or by his publishing house, on behalf of an important customer. Blending media for the purposes of embellishing particular copies – such as Caxton’s addition of an engraving to one copy of his 1473/4 edition of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye – was an early instinct among printers.20 The frontispiece to Thorney’s Sammelband occurs on an inserted vellum leaf (fol. 1v), recalling Caxton’s practice in Bruges. Without the original binding, it is ‘the uniform style of decoration added to both printed and manuscript parts’, as Boffey notes, that ‘makes clear that from a very early point they were viewed as constituent parts of a larger whole’.21 Further clarity comes from the paper stock used throughout the manuscript section, which occurs in the Troilus imprint with which it is bound, and elsewhere in Caxton’s Pilgrimage of the Soul (STC 6473–4,

LGM II, 329, 337. Ibid., 297–9. 18 Berkeley, Bancroft Library, MS UCB 150: LGM II, 334–6 (p. 335). 19 LGM II, 338. Scrolls of the same design, but not executed by this hand, also occur in a copy of Caxton’s Canterbury Tales illuminated for a London haberdasher: Oxford, Merton College, Sacr.P.2.1 (D. E. Rhodes, A Catalogue of Incunabula in all the Libraries of Oxford outside the Bodleian (Oxford, 1982), 537). 20 STC 15375. See J. Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London c. 1475–1530 (London, 2012), pp. 47, 72. 21 Boffey, Manuscript and Print, p. 77. 16 17

153

FIG. 2 HISTORIATED INITIAL AND SPRAY WITH DISTINCTIVE C-SHAPED HOOKS ON GOLD TREFOILS. BODL., MS DOUCE 322, FOL. 27R. DEVOTIONAL MISCELLANY. © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

THE BALL (LOBES FANNED BY SQUIGGLES), CRESCENTS, AND MERGED

PINECONE-CRESCENTS. BODL., MS DOUCE 322, FOL. 18R, DEVOTIONAL

MISCELLANY. © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

FIG. 1 DEMI-VINET SHOWING UNUSUAL TREATMENT OF GOLD MOTIFS:

[LONDON: WILLIAM DE MACHLINIA, ABOUT 1484], ON VELLUM (ISTC IH00420300). © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

FIG. 3 THE DOUCE LIMNER’S GOLD SPRAY BORDERS IN A PRINTED BOOK: BODL., ARCH. G F.16, FOLS. 34V–35R, HORAE AD USUM SARUM

CINQUEFOIL (CF. FIG. 1, UPPER BORDER). FOL. 125R OF THIS MS FEATURES THE CRESCENT AND BALL, AS PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED, AND THE QUATREFOIL OF FIG. 1, LOWER BORDER. CAMBRIDGE, ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, MS C.13, FOL. 13R, THOMAS LITTLETON, TENURES, ETC. BY PERMISSION OF THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

FIG. 4 SPRAY INITIALS WITH GOLD MOTIFS INCLUDING:

TREFOILS WITH C-SHAPED HOOKS, BALLS WITH LOBES

FANNED BY SQUIGGLES, AND CRESCENTS. (THE MERGED

PINECONE-CRESCENT MOTIF OCCURS ON FOLS. 96R,

104V, ETC.) BRISTOL, PUBLIC LIBRARY, MS 9, FOL. 119V,

BARTHOLOMAEUS ANGLICUS, DE PROPRIETATIBUS RERUM

(ENG. TRANS. BY JOHN TREVISA). © BRISTOL LIBRARIES.

FIG. 5 THREE-QUARTER BORDER INCLUDING BARBED

BY PERMISSION OF LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY.

AVICENNA, CANON MEDICINAE [STRASSBURG: THE R-PRINTER (ADOLF RUSCH), AFTER FEB. 1473] (ISTC IA01417700).

BY PERMISSION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN.

FIG. 8 SPRAY INITIAL IN LPL MS 186, FOL. 133V, PSALTER.

FIGS 6–7 THE DOUCE LIMNER’S SPRAY INITIALS IN ABERDEEN UL, INC. 5, FOL. 510R (L) AND FOL. 525V (R).

HOURS, SARUM USE. PUBLIC DOMAIN.

FIG. 9 HARVARD UNIVERSITY, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, MS WIDENER 2, FOL. 75R,

MANUSCRIPT). © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

ALSO EXECUTED BY THE DOUCE LIMNER (FIGS. 1–2 FOR THE SAME

ALTERNATING CURLS AND ZIGZAGS IN BLACK INK) WAS PROBABLY

SECONDARY STYLE OF SPRAYWORK (COMPRISING A STIFF LINE WITH

FIG. 10 BODL. MS DOUCE 322, FOL. 78R. DEVOTIONAL MISCELLANY. A

SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED

1483), and Life of Our Lady (STC 17023–4 [1483]).22 The paper evidence implies that the written component of Thorney’s Sammelband was also produced c. 1483, and that both the printed and written constituents were possibly compiled at that time. The compilation’s terminus post quem provides a useful bearing for how we view the dating of the Trinity booklets – including Scribe A’s illustrated booklets – since both projects shared Scribe C and the illustrator. It is intriguing, then, that the Douce Limner should supply the minor decoration to books illustrated by a miniaturist occasionally associated with Caxton, particularly in view of the Douce Limner’s own connections to early metropolitan printing. The Douce Limner supplied illuminated borderwork to a vellum copy of William de Machlinia’s Sarum Hours printed c. 1484 (appx, no. 13; fig. 3). The work may imply his proximity to either one of the printer’s addresses (Fleet Bridge, c. 1483–5; Holborn, c. 1485–6), which was quite possibly a single premises located on the Holborn-side of Fleet Bridge.23 The western suburbs, an area located between Westminster and the City, must have been of particular interest to de Machlinia because he specialised in publishing works in law French: the Inns of Court and Chancery provided him not only with sponsors and buyers, but with ‘access to the manuscripts that had circulated among generations of members of the legal profession’.24 The Douce Limner’s illumination of a manuscript copy of Thomas Littleton’s Tenores novelli (appx, no. 2; fig. 5) clearly served the same market of legal professionals. Indeed, de Machlinia reprinted Littleton’s legal tract in c. 1484 (STC 15720), at about the same time that the Douce Limner illuminated a copy of his Sarum Hours. The legal market had been the focus of de Machlinia’s earlier publishing partnership with London printer Johannes Lettou (c. 1481–3), which had produced the first printed versions of the Littleton, the Year-books, and the Nova Statuta (STC 15719; STC 9742; STC 9264). Closer inspection of the Douce Limner’s books suggests that one of his collaborators, discussed below, shared de Machlinia’s focus on the legal market. The Douce Limner’s books reveal that he belonged to a looselycoordinated collaborative circle, one that I refer to elsewhere as the ‘Owl-illuminating group’.25 As originally conceived by Kathleen Scott, the 22 D. Mosser, ‘The Use of Caxton Texts and Paper Stocks in Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. G. Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 161–77 (p. 173); BMC XI, 137–41. 23 A. F. Sutton, ‘William Caxton, King’s Printer c. 1480–5: A Plea for History and Chronology in a Merchant’s Career’, in The Medieval Merchant, ed. C. M. Barron and A. F. Sutton (Donington, 2014), pp. 259–83 (p. 274). 24 BMC XI, 55 (see further pp. 15, 17). 25 H. James-Maddocks, ‘Illuminators of English and Continental Incunabula in England, c. 1455–1500’, in Production and Provenance: Copy-Specific Features of Incunabula, ed. J. Goldfinch et al. (Leiden, forthcoming), appendix, item nos. 11, 16, 20, 23 (where the Douce Limner is listed as ‘English artist C of the Owl-illuminating group’).

159

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Owl-illuminator’s ‘shop’ was reconstructed on the basis of the collaboration of two illuminators in four manuscripts: the ‘owl artist’, who worked in a Netherlandish style, and the ‘English artist of MS Bodley 283’.26 They frequently worked on the same page: the foreign artist’s owls, peacocks, monkeys and naturalistic flora were inserted within the spaces between the English artist’s bar-framework and feathering. The fifth (and final) manuscript that Scott attributed to the Owl-illuminator was LPL MS 186 but the usual English artist was replaced by three others, one identified here as the Douce Limner (appx, no. 5; fig. 8). The chief interest of the collaborative coordination in LPL MS 186 – from the perspective of localisation – is that it places the Douce Limner, the French illustrator of so many Thorney-owned books, and the Netherlandish Owl-illuminator, in the same context. In addition to working directly with the Owl-illuminator, the Douce Limner also collaborated regularly with the English artist of Bodley 283 (appx, nos. 1, 6; fig. 4), the Owl artist’s customary associate. This English artist illuminated multiple copies of the Nova Statuta, some of which were clearly speculatively produced.27 The parallel with de Machlinia’s activity is striking, especially in light of their connection through the Douce Limner. The Fall of Princes (no. 6), one of the manuscripts they co-­decorated, shows a division of labour that would seem to indicate proximity: the Douce Limner contributed relatively little (nine spray initials over seven folios) but most of what he did add occurs on the same bifolia as borders or spray initials by the English artist of Bodley 283. The majority of spray initials were executed by Hand A of this manuscript whose bifolia are separable from those decorated by either the Douce or Bodley 283 limners. The Douce Limner apparently took the liberty of adding his distinctive hooks to the Bodley 283 artist’s gold trefoils (see the Bodley artist’s border on fol. 255v, with the Douce Limner’s spray initial on the conjugate fol. 248v). Remarkably, he did the same to the border on fol. 50v despite otherwise having no involvement in quire 7. His access to bifolia that did not require his spray initials may imply a shop connection with the Bodley 283 artist, and may further explain his role as the Owl illuminator’s collaborator in LPL MS 186 (instead of the expected Bodley 283 artist). Nevertheless it is safer to conceive of location more broadly, as a street or area that functioned as an ‘over-arching “shop”’.28 Like another English artist important to the Owl group (the English artist of Oxford, University College MS 85), they were interchangeable in the creation of Anglo-Netherlandish borders.29 26 ‘A Mid-Fifteenth-Century English Illuminating Shop and its Customers’, JWCI 31 (1968), 170–96; LGM II, 354. 27 K. L. Scott, The Mirroure of the Worlde: MS Bodley 283 (Oxford, 1980), pp. 45–50 (esp. p. 49 n. 2 on the incorporation of arms in existing borders), discussing the sections of the Nova Statuta produced between 1470 and 1483. 28 LGM I, 53. 29 LGM II, 318–20 (including some collaborative overlap on copies of Nova Statuta).

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The Owl artist also had equivalent counterparts, each one capable of a similar range of Netherlandish-style motifs, from Scott’s ‘Border Artist A of Fitzwilliam Museum 56’ (appx, nos. 1, 11) to her ‘Border Artist A of Widener 2’ (no. 3). The precise combination of collaborating hands is almost certainly a reflection of availability of craftsmen who operated in the same book-producing location. One of the five manuscripts originally assigned to the Owl artist’s ‘shop’ in 1968 featured work by a miniaturist whose circumstances appear to parallel those of the illustrator of R.3.21 (in respect of their associations with pen-drawing, paper books and Caxton imprints). The talented penwork illustrator of MS Bodley 283, the ‘Caxton Master’, was probably trained in the Low Countries (perhaps in Utrecht) and contributed to manuscripts produced in England c. 1475–90.30 In the late 1470s or early 1480s he worked with the Owl and English artists in MS Bodley 283 to decorate its English translation of the Miroir de monde (a version of the Somme le roi). At precisely this time, as Boffey observes, Caxton was ‘at work himself on two translations related in different ways to the Mirroure of the worlde in MS Bodley 283’.31 The Caxton Master acquired his name for his work on a manuscript copy of Caxton’s translation of the Ovide moralisé, complete with colophon, to which he supplied three coloured drawings.32 The manuscript’s paper is of the same stocks used in Caxton’s edition of Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Westminster, 1483).33 The provision of drawings to Caxton’s Ovide, like the frontispiece to Thorney’s Sammelband, was almost certainly work conducted by penwork illustrators for Caxton’s shop. There is nothing to directly link the production of the Trinity booklets to their use by early printers but the idea that Caxton’s publishing business handled a ‘sideline’ in luxury books, written and printed, may prove important. There is a ‘distinct possibility’, for example, that the manuscript Siege of Thebes in Thorney’s Sammelband was copied from ‘a lost edition by Caxton’ issued about 1482,34 and a more secure example of this phenomenon is the scribal copy, illustrated, of Caxton’s 1477 edition of the Dictes or Sayeingis of the Philosophres (STC 6826–7).35 Caxton’s contact with scribes and artists in Cologne and Flanders is clearly the origin of Spray initials by ‘Hand A’ in this copy of the Fall of Princes (no. 6) are closely related to, if not the same as, those that occur in manuscripts attributed to the border artist of University College MS 85. 30 K. L. Scott, The Caxton Master and his Patrons (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 2, 25–46. 31 Boffey, Manuscript and Print, p. 155. The manuscript was bought by the London draper Thomas Kippyng (d. 1485). 32 Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS F.4.34 (c. 1480): Scott, Caxton Master, p. 3. 33 STC 12142; BMC XI, 314 (identified as Caxton’s Median stocks 1 and 2). 34 N. F. Blake, ‘Manuscript to Print’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 403–32 (pp. 411–12). 35 LPL MS 265, copied by a Westminster scribe: A. I. Doyle, ‘English Books In and Out of Court’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London, 1983), pp. 163–81 (p. 181 n. 54).

161

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the ‘hybridity’ evident in his Westminster practices.36 Caxton’s interest in having the Trinity booklets made for himself is, at least, feasible. As for the Douce Limner, we have seen that his collaborative practice situates him within the context of the Owl group during the last quarter of the century, at a time when their loosely co-ordinated activities included, on occasion, two illustrators associated with Caxton imprints. Scribe A’s illuminators can, then, provide a better sense of time and place for Scribe A’s own engagement with the Trinity booklets. A CAXTON CONTEXT FOR PRODUCTION OF THE TRINITY BOOKLETS? New findings inevitably raise new questions. The connection between the Douce Limner and de Machlinia, on the one hand, and the illustrator of R.3.21 and Caxton, on the other, is interesting given the artists’ links to each other and to Scribe A. How do we square the printers’ different sites with what this implies about different locations for Scribe A’s two artists – two artists whom I have claimed were collaborators? The simplest explanation may arise from the fact that Westminster and the western suburbs were adjacent ‘liberties’ – neighbouring areas free from the jurisdiction of the City – and therefore suited to the predominantly foreign workforces of both Caxton’s press and the Owl group.37 There was evidently some overlap between these circles (the miniaturists with links to Caxton such as the illustrator of MS R.3.21/the Thorney Sammelband and the Dutch Caxton Master of MS Bodley 283/the Ovide moralisé), and yet the tendency towards legal texts in the output of some Owl-group collaborators makes the Holborn area a compelling possibility. This particular group of manuscript craftsmen may well have been long accustomed to loosely-coordinated activity across neighbouring suburbs. Incoming printers presented new opportunities for the artists to diversify, while proximity, presumably, presented a convenience for the printers. One such opportunity – rather a major one – is evidenced by the Douce Limner’s work on an imported printed book, in his contribution of spray initials to a once extensively illuminated copy of Avicenna’s Canon medicinae printed by Adolf Rusch (Strasbourg, after 1473) (appx, no. 12; figs. 6-7). As I have shown elsewhere, artists who illuminated printed books regularly had access to foreign imprints; access, in each case, seems explicable on the basis that they also decorated the local imprints of a nearby

36 For a useful summary see Boffey, Manuscript and Print, pp. 47, 72; on ‘hybridity’ see pp. 76–80. 37 BMC XI, 8–9; on the position of foreigners in the traditional trade see C. P. Christianson, A Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans 1300–1500 (New York, 1990).

SCRIBES AND BOOKLETS: THE ‘TRINITY ANTHOLOGIES’ RECONSIDERED

printer-bookseller-importer.38 Here, de Machlinia (appx, no. 13) is the likeliest source for the Douce Limner’s work on native and foreign editions, and yet – apart from one interesting link to an alien merchant, Henry Frankenbergh, who imported printed books from at least 1478 to 1485 – nothing is known about de Machlinia as an importer.39 Intriguingly, the Douce Limner is not the only Owl-group collaborator to illuminate printed books: the Avicenna was partly illuminated by the English artist of University College 85, or an artist closely related to him, while another Owl-group artist finished a further two foreign imprints, one of which was again printed by Adolf Rusch in Strasbourg.40 While it is clear that Caxton did import books in large quantities,41 the de Machlinia connection makes it difficult to determine exactly who coordinated this movement of books across borders and into the hands of Owl-group collaborators. A related consideration, then, must be the connection between the printers themselves. Numerous clues for Caxton’s contact with London’s first printers indicate the potential of his influence on printing houses beyond his own. There is compelling circumstantial evidence that Caxton commissioned work printed both by Lettou and the Lettou/de Machlinia partnership. Not long before the Douce Limner illuminated a vellum copy of de Machlinia’s Sarum Hours (c. 1484), for example, the partnership appears to have conducted ‘jobbing work’ for Caxton, ‘King’s printer’, in their c. 1483–5 edition of the Nova Statuta (STC 9264).42 Given the Caxton shop’s own reliance on the services of binders, rubricators, and artists, it is possible that nearby London printers accessed the same group of illuminators intermittently used by Caxton (thus explaining the collaboration of the Douce Limner and anthologies illustrator in the same manuscripts). Legal texts printed by the partnership show a uniform style of hand-decorated red and blue initials, suggesting that they, like Caxton, saw the value of being able to offer books with different degrees of ‘finishing’.43 Relatedly, the correspondences in type and paper stocks used 38 ‘Illuminators of English and Continental Incunabula’ (see the ‘Fitzjames Limner’); ‘Illuminated Caxtons and the Trade in Printed Books’, The Library, 7th s. 22 (2021), 291–315 (the ‘Incunables Limner’). 39 De Machlinia’s c. 1485 edition of the popular Speculum Christiani was printed at the expense of Frankenbergh (STC 26012; BMC XI, 255–6, 325 n. 3). 40 Catalogued in James-Maddocks, ‘Illuminators of English and Continental Incunabula’ (see n. 25 above). The Avicenna is item 11; for further fragments from this copy see J. Pirie, ‘“An imperfect copy”: Avicenna’s Canon de medicina in the University of Aberdeen’, in Incunabula across Europe: Production, Reception and Collection, ed. A. Hagan (Leiden, forthcoming). 41 See, for example, the essays in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume III 1400–1557, ed. L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), especially P. Needham, ‘The Customs Rolls as Documents for the Printed-Book Trade in England’, pp. 148–63, and M. Ford, ‘Importation of printed books into England and Scotland’, pp. 179–201. 42 Sutton, ‘King’s Printer’. All works printed by Lettou alone were also printed on commission, including at least four indulgences probably for Caxton (1480): BMC XI, 10, 16. 43 BMC XI, 28, 247–51.

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by the partnership and in Caxton’s shop may even indicate dependence on Caxton.44 It is impossible to know – without closer and broader investigation of copy-specific features in incunabula – whether the Douce Limner’s work on native and foreign imprints resulted from proximity to the Holborn printer or, indeed, from Caxton’s coordinated ‘comradeship among the earliest printers of London and Westminster’.45 Nevertheless, investigating the wider circle of books associated with Scribe A’s artists situates the scribe within a Westminster-Holborn circuit of production; moreover, the fact that both Scribe A’s artists contributed to the ‘finishing’ of products from the earliest metropolitan presses confirms that their community included printers for at least some of the time that they were active. These wider circumstances pertaining to time and space reframe how we view Scribe A’s (and the illustrator’s) role in the production of the Trinity anthologies, together with Scribe C’s (and the same illustrator’s) role in the Sammelband: it now seems less probable that Scribe A’s booklets were earlier than Scribe C’s, and in turn that his activity represents a ‘brief period of commercial manuscript production of vernacular literary texts … eclipsed by the introduction of print’.46 Although the evidence of the illuminators can be taken no further at this time, what we have learned about their milieu resonates with a set of coincidences surrounding the Trinity booklets’ early use – circumstantial evidence that may yet help us to understand the purpose of these booklets to their medieval producers and users. Caxton is the common connection between the three earliest-known handlers of ten of Scribe A’s booklets: Roger Thorney, Wynkyn de Worde, and the illustrator of MS R.3.21. Thorney, Caxton’s fellow mercer and merchant adventurer, may well have been an early Caxton customer.47 In addition to the Caxton Sammelband, Thorney owned a copy of the 1481 edition of Godfrey of Boloyne, a romance Caxton dedicated to Edward IV.48 Thorney’s acquisition of three booklets of the Trinity anthologies, one of which was probably also illustrated by the artist of the Sammelband’s Troilus frontispiece, according to Scott, certainly encourages the view of regular dealings within this circle of printer-owner-illustrator. As a bookseller, 44 The Lettou/de Machlinia partnership used a version of Caxton’s main text type in addition to a casting of his heading type. The display type was also used by both separately, first by Lettou in 1481 and finally by de Machlinia in Littleton, Tenores novelli, with the imprint at Fleet Bridge (c. 1484): BMC XI, 10, 17, 337, 353–4, 393–4. The paper supplies of the partnership’s books number around eighty stocks of which more than twenty were used in Caxton’s shop, including instances of ‘less usual long runs of a single paper stock’ (see BMC XI, 314, 324). 45 Sutton, ‘King’s Printer’, p. 269. 46 Mooney, ‘Vernacular literary manuscripts’, p. 209. 47 Y.-C. Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances and their Early Tudor Readers’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004), pp. 173–88 (pp. 180–1); BMC XI, 60, 62, 65. 48 S. de Ricci, A Census of Caxtons (Oxford, 1909), p. 54 (46.2); Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library (olim Holford) (STC 13175).

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printer, publisher and reader, Caxton’s uses for the Trinity collection could have been multiple, and could easily have included selling some units to customers like Thorney and keeping others for copy (or, indeed, for his own pleasure). De Worde’s relationship to the booklets is clearer than Caxton’s. His use of the Assembly of Gods in MS R.3.19 (booklet II, Scribe A) as copytext for his first edition of c. 1494 remains the earliest confirmed use of any Trinity booklet.49 Thorney’s acquisition of three other booklets written by Scribe A – constituent parts of the same production campaign – feasibly reflects their common origin in Caxton’s retail bookselling. De Worde’s inheritance of Caxton’s Westminster business in 1492 meant continuity in terms of materials and network: Thorney, for example, sponsored two substantial works printed by de Worde around 1495.50 It was also early in his post-Caxton career that de Worde used the manuscript component of Thorney’s Sammelband as copy for his c. 1494 edition of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. The supply of Scribe C’s Siege manuscript for copy, like others acquired by de Worde, was ‘very likely still shaped by Caxton’s former mercer contacts’.51 It remains a possibility, of course, that it was de Worde who compiled the Sammelband for Thorney in the mid 1490s (or later) using written and printed materials inherited from Caxton. Indeed, we cannot pinpoint any of Thorney’s book-buying activities before 1515, including his acquisition of at least three Trinity booklets. Even if de Worde was Thorney’s source for all of these items, this would not affect the hypothesis that Scribe A’s booklets came into being for the purposes of serving the Caxton business. If they were Caxton’s ‘paunflettis’ (or de Worde’s), one purpose they may have served in this publishing environment is suggested by the example of the Sammelband itself: composite volumes of printed books sometimes also included written books. Like the Hammond scribe, scribes A, C and D, ‘will have to be reckoned up’ if we are to understand anything about the former as a ‘stable center in the maze of crisscrossing fifteenth-century texts’.52 DATING SCRIBE A’S BOOKLETS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ‘SHOP’ AND ‘STOCK’ In this final section I return to the subjects with which I opened: the 49 See n. 12. A list of the texts within the Trinity anthologies that correspond with early prints of minor poems by Caxton and de Worde is given in Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 264, esp. n. 30. See also J. Boffey, ‘The Treatise of a Galaunt in Manuscript and Print’, The Library, 6th s. 15 (1993), 175–86. 50 De Worde reprinted Caxton’s Polychronicon in John Trevisa’s translation (STC 13439, 1495), and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, also in Trevisa’s translation (STC 1536 [c. 1496]). 51 Boffey, Manuscript and Print, p. 50. 52 Hammond, ‘The Nine-Syllabled Pentameter Line’, p. 130.

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stock-like appearance of some Trinity booklets, the implied stock of the scribal environment (e.g. Shirley’s sources), and why a process of constantly refining presumptive dating really matters. These booklets are ‘the first unambiguous example of commercial vernacular literary book production in England’ – but was this scribal labour ‘soon eclipsed by the introduction of print’ (Mooney), or were the Trinity producers actually ‘imitators of De Worde’ (A. Gillespie)?53 The question of whether any Trinity booklet served as ‘stock’ (especially in the sense of an item retained for copy) – and specifically whether it served a scribal or print environment – has profound implications for the positioning of vernacular literary works in the shift from bespoke to speculative production. Was it really a scribal culture that viewed such anthologies as a marketable commodity? Did Caxton see manuscript booklets of Chaucerian verse already in use as shop copies when he set up his press in 1476? It is a question of direction of impact, in Gillespie’s view, and she sees it as ‘unlikely’ ‘that the largely bespoke and second-hand book trade that predated the advent of printing required the systematic production of books or booklets as “stock”’.54 Elsewhere, however, she does allow for the possibility that the Hammond scribe’s circle could prove an exception to the absence of evidence for preprint scribal stocks of literary texts.55 The magnitude of questions raised by 1476 is not an easy negotiation when we can neither date our manuscript materials with precision nor name the producers involved. It is for these reasons that it is important to keep reconsidering the textual and material clues presented by the booklets themselves, especially in light of more recent incremental gains in dating (discussed further below). The clearest indication that some units may have functioned as exemplars is the duplication of a series of short Marian poems in booklets V and IX of R.3.21, with the latter sold to Thorney.56 Thorney’s booklet also shares with booklet XIII a ‘virtually identical’ copy of Lydgate’s verses on the ‘Kings of England’ (DIMEV 5731).57 Thus booklets V and IX duplicate texts, as do IX and XIII, but only one is illustrated – implying, possibly, a system made flexible for the potential customer. Scribe A customised 53 Mooney, ‘Vernacular literary manuscripts’, pp. 208–9; A. Gillespie, ‘Medieval Books, Their Booklets, Booklet Theory’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 16 (2012), 1–29 (p. 11). 54 Gillespie, ‘Booklet Theory’, p. 11. 55 Print Culture and the Medieval Author (Oxford, 2006), p. 49: ‘If a case is to be developed … for organized, commercial, and even speculative production of manuscript books in England before the arrival of the press, and for the impact of this on Caxton, the Hammond scribe must be central to it’. 56 Duplication is connected to the idea of ready stock in both Gillespie, Print Culture, p. 49, and J. Boffey, ‘Lydgate’s Lyrics and Women Readers’, in Women, the Book, and the Worldly: Selected Proceedings of the St Hilda’s Conference, Oxford, ed. L. Smith and J. Taylor (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 139–49 (pp. 144–5). Five Marian texts are duplicated, four in sequence (Ave Regina Celorum; Regina Celi Letare; Ave Jesse Virgula; The Legend of Dan Joos) while the fifth (The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary) precedes the sequence in V and follows it in IX. 57 Mooney, ‘Shirley’s Heirs’, p. 185: fols. 242r–3v and 319r–20v (see Table 2).

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booklet IX for Thorney, as Boffey and Thompson observed, when he added a prayer for Edward IV (following Lydgate’s poem ‘A Prayer for King, Queen and People’) using a lighter ink. It cannot be demonstrated, however, that ‘[t]he decoration … upgrade[d] the otherwise plain booklets he was buying’.58 The updated prayer features scrollwork that is not in the customary style of the illustrator’s tinted pen-drawn scrolls, which are evident earlier in the same booklet. Scribe A’s own use of closely similar catchword-scrolls in other manuscripts makes it likely that the added decoration was his handiwork.59 The mismatched scrollwork reinforces Boffey’s and Thompson’s suggestion that Thorney made his selection of booklet IX from existing copies. It may imply more: that someone (Scribe A? Caxton?) kept a ready stock of illustrated vernacular literature.60 If so, there was no distinction between ‘unembellished/stock’ and ‘embellished/ sale’,61 it seems, and some booklets were even half-embellished. Indeed, the part-completion of decoration within booklets, rather than simply between booklets (Table 2: I, II, VII and IX), is another puzzling and unnoticed facet of their production. Some sections of illustrated booklets are missing aspects of textual apparatus present elsewhere (such as paraphs, running titles, highlighting of initials, underlining). Was this motivated by marketing – a desire to show the potential customer a sample of what was possible alongside what was complete (III, X, XI) – while reducing the capital committed? The evidence can accommodate a different possibility: that these booklets represent an abandoned project recycled by the bookseller, that something interrupted the original production campaign and led to their later re-use as stock for copy/sale. The fact that Thorney acquired one half-embellished booklet and two unembellished booklets – and possibly from de Worde at a later date – may reflect changed intentions regarding the usage of some of these booklets within a short space of time. De Worde’s inheritance of old Caxton materials would provide a very neat explanation, even if it is an imagined sequence. We can be certain only of Scribe A’s continued access, or re-access, to at least one booklet (the added prayer) but not of its implications: were the booklets Scribe A’s speculatively-produced stock? Or was his association with the Caxton/de Worde business long enduring? The pattern of duplicated texts extends to Scribe A’s other 58 See: ‘Anthologies and miscellanies: production and choice of text’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. Griffiths and Pearsall, pp. 279–315 (p. 288). The added stanzas are on fol. 245v. 59 Compare the figures in Dresvina, ‘A Note’, p. 231. 60 Beyond liturgical manuscripts, or the manuscripts of the Nova Statuta previously mentioned (n. 27), the practice of speculative illumination is not easily discernible in English-language texts until its occurrence in printed books. See, for example, the contemporary example of illumination in a uniform style applied to six copies of Caxton’s Golden Legend (STC 24873–4 [1483–4]): James-Maddocks, ‘Illuminated Caxtons’. 61 Cf. Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, pp. 264–5, developing Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and miscellanies’, pp. 288–9.

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booklet-constructed collection in Douce 322, which shares three texts with R.3.21. Two of them – ‘Pety Job’ and ‘Parce michi domine’ (DIMEV 3075, 924) – occur together within the second booklet of both volumes.62 Crucially, booklet II of R.3.21 is the only booklet copied in part by the Hammond scribe (fols. 34r–49v). In spite of his small role, his involvement has had a significant impact on how scholars have understood the use of Scribe A’s booklets, as well as the approximate date of that usage, namely as stock in a pre-print culture. Mooney suggested, for example, that booklet II of R.3.21 provided the ‘shop exemplar for the copy made for William Baron’ in Douce 322 ‘in the 1460s’.63 This interpretation of the Douce booklets fits the broader patterns of duplication within the Trinity booklets and develops Eleanor Hammond’s idea of the ‘scriptorium’: ‘They [the Hammond scribe and Scribe A] had in stock a large library of manuscripts of English literary texts both religious and secular, including some of John Shirley’s manuscripts or copies made from them’.64 Indeed, it is the Hammond scribe’s use of Shirley sources for his copying of two other Lydgatian miscellanies – BL MSS Harley 2251 and Add. 34360 – that makes a 1460s dating for Scribe A’s activities seem reasonable.65 The Hammond scribe’s own miscellanies are datable to around the mid 1460s and they derive in part from volumes copied by Shirley in the early 1430s and late 1440s in London, probably in property rented in the close of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield.66 In turn, the Hammond scribe’s Harley 2251 (or a copy made from it or its exemplars) appears to have been the source for twenty-four texts in the Trinity anthologies, four of them in two copies.67 The recurrence of Harley 2251 (or copies) during production of the Trinity booklets, and the collaboration of the Hammond scribe and Scribe A, led Mooney to view their activities as a commercial mid-point in a ‘line of descent’ for texts from Shirley to Caxton.68 Within this framework, Scribe A’s booklets must be earlier than Scribe C’s and Scribe D’s. This elegant solution combines 62 The third text, an English translation of sentences on receiving the eucharist attributed to Albertus Magnus, occurs in booklet III of Douce 322, fol. 62ra–va, and in booklet VIII of R.3.21. See A. I. Doyle, ‘Books Connected with the Vere Family and Barking Abbey’, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society 25 (1958), pp. 222–43 (esp. pp. 225 n. 4, 226 n. 6); updated in ‘A Text Attributed to Ruusbroec’, pp. 153–71. 63 ‘Scribes and Booklets’, pp. 257, 265. 64 Ibid., p. 265. 65 Hammond, ‘Two British Museum Manuscripts’, p. 27. 66 Mosser, ‘Dating the manuscripts’, p. 44. On the dating of Shirley’s later collections, see Connolly, John Shirley, pp. 75–80, 153. 67 Hammond, ‘Two British Museum Manuscripts’, esp. pp. 19–23. Intriguingly, Harley 2251 was marked up for use as printers’ copy some time before it passed to John Stow, although no edition of the items survives: A. Gillespie, ‘Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos: Miscellanies from manuscript to print’, TCBS 12 (2000), 1–25 (p. 20 n. 77). 68 Mooney, ‘Vernacular literary manuscripts’, p. 209, following Hammond, ‘A Scribe of Chaucer’, p. 32. Developed most recently in: M. Livingston, ‘A Sixth Hand in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19’, JEBS 8 (2005), 229–37, discussed below.

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the possibilities of Eleanor Hammond’s ‘scriptorium’ or ‘publishing business’ and resolves several difficult issues: the same-page collaboration of the Hammond scribe and Scribe A; the access that both scribes had to Shirley sources; and the use of some of the Trinity booklets by later printers from de Worde to John Stow. The shop theory is attractive, too, because it is flexible; it allows for the possibility of a rolling production of booklets over time. The usual problem of dating a manuscript is potentially many times more complex in this instance – ‘[t]he specific dating for one booklet may not apply to … others’ – meaning that some units may well have been used as exemplars in earlier decades.69 Nevertheless, the suggestion that Scribe A’s booklets were used in this way in the 1460s – with the function explained by the Hammond scribe’s ‘shop’ – sits uneasily alongside the later activities of Scribe A’s two artists. Further pressure to reposition Scribe A’s booklets as later comes from recent work on the contents and materials of the Trinity anthologies. The most precise internal evidence for dating is offered by The Petigrew of Englond, the prose chronicle in booklet XIII of MS R.3.19, written by Scribe C between 1477 and 1483.70 Scribe A’s two copies of Lydgate’s verses on the ‘Kings’ in booklets IX and XIII of MS R.3.21 provide a less narrow but complementary range: between 1471 and 1483. Correspondingly, Scribe A’s Bochas compilation in booklet IX of MS R.3.19 has a terminus post quem of 1476–7: Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales (STC 5082 [1476–7]) was the exemplar for the excerpts from Chaucer’s Monk’s Prologue and Tale.71 Scribes A and C could have worked concurrently on separate booklets. Furthermore, the Bochas compilation is an intriguing conflation of extracts from Chaucer (copied from Caxton) with extracts from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes – with the latter derived from the Hammond scribe’s Harley 2251.72 Rather than ‘written at different times over a number of years’, this small selection of datable booklets raises the possibility that all booklets were written between 1477 and 1483 – an idea consistent with the fact that production involved one main scribe and a single illustrator (unless they were a scriptorium producing their own stock: a circular argument).73 The increasingly narrow date range implied by the contents corresponds with Daniel Mosser’s dating of the booklets’ paper stocks to a ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 245. A. Putter, ‘An East Anglian Poem in a London Manuscript? The Date and Dialect of The Court of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19’, in Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age, ed. R. Alcorn and J. Kopaczyk (Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 212–43 (pp. 215–18). Putter’s evidence is consistent with Fletcher’s view that R.3.19 was ‘together in generally its present form by ca. 1480’: Manuscript Trinity R.3.19, p. xxii. 71 Manly and Rickert, I, 533. See further Mosser, ‘The Use of Caxton Texts’, pp. 164–5. 72 The Fall of Princes extracts (Harley 2251, fols. 81r–145v and R.3.19, fols. 170v–202r) show ‘striking agreement’: Hammond, ‘Two British Museum Manuscripts’, p. 23. 73 This date range excludes Scribe B’s and John Stow’s sixteenth-century additions (booklets V and XI in R.3.19). Quotation from Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 245. 69 70

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period spanning ‘from the mid-1470s to perhaps the early 1480s’.74 One paper stock, for example, used by Scribe A in booklet VIII of R.3.19, also occurs in the production of Caxton’s History of Jason (STC 15383 [1477]), providing a terminus post quem for yet another Scribe A booklet, and one that accords well with the scribe’s use of Caxton’s printed text in booklet IX.75 Both volumes share four paper stocks, and in a distribution suggestive of simultaneous copying.76 Another important factor to emerge from this data is that scribes A, C and D used the same paper stocks and this encourages the view that their production of separate booklets was part of a single campaign. The exceptionally intriguing correspondence of text and material associated with Caxton in R.3.19 would certainly support a theory linking Caxton to the Trinity booklets’ production, but it is also possible (as Mosser warned) that all of these snippets of circumstantial evidence amount to little more than coincidence. What is clear is that the chronological gap between their production and their first known use within England’s early printing houses is much narrower than can be deduced from palaeographical evidence alone. The chronological compression, together with the possibility that booklets produced by scribes A, C and D were a coordinated campaign, has considerable impact on how we imagine these scribes’ physical environment. We have lost the necessity of the Hammond scribe’s ‘scriptorium’ as a ‘stable center’ in the transmission of texts from 1450s Shirley to 1490s de Worde. In addition, it is the ‘stock’ that has justified the ‘shop’, and yet we cannot be certain that any single booklet was used as copytext before de Worde. Without evidence that these scribes made the booklets for use in their own environment, as exemplars for other copies that they themselves made, how do we know that it was a pre-print ‘scriptorium’, rather than a ‘publishing business’, that viewed the Trinity anthologies as marketable commodities? Doyle’s work on the textual relations between R.3.21, Douce 322, and a third manuscript described as a ‘utilitarian replica’ of Douce (BL MS Harley 1706, pt I), in fact problematises the idea that the second booklet in R.3.21 acted as a ‘shop exemplar’ for Douce’s booklet II.77 Doyle’s collation of the three texts these manuscripts have in common suggested to him that Harley 1706 and R.3.21 were ‘separately dependent’ on Douce 322 or its sources. This included, in his view, the possibility that ‘the exemplars of Douce were simultaneously available and occasionally copied by the scribes of Harley and Trinity, in the same shop’.78 Indeed, this merits slight reformulation: could ‘the scribes of Harley and Trinity’, and associated artists, have worked ad hoc for the Caxton ‘shop’? Intriguingly, 74 D. Mosser, ‘Dating the Manuscripts of the “Hammond Scribe”: What the Paper Evidence Tells Us’, JEBS 10 (2007), 31–70 (p. 43). 75 Mosser, ‘The Use of Caxton Texts’, p. 167. 76 Mosser, ‘Dating the Manuscripts’, pp. 38–9. 77 See n. 63 above. Doyle, ‘Books Connected with the Vere Family’, p. 224. 78 Doyle, ‘Ruusbroec’, p. 165.

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the correspondence in text extends to the unusual iconography of the illustrations for both ‘Parce michi’ and ‘Pety Job’ – a factor that is more significant in light of the new evidence that the artists collaborated on other manuscripts (appx, nos. 3, 5).79 It makes it feasible, for example, that the source of the compositions was shared between Scribe A’s two artists. The availability of Douce exemplars during production of the Trinity booklets is important in view of the Trinity scribes’ simultaneous access to texts derived from Shirley’s collections. The separate transmission of similar sequences of texts may imply a movement of texts in booklets from noncommercial to commercial environments. Doyle thought it possible, for example, that Douce’s sources were ‘groups of pieces’ drawn from volumes belonging to milieux connected to William Baron: the neighbourhood of St Bartholomew’s Close where Baron lived and the London Charterhouse where he was buried (c. 1484).80 John Shirley certainly knew this exchequer official,81 but no evidence survives to suggest that Baron was a conduit for the supply of Shirley sources (as well as Douce sources) to the Trinity scribes. He shared his friend’s disposition for collecting and gifting books: in addition to Douce, Baron’s arms were added in the margins of two older manuscripts, one containing the earliest extant copy of ‘Parce michi’, and the other the Latin version of ‘Pety Job’.82 The historiated initial of Job in Baron’s book is replicated in Douce’s Middle English version, as Doyle observed, and so too is the division of the text according to different-sized initials.83 Baron appears to have ‘designed’ Douce from his own books, enabling Scribe A and the Douce Limner to work ‘with the assistance of non-commercial literary resources’.84 What we have, it seems, is a culture of borrowing between different milieux. After Douce was compiled for Baron, the ‘utilitarian replica’ in Harley 1706 may well have been retained for some years as an exemplar in a commercial environment. How might we conceive of the Hammond scribe’s role in such a context? His books are of a completely different character to those produced by Scribe A, whose commercial habits and associations may not have routinely included the Hammond scribe. Fourteen of the Hammond scribe’s fifteen paper manuscripts are distinguished with little more than the most basic ornament (if they are not entirely plain). Thirteen of them show no evidence that he collaborated with other scribes. The common exception 79 Job on dunghill with God above (for the nine lessons of Job’s dirge): Douce 322, fol. 10ra, and R.3.21, fol. 38r. Man lying in leafy bower with birds (‘Parce michi domine’): Douce 322, fol. 15rb, and R.3.21, fol. 34r (LGM II, 338). 80 ‘Books connected with the Vere Family’, p. 223 (see also p. 228). 81 Connolly, John Shirley, p. 165. 82 Bodl., MS Bodley 596 (I), XV1, devotional texts and Westminster historical records (incl. ‘Parce michi’: fols. 21v–4v); and SJO, MS 208, mid-XV, office of the dead, psalter, suffrages (incl. ‘Pety Job’: fols. 23r–47r). 83 Doyle cited in S. Fein, ‘Pety Job: Introduction’, Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, 1998). 84 Doyle, ‘Ruusbroec’, p. 160; and ‘Books connected with the Vere Family’, p. 228.

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is MS R.3.21, to which he made only a very minor contribution. A single instance of collaboration between two scribes is not sufficient evidence for a ‘scriptorium’ but, in the case of the Hammond scribe and Scribe A, the lure has always been the ‘stock’. The combination of actual stock (Trinity booklets) and assumed stock (copies from Shirley) certainly creates the impression of a stock-filled shop. Nevertheless, the Shirley sources might easily have been borrowed by the employers of the Hammond scribe for the purposes of creating the Lydgatian miscellanies in MSS Add. 34360 and Harley 2251 (c. 1460s). Both volumes, like several others copied by the Hammond scribe, show evidence of use by members of the household of the draper Sir Thomas Cook (Mayor of London 1462–3; d. 1478).85 Harley 2251, for example, features the monogram of Cook’s secretary, John Vale. Conversely, the same household associations have led many scholars to identify the Hammond scribe with the London stationer, John Multon (d. c. 1475), based on instances of ‘Quod Multon’ in the margins of a single text in a scientific anthology (TCC MS R.14.52, also with Vale’s device).86 The John Multon theory applies a terminus ante quem of about 1475, of course, and with it the implied potential for assigning any literary exemplars associated with the Hammond scribe (i.e. booklet II, R.3.21) to a pre-print culture.87 Vale certainly knew Multon but, as Mooney has argued, he was much more likely to have been the source of the quadrant text that bears his name in MS R.14.52.88 Indeed, the post-1475 dating of some paper stocks used by the Hammond scribe suggest that if he was one of the Multon stationers of Paternoster Row, he was unlikely to have been the Multon who died around 1475.89 The Hammond scribe’s access to diverse sources for copy need not make a necessity of the shop. Numerous archival records speak to the friendship between Cook and Shirley’s brother-in-law, Avery Cornburgh, as well as to another friendship

85 Five Hammond scribe manuscripts can be connected to the Cook household: Mooney, ‘The Scribe’, in Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium, ed. M. Tavormina, 2 vols. (Tempe AZ, 2006), I, 55–63. 86 The text is on making and using a quadrant (fols. 217r, 219r, 222r; and fol. 215r for ‘Quod Multon 1458’). See Boffey, Manuscript and Print, pp. 79, 158; Christianson, Directory, pp. 32, 136 (who noted that the shop was still active in 1495 with the nephew, Robert Multon); and A. Sutton and L. Visser-Fuchs, ‘The Provenance of the Manuscript: The Lives and Archive of Sir Thomas Cook and his Man of Affairs, John Vale’, in The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John Vale’s Book, ed. M. L. Kekewich et al. (Stroud, 1995), pp. 73–123 (pp. 109–10). 87 For example: ‘Like William Caxton, a few years later, [Multon] may have resorted to making his own translations to keep his shop stocked with “new” English titles’ (Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, ‘The Provenance’, p. 110, my emphasis). 88 ‘More Manuscripts Written by a Chaucer Scribe’, The Chaucer Review 30 (1996), 401–7 (p. 405). Simon Horobin disputed the Multon identification on dialect grounds: ‘Linguistic Features of the Hammond Scribe’, Poetica 51 (1999), 1–10. 89 Mosser, ‘Dating the manuscripts’, pp. 32, 44, and 46 n. 5 for Multon’s will dated 1475. (The date given in the will does not necessarily correlate with Multon’s death; the only reliable date would be the date of probate, if granted and recorded.)

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between Cook’s secretary, John Vale, and the stationer John Multon.90 The Hammond scribe worked regularly for a household that was exceptionally well connected to the mercantile and civic elite; it had feasible means of access to non-commercial literary resources (Cornburgh), as well as to commercial non-literary resources (Multon). The Hammond scribe’s value to Scribe A (or Scribe A’s employers) may have been his ability to supply copy from the Cook-household environment, including from his own earlier copies of Shirley-derived miscellanies, such as Harley 2251 whose contents were in part duplicated in the Trinity anthologies. So why imagine a ‘scriptorium’ at all given the feasible means of borrowing Shirley and non-Shirley sources via the household and civic connections discussed above? What I have suggested, in the course of this essay, is that while some Trinity booklets were repurposed (if not originally purposed) as stock in a print environment, there is nothing to indicate that they were produced as stock for use in a scribal environment. One issue remains: what account can be made of the same-booklet collaboration that underpinned Eleanor Hammond’s conception of a single commercial premises containing the Hammond scribe, his collaborator in Royal 17 D.xv, and his collaborator in R.3.21 (i.e. Scribe A)? Indeed, a second instance of this kind of cooperative practice was identified more recently by Michael Livingston – this time between Scribe A and ‘Scribe F’ (Table 1). This led to a suggested increase in the scale of the shop first imagined by Hammond and, as such, it becomes important to ask whether either of these instances of same-booklet collaboration really bear the weight of this interpretation. Scribe F’s stint was brief: he copied fol. 42r–v in booklet IV of R.3.19 (lines 70–140 of George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections). Scribes A and F not only contributed to the same booklet but a misplaced line makes it clear that they worked from the same copy text: line 70 is missing from A’s stint but appears in F’s stint between lines 84 and 85. The resulting booklet IV was made, in Livingston’s view, ‘to be kept in a shop and not put out for sale … Scribe F provides further proof of multiple scribes working side by side, copying and recopying texts in what can only be thought of as a secular, commercial scriptorium in London’.91 Nevertheless, a shared exemplar need not imply a shared physical space. A simpler explanation for the error created by scribes A and F is that they worked from different parts of the same exemplar in different locations. The misplaced line 70 should have been the last line of Scribe A’s 90 These culminate in conspicuous bequests to Cornburgh and Vale in Cook’s will, in addition to Multon’s bequest of a psalter to Vale. See Sutton and Visser-Fuchs (‘The Provenance’, pp. 95–7, 107–12) who view Beatrice Cornburgh as the ‘key figure in the descent of so many Multon [i.e. Hammond scribe], Shirley and Vale manuscripts’ to John Stow (p. 103). See further Margaret Connolly’s suggestion that a psalter owned by Beatrice Cornburgh was inherited from Shirley: ‘A London Widow’s Psalter: Beatrice Cornburgh and Alexander Turnbull Library MS MSR-01’, Trivium 31 (1999), 101–16 (p. 116). 91 Livingston, ‘A Sixth Hand’, p. 234.

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stint, before he inserted the catchword on fol. 41v. As it is, the line appears two stanzas later in Scribe F’s stint. The quire break is the first clue to the scribes’ separation. Had they been ‘working side by side’, as Livingston argues, the solution to a line both missing and surplus – and only two stanzas apart – would have been obvious. A quick line count and a glance for the rhyme word would have sufficed. Scribe A did not fix the problem because he could not see its solution: that part of the exemplar, along with Scribe F, was elsewhere. It is possible that they worked simultaneously on two copies (by swapping the two halves of the exemplar), following the pattern of other duplicated texts in extant booklets. The second clue for the scribes’ independent workplaces is their use of a different paper stock in what would eventually be reorganised as a single quire: Scribe A’s three bifolia (fols. 43–7) were incorporated with Scribe F’s bifolium (fols. 42 and 48) and written on paper from a stock otherwise used only by Scribe D in booklet XII (quire F). Aspects of codicological disruption – such as the exemplar’s quire break or the different materials used – better support a theory that scribes A and F worked independently. The most compelling evidence that any of these scribes were ‘working closely together, probably in the same scriptorium’, is the same-page collaboration between Scribe A and the Hammond scribe.92 In booklet II of R.3.21, the Hammond Scribe commenced copying on the second folio of the quire, producing all of ‘Parce michi domine’ and most of ‘Pety Job’; Scribe A resumed copying mid-page (fol. 49v) in order to complete ‘Pety Job’, which he did but only just within the limits of the booklet. The lack of space was presumably why Scribe A returned to the verso of the blank opening folio to add part of ‘Erthe upon Erthe’ (DIMEV 1170). The most likely purpose of blank folios at booklet openings was to serve a protective function, much like the role speculated for the early addition of the title page to unbound printed books.93 Whether or not they viewed it in these terms, the Hammond scribe’s incorporation of a blank opening leaf certainly differs from Scribe A’s customary practice, which was to commence writing on the recto of the first leaf.94 Two different scribal approaches to booklet openings would seem odd for two scribes ‘working closely together’ and it is possible, at least, that the protective blank was incorporated precisely because they anticipated the booklet’s movement between their respective locations. Indeed, the circumstances occasioning their collaboration may have been similar to those speculated for Scribe A’s engagement with Scribe F: two copies were needed. In this case, duplicate copies survive: Douce 322 and its ‘utilitarian replica’ in Harley 1706. Scribe A’s context was certainly commercial but it was not Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 243. M. Smith, The Title-Page: Its Early Development, 1460–1510 (London, 2000). 94 Of the 25 fifteenth-century booklets, only two others incorporate a blank opening leaf (booklet IX of R.3.19 and booklet VII of R.3.21). 92 93

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the large, single-site ‘scriptorium’ that Eleanor Hammond imagined for his collaborator, the Hammond scribe. After all, even same-booklet collaborations can be read very differently – as evidence for separate and not shared physical spaces – and thus Scribe A’s association with a ‘publishing business’ may yet prove to be the best explanation for ‘a stable center in the maze of crisscrossing fifteenth-century texts’. CONCLUSION Although a definitive conclusion is impossible, some new factors have emerged that may help orientate the direction of future research on the scribes and booklets of the Trinity anthologies. Scribe A’s artists in his booklet-based miscellanies – the Douce Limner and the illustrator of MS R.3.21 – clearly knew one another (nos. 3, 5). Moreover, both artists worked for either Caxton (Thorney’s Sammelband, c. 1483) or de Machlinia (no. 13, c. 1484) at about the same time. There is no proof that Scribe A made the Trinity booklets specifically for a print environment. It is a distinct possibility, of course, given the chain of connections between scribes and artists, including Scribe C’s role in Thorney’s Sammelband. What is clear, however, is that there was no pre-print era ‘scriptorium’ involved in the production and use of some Trinity booklets as scribal ‘shop copies’. Units written by Scribe A (with the Hammond scribe and Scribe F) were probably concurrent with those written by scribes C and D. The likely timeframe (1477x1483), as indicated by contents and paper stocks, finds support in the growing links between the artists of Scribe A’s booklet-based miscellanies and England’s printers. As Gillespie predicted, the Trinity anthologies cannot be used as evidence for pre-print scribal stocks of English literary works. As I have tried to show, all that is really demonstrable is that they were used in this capacity at least as early as de Worde, and that a chronological realignment of Scribe A’s booklets with Scribe C’s, in particular (with their associated artists), make the Caxton business a very compelling candidate for their commission. The consequence of a decentralised Hammond scribe, particularly in respect to the Trinity booklets, is that it allows us to reconceptualise their production in relation to Scribe A. We might imagine Scribe A’s shop as a small household unit, like those of the stationers on Paternoster Row, and we might imagine the Hammond scribe as a well-connected ‘hand for hire’, a freelance scribe associated with drapers, heralds, and a mayoral household. We might further imagine Scribe A as the middleman co-­ordinator, taking commissions from customers like Baron and the original anthologies owner, and engaging nearby scribes as necessary. We might even imagine the nearby printer-publisher, Caxton, being kept informed of the interesting examples of religious and secular literature that crossed his threshold. ‘We might imagine’ makes clear the difficulty: how little we

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know about Scribe A (or scribes C and D). The artists provide some clues to the kind of milieu to which they belonged, with connections drawn to two printers to the west of the city and a focus on the 1480s for their activities. In the case of the anthologies’ scribes, the most fruitful area for ongoing research is likely to be the early metropolitan editions dependent on scribal hands for their ‘finishing’. As demonstrated by the case of the Douce Limner, investigating the copy-specific features of incunabula leads to a more integrated history of books in this period, whether written or printed. More broadly, a better sense of ‘scribal culture’ will come with exploring the full potential of a given scribe’s cultural milieu. Analysis of collaborative practice creates encounters with other scribes – as demonstrated so compellingly in Linne Mooney’s work – and in turn with illuminators, illustrators, binders, and occasionally even printers. Amassing oeuvres, especially overlapping oeuvres, creates opportunities for cross-profiling information on date, location, and patronage, and, consequently, incremental but significant gains in unravelling the complexities of late medieval scribal culture. APPENDIX: BOOKS DECORATED BY THE ILLUMINATOR OF MS DOUCE 322 (FL. C. 1470–90) Key XV3-4: third-fourth quarters of 15th century Provenance: s. XVI or earlier * suggested addition to an artist listed in LGM MANUSCRIPTS 1. Bristol Public Library, MS 9, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, Eng. trans. by John Trevisa, XV3-4. Provenance: Thomas Andrews of the Exchequer admitted to Middle Temple in 1517 (Treasurer 1567–9) (fol. 117r).95 Four artists contributed work: Hand A (spray initials on fols. 1r, 2v, 15r, etc.); ‘English artist of MS Bodley 283’* (spray initials on fols. 6r, 6v, 24r, etc.); ‘Border Artist A of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56’* (border on fol. 58r) (LGM II, 330, 354);96 Hand D, the Douce Limner (spray initials on fols. 95r, 95v, 96r, etc.).

95 N. Mathews, Early Printed Books and Manuscripts in the City Reference Library, Bristol (Bristol, 1899), p. 69; MMBL II, 204. On Andrews see J. B. Williamson, The Middle Temple Bench Book, 2nd edn (London, 1937), p. 73. 96 Cf. Scott’s assignment of the border on folio 58r to ‘Border Artist B of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56’ (LGM II, 330).

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2. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS C.13, Thomas Littleton, Tenures; De natura brevium, in law French and Latin, XV3-4.97 6- to 9-line initials on gold grounds with illuminated borders (fols. 13r, 24r, 47v, 125r). 3. Cambridge MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Widener 2, Hours, c. 1470–80.98 Five artists: Hand A, the Douce Limner (the majority of gold spray initials except for those on fols. 27r, 29v by Hand B, and on fols. 46r–v, 51r, 72v, 89r by Hand C); with miniatures by ‘Illustrator B of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56’ (i.e. the illustrator of MS R.3.21) and borders by ‘Border Artist A of Widener 2’ (LGM II, 329, 340). 4. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 3178, Hours, 1425–50, updated c. 1470–90. Provenance: ‘Thomas Fortescue’ written backwards, s. XVI (fol. 64v).99 The later additions by the Douce Limner: ‘KL’ gold initials, and 2- to 5-line gold initials with pen-flourishing from fol. 53; three-quarter border on fol. 65. 5. London, LPL, MS 186, Psalter, XV3-4. Provenance: Robert Hare (c. 1530–1611).100 Five artists: Hand A (‘KL’ initials with demi-vinets, spray initials on fols. 45v, 50v, etc.); ‘Illustrator B of Fitzwilliam Museum 56’ (historiated initials on fols. 1r, 109r) and the ‘owl illuminator’ (initials and borders on fols. 1r, 19v, 32v, etc.) (LGM II, 329, 354); Hand D, the style of the Douce Limner but in a more refined mode (spray initials on fols. 14v, 22v, 143v, etc.); Hand E, the Douce Limner (spray initials on fols. 133v, 139v with demi-vinet). 6. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 40, John Lydgate, Fall of Princes (XV3-4).101 Three artists: Hand A (spray initials on fols. 3r, 6v, 9r–v, etc.), closely related to spray initials in MSS attributed to the Border artist of Oxford, University College MS 85*; Hand B, the Douce Limner (spray initials on fols. 7r, 20v, 222r, 232r [2x], 239v [2x], 248v, 255r); Hand C, the ‘English artist of MS Bodley 283’* (borders on fols. 50v, 83r, 84r; and spray initials on fols. 13r, 27r, 50r, etc.) (LGM II, 319, 354).

97 M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College Cambridge (Cambridge: 1913), pp. 86–7 [accessed 30 January 2021]. 98 R. S. Wieck, Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts 1350–1525 in the Houghton Library (Cambridge MA, 1983), no. 46. See also ‘MS Widener 2’, Harvard Library Viewer [accessed 30 January 2021]. 99 National Library of Scotland Catalogue of Manuscripts Acquired since 1925. Volume 2, Manuscripts 1801–4000 (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 202. 100 C. Reynolds, ‘A London Liturgical Psalter’, in Lambeth Palace Library: Treasures from the Collection of the Archbishops of Canterbury, ed. R. Palmer and M. P. Brown (London, 2010), pp. 72–3. 101 ‘The Fall of Princes’, Yale University Library Digital Collections [accessed 30 January 2021].

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7. New York, Morgan,102 MS M. 47, Missal, 1425–50, updated c. 1470–90. The Douce Limner completed the spray initial and gold initial with pen-flourishing (fol. 230r–v) at the added offices for SS. David, Chad, John of Beverley, and Winifred. 8. New York, Morgan, MS M. 1122.4, Missal, single-folio fragment. Calendar (March-April). 9. Oxford, Bodl., MS Douce 322, devotional anthology in three booklets, c. 1470–84. Provenance: William Baron (d. c. 1484), intended for donation to the Dominican nunnery at Dartford, Kent (fol. i recto). Written by ‘Scribe A’ of TCC MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21.103 10. Oxford, Bodl., MS Gough London 10, Chronicle of London to 1470 with additions, and possibly compiled by Miles Adys, Chamberlain of the City 1479–84.104 KL-initials on fols. 10ra–12ra by Douce Limner (change of artist and scribe at fol. 12rb). 11. Oxford, Trinity College, MS 73, Hours (XV4).105 Douce Limner (spray initials), with ‘Border Artist A of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56’ (borders on fols. 57r, 65r, 68r, etc., ‘cruder in execution’) and probably ‘Illustrator A/A1 of Fitzwilliam Museum 56’* (historiated initials on fols. 86r, 91r, 91v, ?148v [incomplete]). The recurrence of this border artist and illustrator in many of the same manuscripts suggests the possibility of one individual (cf. LGM II, 328–30). PRINTED BOOKS 12. Avicenna, Canon medicinae (Lib. I–V, Latin trans. by Gerard of Cremona) [Strasbourg: The R-Printer (Adolf Rusch), after Feb. 1473] (ISTC ia01417700): a) Aberdeen, UL, Inc. 5, 406 leaves (fols. 94–539: books II, III, IV, with some omissions).106 Three artists: Hand A (fols. 94r–176v, eleven surviving spray initials), closely related to spray initials in MSS attributed to the Border artist of University College 85* (LGM II, 319); Hand B (spray initials fols. 192v–386v, but not 204r or 266v); Hand C, the Douce Limner (spray initials fols. 204r, 266v, 441v, 491r, 510r, 525v).

102 CORSAIR Online Collection Catalog: Descriptions of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts [accessed 30 January 2021]. 103 R. Hanna, The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (Exeter, 2010), no. 84. 104 Boffey, Manuscript and Print, p. 177. 105 R. Gameson, The Medieval Manuscripts of Trinity College, Oxford: A Descriptive Catalogue (Oxford, 2018), pp. 371–375. 106 Pirie, ‘Avicenna’s Canon de medicina in the University of Aberdeen’, including a table for pages missing. Pirie’s study identifies five further fragments, not listed here, of which two were illuminated by Hand B (fols. 228r, 255r).

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b) Cambridge, UL, Inc.Fragments.0[77], a 2-leaf fragment from book IV. Spray initial by the Douce Limner (fol. 508r).107 13. Oxford, Bodl., Arch. G f.16. Horae ad usum Sarum (Salisbury) [London: William de Machlinia, about 1484], on vellum (STC 15869; ISTC ih00420300).108 For a full description of the illuminated borders, coloured woodcuts, and illuminated initials see James-Maddocks, ‘Illuminators of English and Continental Incunabula’, no. 23.

107 James-Maddocks, ‘Illuminators of English and Continental Incunabula’, no. 11. See also ‘Inc.Fragments.0[77]’, iDiscover [accessed 30 January 2021]. 108 ‘Bod-inc: H-182’, Bod-Inc Online [accessed 30 January 2021].

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PART III SCRIBAL PRODUCTION

SOME CODICOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS ON MANUSCRIPTS OF WALTER HILTON’S SCALE OF PERFECTION MICHAEL G. SARGENT

W

hen Linne Mooney and I studied Latin paleography and codicology with Fr. Boyle in the Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies in Toronto (in the same class, although Linne is younger than I), Malcolm Parkes’s revolutionary study of ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’ had not yet been published.1 Particularly remarkable about this article was Parkes’s focus of attention on the change in mentalité in the makers and users of late medieval books that manifested itself especially in scholastic forms of compiling, ordering and accessing of materials. This article, and further studies by Parkes and a growing list of other scholars – including, of course, Linne Mooney – have established the examination of the codicological aspects of manuscripts of late medieval literary works as an indispensable source of information about the making and circulation of texts, complementary to the evidence of textual affiliation and patterns of provenance, patronage, ownership and gift. My purpose here is to draw out some of the textual critical implications of codicological aspects of the manuscripts of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. Hilton was probably born in the Huntingdonshire village of Hilton in the early 1340s, and began to write his Latin and English works of M. B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), pp. 115–41.

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spiritual advice as a secular cleric attached to the consistory court of Ely, which met in Cambridge, when he was some thirty years old.2 The Scale was written in two parts: Scale I, directed to a woman enclosed as an anchoress, was probably begun at the same time as the Latin letter De Imagine peccati and the English letter On Mixed Life, which was written to guide a man with lands, children and tenants, who wished to lead a life of contemplation without evading his secular obligations. Scale I and the Mixed Life begin with similar taxonomic discussions of the parts of the active and contemplative lives; the Scale proceeds to deal with the eradication of the image of sin in the soul, particularly in a long section on the seven deadly sins. Written a decade or so later, Scale II opens with a response to his reader’s request for a further explanation of the idea of reformation of the image of God in the soul. It explains the theology of justification according to the reasoning of Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus homo and sacramental theology – reformation in faith – and proceeds in the latter half of the work to describe a further reformation in faith and in feeling – an affective theology of contemplation. Scale II may not have been complete when Hilton died at the house of Augustinian canons at Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire on the eve of the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March), 1396. In the letter De Utilitate et prerogativis religionis, written to encourage Adam Horsley, an official of the king’s exchequer, to join the Carthusian order (which he did at Beauvale in Nottinghamshire in 1386), Hilton describes himself as having unsuccessfully tried his vocation as a hermit, but admits that he does not feel a calling to a religious order as Horsley does; this probably marks the midpoint of Hilton’s career as a writer and a spiritual advisor. Jonathan Hughes has argued that Hilton was of Northern origin, and accompanied Thomas Arundel, bishop of Ely, on his elevation from Ely to the see of York in 1388 as part of a ‘Northern circle’ of ecclesiastical administrators.3 It is improbable that Hilton came from Yorkshire, but it is not impossible that he travelled north to attempt an eremitic life modeled on that of the famous hermit and contemplative writer Richard Rolle. If Hilton did live for at least a while in the north, he seems eventually to have returned to the East Midlands, where he maintained a connection with Cambridge. Certainly some manuscripts of the earliest version of Scale I travelled north, however, since several 2 For the details of Hilton’s life and writing career, see the section ‘The Place of Scale II in Hilton’s Opus’ in the introduction to Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II. An Edition Based on British Library MSS Harley 6573 and 6579, ed. S. S. Hussey and Michael G. Sargent, EETS OS 348 (Oxford, 2017), pp. lxxiv–lxxxvii. 3 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 179–80, 183, 209–12, 217, 228, 270. See also Sargent, ‘Bishops, Patrons, Mystics and Manuscripts: Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love and the Arundel and Holland Connections’, in Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th birthday, ed. Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney (York, 2014), pp. 159–76.

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strands of transmission can be traced to the West Midlands and to northern and western Yorkshire. The observation that some time must have separated the composition of the two books of the Scale is based on the single most notable piece of codicological evidence concerning the manuscripts of the Scale: only eighteen of the forty-one surviving substantially complete manuscripts originally contained both books;4 most of the remainder – twenty-one manuscripts – originally comprised Scale I alone.5 Scale II was added by later hands to three of these;6 the Latin version of Scale II was added to a fourth;7 and two manuscripts comprise Scale II alone.8 The first book must have circulated for some time before the second was added to it. Textual critical evidence concurs with this: the patterns of affiliation among the manuscripts of the two books of the Scale are not the same. Further, we should note that the circulation of copies of Scale I without Scale II to Yorkshire and the West Midlands accords with the geographical criterion of textual criticism, that the earliest form of the text tends to occur at the periphery of the area of transmission. A number of copies of Scale I alone occur in large-format anthologies together with Hilton’s Mixed Life and similar works, particularly those by or attributed to Richard Rolle.9 The most notable of these are the two earliest surviving copies of Scale I alone, accompanied by Hilton’s Mixed Life, in V and S, the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts.10 Among the prose texts of the compilation that forms Part IV (Hanna’s Booklet 4) of V and S are The Prickynge of Love (the translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran MSS A, As, B, B3, Br, Cc, Ch, E, H5, Hu2, L, Ld, Lw, P, Pl, Sr, T and Ws. See Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, p. xxviii. Details of the descriptions of manuscripts of Scale II in the present article derive from this edition. For the identification of sigla of manuscripts of the Scale referred to in the present article, see the list appended below, pp. 198–9. 5 MSS C, D, F, H3, H4, Hu, J, Ln, Lt, N, Ry, S, St, T2, U, V and Wo. 6 In MS H, Scale II is added in a second hand immediately following Scale I on fol. 63r. See Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, Frontispiece. In MS R, Scale II was added by another hand following the complete compilation (on which see below). MS H7 was written by a number of similar hands; the first ten lines of Scale II, immediately following Scale I on fol. 43v, are written in a different hand than the end of the first book; yet another hand follows on 44r. See Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, pp. xlvi–vii. 7 MS H2. 8 MSS H6, the incipit of which does refer to the text as ‘þe secunde parte’, and M, the incipit of which has been altered to delete the opening reference to Scale I that occurs in all other manuscripts. 9 Twelve manuscripts comprising Scale I alone have other works (MSS T2, C, D, F, S, H3, H4, V, Ry, Hu and Wo [plus R, which originally had only Scale I, and H2, which also contains a Latin Scale II]); and eleven of those with both books (MSS Br, Cc, T, E, A, P, L, B3, Pl, Sr and Lw). MS H6 of Scale II alone also comprises other works by Hilton. 10 All measurements for the section of the manuscript in which the text of the Scale occurs: MS V measures 544 x 393mm (writing space 412–20 x 284–94mm), two columns at 80 lines per page; S measures 585 x 393mm (460–8 x 281–8), two columns at 84–90 lines. 4

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Stimulus amoris attributed elsewhere to Hilton),11 Hilton’s Scale I and Mixed Life, Rolle’s Commandment, Form of Living and Ego dormio,12 and a number of other contemplative and religious works – including, in V but not S, Ancrene Riwle and a copy of the A-text of Piers Plowman.13 In MS V but not S, the text of Scale I is preceded by a Table of Chapters; this is itself preceded by the two Hilton psalm commentaries on Qui habitat and Bonum est.14 The texts of Scale I and the Mixed Life in V and S are closely affiliated, as are also the copies of the same works in the late fourteenthcentury northern Surrey MS Pl, in which a copy of Scale II was inserted following Scale I.15 The pattern of the evidence suggests that Scale I and the Mixed Life came to the compiler of V and S in a single exemplar, one of a number of exemplars employed in building up the Part IV compilation in V and S, but that the text of Scale II in Pl derives from some other exemplar. In contrast to the size of V and S, Pl, with 241 fols. at 190mm2, is the smallest manuscript of the Scale in page size, and its text occupies the largest number of folios.16 Not all large-format compilations of contemplative and religious materials including Hilton’s Scale contain works by or attributed to Richard Rolle, however, nor do they necessarily comprise Scale I with the Mixed Life, but without Scale II (the pattern in V, S and Pl). This can be seen in four further manuscripts of greater than quarto size, three written like V and S in double columns of forty or more lines per page, and one in a single column.17 The largest of these in format is MS Sr, at 9800mm2, 11 The Prickynge of Love, ed. H. Kane (Salzburg, 1983). The attribution of the translation of the Prickynge to Hilton is made in the unrelated manuscript pairs Durham UL, Cosin V.iii.8 and University of Pennsylvania Library MS Codex 218 (olim Stonor), and Yale, Beinecke Library, Osborn fa46 and CUL Hh.1.12. 12 Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, edited from MS Longleat 29 and related manuscripts, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS OS 293 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 3–39. 13 ‘Part IV’ of V comprises gatherings 42–52 (fols. 319–406); the comparable section of S comprises gatherings 18–24 (fols. 92–134). The original denomination of the parts of V and S was by M. S. Serjeantson, ‘The Index of the Vernon Manuscript’, Modern Language Review 32 (1937), 222–61; see A. I. Doyle, ‘The Shaping of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts’, in English Studies in Honor of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. B. Rowland (London, 1974), pp. 328–41, and the Introduction to The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng. Poet. a.1 (Cambridge, 1987); R. Hanna, The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (Exeter, 2010), nos. 85 and 40, respectively; and S. S. Hussey, ‘Implications of Choice and Arrangement of Texts in Part 4’, in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 61–74. 14 An Exposition of Qui habitat and Bonum est in English, ed. B. Wallner, Lund Studies in English 23 (Lund, 1954). 15 The Pl texts of the Scale and Mixed Life, originally a single manuscript, were separated in rebinding in the nineteenth century, and coincidentally reunited by separate purchases by George A. Plimpton; they are now Plimpton MSS 257 and 271 respectively. See A. J. Bliss, ‘Two Hilton Manuscripts in Columbia University Library’, Medium Ævum 38 (1969), 157–63. 16 I will note only overall page area (in mm2) in comparing the simple size of the manuscripts, rather than the number of columns and lines. 17 See n. 10 for measurements of MSS V and S; MS Sr measures 385 x 255mm (283 x 180), two columns at 41–2 lines; C measures 290 x 220mm (220 x 140), two columns

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written early in the fifteenth century, comprising an acephalous copy of Scale I followed by Scale II, a copy of The Prickynge of Love, attributed here to Hilton,18 Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God,19 followed by a ‘Meditation on the Five Wits’ (IPMEP 192) and the opening section of The Prick of Conscience. The contents of this manuscript are (with the possible exception of the last item) all written in a single hand, and follow on from one-another on the same page, without interruption: it was not compiled in booklets, but as a single enterprise. MS C, on the other hand, another medium-large format manuscript of the early fifteenth century (6400mm2), comprises three separate books written in different hands, that appear from their similarity of dimensions to have been intended to form a single whole. The first book (fifteen gatherings: fols. 1–118, writing space 218 x 142mm, 36 lines per page) comprises a copy of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ nearly identical textually to CUL Add. MS 6578, the copy belonging to Mount Grace Charterhouse.20 This book is the only one of the three that make up MS C to be illuminated, with a full or partial border for each of the nine major divisions of the Mirror. The second book, (three gatherings: fols. 119–38, writing space 212 x 142mm, 40 lines) comprises a copy of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God and other matters, written in three hands. The third (five gatherings: fols. 139–82, writing space 222 x 147mm, 41 lines), has Scale I, followed by Latin verses on the sacraments and a copy of the Thorseby Register version of ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’,21 in another hand. One other larger-format manuscript containing Scale I but not Scale II, is MS Wo, a late fifteenth-century London compilation that contains a total of twenty items, including a unique copy of one of the English versions of Rolle’s Emendatio vitae, a partial copy of The Gospel of Nicodemus, ecclesiastical regulatory materials and the Wycliffite later versions of Acts and the Psalter with Prologue (including Prologues to the sapiential books). This manuscript was written on paper between 1447 and 1468 by the Hammond Scribe for John Vale while a servant of the draper Thomas Cook, mayor of London.22 at 41 lines; Ld measures 220 x 147mm (185–90 x 125), two columns at 43 lines; and Wo measures 285 x 205mm (185–90 x 125), one column at 40 lines. 18 On the infrequent and improbable attribution of this text to Hilton, see Sargent, ‘A New Manuscript of The Chastising of God’s Children with an Ascription to Walter Hilton’, Medium Ævum 46 (1977) 49–60. The form of the attribution of the Prickynge to Hilton in Scale MS Sr is identical to that in the Durham manuscript. 19 Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, ed. M. Connolly, EETS OS 303 (Oxford, 1994). 20 Nicholas Love: The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. A Full Critical Edition based on Cambridge University Library MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. M. G. Sargent (Exeter, 2005), pp. intro 154–intro 158. 21 The Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. T. F. Simmons and H. E. Nolloth, EETS OS 118 (Oxford, 1901). 22 Hanna, English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle, item 118; M. Dove, The First English

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Two groups of Scale I manuscripts compile Hilton’s text with English works of Richard Rolle and various patristic and medieval contemplative and eremitic materials.23 As Ralph Hanna has demonstrated, MS R, the exemplar of the group, originally contained Scale I followed by a now-lost gathering of minor Hiltoniana and Rolleana in one booklet, Rolle’s Form of Living and a set of nine extracts primarily from Hilton and Rolle in a second booklet, and a set of extracts from the desert fathers in a third. As Hanna noted, the coincidence of incipits and explicits, changes of hand and folio and gathering divisions shows how this original manuscript was compiled. A later hand added Scale II in a separate booklet at the end of MS R, in a dialect from the area of the Norfolk-Ely border. Two other manuscripts, MSS D and F, were copied from MS R. In MS D, the lost gathering of the first booklet of MS R is present following Scale I: Rolle’s Commandment (IPMEP 660), the piece ‘On Proper Will’ attributed to Hilton (IPMEP 551), Hilton’s Angels’ Song (IPMEP 146) and the ‘Treatise on Deadly Sin’ (IPMEP 149). Rolle’s Form and the sets of extracts found in the second and third booklets of MS R follow. MS F begins with a booklet that does not occur in MSS R and D, comprising an acephalous copy of the longer version of Hilton’s Mixed Life (IPMEP 147) and Middle English Version 3 of Rolle’s Emendatio. MS D, like MS R, is dialectally northern, possibly from northwest Yorkshire; MS F is dialectally localisable to northeastern Norfolk, and seems to have been copied from MS R after it had been brought to the East Midlands, but before the text of Scale II was added. Two other Scale manuscripts contain compilations that include other materials in common, in the same order: MSS H3 and A. MS H3, written in the late fourteenth or the early fifteenth century, comprises what Hanna describes as ‘four separate (although linked) books’.24 The first is a theological commonplace book containing patristic material. The second book comprises two booklets, one containing Scale I, the other Rolle’s Form of Living. The third book contains Rolle’s Oleum effusum (IPMEP 506), The Rule of the Life of Our Lady (IPMEP 22) and Gaytryge’s catechism (IPMEP 71). The third book contains The Twelve Patriarchs (IPMEP 4), the English version of the Benjamin minor of Richard of St Victor attributed to the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and the fourth book a Latin tract on Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge, 2007), p. 305 (WB 212). The fullest list of books in the hand of the Hammond scribe is in L. R. Mooney, ‘A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, V. Gillespie, and R. Hanna (London, 2000), pp. 113–23; ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and their scribes’, in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. A. Gillespie and D. Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 192–211. 23 See Sargent, ‘The Scale of Perfection in Devotional Compilations’, in Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, ed. M. Cré, D. Denissen and D. Renevey (Turnhout, 2018), pp. 309–39. 24 Hanna, English Manuscripts, item 48.

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the Pater noster. MS A, written in the first half of the fifteenth century, comprises both books of the Scale, followed by the English Oleum effusum and The Rule of the Life of Our Lady, followed by an English Arma Christi (DIMEV 4083). The explicit of Scale I identifies it as ‘liber primus Magistri Walteri Hilton, decretorum inceptoris, de vita contemplativa’ – the earliest reference to Hilton’s academic and legal career, and a possible indicator of the point in that career when he wrote the first book of The Scale of Perfection. The Scale text in MS H3 is LALME LP 115: central West Riding of Yorkshire; the Twelve Patriarchs is LP 4: northern West Riding; the dialect of the Scale and The Rule of the Life of Our Lady in MS A has been localised to northern Staffordshire or the Cheshire/Derbyshire border; the Arma Christi to Dorset, ‘overlaying some kind of Midland English’.25 The coincidence of contents in MSS H3 and A suggests that these two manuscripts shared at least a partial exemplar. The juxtaposition of Hilton’s Scale (particularly Scale I) with Rolle’s Form of Living and English versions of the Emendatio vitae in these manuscripts demonstrates a desire for guidebooks to the contemplative life, particularly for women, and particularly in the West and North of England. One other group of Scale manuscripts present a different kind of compilation: a collection of the English works of Walter Hilton. The earliest of this, the ‘London group’ of manuscripts, and probably its exemplar, is LPL MS 472 (MS L), the ‘common profit’ book of John Killum.26 According to the ‘common profit’ inscription on fol. 260r, MS L was ‘maad of þe goodis’ of Killum, a London grocer whose will was probated in 1416; it is dialectally localisable to Cambridgeshire (LALME LP 672), and was probably made after Killum’s death. Its contents are a near-complete collection of Hilton’s English works: both books of the Scale, followed by the Mixed Life, the Eight Chapters on Perfection and the commentaries on Qui habitat and Bonum est, as well as the commentary on the Benedictus attributed to Hilton. The texts of MS L have been corrected by contemporary annotators; the Scale, Mixed Life and Eight Chapters each begins a fresh page (fols. 1r, 193r, and 213v); and a set of running headers identifies each item in the manuscript. With the exception of dialectal translation and variant ordering of the contents, MS B3 (Midland Standard) and MS P (southern Greater London) are direct textual descendants of MS L. MS P (London, Inner Temple, Petyt MS 524) belonged to Henry Langford, organmaker, dwelling in the Minories, the street by the convent of the Franciscan nuns – the minoresses – just outside Aldgate.27 In MS P, an acephalous copy of

Sargent, in Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, p. xxx. Sargent, in Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, pp. l–lii, xxxiv–xxxv, lvii–lviii, xliii–xliv, cxiv, cxxv–cxxix. 27 Langford’s ownership is expressed in an alpha-numeric cipher that he also uses in BL, MS Royal 18 A.xiii of Walton’s Boethius. 25

26

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the Mixed Life and the Eight Chapters precede the Scale, and the scriptural commentaries are lacking. MS B3 comprises only the Scale. Yet another manuscript, MS H6, has texts of the second book of the Scale followed by the Mixed Life and Bonum est closely affiliated to those in MSS L, B3 and P. MS H6, written in the mid fifteenth century, belonged to Elizabeth Horwood, abbess of the Minories, who bequeathed it to the convent. Other codicological features connect the manuscripts of this group as well. MS B3 appears textually to have been copied from MS L after the first corrector had completed his work, but before the second. MSS L and B3 also have headers throughout in precisely the same form: they read across the opening, from verso to recto, with one word at the inner and the outer margin of each, e.g.: ‘pri – ma || pars – libri’; ‘octo – capitula || perfec – torum’. Only one other manuscript of the Scale, Huntington Library MS 266 (Hu2) has headers; these also read across the opening, but have a different form, with the word ‘liber’ at the left margin of the verso and the identification of book and chapter at the right margin of the facing recto, e.g. ‘primus cap. 32’. The chapters of this text are also (uniquely) divided into reading-units by upper-case letters of the alphabet written in the outer margins. The LB3 and the Hu2 headers are thus independent conceptions. All of the corrections in MS L (made in two different hands) are copied into the margins of MS P by the scribe or incorporated into the text in precisely the same places. At some points, the corrections as copied by the scribe of MS P are confusing in themselves. For example, the scribe of MS L uses the spelling ‘be’ for ‘by’ and vice-versa; the corrector notes ‘quere: bi or be’. The scribe of MS P inserts ‘bi or be’ in the text (where the reading requires one or the other, inserting both is confusing, and the redundancy was later cancelled), and records ‘quere’ in the margin. Finally, the owners of MSS P and H6 dwelt within yards of each other. MS P is also interesting in that it is the only manuscript of the Scale with full-border, floreate illumination, in a mid fifteenth-century metropolitan style. According to Kathleen L. Scott, the hand of the border-artist of MS P is also to be found in Morgan MS M. 125 of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,28 and MS M. 775 of John Astley’s Ordonances of Chivalry, Ushaw College MS 5, a Sarum Missal, and Bodl., MS Rawl. A. 387B of Nicholas Love’s Mirror.29 The only other manuscript of the Scale in which full-border 28 See D. Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Work’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. S. Echard (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 73–97; and see the page in the AHRCsupported Late Medieval English Scribes website. 29 Private correspondence, 1 February, 2020. I wish to thank Kathleen Scott for her generous identification of the work of the limner of the Petyt manuscript. Holly JamesMaddocks attributes the borderwork in Morgan MS M. 125, in parts of Morgan MS M. 775, and in nine other manuscripts, to the ‘HM 932 Border Artist’, an illuminator active c. 1425–50 in the circle of William Abell: see ‘The Peripatetic Activity of Thomas Tresswell, London Stationer (fl. c. 1440–1470)’, in Manuscripts in the Making: Art & Science, ed. S. Panayotova and P. Ricciardi, vol. 1 (London and Turnhout, 2017), pp. 109–23 (pp. 115–18). James-Maddocks’ work builds upon a grouping of four manuscripts given in K. L.

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illumination occurs is MS C, in which it is not the Scale, but Nicholas Love’s Mirror that is illuminated;30 the text of the Scale opens with a simple three-line red initial. Seven other manuscripts of the Scale have decorated borders at the beginning of the text: two, MSS H5, and A, with bar borders at the left margin and floral extensions in the top and bottom margins. MS H5 is an early fifteenth-century manuscript given to Syon Abbey by Margery Pensax, recorded as an anchoress at Bishopsgate in 1399 and 1413. The majority of MS A is dialectally localisable to Northern Staffordshire or the Cheshire/Derbyshire border area; the final folios are localisable to Dorset. It belonged in the late fifteenth century to Shaftesbury Abbey. MS E, a late fifteenth-century copy whose text presents a complete conflation of the ‘Carthusian’ and ‘London’ affiliational groups,31 has complete floral borders at the left-hand margin of the beginning of each book of the Scale. It also has an elaborate form of ex libris: each of the letters of the words ‘Liber Domus Salutacionis Matris Dei Ordinis Cartusiensis prope London’ is written in the same quadrata script as the text itself in the middle of the lower border of each recto, fols. 4–62. Bodl., MS Bodley 100, written at the beginning of the fifteenth century in a southwestern (perhaps Gloucestershire) dialect, has a floreate partial bar border at the top and in the left margin at the beginning of the text of Scale I. In MS Ld, a thirdquarter fifteenth-century copy of both books of the Scale with a probable connection to Syon Abbey, the text of Scale I begins halfway down the right-hand column, following the Table of Chapters; it has floreate decoration occupying two lines’ worth of space immediately above the rubric for the first chapter, and extending down the space between the columns. The opening of the text in MS Ch (annotated by James Grenehalgh, probably at Coventry Charterhouse) has idiosyncratic penwork bar borders down the left margin and across the top. The chapter initials of eleven further manuscripts have penwork decoration, extending into the margins in the case of the initials of either book of the Scale: MSS As, B3, Cc, Ch, D, H2, H4, R, T, Wo and Ws. These penwork initials are usually two or three lines in height; those of MS T are seven lines. The initial of Scale I in MS R is gilded, and border decoration including flowers and birds has been added in a later hand, in a purplish ink. In comparison with the one other large-corpus Middle English text with which I have worked extensively, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the surviving manuscripts of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection Scott, ‘The Illustration and Decoration of Manuscripts of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’, in Nicholas Love at Waseda: Proceedings of the International Conference, 20–22 July, 1995, ed. S. Oguro, R. Beadle and M. G. Sargent (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 61–86 (pp. 73–4). 30 Nicholas Love: The Mirror, ed. Sargent, pp. x–xi. 31 Sargent, in Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, pp. cxii– cxiii, cxxv.

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are considerably lower in aesthetic value, much more utilitarian in aspect. Love’s Mirror is very often illuminated, although the pseudo-­Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi upon which it was based is not.32 Kathleen L. Scott counts two manuscripts of Love’s Mirror with illustrations and one with space left for illustrations that were not provided, thirteen others with a set of as many as seven full decorated borders for the major divisions of the text, and nine with full or partial borders only at the beginning of the text.33 Among the surviving manuscripts of the Scale, none have illustrations (there being, of course, little appropriate to illustrate),34 one has full-border decoration, and seven have partial border decoration. The level of decoration seen in the surviving manuscripts of Love’s Mirror is much more similar to that of the surviving manuscripts of the Middle English Bible with which it was in competition for audience:35 a book that was at one and the same time a marker of social status and connections, and an object of veneration. The manuscripts of Hilton’s Scale seem to have been made more to be read than admired. Three other, primarily textual, features of Scale I have left codicological traces in the manuscripts. The first of these is the fact that Hilton seems to have added a pair of qualifying discussions to his text, signaling them – as he often signals changes in the direction of his discourse – with the phrase, ‘but then you say’.36 This verbal formula, or others like it (e.g. ‘but now you say’, ‘but now you ask’), occurs eighteen times in the text of Scale I and four times in the text of Scale II.37 The present cases occur at the end of chapter 44, in which Hilton discusses the necessity of salvation 32 Modern editions of vernacular versions of the Meditationes tend to give the opposite impression: e.g. Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, ed. I. Ragusa and R. Green (Princeton, 1961), and La Vie de nostre benoit Sauveur Ihesuscrist & la saincte vie de nostre Dame translatee a la requeste de tres hault et puissant prince Ihanm duc de Berry, ed. M. Meiss and E. H. Beatson (New York, 1977). 33 Scott, ‘The Illustration and Decoration of Manuscripts of Nicholas Love’s Mirror’, pp. 61–86; Sargent, ‘The Program of Illustration in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ Library MS 18.1.17 and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 648 of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’, in Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott. Medieval Manuscripts: Readers, Makers and Illuminators, ed. M. Villalobos Hennessy (London, 2009), pp. 251–67, 289–92. 34 In the half-column blank space facing the opening of the text of Scale II, MS B does have a pen-and-ink sketch of a half-naked penitent with a staff, and one of a blackshaded, shackled human figure, with a tormenting devil holding his neck-shackle; these are labelled ‘ymago penitenti’ and ‘anima captiua’. This decoration was probably not part of the original conception of the manuscript. 35 L. Dennison and N. Morgan, ‘The Decoration of Wycliffite Bibles’, in The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History, and Interpretation, ed. E. Solopova (Leiden, 2017), pp. 266–345; K. E. Kennedy, The Courtly and Commercial Art of the Wycliffite Bible (Turnhout, 2014). 36 The passages occur at the end of Scale I, chapters 44 and 70, in Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, ed. T. H. Bestul (Rochester, 2000), Scale I, ll. 1213–76 and 2021–39. 37 Besides the two noted above, the phrases occur at Scale, ed. Bestul, Scale I, ll. 409, 510, 645, 816, 1562, 1579, 1615, 1625, 1694, 1940, 2065, 2110, 2318, 2327, 2369, 2415, Scale II ll. 892, 1854, 2307 and 3268.

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by virtue of the passion of Christ, and chapter 70, on loving one’s enemy while hating his sin. In the first instance, Hilton’s interlocutor is presented as asking how she is to understand the claim of some writers that one may not be saved without devotion to the name of Jesus. Hilton explains that since the name of Jesus means ‘saviour’ or ‘salvation’, everyone who truly desires salvation is devoted to that which is meant by the name of Jesus. In the second, she asks how she can love someone who is bad as well as one who is good. Hilton’s answer is that since all love is love of God, one loves one’s good even-Christian (as one loves oneself) for the goodness in them, which is of God, and one loves those who are not good for the sake of God, their Creator, in them. In her 1927 modernised edition of the Scale, Evelyn Underhill noticed that the ‘Holy Name passage’ was added in a hand other than that of the main scribe in MS H,38 on a separate bifolium, slightly smaller in size than that of the main text,39 tipped in between fols. 27 and 30, with marks for inclusion. Further, she noted that a number of other manuscripts lacked the passage. For Underhill, as later for Helen Gardner,40 the presence or absence of this passage became a major criterion in the discussion of the affiliation of the manuscripts. A. J. Bliss noted decades later, in the course of his work on the text of Scale I,41 that the ‘Charity passage’ was similarly added to the end of Scale I, chapter 70, on a single small sheet sewn to the outer edge of fol. 48,42 written in yet another hand. Both passages reflect Hilton’s thought, and are presumably authorial additions to the text of Scale I. They are both present in sixteen surviving manuscripts, and both absent in nine.43 Two manuscripts lack the ‘Holy Name passage’, but are defective at the point where the ‘Charity passage’ may have occurred.44 In MS Hu2, the ‘Charity passage’ is added on a separate folio, similarly to MS H, but the manuscript is defective at the point where the ‘Holy Name passage’ may have occurred.45 The texts of seven manuscripts have the ‘Holy Name passage’ but lack the ‘Charity passage’; 38 The Scale of Perfection, by Walter Hilton, Canon of Thurgarton, ed. E. Underhill (London, 1923), pp. xliv, 104. 39 The ‘Holy Name passage’ occupies three and a half sides of this bifolium. 40 Gardner, ‘The Text of The Scale of Perfection’, Medium Ævum 5 (1936), 11–30. 41 Bliss died on 24 November 1985, having worked on the edition of Scale I for more than twenty years. I was asked to take up the project of completing the Bliss edition for the Early English Text Society (as I was later asked to take up the completion of S. S. Hussey’s edition of Scale II). The Bliss family has generously allowed me to take possession of the collations, other materials and correspondence relating to the edition, which will be used to bring the project to conclusion. A number of the observations concerning the manuscripts of Scale I in particular derive from Bliss’s materials, which I have checked and to which I have added. 42 The ‘Charity passage’ occupies the recto and half of the verso of this sheet. 43 Both passages are present in MSS A, B3, C, E, L, Ln, Lt, Lw, P, Ry, Sr, T, T2, U, W and Ws. Both are lacking in MSS B, Cc, Ch, D, F, H, H3, Ld and R. 44 MSS H4 and H7 lack the ‘Holy Name passage’, but are defective at the point where the ‘Charity passage’ would have occurred. 45 MS Hu2, fol. 1, a singleton. Thanks to Ralph Hanna for reconstructing the contents

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and four have the ‘Charity passage’ but lack the ‘Holy Name passage’.46 Thus, just over one-third of the surviving copies have both passages, just under one-third have one or the other, and just under one-third lack both. Further, annotations in six manuscripts demonstrate awareness of the discrepancy among the texts on this point: In MS L, an annotator has noted in the margin next to the ‘Holy Name Passage’, ‘From þis to þe ende of þis chapitill is more þan oþere bookys haue’; in MS P, the same note has been written in the margin by the scribe himself. In MS Ch, which lacks both passages, a marginal note observes, at the point where the ‘Holy Name passage’ would have occurred, ‘Hic deficit multum’; where the ‘Charity passage’ would have occurred, ‘Hic deest multum’. The scribe of MS H4 has left space where the ‘Holy Name passage’ would have occurred, but it is of insufficient length to have accommodated the whole; a later hand has noted, ‘Hic deficit modicum. Sic incipit, But now seist þou’. There is also a short space left blank at the point where the ‘Charity passage’ would have occurred in MS H2. The earliest manuscripts of Scale I, MSS V, S, H, B, R and H7 all originally lacked both of the additional passages, but manuscripts otherwise affiliated with them have the passages. In fact, the presence, absence, or addition of these passages cuts across the affiliational groups observed by Bliss, or, before him, by Rosemary (Birts) Dorward.47 Dorward divided the manuscripts into three groups: N, comprising MSS R, D, F, U, H3, V, S, Pl, Ws, Ln, B and Ld; O, comprising MSS C, A, L, B3, P, Wo, Hu and H5; and Q, comprising MSS As, Cc, H2, H4, H7, J, Sr, St, T and W, and the uncorrected text in MS H; MSS Lt, Ry and T2 represent a conflation of N and O, and MSS E, H5, Hu and Wo represent a conflation of O and Q. Bliss’s group Z is basically identical to Dorward’s group N, his group G to her group O, his group X to her group OQ, and his groups Q and K to her group Q.48 Both the ‘Holy Name passage’ and the ‘Charity passage’ are present in the text of Bliss’s G MSS A, C, B3, L and P, K MSS E Lw, T and W, Q MS Sr, and Z MSS Ln, Lt, Ry, T2, U and Ws; both are absent in Bliss’s K MS Ch, Q MS Cc, and Z MSS B, D, R, F, H3 and Ld. Both are of this completely disordered manuscript: ‘The Archeology of a Manuscript: Huntington Library HM 266’, Scriptorium 36 (1982), 99–102. 46 MSS As, H5, Hu and Wo lack the ‘Holy Name passage’; MS H2, J, N, Pl, S, St, V lack the ‘Charity passage’. 47 R. Birts, ‘The Scale of Perfection, by Walter Hilton, Canon at the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton, Book I, Chapters 38–52’ (unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1951). Birts (by then Dorward) was in regular correspondence with Bliss about the text of Scale I from 1974 until his death, undertaking various tasks toward the edition; her part in the conceptualisation of the textual relations of the manuscripts of Scale I must not go unrecognised. I thank the Bliss family for providing me with Bliss’s copy of Dorward’s thesis. 48 For Bliss’s and Dorward’s discussions of the affiliation of the text, see Sargent, ‘Editing Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection: The Case for a Rhizomorphic Historical Edition’, in Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed. V. Gillespie and A. Hudson (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 509–34.

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added in MS H; the ‘Charity passage’ is lacking, and, as noted above, the ‘Holy Name passage’ is added in K MS Hu2. The ‘Holy Name passage’ is present in the text, but the ‘Charity passage’ is lacking, in K MS St, Q MSS H2, J and N, and Z MSS V, S and Pl; the ‘Charity passage’ is present but the ‘Holy Name passage’ lacking in K MS As and X MSS H5, Hu and Wo. The ‘Holy Name passage’ is lacking and the textual locus where the ‘Charity passage’ would have occurred is missing in Q MSS H4 and H7. The other major criterion for the discussion of the textual affiliation of manuscripts of The Scale of Perfection put forward by Underhill and Gardner was the presence or absence of a set of readings added as corrections to the text in MS H – readings characterised by Underhill as the ‘Christocentric additions’, but more neutrally by Gardner as ‘interpolations’.49 In her treatment of the thirty-seven complete manuscripts of which she was aware and the 1494 Wynkyn de Worde editio princeps of Scale I, Rosemary Dorward collated and reported the variants in the ‘Holy Name passage’ and the interpolations (which she termed the ‘expansions’) separately from those in the underlying, ‘unexpanded’ text. Where Dorward had collated only chapters 38–52 for her thesis, Bliss collated the entire text, paying particular attention to the ‘Holy Name passage’, the ‘Charity passage’ that none before him had noticed, and the interpolations. As is the case with Holy Name and Charity passages, Bliss notes that the attestation of the expansions does not agree with the pattern of affiliation that he found in the underlying, unexpanded text. He describes four sets of interpolations: the specifically Christocentric additions occur in three clusters, in chapters 11 to 25, 35 to 54, and 88 to 91, in virtually identical form in manuscripts of group K, and in variant forms in various manuscripts of other affiliational groups; a second series of primarily explanatory expansions occurs throughout the text, in groups G and X, and in Fishlake’s Latin translation; a third series occurs only in chapters 4 to 22 and 71 to 84, in groups G and Q; and a fourth series occurs in chapters 35 to 58, in groups Q and Z. All of this suggests that soon after the text of Scale I began to circulate, but after most of the western, northern and southern ramifications of transmission had already begun, there must have been a fair amount of cross-correction in the production of copies of Scale I. Bliss spent the majority of his time and effort in trying to work out a pattern of recension that would explain in complete detail these varying, contradictory patterns.50 As I have argued elsewhere,51 my intention in completing work 49 The characterisation of the annotations in MS H as ‘Christocentric’ may have less to do with the spirituality of Walter Hilton than that of Evelyn Underhill, who was attempting under the influence of Friedrich von Hügel to convert herself to a less theocentric and more incarnational devotion at the time. See Sargent, James Grenehalgh as Textual Critic, Analecta Cartusiana 85 (Salzburg, 1984), pp. 306–9. 50 Bliss’s discussion of the interpolations occupies 73 pages in typescript. 51 Sargent, ‘Editing Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection’; ‘Editing Scale II’ in Hilton,

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toward the critical edition of the Scale will not be to use recension to produce a stemmatic construction of the textual affiliation of the manuscripts, but to produce instead a non-hierarchic, rhizomorphic description of their relations. In such a description, interpolations and corrections in the various manuscripts would be discussed and analyzed as what they are: interpolations and corrections. This was the practice used in the edition of Scale II, in which the agreements of the text of MS H before correction (as much as they could be ascertained) and the corrections were collated, to determine that the majority of the original, corrected readings were either isolative variants, or in agreement with one pair of manuscripts of the Carthusian group, MSS H5Ws.52 The majority of the corrections agree with another pair of manuscripts from the same group, MS Lw and the W editio princeps. Likewise, James Grenehalgh, the well-known textual corrector of Sheen Charterhouse, corrected the English text of the Scale in MS T and W against each other, and W against the Latin text in BL, MS Harley 6576, in some cases providing his own English text based on the Latin version and his own Latin text based on the English. It would appear that although the Carthusians were assiduous in correcting copies of The Scale of Perfection, they tended to correct their copies against other Carthusian copies of the book. This is also the case with MS Hu2, the copy made by John Clerk of Hinton Charterhouse (although copied in a dialect more appropriate to the house at Coventry), described by Daniel Wakelin.53 After noting a number of the particulars of the annotations in MS Hu2, Wakelin concludes that ‘Clerk’s correcting was not idiosyncratic; it was informed by common practice’.54 But the practice was circumscribed by the fact that the Carthusians tended to correct their copies – of Scale II, at least – against other Carthusian books. Even more complicated in the case of MS H is the fact that its text was not divided into ninety-two or ninety-three chapters like the majority of manuscripts, but into twenty-nine sections. This system is more apparent The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, pp. lxxxvii–cxli; ‘Organic and Cybernetic Metaphors for Manuscript Relations: Stemma–Cladogram–Rhizome–Cloud’, in The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition, ed. I. Johnson and A. F. Westphall (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 197–263. 52 See the discussion of ‘Correction and Conflation’ in Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, Book II, pp. cxii–cxv. 53 Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts, 1375–1510 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 80–1; for the dialectal characterisation of MS Hu2, see Hilton, The Scale of Perfection: Book II, ed. Hussey and Sargent, p. l (LALME LP 4683: Warwickshire). 54 Wakelin’s conclusions are limited unfortunately by the fact that the edition of Scale I is still not available, and the edition of Scale II was not available at the time of his writing. He remarks, for example, of a long note at the foot of fol. 28v that the reading ‘is missing from three MSS’. In fact, it is one of the Christocentric expansions, and occurs only in MSS H5LwTWo and E, besides H and Hu2, into both of which it was added by correcting hands. Note that Wakelin’s references to the text of the Scale are not to the line-numbers of the edition of Thomas Bestul (Rochester, 2000), but to the pages of Evelyn Underhill’s 1927 modernisation.

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in MS Ch, which has two- or three-line initials at each division, with space for rubricated headings that were never supplied; another hand has supplied arabic numbers. In MS B, the text of which is divided into ninety-three chapters, a corrector has added roman numerals in the margin, corresponding to the divisions in MS Ch. In the fragmentary and disordered MS Hu2, two-line initials occur at the same places as in MS Ch. In MS H, the space for decorated initials occurs at the same places as in MSS Ch and Hu2, with the exception of the single-paragraph section II. No fewer than six correctors numbered these sections, added arabic and roman numerals in the margins representing the ninety-two and ninetythree chapter systems of division found in non-Carthusian manuscripts, and provided chapter titles. The annotations in MS L also demonstrate a relatively circumscribed pattern of correction. Although this manuscript, the Common-profit book of John Colop, is firmly connected with the city of London, its dialectal characterisation is of Cambridgeshire, and the fact that it presents a full collection of Hilton’s English works suggests that some effort was made to bring a one-volume library of Hiltoniana from the center of dissemination of his works to the city. The original readings of MS L that were corrected tend either to be isolative variants, or to agree with MS B3, which is otherwise the closest congener of MS L. The corrections themselves tend to agree with the London group as a whole: MSS B3PH6, together with MS E, a textual conflation of the Carthusian and London groups. As noted before, the corrections made by other hands in the margins of MS L have been written by the scribe himself in the margins of MS P. Again, the pattern of correction seems to reflect a fairly restricted set of source texts. As Matti Peikola noted in his description of aspects of the mise-en-page of manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible versions, codicological evidence not only ‘provid[es] a means for understanding the intended use and interpretation of texts in different manuscript contexts’ but also ‘has the potential to shed more light on affiliations between manuscripts with regard to their origins and patterns of transmission’.55 It has been the purpose of this study to demonstrate something of the pattern of circulation of texts of the two books of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection through the evidence of book size and compilation, illumination, textual addition and interpolation, and correction. Other areas of examination that might be profitably explored include the evidence of dialect, provenance and early ownership, recently put forward by Michael Robert Johnston to demonstrate the probability of the production of copies of wide-circulation texts not from a small number of centers of transmission, but all across the country.56 What I 55 Peikola, ‘Aspets of mise-en-page in manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible’, in Medieval Texts in Context, ed. D. Renevey and G. D. Caie (London, 2008), pp. 28–67 (p. 28). 56 Johnston, ‘The Prick of Conscience in Late Medieval England’, Speculum 95 (2020), 742–801. I explored the use of Johnston’s methodology in the case of Hilton’s Scale in a

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hope to have demonstrated here is a pattern of pulses of transmission – western, northern, Carthusian, city of London – each of which manifested itself not just in the textual affiliations of the manuscripts, but in the very way that the books were made. These are not the only patterns, but this is the kind of evidence that will allow us to understand better the circulation of late medieval books in England. SIGLA OF THE ORIGINALLY COMPLETE MANUSCRIPTS AND INCUNABLE PRINTS OF THE SCALE OF PERFECTION IN ENGLISH A As B B3 Br C Cc Ch D E F H H2 H3 H4 H5 H6 H7 Hu Hu2 J L Ld Ln Lt Lw M

BL, MS Additional 11748 (Scale I and II) Oxford, All Souls College, MS 25 (Scale I and II) Bodl., MS Bodley 100 (Scale I and II) Bodl., MS Bodley 592 (Scale I and II) Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 2544-5 (Scale I and II) CUL, MS Additional 6686 (Scale I) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 268 (Scale I and II) Chatsworth, Chatsworth House, Devonshire Collection (Scale I and II) CUL, MS Dd.5.55 (Scale I) CUL, MS Ee.4.30 (Scale I and II) CUL, MS Ff.5.40 (Scale I) BL, MS Harley 6579 (Scale I and II) BL, MS Harley 330 (Scale I English; Scale II Latin) BL, MS Harley 1022 (Scale I) BL, MS Harley 1035 (Scale I) BL, MS Harley 2387 (Scale I and II) BL, MS Harley 2397 (Scale II) BL, MS Harley 6573 (Scale I and II) San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 112 (Scale I) San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 266 (Scale I and II) Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.35 (Scale I) Lambeth Palace Library, MS 472 (Scale I and II) Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 602 (Scale I and II) BL, MS Lansdowne 362 (Scale I) Warminster, Longleat, MS 298 (Scale I) New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 3 (olim Luttrell Wynne) (Scale I and II) Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS F.4.17 (Scale II)

paper, ‘The Manuscript Circulation of The Scale of Perfection: The Evidence of Dialect and Provenance’ at the Early Book Society Conference, ‘Social Media in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Production, Circulation and Reception of MSS and Early Printed Books, 1350 to 1550’, University College Dublin, July 7–11, 2019. My conclusions are in agreement with Johnston’s observations for manuscripts of The Prick of Conscience: that more than two-thirds of the manuscripts for which we have both dialectal charaterisations and evidence of provenance can be localised to the same or adjacent counties.

MANUSCRIPTS OF WALTER HILTON’S SCALE OF PERFECTION

N P Pl R Ry S Sr St T T2 U V W Wo Ws

Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 6126 (Scale I) London, Inner Temple Library, MS Petyt 524 (Scale I and II) New York, Columbia UL, MS Plimpton 257 (Scale I and II) Bodl., MS Rawlinson C. 285 (Scale I and II) Liverpool, Liverpool UL, MS F.4.10 (Scale I) BL, MS Additional 22283 (Simeon) (Scale I) Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, MS Codex 218 (olim Stonor) (Scale I and II) Stonyhurst College, MS 31 (Scale I) Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.18 (Scale I and II) Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.7.47 (Scale I) Oxford, University College, MS 28 (Scale I) Bodl., MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (Vernon) (Scale I) Wynkyn de Worde, 1494 (STC 14042) (Scale I and II) Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.172 (Scale I) Westminster School, MS 4 (Scale I and II)

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THE FIRST EMERGENCE OF THE RICARDIAN CONFESSIO: MORGAN M. 690 JOEL FREDELL

A

mong the longstanding puzzles for Gower scholarship is the emergence of Confessio Amantis manuscripts dedicated to Richard II. Deluxe copies for London patrons were first produced during the reign of Richard’s replacement and probable bane, Henry IV, at a time when Gower himself was writing notably partisan poetry for the Lancastrian regime. Along with the elite of Lancastrian London, even the sons of Henry owned copies promoting this apparent regime confusion.1 The earliest surviving copy associated with Ricardian Confessios, Morgan MS M. 690, offers compelling evidence of a ‘late state’ model for Gower’s poetry that would solve the puzzle.2 Gower’s great poem did go through the political changes for which it is famous, but the proving ground for those changes in our manuscript evidence was the crucible of early Lancastrian rule after 1 According to A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and A. G. Watson (London, 1978), pp. 163–210 (pp. 208–9), Thomas, duke of Clarence (or possibly Prince Henry) owned Oxford, Christ Church, MS 148, with dedications to Richard at the Confessio’s opening and closing; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester owned Bodl., MS Bodley 294, the sole ‘second recension’ manuscript with the Ricardian Prologue and the Henrician epilogue. John, duke of Pembroke, owned Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307. See K. Harris, ‘The Role of Owners in Book Production and the Book Trade’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 163–99 (p. 170 and pl. 16); and J. E. Krochalis, ‘The Books and Reading of Henry V and His Circle’, The Chaucer Review 23 (1988), 50–77 (pp. 55, 57). 2 I had the pleasure of spending substantial time with Morgan M. 690 recently in the company of Linne Mooney, who offered observations on the manuscript that helped shape this chapter.

THE FIRST EMERGENCE OF THE RICARDIAN CONFESSIO: MORGAN M. 690

the great rupture of 1399. This period also constituted the poetic crucible for Gower’s late career, whose alchemy transformed him into a laureate veering perilously close to loyalist pamphleteer as the Confessio came before the public of London and, eventually, England. Morgan M. 690 represents a pivotal point in this crucial period of disruption after 1400 for the contending versions of the Confessio dedicated to Henry and Richard. Although longstanding narratives about Gower’s creation process for the Confessio place the poem’s genesis in the late 1380s or early 1390s during the reign of Richard II, the manuscript evidence does not begin until after Henry IV had deposed Richard in 1399. Nor does this evidence offer any clear candidate for a Ricardian Confessio datable before Morgan M. 690, although speculation about such an original began with Gower’s first great editor, George Macaulay. Bodl., MS Fairfax 3, one of the two earliest surviving Confessios, underwent revisions probably beginning around 1400 and extending beyond Gower’s death in 1408. These revisions included replacing the opening folio (once) and closing section (twice); both contain dedication passages to Henry in the manuscript’s surviving form.3 This change quite naturally invited speculation, beginning with Macaulay, that the revisions were intended to replace dedications to Richard with dedications to the newly-crowned Henry.4 Fairfax 3, then, would be the first Ricardian Confessio (before it was repurposed) rather than Morgan M. 690. However, no remaining physical evidence supports this speculation directly. The original content simply is gone: the revisions are not a matter of offending lines scraped off and replaced but a series of folio removals, replacements, and expansions. Nor does the Fairfax 3 text align itself with contemporary Confessios containing dedications to Richard, but has substantially different readings than any surviving Ricardian Confessios.5 Instead, as Macaulay first acknowledged, the text in Fairfax 3 is very close to that of the other earliest Confessio manuscript, San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 26.A.17 (Stafford), whose beginning and end survive in their original form and whose dedications

3 On these revisions and further additions see M. B. Parkes, ‘Patterns of scribal activity and revisions of the text in early copies of works by John Gower’, in New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 81–117 (pp. 89–91). 4 The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1899–1902), II, clvii–clviii. Macaulay also asserts that Fairfax was produced ‘in the “scriptorium” of the poet’, II, cxxx. 5 P. Nicholson, ‘Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis’, in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 130–42 (pp. 132–6), points out that the manuscripts Macaulay calls ‘third recension’ all derive from Fairfax or a parallel exemplar and so (aside from the prologue and epilogue) represent a textual family line rather than one final authorial revision. Also see Nicholson’s recent thinking about Fairfax as close to Gower in ‘Gower’s Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis’, in The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones, ed. R. F. Yeager and T. Takamiya (New York, 2012), pp. 75–86.

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are to Henry.6 In terms of textual affiliations, then, the first scribe of Fairfax 3 used an exemplar very close to that of the earliest Henrician copy. Consequently, the speculation that Fairfax 3 was originally dedicated to Richard is a reasonable and attractive surmise, but no more than that. Another possibility is that the replaced folia at the beginning and end of Fairfax 3 served other purposes. The opening folio may have been replaced to support a decoration program that now includes a major miniature at the opening. I would argue that the same decorating hand for borders and initials appears throughout Fairfax 3, including the revised portions; similarly, the two miniatures are likely to be by the same hand.7 The scribal revisers, then, probably received Fairfax 3 in an unfinished state more suggestive of collaboration than a partial teardown and rebuild of someone else’s completed project. Revisions at the end are complicated by two different scribes replacing the final two folia of the Fairfax 3 Confessio, in part to add a section of short poems by Gower. These two revising scribes were part of a circle that produced and revised four of the earliest Vox clamantis manuscripts, along with the Trentham anthology, a circle that may have included Gower himself.8 In short, Fairfax 3 provides material evidence for collaboration by a number of scribes who did not produce a finished book until the replacement folia were inserted. The original may have been a Ricardian Confessio, but nothing can confirm that idea and some evidence undercuts it. In any case, Fairfax 3 is not a Confessio produced during the Lancastrian period with a deliberate inclusion of the dedications to Richard. Morgan M. 690 presents a surprisingly similar problem. Macaulay did not see Morgan M. 690, so John Fisher first categorised it among Macaulay’s ‘first recension’ manuscripts dedicated to Richard.9 However, Morgan M. 690 is imperfect: the opening folio is missing (Prol.1–136) and the end lacks lines that would fit onto two folia (8.2902–3172). In other words, Morgan M. 690 does not contain either of the dedications at front 6 Works, ed. Macaulay, II, cliii, cxxxiv. Stafford contains additional texts indicating its status as the earliest surviving witness to a textual subfamily: its dedications at beginning and end are to Henry, but the additional texts seem to be more about issues of layout than content, since these passages fit neatly into the page designs of the manuscripts in question; see Nicholson, ‘Poet and Scribe’. Macaulay split the two Confessio textual families with dedications to Henry into his ‘second recension’ and ‘third recension’; Confessios with dedications to Richard fell into Macaulay’s ‘first recension’; see Works, ed. Macaulay, II, cxxvii–cxxx. For a recent full analysis of the Confessio text families by this author see ‘John Gower’s Manuscripts in Middle English’, in The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, ed. A. Sàez-Hidalgo, B. Gastle, and R. F. Yeager (London, 2017), pp. 91–6. 7 On these two miniatures also see K. L. Scott’s LGM II, 109–10; she does not offer there or elsewhere an opinion on the hands for these miniatures. 8 Parkes, ‘Patterns’, pp. 89–91; Parkes also argues, pp. 94–8, that his scribes 4 and 5 were the most likely to be close to Gower and that these scribes were likely to be producing copies for close associates of Gower. Trentham (BL, MS Additional 59495) is discussed further below. 9 J. Fisher, John Gower; Poet and Friend to Chaucer (New York, 1964), p. 305, puts Morgan M. 690’s text into Macaulay’s ‘first version unrevised’ category.

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and back, so calling this witness either first recension or Ricardian is based purely on textual collation that Macaulay never did. My own limited collations in the first four books do confirm what Fisher found: Morgan M. 690’s text is close to a set of Ricardian Confessios that include the earliest surviving manuscripts written by another circle of London scribes who focused on deluxe Gower manuscripts now in Oxford: Corpus Christi College, MS 67; Christ Church, MS 148; and Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 609. Corpus 67 and Christ Church 148 both were written by the now-famous Scribe D, identified by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs as Guildhall scribe John Marchaunt;10 the Trevisa-Gower scribe (who produced a later Confessio, Princeton UL, MS Taylor 5, with Marchaunt, and another, Bodl., MS Bodley 693, by himself) wrote Laud 609. Although Morgan M. 690 shares no known relationship with this group of scribes, all the early flurry of Ricardian Confessio manuscripts in London share a distinctive page design, abandoning the quasi-academic layout of the early Henrician Confessios Fairfax 3 and Stafford. This change is not immediately obvious, since all of these manuscripts share a basic makeup Derek Pearsall has termed the Confessio’s ‘standard’ London style: folio leaves in quires of eight; a generous two-column layout on each page whose text runs to around 46 lines per column; a well-defined ordinatio that showcases Gower’s use of Latin headverses and levels of narrative division within the frame-tale structure; substantial decoration supporting that hierarchy, including in many cases miniatures for Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Ages of Man and for Amans kneeling before his Confessor, Genius.11 However, within this standard are two distinct categories that parallel the separate circles of production for early Confessios dedicated to Henry and dedicated to Richard. Early Henrician Confessios offer an elaborate marginal machinery for long summaries, short indexing glosses, and speaker markers that we have long assumed to be central to Gower’s intended ordinatio for his poem. Because it has been enshrined in the page layout for Macaulay’s edition and its marginal texts available without collation in the Peck/Galloway edition, students of Gower can be forgiven for thinking that this design is equally ‘standard’ across all versions of the Confessio.12 That assumption is supported by the relationship between the scribes for the early Henrician Confessio and the scribes for early copies of Cronica tripertita and the Trentham manuscript, all of which are heavy 10 L. R. Mooney and E. Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York, 2013), pp. 38–65. The original designation of ‘Scribe D’ is in Doyle and Parkes, ‘Production’. Marchaunt also wrote all or part of four other Confessio manuscripts: BL, MS Egerton 1991; Bodl., MSS Bodley 902 and Bodley 294; and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2 (with Thomas Hoccleve and another Guildhall scribe identified by Mooney as Adam Pinkhurst). 11 D. Pearsall, ‘The Manuscripts and Illustrations of Gower’s Works’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. S. Echard (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 73–98 (p. 80). 12 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. R. A. Peck, trans. A. Galloway, 3 vols., 2nd edn (Kalamazoo, 2006).

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with authorial glosses. By contrast, Morgan M. 690 has inaugurated a process, accelerated by the Confessios associated with Marchaunt and his associates, that shifts this great poem into a design far more reliant on its vernacular narratives. Morgan M. 690 is the first surviving Confessio to leave out most of the speaker markers for Amans and Genius (usually identified as ‘Confessor’); more notably, Morgan M. 690 moves most of the many summary and indexing glosses into the main text column to leave the margins clean and bare. The later Ricardian Confessios by Marchaunt and associates not only follow this design but begin to leave out many of the glosses entirely.13 Parallel transitions in Fairfax 3 and Morgan M. 690 from Confessio Book 3 to Book 4 offer a stark contrast in the handling of dialogue markers and Latin summaries. Fairfax 3 indicates the substantial dialogue between Amans and Genius that closes Book 3 using both marginal speaker markers and 1-line penwork initials in the main text, visible in both margins (Fig. 1). Morgan M. 690 replicates the initials exactly, but does not provide marginal speaker markers (Fig. 2). At other points Morgan M. 690 does occasionally provide rubricated speaker markers, but these are uncommon. Fairfax marks most heads of speech between Amans and Genius with both initials and marginal markers throughout the Confessio.14 More visibly and substantively, Fairfax 3 provides a Latin summary for the first section of Book 4 in the right margin of the b text column, a massive and consistent feature of the poem’s design across its many narratives (Fig. 1). Morgan M. 690 inserts the summary below the Latin headverses laid out to imitate those headverses; in the rest of the manuscript summaries are more regularly kept near headverses than at lesser narrative divisions, and always positioned in the main text column (Fig. 2).15 Two other important points of difference in these Henrician and Ricardian manuscripts come from the miniatures that appear in several early London Confessios. Fairfax 3 positions the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar miniature at the beginning of the manuscript to serve as a frontispiece for the Confessio as a whole, the placement typical in early Confessios dedicated to Henry (Fig. 3).16 Morgan M. 690 puts the Dream miniature 13 Also see S. Echard, ‘Glossing Gower: In Latin, in English, and in absentia: The Case of Bodleian Ashmole 35’, in Re-visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Charlotte, 1998), pp. 237–56. 14 For instance, Morgan M. 690, fol. 162ra, where a rubricated speaker marker for Amans/Confessor is centered on its own line. Some other speaker markers are scattered throughout, though not consistently. A separate hand has added marginal ‘chapter’ numbering in several places. 15 A few key passages, such as the Ages of Man description from Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (Pro. 595–624) in Morgan M. 690, fol. 5r keep both marginal summaries moved into the main column and rubricated notae in the margin. 16 Henrician manuscripts with this positioning include Stafford, BL, MS Harley 3869, and Taylor 5; probable Henrician examples with imperfect opening folia include Geneva, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 178, and Nottingham UL, WLC/LM/8. See J. Griffiths, ‘Confessio Amantis: The Poem and Its Pictures’, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 163–78. Also see J. Coleman, ‘Illuminations in Gower’s Manuscripts’, in The Routledge Companion to Gower,

FIG. 1 BODL., MS FAIRFAX 3, FOL. 62R: CONFESSIO 3.2731–2774; 4.1–40. © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

FIG. 2 MORGAN M. 690, FOL. 66R: CONFESSIO 3.2740–2774; 4.1–36. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

FIG. 3 BODL., MS FAIRFAX 3, FOL. 2R. OPENING OF CONFESSIO WITH DREAM FRONTISPIECE. © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

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a few folios in, at the head of the passage narrating the Dream (before Prol.595). The literary function of the Dream passage shifts with the miniature: rather than using the Ages of Man statue to summarise the Prologue’s social and political criticism in its entirety, and by implication the grand project of the Confessio itself, the passage on the world’s devolution remains isolated, limited, more subject to the restorative powers of love and poetry (Fig. 4).17 Furthermore, the iconography also changes dramatically from the early Henrician Dream miniature to Morgan’s later form. Fairfax 3 and the other early Henrician Confessios which include the Dream miniature position the dreaming Nebuchadnezzar as a dominant element, grounding the miniature in biblical iconography and the arc of salvation history offered by the Book of Daniel and traced by generations of exegetes.18 Morgan M. 690, and the early Ricardian Confessios after it, illustrate the Ages of Man statue alone in direct imitation of Remède de Fortune miniatures illustrating the same scene (Fig. 5).19 The miniature’s iconography is effectively detached from the biblical figures who defined and controlled its meaning in Daniel 2 along with the apocalyptic fears embedded in the criticisms of the Prologue, and aligned instead with the narrative body of the poem and the Confessio’s allegorising Ovidian humanism – whose great predecessor for Gower in vernacular poetry was Guillaume de Machaut.20 Kathleen Scott suggests that the Dream miniature in Morgan M. 690 (which she dates c. 1400) may be the work of pp. 122–3, for an updated version of Griffiths’s chart; for more art historical detail see J. Coleman, ‘Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and Confession Miniatures in Gower’s Confessio Amantis’, John Gower Society [accessed 18 May 2020]. 17 Morgan M. 690 does not contain a Confessor miniature. 18 Daniel 2.1–45. Among the authoritative commentaries are Jerome’s Commentariorum in Danielem librii III, ed. F. Glorie, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 75A (Turnholt, 1964), I.3.1–198; Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica: Liber Danielis, PL 198, 1449; and Richard of St Victor’s De eruditione hominis interioris, PL 196, 1231. Also see R. A. Peck, ‘John Gower and the Book of Daniel’, in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager, (Kalamazoo, 1989), pp. 159–87. 19 The earliest surviving example is BN, MS français 1584, fol. 53v. On this manuscript and its illustrations by the ‘innovative’ artist identified as the Machaut Master see most recently D. Leo, ‘BN ff 1584: An Art Historical Overview’, in Guillaume de Machaut, The Debate Series: Volume 1 of the Complete Works, ed. R. B. Palmer (Kalamazoo, 2016), pp. 37–45. A version of the image in the Remède with both Nebuchadnezzar and the Statue, in BN, MS français 1586, fol. 30v (with an International Style hillside much like those in Henrician Confessio examples but whose boulder hovers near the ground) probably came to England with Jean le Bon of France; see most recently Coleman, ‘Illuminations’, pp. 121–4. On these Machaut miniatures also see recently A. Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 142–72; and J. Fredell, ‘Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis’, Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995), pp. 61–93 (pp. 70–3). 20 On Gower’s relationship with Machaut’s debate poems see recently L. Burke, ‘Bohemian Gower: Confessio Amantis, Queen Anne and Machaut’s Judgment Poems’, in Machaut’s Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond, ed. R. B. Palmer and B. Kimmelman (Gainesville, 2017), pp. 192–216. For a larger perspective see A. Butterfield, ‘Confessio Amantis and the French Tradition’, in A Companion to Gower, ed. S. Echard (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 165–80.

FIG. 4 MORGAN M. 690, FOL. 4V. DREAM MINIATURE STATUE EMBEDDED IN TEXT. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

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FIG. 5 BN, MS FRANÇAIS 1584, FOL. 53V DETAIL. MACHAUT, REMÈDE DE FORTUNE. USED BY PERMISSION.

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the Carmelite-Lapworth Master (one of the greatest London decorators emerging in the 1390s and continuing into the next decade) or an associate; a striking marine blue in the background certainly resembles the unusual shade in miniatures more definitely ascribed to this hand.21 With this shift in mind, we can see a larger distinction between the designs of Ricardian and Henrician Confessios. The revising scribes for Fairfax 3, as I have noted above, were also responsible for producing Gower poems with the same sort of marginalia-heavy design. The French balade sequence Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz was copied in the Trentham anthology by the scribe who first revised Fairfax 3 (Fig. 6). Other surviving copies are attached to early Vox manuscripts from this same group of scribes, and to early Henrician Confessios.22 The first witnesses for Cronica tripertita undoubtedly appeared in the early years of Henry’s reign; all but one surviving witness were attached to early Vox manuscripts by the same set of scribes, probably close to Gower, who revised and supplemented these Vox manuscripts along with Fairfax 3.23 This group producing Henrician manuscripts, likely 21 LGM II, 28, where she identifies this limner as Hand A of the Carmelite Missal, or ‘at least [from] a common shop or training’. 22 Traitié survives in twelve manuscripts and one fragment. All but three of these witnesses follow the Confessio: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, fols. 148r–52r; Cod. Bodmer 178, fols. 182v–6r; Harley 3869, fols. 186v–90r; New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fa1, fols. 196r–9r; Nottingham UL, WLC/LM/8, fols. 201r– 3v; Fairfax 3, fols. 186r–90r; Bodley 294, fols. 197v–99v; Oxford, Wadham College, MS 13, fols. 442v–6v; and Taylor 5, fols. 187r–91r. Traitié also appears in one apparent anthology: BL, MS Additional 59495 (Trentham) fols. 34r–9r. The other two witnesses are attached to early copies of Vox: Glasgow, UL, MS Hunter 59; and Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, fols. 132r–5r. For a list including fragments and a translation see John Gower, The French Balades, ed. and trans. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, 2011), p. 21. 23 Cronica survives in five manuscripts: All Souls 98; BL, MSS Cotton Tiberius A.iv

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to be close to Gower, fostered the academic layout otherwise known from the profusely-­annotated works such as the Ovide moralisé or John of Garland’s Integumenta; a contemporary example of this strategy recovered for vernacular poetry, Christine de Pizan’s Epistre d’Othea, may also have been known in Henry’s London.24 The page design in Morgan M. 690

FIG. 6 BL, MS ADDITIONAL 59495 (TRENTHAM), FOLS. 37V–38R, TRAITIÉ. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY

and Harley 6291; MS Hunter 59; and Bodl., MS Hatton 92. In the first four manuscripts Cronica follows Vox. In Hatton 92 Cronica appears without Vox but with the prologue, prose prefaces, and explanatory notes; followed by H. aquile pullus, O recolende, Rex celi Deus and Quicquid homo scribat. Carlson argues that this text represents an earlier state of the work though the scribal hand indicates a mid fifteenth-century production date: see John Gower: Poems on Contemporary Events: The Visio Angliae (1381) and Cronica Tripertita (1400), ed. D. R. Carlson, trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 2011), p. 17. Also see J.-P. Pouzet, ‘Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts’, in John Gower, Trilingual Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition, ed. E. Dutton with J. Hines and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 11–25 (pp. 20–2); Pouzet argues that a well-informed scribe might have used a copy of Cronica originally attached to Vox and followed by the cluster of short poems and suggests the scribe may have been Roger Walle, though his documented career (1436–88) may be late for Hatton 92. 24 See further on this point J. Fredell. ‘The Gower Manuscripts: Some Inconvenient Truths’, Viator 42 (2010), 231–50 (pp. 246–50).

BOARD.

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eliminates marginalia in favor of main text columns framed luxuriously by ample negative space created by (predominantly) empty margins. This layout positions the Confessio in a tradition for English vernacular poetry found in the Vernon and Simeon anthologies shortly before 1400, and in the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman manuscripts produced in deluxe editions by Marchaunt and his associates at or after the date for Morgan M. 690.25 Its design does preserve the hard Latin of Gower’s headverses but otherwise gives primacy to the vernacular narrative without obtruding academic voices. We have not identified the main scribe of Morgan M. 690, writing all but one quire in ‘competent textualis script of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries’ according to Linne Mooney.26 We cannot, then, associate the manuscript with any scribal group at this point. Nonetheless, this manuscript is a crucial witness – in textual terms as well as in its design – for the burst of luxury Ricardian Confessios this second circle of scribes started producing around the time of Gower’s death in 1408 and continued to produce for the next decade. When this manuscript came before the London public becomes a central question, not only in terms of Gower’s career during his laureate period, but also in terms of the eventful politics of Henry IV’s first decade. Although we cannot rely on palaeography for precise dates, two features in Morgan M. 690’s decoration – miniatures and borders – establish its early status, probably before the four Ricardian Confessios by Marchaunt and the Trevisa-Gower scribe. Decoration comes after scribal production, so dating borders can be only one more piece of evidence for dating the manuscript. Nonetheless, deluxe productions like the manuscripts discussed here are more likely to be commissions in which all elements of production are coordinated within a limited time frame, so those dates are useful both for establishing a time of production and for establishing a sequence of manuscripts. Morgan M. 690’s partial borders are early and similar to those in Vernon, Simeon, and Fairfax 3.27 With manuscripts produced close to 1400 (such as Fairfax 3), Vernon and Simeon share partial bar borders whose simple bands of color extend along the margins vertically, and then terminate in simple vines at the corners, often with daisy buds as here in all three cases (Fig. 7). The bars are often club-like in their endings, and 25 Bodl., MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (Vernon) and BL, MS Additional 22283 (Simeon). Marchaunt’s illuminated manuscripts include: University of London, Senate House, MS Sterling V.88 (Piers Plowman), BL, MS Harley 7334 and Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 (Canterbury Tales); John Carpenter’s Morgan, MS M. 817 (Troilus and Criseyde); Delta’s Aberdeen UL, MS 21 and BL, MS Additional 24194 (Trevisa, Polychronicon). 26 One eight-leaf quire near the end of the manuscript is written by a separate hand and decorated in a later style. Scribe A wrote fols. 2ra–152vb and 161ra–204vb; Scribe B wrote fols. 153ra–60vb. I am grateful to Linne Mooney for sharing her entry for Morgan M. 690, which I quote here, from: L. Mooney and D. Pearsall, drawing on earlier unpublished work by J. Griffiths and K. Harris, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, 2021). 27 On the resemblance of Fairfax 3 borders to those of Vernon and Simeon see LGM II, 23.

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depend for visual drama on highlighting in white and a central band of gold that often terminates with its own club-like finial at top or bottom. What these elements anticipate is a falling-away from complexity around the turn of the century in terms of what inhabits or sprouts from the borders. By 1400 the varied leaf-forms visible throughout Vernon become a handful of standardised shapes (a trend already apparent in Simeon): abstract trefoils, thimbles, or kites; the only blossoms to be found (with rare exceptions, again already apparent in Simeon) are simple daisy buds. Even the lavish Vernon borders, in other words, anticipate the more austere kinds of design we will see in Fairfax and Stafford. A number of post-1400 features for borders in Morgan M. 690 indicate a date not long after 1400: bar corners become leaf roundels; thick and slightly wavy vines extend beyond boundaries set up by the text blocks, a feature of London border work around 1405; simple, sparse leaves sprout

FIG. 7 LEFT: BODL., MS ENG. POET. A. 1 (VERNON), FOL. 117RA DETAIL – HAND D; MIDDLE: BL, MS ADDITIONAL 22283 (SIMEON), FOL. 52RA DETAIL – HAND A; RIGHT: BODL., MS FAIRFAX 3, FOL. 2R DETAIL, C. 1400. © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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off the vines and the bar itself; vines on the border bar that had been dense with leaves become, by 1405, sparsely populated with occasional leaves from which gold balls with pen squiggles and other motifs spring; gold spikes emerging between leaves on bars, a standard feature of illuminated borders in the late fourteenth century, disappear by 1405, leaving more rounded gold forms that often simply described a semicircle under arching leaf roundels (Figs. 8 and 9). As Kathleen Scott has pointed out, for manuscript borders ‘the most fundamental change … is a movement from rigid, straight, and attached designs to curling, circular, and dissociated designs’. Stiffer bar frames with rigid details, persisting through around 1400, give way gradually to curving border frames with softer curling details that develop rapidly in the first two decades of the fifteenth century.28 BL, MS Harley 2946 provides a comparable example, dated 1405 by its scribe and likely to be from London. A breviary and psalter, its borders exemplify this new simplicity and use of restrained corner roundels (Fig. 10).29 On the bars only a few leaves and gold balls occur, while roundels at the corners show a profusion of leaves extending from a single vine-like stem with no gestures toward interlace or any other forms of corner medallions found in older styles, as in Stafford’s or Hengwrt’s interlace medallions on the full bar border on the first folio. In the three earliest Confessios written by Marchaunt and his associates the border decorations date these manuscripts probably after 1405 but unlikely to be after 1410: whorl-like leaf roundels at the corners and on the bars sketched in relief with white highlighting, increasing use of thin vines curling off the bars, and mitten leaves. Corpus Christi 67, a Ricardian Confessio written entirely by John Marchaunt, has borders with features emerging in London by 1408: the colored vines coming off border bars recede back towards their origins in a pool of gold ground, using thin penwork sprays to extend the borders (Fig. 11). Another Ricardian Confessio written by Marchaunt from this same period, Christ Church 148, has very similar features by a different border hand; this decorator adds a collar at the top of the central vine, a detail that will become commonplace in London borders after 1410 (Fig. 12). In the period after 1410 we know quite a bit about dating London borders thanks to datable deluxe London manuscripts such as BL, MS Arundel 38, a presentation copy of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. After 1410 two border features begin to appear in London: a trumpet-like flower form, often with sprays originating out of its bell, and green wash on pen squiggles extending from gold balls, leaves, vines, and other elements.30 These 28 Kathleen L. Scott, Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders c. 1395–1499 (London, 2002), pp. 8–9. 29 Also see Scott, Dated and Datable, p. 34; and the catalogue entry and reproductions on the BL’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts [accessed 18 May 2020]. 30 Scott, Dated and Datable, pp. 42–3. Scott’s observation that green wash in London borders begins c. 1410 has been confirmed in my observations by other datable border

FIG. 8 MORGAN M. 690, FOL. 25R DETAIL. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

FIG. 9 SAN MARINO, HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, MS EL 26.A.17 (STAFFORD), FOL. 113R DETAIL. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CA.

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FIG. 10 BL, MS HARLEY 2946, FOL. 244R DETAIL. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

FIG. 11 OXFORD, CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, MS 67, FOL. 2R DETAIL. BY PERMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.

features appear in two more manuscripts written by John Marchaunt: the Ricardian Confessio and the Canterbury Tales in, respectively, BL, MSS Egerton 1991 and Harley 7334 (Fig. 13). Although I will not go through elements in a wide number of hands and manuscript contexts. Further work is needed, nonetheless, to extend Scott’s analysis to a larger sample for London and for areas outside London. Green wash in northern borders, for instance, appears in manuscripts reliably dated earlier than 1410; see J. Fredell, ‘The Pearl-Poet Manuscript in York’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014), 1–39 (p. 17).

FIG. 12 OXFORD, CHRIST CHURCH, MS 148, FOL. 26V DETAIL. BY PERMISSION OF THE GOVERNING BODY OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.

FIG. 13 LEFT: BL, MS EGERTON 1991, FOL. 142V DETAIL; RIGHT: BL, MS HARLEY 7334, FOL. 1R DETAIL. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

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the rest of the evidence in detail here, the rest of the Confessios from Marchaunt and his associates have decorations that fall into this period as well.31 Later, around 1416, spray borders originating entirely from a large illuminated initial began to appear at major divisions, largely replacing bar designs;32 added to the trumpet flower and green wash are acanthus leaves that will come to dominate London border designs in the period (Fig. 14). In practical terms these border features allow some initial rough dating of Confessios produced in London in a period around 1400 to 1405 (the Henrician Fairfax 3 and Stafford), another period closer to 1405 (Morgan M. 690); 1405 to 1410 (Marchaunt’s Christ Church 148 and Corpus Christi 67); 1410 to 1416 (Marchaunt’s Egerton 1991 and the bulk of the Ricardian Confessios), and after 1416 (the Petworth scribe’s Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307 and two manuscripts by the Gower III scribe: Glasgow UL, MS Hunter 7 and Morgan, MS M. 125). There remains the question whether Morgan M. 690 is the first Ricardian Confessio, emerging into public view during the first five years of Henry IV’s rule and a period when Gower was still an active poet. The question may seem insoluble given the missing dedications at beginning and end of the manuscript. Although Morgan M. 690 can simply be called imperfect at beginning and end, a typical victim of time if not politics, the quire structure at the end of the manuscript (two quires of four, one of which includes a sewn-in singleton) indicates that the scribe intended to end the poem where the text now ends: after Amans/Gower negotiates his final deal with Venus, a closing strategy that avoids any problems that might come with the choice between Ricardian and Henrician dedications in a time when the Lancastrians were battling for legitimacy and stability. The text concludes on the verso of the final surviving folio at the very bottom of the b column, and so looks like the text is meant to continue on following folia now lost (Fig. 15). However, both the gatherings and the text itself tell a different story. After setting up twenty-six standard quires of eight across the entire manuscript, the producer of Morgan M. 690 organised the final two quires very differently: a quire of three with a sewn-in singleton followed by a quire of four. This arrangement seems to position the more vulnerable gathering with the sewn-in singleton inside the two bifolia that would hold their intended outer position more securely (Fig. 16). Scribes set up such arrangements to accommodate irregular amounts of text, such as at a poem’s end; they do not insert these kinds of quire complications for no reason. Also, if we look at the actual text at the end of Morgan M. 690, it does a remarkably good job of ending the poem without the political complications of the concluding dedication passage. On this last folio close to the end of Book 8 Gower the Lover has come out of his swoon bereft of love’s 31 32

On these manuscripts I hope to provide full analysis in a forthcoming book. Scott, Dated and Datable, p. 11.

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rage, and Venus tells him it’s time to leave her court. Gower the Lover agrees, but asks for absolution from Genius, his Confessor throughout the poem. Genius obligingly grants him absolution, and Gower the Lover ends his business both with Genius and Venus: My holy fader graunt mercy Quod I to him & to þe qweene I fel on kneus upon þe greene And toke my leve forto wende. (8.2898–2901)

Gower the Lover wends his way in this final line, and Morgan M. 690 concludes in a perfectly believable finale. This passage does leave the second line of a rhyming couplet hanging, and its position at the end of the folio may feel suspicious in its perfect spacing. Nonetheless, this passage works as a closing strategy that avoids any problems that might come with the choice between Ricardian and Henrician dedications in a time when the Lancastrians were battling for legitimacy and stability. We cannot know what ending the Morgan M. 690 scribe might have seen in exemplars, but we do know that the next cluster of Guildhall manuscripts whose decorations are likely to date from c. 1405 to c. 1410 – that is, only a few years later and possibly within Gower’s lifetime – do choose to incorporate the Ricardian dedications at the beginning and end of the Confessio; we also know that these next Confessios are very closely related to Morgan M. 690 in text, ordinatio, and the iconography of the

FIG. 14 CAMBRIDGE, PEMBROKE COLLEGE, MS 307, FOL. 49R DETAIL. BY PERMISSION OF THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

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FIG. 15 MORGAN M. 690, FOL. 204V DETAIL. FINAL LINES OF THE CONFESSIO. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM.

FIG. 16 QUIRE STRUCTURE AT THE END OF MORGAN M. 690.

Dream Statue miniature. One crucial and, at present, unanswerable question is what the textual source for these dedications was for the Guildhall coterie Confessios. The most likely scenario is that there were Ricardian versions of the Confessio available in London outside the control of Gower (or representatives of the Lancastrian government). If so, Morgan M. 690 may represent an early stage of a movement to reproduce Ricardian literature separate from Gower’s efforts to control his own canon, and from the efforts of that group of scribes revising manuscripts. The ending of Morgan M. 690, and its startling shifts from academic to vernacular in presenting the poem, argue that the Confessio went through its own battle

THE FIRST EMERGENCE OF THE RICARDIAN CONFESSIO: MORGAN M. 690

for legitimacy and stability in Lancastrian England from its first public emergence. Morgan M. 690 is one more reminder that we need to view the Confessio through the ‘late state’ model: charting the political valences of Gower’s poem in its public forms, particularly those created for the elites like the sons of Henry IV. Their political fortunes seem profoundly interwoven with the early waves of deluxe manuscripts celebrating Middle English literature. If we can date the Gower manuscripts with more precision at all we may hope to chart the unfolding importance of the Ricardian Confessio against the major signposts of Henry IV’s reign: the years after 1399 when the Confessio first emerges; 1406, the year of Henry’s health collapse that prompted a Council led by Prince Henry, Archbishop Thomas Arundel, and Sir John Tiptoft, and inaugurating Arundel’s reassumption of the role of Lord Chancellor in 1407–10; also around the time of the first Guildhall Ricardian cluster, along with the Ellesmere and Harley 7334 Canterbury Tales. Or 1410, the year Arundel gives up his post, Prince Henry becomes effective ruler, and Thomas Chaucer is returned as Speaker of Parliament for two years and becomes a major player at the highest level. Or, of course 1413, when Henry V is crowned and brings Richard II to Westminster Abbey. This five-year stretch includes a massive number of deluxe literary manuscripts, particularly favoring Gower and Trevisa. Then again, in this period scribe Marchaunt goes in strange new directions for the Confessio with Bodley 294 and Taylor 5. All in all, the work to be done on the Confessio now needs to take into account the actual public life of the poem, for which we have an astonishingly rich body of evidence in these many early manuscripts with so much evidence for dating and for associations among the flourishing powerbrokers of the London book trade.

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he majority of Linne Mooney’s research has been concerned with textual production in England in the mid fifteenth century. Although her interest has increasingly been drawn to scribes and the environments in which they copied texts (most recently the networks centred on the London Guildhall), many of her earlier research ventures focussed more squarely on texts themselves. These were often the kinds of texts that had received little attention from literary scholars. One genre of late medieval literature that she has helped to define is that of didactic writing, a capacious and still under-studied area that encompasses not just works of science and information as categorised by George Keiser but also persuasive and instructional texts from across many fields.1 Linne Mooney’s contributions to this broad area have been of various kinds, beginning with her 1981 thesis and including published editions of texts such as The Seven Liberal Arts and John Somer’s Kalendarium.2 Another edition, of a text that belongs to the subgenre of literary propaganda, appeared as an appendix to an important article ‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England” and 1 G. R. Keiser, ‘Works of Science and Information’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. A. E. Hartung, vol. 10 (New Haven, CT, 1998). 2 L. R. Mooney, ‘Practical Didactic Works in Middle English: Edition and Analysis of the Class of Short Middle English Works Containing Useful Information’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1981); ‘The Seven Liberal Arts’, in Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ, 2006), II, 701–36; The Kalendarium of John Somer (Athens, GA, 1998). See also the discussion in the Introduction above, pp. 6–7.

THE ANONYMOUS ‘KINGS OF ENGLAND’

Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’ published in 1989.3 In this assessment of the two works Linne Mooney established that the anonymous poem was entirely separate from Lydgate’s poem and recorded the then known copies of both texts. In the present essay I will extend that account of witnesses to include one more copy of Lydgate’s poem and several more recently discovered copies of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’. I will also argue that the augmented list of witnesses for the anonymous poem, and the material form of those witnesses, reinforce conclusions about the work’s reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and deepen understanding of the circumstances of its production. Prior to Linne Mooney’s 1989 article these two Middle English poems were largely available to scholars through MacCracken’s edition of John Lydgate’s shorter poems.4 MacCracken presented both poems together under a single heading: ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror (with a Popular Redaction)’. Thus described the poem sits amongst other ‘Didactic Poems’ along with others such as ‘A Dietary’ and Stans puer ad mensam. Evidently MacCracken regarded the two poems about England’s regnal history as informative pieces rather than as instruments of political propaganda since he chose not to place them in the different section dedicated to ‘Political Poems’ where works such as ‘The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI’ appear. Yet the editorial presentation of ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror’ was far from satisfactory. In MacCracken’s attempt to rationalise several similar versified histories of the medieval English kings he assumed, either innocently or for the purposes of convenience as he sought to establish the canon of Lydgate’s works, that all stemmed from the same source. His edition presents the different versions as a single poem written and then revised and extended by Lydgate, and subsequently imitated by a later redactor. The three different pieces are therefore arranged as if they were essentially one item. The revision or extended version comes first, on pp. 710–16, as ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror (A Revised Version, with stanzas also for Earlier Kings)’, beginning: ‘Froom tyme of Brute, auctours do specefye, / Two hundrid & fowr & twenty be succession’. MacCracken edited this version from BL, MS Harley 372. Within it the more usual opening of the poem occurs as the first lines of stanza 16: ‘This myghti William Duk of Normandie / As bookis olde make mencion’ (at p. 713). The whole poem (that is, the revised version in BL, MS Harley 372) is presented as thirty stanzas in rhyme royal, though the section from William the Conqueror onwards (the part that actually reflects Viator 20 (1989), 255–89. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II: Secular Poems, ed. H. N. MacCracken, EETS OS 192 (London, 1934), pp. 717–22. The text of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ had also been published in the eighteenth century by Thomas Hearne, Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle Transcribed, and Now First Published, from a MS. in the Harleian Library, 2 vols. (London, 1724), II, 585–95. 3

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MacCracken’s chosen title), consists of only fifteen stanzas. Then on pp. 717–22, as ‘Part II’, MacCracken presented the third piece with a qualified heading set in editorial brackets ‘[A Later Redaction of the Same, by another hand]’. This version is edited from Bodl., MS Additional E. 7, and begins: ‘The mighty William, Duk of Normandy / By iust tale and by his cheualry’. It consists of sixteen stanzas of irregular length, set in rhyming couplets. In a discipline where it has long been traditional to identify and refer to poems by their opening lines as much as by their titles, MacCracken unhelpfully confused perception of the precise form of Lydgate’s ‘Kings of England’ and left the other anonymous version, which has a very similar opening line, without a proper title. This confusion was perpetuated by the major twentieth-century reference works for Middle English poetic texts. The Index of Middle English Verse, published in 1943, listed Lydgate’s poem as no. 3632 with cross references to the ‘variant texts’ of no. 882 (actually MacCracken’s revised version ‘Froom tyme of Brute’) and no. 3431 (described as a later redaction of no. 3632); none of these entries referred the reader to no. 444 which recorded four copies of a poem beginning ‘At Westm. Wyllyam j-crovnyd was’.5 The later Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse (1965), connected no. 444 to the other entries, deleted no. 3431, and revised the list of manuscript witnesses to all three texts.6 The publication of Linne Mooney’s article in 1989 did the important service of disentangling the two poems from each other as well as noting some further metrical accounts of England’s medieval kings that either derived from them or were more loosely inspired by them. Appendices to the article, as well as presenting an edition of the anonymous poem, also quantified the extant witnesses to both it and Lydgate’s poem. The number of recorded manuscripts of Lydgate’s poem has increased slightly since then to thirty-five.7 To these I can add one more, a hitherto unrecorded copy at Lancashire Record Office where it is part of the Hawkshead-Talbot of Chorley collection, misleadingly catalogued under the heading ‘Copy Documents’ (defined as ‘documents copied by school children for handwriting practice’).8 Written by a trained fifteenth-century secretary hand that has an upright duct this copy of Lydgate’s poem begins imperfectly in the stanza about William Rufus (‘… sand for huntyng / xiij … his crou. in dede /’, equivalent to lines 117–18 in MacCracken’s edition) due to The Index of Middle English Verse, ed. C. Brown and R. H. Robbins (New York, 1943). Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse, ed. C. Brown and R. H. Robbins (Lexington, 1965). 7 Listed as NIMEV 882 and DIMEV 1472 (the revised/longer version) and NIMEV 3632 and DIMEV 5731 (the fifteen stanza-version); see also DIMEV 3158. Each reference work treats variant versions and later transcripts differently, and each list has some omissions and errors, but collectively they record a total of thirty-five copies. 8 Lancashire Record Office, DDHK/11/3/1 ‘Verse commemorating the reigns of the Kings of England from Henry I to Henry VI’. 5

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damage to the upper part of the writing support which seems to be paper.9 The value of this copy is rather greater than its status as the thirty-sixth recorded manuscript witness to Lydgate’s poem because to my knowledge this is the only copy that preserves the poem in roll rather than codex format; the significance of this format will be returned to later in connection with the anonymous verse chronicle.10 In 1989 Linne Mooney listed fourteen manuscripts of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ and noted two further copies that had come to light at too late a stage for her to investigate them. The number of copies of the poem now recorded in the New Index of Middle English Verse and the Digital Index of Middle English Verse is eighteen, but since their two listings are not identical the total number of copies they collectively record is actually nineteen.11 To these I can add two more, bringing the number of known witnesses to twenty-one. These are: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

D1 B2 R2 Cj1 Cj2 H1 H5 S1 Ar A2 Do Ba He Sp Y

16

Tk1

Bodl., MS Digby 186, fols. 49v–63v Bodl., MS Bodley 131, fols. 140v–4r Bodl., MS Rawl. C. 86, fols. 187r–9r BL, MS Cotton Julius D.viii, fols. 27r–31v BL, MS Cotton Julius E.iv, fols. 2r–9r BL, MS Harley 78, fols. 69v–72r BL, MS Harley 4205, fols. 1r–8r BL, MS Sloane 1986, fols. 103–10v London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 58, fols. 335v–42v Bodl., Ashmole Rolls 21 Bodl., MS Douce g. 2 Bodl., MS Additional E. 7 Hertford, Hertfordshire Archives, MS Ref. 15857A12 New York, Public Library, MS Spencer 19313 New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn a14 New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 3514

9 Due to Covid restrictions in 2020–21 I have not been able to see the original and have worked solely from images, so my conclusions about its material nature should be regarded as provisional. 10 For more detail about Lancashire Record Office, DDHK/11/3/1 see M. Connolly, ‘An Unrecorded Copy of John Lydgate’s Verses on the Kings of England in Lancashire Record Office and an Updated List of Witnesses to the Poem’, Journal of the Early Book Society 24 (2022), forthcoming. 11 J. Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London, 2005), no. 444; The DIMEV: an Open Access Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse, ed. L. R. Mooney, D. Mosser et al. [accessed 11 July 2020], no. 727. NIMEV omits Tk1 and marks Y (a hybrid) for deletion; DIMEV omits N. I have retained the sigla Mooney gave to the manuscripts she knew (nos. 1–14) and assigned my own to the remainder. 12 Not Hereford as given in NIMEV. 13 Phillipps MS 26448, sold at Sotheby’s 21 November 1972, lot 556. 14 Sold at Sotheby’s 5 December 1978, lot 40.

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17

Tk2

18 19 20 21

W N So St

New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 5215 Aylesford, Earl of Aylesford, Warwick CRO, MS Z 15516 Northallerton, North Yorkshire CRO, MS ZDV V 55 Somerset, Somerset Heritage Centre, MS DD/SF/18/2/3 St Andrews, University of St Andrews, MS 38660

The last two are not included in any current listing and are therefore largely invisible to scholars. One of the differences that Linne Mooney noted between the anonymous verse chronicle and Lydgate’s poem was in terms of reception. She observed that whilst Lydgate’s poem reached a broad range of professional and gentry readers, the readership of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ seemed to be monastic and aristocratic, and she noted four copies that could be linked with monastic houses: D1 with the Cistercian priory of Stanlaw, near Chester; Cj1 with the Benedictine nunnery of Barking; B2 with either the Austin friars in York or the Carmelite friars in Scarborough; and R2 with the Cluniac priory and abbey of St Saviour in Bermondsey, Surrey.17 This pattern of circulation amongst religious establishments is confirmed by two of the copies, N and St, that have come to light since the 1980s, and as these manuscripts are not widely known I will describe both briefly here. The Northallerton manuscript (N) is connected with the secular college of Sibthorpe in Nottinghamshire.18 Sibthorpe was founded as a chantry in 1324 but was augmented by a series of grants so that by 1349 it was a secular college consisting of nine chaplains and three clerks; the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1534 recorded its clear value as £25 18s 8d and the warden at that time, Thomas Magnus, was still in place in 1545 when the college was dissolved and was granted all its properties for life. The manuscript, which consists of four membranes stitched together, is an account roll; the poem is written on the dorse, its rough presentation indicating that it was a later addition perhaps prompted by the desire to preserve the textual contents of another damaged copy. The opening stanza describing William the Conqueror’s reign is entirely omitted, though space is left blank to accommodate it, showing that the scribe did not have access to this portion of the text at the time of writing but hoped to supply it later. The opening section of the poem is imperfect in many extant roll copies due to its vulnerable placement at the uppermost part of the first membrane, Sold at Sotheby’s 24 June 1980, lot 42. The property of the Earl of Aylesford of Packington Hall and partially in the public domain through the deposit of microfilm copies at Warwick County Record Office and at Coventry Archives. 17 Mooney, ‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England”’, p. 272 n. 42. 18 Northallerton, North Yorkshire CRO, ZDV V 55, part of the estate and manorial records section of the Fauconberg (Belasyse) of Newburgh Priory collection. 15

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an area often damaged by handling and particularly by the methods used to fix the roll open for display. Nevertheless the Northallerton roll offers a pen-sketched illustration of William I within a roundel. William stands in familiar pose, his right hand holding a sceptre, his elaborate crown extending to the very edges of the roundel and his body set on an approximation of a grassy mound; his name is written around the lower part of his body. This is this scribe’s only attempt to illustrate any of the kings and it clearly derives from a knowledge of the style of kingly representation used in other roll copies of the poem. The hand of the majority of the text is an untidy secretary hand that struggles with capital forms. Occasional sections appear to have been contributed by more trained hands: the stanza on Henry II is more confidently written with more ligatures and initial capitals that have traces of skeletal decoration, and on the third membrane the names within the roundels for Edward III and his offspring are written by a neater hand with a more upright duct. The St Andrews manuscript (St) was owned by the Gilbertine double house of monks and nuns at Watton, seven miles north of Beverley in East Yorkshire. This manuscript is also a roll, at the head of which is a very faded and damaged inscription that reads ‘Dominus Willelmus Cayton prior de Wattonis’. William Cayton was prior at Watton in the 1470s and may have been in that position since before 1455 though the only secure mentions of him are later.19 In 1472 he was granted a general pardon by Edward IV though the record of this gives his name as William ‘Geyton’ (either a homophonic mistake or more likely a mistranscription that confused the similar capital forms ‘C’ and ‘G’); this was presumably in connection with events surrounding the readeption of Henry VI and Edward’s regaining of the throne in 1471.20 In 1473 Cayton was admitted to the Corpus Christi Guild in York, but by 1482 he had been succeeded as prior by James Bolton and so was presumably dead by that date.21 His roll copy of the poem now consists of two membranes pinned together; there are no indications that they were ever stitched. The text now ends imperfectly after the stanza for Richard II and the roundel illustration of Henry IV, but originally continued onto a third membrane that has been lost. The manuscript has no historic affiliation with St Andrews; it was deposited at the university in 2003, and later gifted to the institution, having come to light during a house clearance in Scarborough.22 It was discovered along 19 The prior’s name in 1455 is given only as ‘William’ so perhaps the same, see A History of the County of York, vol. 3, Victoria County History (London, 1974), pp. 254–5, and W. P. Baildon, Notes on the Religious and Secular Houses of Yorkshire, vol. 1, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 17 (London, 1875), p. 215. 20 Baildon, Notes, p. 220. 21 The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, ed. R. H. Skaife, Publications of the Surtees Society 57 (Durham, 1872), p. 86. 22 I know the circumstances of this donation but respect the donor’s wish to remain anonymous.

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with two other items: a bundle of eleven documents related to properties in the Isle of Axholme and its environs with dates spanning 1569–1683, now at the Lincolnshire Record Office; and a set of ordinances for the Beverley butchers’ guild dated 22 July 1658, now at the East Riding Record Office.23 There is no apparent or indeed necessary connection between the roll and the other documents, but their survival together does seem to indicate a long and unbroken presence in East Yorkshire. The evidence of these two copies of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ aligns with previous conclusions about the type of environment in which the poem circulated, but also introduces a difference in our understanding of how contemporary readers encountered the text. That difference is one of material form. The copies previously connected with monastic houses were all manuscript books whereas N and St are both rolls, and in fact all the more recently discovered manuscripts of the poem are in roll format. In Linne Mooney’s original list of fourteen manuscripts there were nine codices and five rolls, but in the current list of twenty-one manuscripts there are nine codices and twelve rolls; this constitutes a considerable shift in the material nature of the corpus of evidence. Notwithstanding Michael Sargent’s question ‘What do the numbers mean?’, which is an important reminder of the danger of relying too heavily on accidents of survival and the complexities inherent in interpreting such data, this revised configuration where rolls represent the majority of extant witnesses prompts new lines of enquiry related to both reception and production.24 Two questions suggest themselves. Firstly, is the larger number of rolls reflective of the way that the poem habitually circulated in the fifteenth century? And secondly, was this text purposefully designed for presentation in roll rather than codex format? These aspects may not have received much critical attention in the past precisely because the roll is a physical format that is comparatively unusual to readers and researchers alike. Modern readers are thoroughly conditioned to associate poems with books, and researchers, especially literary 23 The Axholme documents (some in Latin, others in English), consist of five sales of property with feoffment, a lease, a quitclaim, a bond, a will, and two inquisitions post mortem; they are catalogued as Misc Don 1774/1–11, see [accessed 7 July 2020]. The Beverley Butchers’ Guild ordinances include statutes relating to the election of wardens, stewards, and their duties, penalties for not taking office, penalty for abusing the warden or steward or any brother, penalty for buying and selling live cattle, penalty for trading as a tanner while still a butcher, order that no butcher be made a freeman before he is a brother, order for contribution of money to the guild and order for payments to the poor; East Riding Record Office, DDX1904/1, see [accessed 11 July 2020]. 24 M. G. Sargent, ‘What do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. M. Connolly and L. R. Mooney (York, 2008), pp. 205–44.

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researchers, are generally much more familiar with medieval manuscript books than with rolls. Although rolls are habitually encountered in some subject areas these are not the same areas regularly frequented by literary specialists. The roll was the typical form employed in the long history of the composition of genealogies in Latin and Anglo-Norman, probably because it offered a layout that effectively conveyed a sense of historical continuity and succession, and also because the format’s easy extendibility made it uniquely suited to accommodating long texts which might need to be supplemented and whose contents might need to be seen in their entirety. An equally important factor was the inherent authority that the roll format suggested: because rolls were routinely used for official record-keeping the physical form itself could convey a sense of veracity and importance.25 In combination these aspects – convenience of layout and the semblance of authority – made the roll a powerful form to use for official propaganda. A more holistic consideration of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ reveals this intimate relationship of form and function more clearly, but only if we transcend our entrenched and instinctive tendency to regard it as an English poem that naturally belongs in a book, and instead pay closer attention to those copies that were produced as rolls. Interrogating texts in their manuscript contexts has been the mantra of Middle English studies for the last forty years, but actual access to texts is necessarily mostly via modern editions. A critical scholarly edition is a thing of lasting value, but editions also perforce detach texts from their physical contexts. In this regard it is interesting to note that although both MacCracken’s and Mooney’s editions of the poem were actually based on copies of the text that were found in rolls (Bodl., Additional E. 7 and Bodl., Ashmole Rolls 21 respectively), that material heritage barely registers with the reader because it is obscured by the natural constraints of the critical edition and the layout of the modern printed page. The aspect of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ that suffers most from the standard conventions of layout and presentation employed by modern editors is its tripartite nature which in the critical edition is rendered largely invisible. The twelve roll copies of the poem are by no means identical, but most are laid out in a similar fashion in order to accommodate three different components, one visual and two textual (Fig. 1). The visual component shows the line of succession of the English kings from William the Conqueror to Henry VI, and is usually conveyed by a series of roundels of varying sizes joined together with angled lines; illustrations 25 For a useful overview see P. Robinson, ‘The Format of Books: Books, Booklets and Rolls’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, II: 1100–1400, ed. N. J. Morgan and R. M. Thomson (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 41–54 (pp. 43–6). See also Simon Walker’s comments on genealogical roll chronicles in the posthumously published ‘Remembering Richard: History and Memory in Lancastrian England’, in Political Culture in Later Medieval England: Essays by Simon Walker, ed. M. J. Braddick and G. L. Harriss (Manchester, 2006), pp. 183–97 (pp. 191–2).

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of the kings are contained within the larger roundels and the names of their offspring within the smaller ones. This type of graphic layout was traditional and had been used in Latin and Anglo-Norman genealogical royal chronicles produced in England since the late thirteenth century.26 The diagrammatic scheme fits around the second component, the Middle English text which is usually set centrally down the middle of the roll, with the stanza that describes each king placed immediately below his roundel illustration. The third component is the Latin text which consists of a series of statements of unequal length that give more information about most of the fifteen kings and their reigns.27 These Latin statements are accommodated either to the right or left of the roundels, and their off-centre location gives them the appearance of marginal additions; if only one or two rolls existed it would be easy to misinterpret these Latin sections as ad hoc annotations, especially since in some instances other Latin text has been added.28 This regular Latin text is always written by the hand of the main scribe, and its repeated occurrence across most of the rolls demonstrates that it is not an accretive series of notes or glosses but rather an integral element of the work as it was originally conceived. E. A. Jones has identified the source of the Latin notes as the Tabula cronicarum Regum Anglie, and has also shown that this work, which survives uniquely in Oxford, St John’s College, MS 209, is the source of the Middle English text as well, further demonstrating the intimate relationship between these elements of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’.29 Regardless of intention variation occurs in execution, and not all of the surviving rolls preserve all three elements to the same extent. The requirement to provide illustrations of the kings was interpreted differently, perhaps in response to constraints of time or resources, or because of lack of artistic competence. Sometimes the roundels contain full length portraits, as in A2, He, St, and So, and N also makes a single attempt at such a portrait for William I; as discussed below the use of colour in these portraits varies, with some examples only sketched in pen. Some 26 See D. Skemer, ‘Frater Richard Bury’s Roll: Ownership and Use of an Early Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England’, in English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol. 17: English Manuscripts before 1400, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and O. Da Rold (London, 2012), pp. 60–106. Illustrated examples of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century genealogical rolls of the English kings may be seen in Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, ed. S. McKendrick, J. Lowden, and K. Doyle (London, 2011), pp. 344–7 (nos. 117, 118). For a list of manuscripts of Anglo-Norman genealogical chronicles see R. J. Dean and M. B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London, 1999), pp. 7–10. 27 There are no entries for the earliest kings, William I and II, nor for Richard I, but conversely some kings (Henry II, Edward III, Richard II, Henry VI) have more than one Latin section or paragraph. 28 He, for example, has both the regular Latin commentary in the hand of the main scribe and additional Latin text added by a later hand. 29 E. A. Jones, ‘A Source for the Anonymous “Kings of England”’, Notes and Queries 56.2 (2009), 194–7.

FIG. 1 ST ANDREWS MS 38660, SECTION SHOWING HENRY III AND EDWARD I. COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS LIBRARY.

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codex copies of the poem also contain full portraits which are considerably more elaborate than the ones in the roll copies, but the manuscripts in question, Cj2, H5, and Ar, are all deluxe books. Exceptionally the roundels in Sp contain pen-drawn head and shoulders portraits only, a style that was familiar from other genealogical rolls such as Richard Bury’s roll in Princeton MS 57.30 Other roll copies provide crowns and name labels rather than king portraits.31 In Tk2 these are elaborate gem-studded yellow crowns set within roundels against a contrasting blue-filled background.32 Do and Ba have pen-drawn crowns instead of roundels for the kings; in Do the crowns are washed with yellow and the kings’ names are written in red ink, and the smaller roundels and simple connecting lines are also in red; in Ba the crowns are smaller and less elaborate, and only faint penned lines make connections between the kings’ names and those of their offspring, the latter simply boxed in rather than being set in roundels. Tk1 has no crowns and populates both large and small roundels only with simply written names but the outlines of the larger roundels and the connecting lines are in red and decorated with different geometric patterns.33 Simpler still is W which is well-spaced out, with boxes rather than roundels, and with only a single elaborate crown drawn at the head of the poem.34 And one roll, Yale, Osborn a14 (Y), has no illustration at all: it presents just the Middle English text, in a shortened version topped and tailed with stanzas from Lydgate’s poem.35 Although the generous spaces left between stanzas and to either side of the text suggest knowledge of the other elements and an aspiration to supply them, there are no vestiges of any diagrammatic scheme, no illustrative detail (not even coloured capitals), and no Latin text either. Three of the rolls (Y, Ba, Do) do not contain any Latin text at all, and the nine rolls that do contain the Latin text preserve it in differing 30 Illustrated in Skemer, ‘Frater Richard Bury’s Roll’, p. 61. Digital images of Sp are available at [accessed 12 July 2020]. 31 Codex copies that adopt this model are B2, R2, Cj1. 32 Digital images of Tk2 are available at [accessed 12 July 2020]. 33 Digital images of Tk1 are available at [accessed 12 July 2020]. 34 This roll is only currently accessible via black and white microfilm copies and the only published description of the manuscript likewise relied on photocopies, see C. Louis, ‘A Yorkist Genealogical Chronicle in Middle English Verse’, Anglia 109 (1991), 1–20 (pp. 2–6). I am grateful to the owner, the Earl of Aylesford, for confirming that colour is present on the roll (private communication 1 July 2020). 35 Textually Y is like B2 and Ba; two other manuscripts, Do and R2, also introduce elements from Lydgate’s version to the opening and closing stanzas, using a different method of combination, and the opening stanza of Cj2 also contains lines from Lydgate. Three of these various miscegenated versions are rolls (YBaDo) and three are codices (B2R2Cj2). For digital images of Y see: [accessed 8 July 2020].

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measures. Sp has the largest amount of Latin and is the only roll to offer Latin commentaries on every king, including the very earliest ones; the commentaries are also lengthier than those in the other rolls, and more prominently presented in red ink. The producer of this roll was clearly working to a different agenda in combining the text of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ with the pedigree of the Sudeley family and some of its additional Latin sections which contain references to Winchcombe, Berkeley and Gloucester could be explained as points of local interest; for the most part though its Latin sections offer fuller accounts of national history, suggesting that the compiler was blending information from a number of sources.36 This copy aside, the largest amount of Latin text is preserved in Tk2 which has statements on all but three kings (Henry I, Richard II, and Henry VI) and the least amount of Latin is offered by A2 which nevertheless has commentaries relating to nine of the kings. If allowance is made for the two rolls which now contain shorter amounts of the overall work because of the casual loss of membranes (St and Tk1) then all the remaining rolls may be regarded as having essentially the same core Latin commentary to more or less the same degree, albeit each with different individual omissions. In contrast amongst the nine copies of the poem in codex format only Ar preserves the full Latin commentary and Cj1 has some notes; Cj2 has longer Latin notes added in the sixteenth century, and H5 has a quite different set of Latin notes that offer information about the kings’ marriages.37 The tripartite composition of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ is therefore apparent across the whole of its textual tradition but is most clearly evidenced by the roll copies. Within these there are many individual variations and anomalies, but a comparison of the three most similar ones reveals a coherence of textual and visual aspects that suggests an organised programme of production. The appearance of St Andrews MS 38660 is remarkably similar to that of Bodl. Ashmole Rolls 21 (Fig. 2).38 These two witnesses share the same diagrammatic layout, the same scheme of 36 For a translation and commentary on the Latin text in Sp see D. Winkless, ‘Medieval Sudeley Part 2: The 15th Century Roll Chronicle of the Kings of England, with the Sudeley and Boteler Pedigree. The Latin Text and the Roundels’, Family History: The Journal of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies 10 (1977), 21–39; in the same issue the previous article by Lord Sudeley gives an account of the family’s history, see ‘Mediaeval Sudeley Part I: The Sudeleys and Botelers of Sudeley Castle’, 9–20. 37 H5 is fully digitised at and a single image from Cj2 may be seen at [accessed 20 July 2020]. Mooney, ‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England”’ (p. 289) notes that H1 has Middle English prose notes that translate the Latin content. 38 When I first saw images of A2, as part of a presentation by Alex Franklin at the Early Book Society conference in Oxford, July 2015, I mistook it for the St Andrews manuscript. For brief discussion of A2 and Ba see D. Wakelin, Designing English: Early Literature on the Page (Oxford, 2018), pp. 67–70.

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large and small roundels linked by doubled lines, and the same portraits of kings, all identically conceived in terms of their full body profiles, their ermine-trimmed robes and accoutrements, and their stances on little green mounds. All of these aspects of the illustrative programme construct a visual template that tricks the memory into thinking that the two objects are actually identical. The relative positioning of the Middle English, the roundels, and the Latin, contributes to this sense that both objects are the same; and some details, such as the red hatching within the small roundels, and the shape of the large capitals, add to that overall effect. Only a very close inspection reveals a range of minor differences between the two. The king portraits follow the same cartoon, but the colour palate is not quite the same: the St Andrews kings wear brown, whilst the Ashmole kings wear red; and the Ashmole illustrator uses red everywhere whereas the St Andrews illustrator uses a variety of red, blue, and brown. The roundels in the Ashmole roll appear to be of smaller size (though it is hard to be sure of this point when working from digital images), but the Ashmole artist was certainly less adept at fitting the kings into the roundels and their crowns frequently abut the edges of the roundel frames. The large capital letters in Ashmole are in red again, throughout, whereas in the St Andrews roll the oversized capitals alternate between red and blue; the design of the capital forms in each is similar but not quite the same. The scribal hands are certainly not the same. A few letters are very similar (notably the ‘w’), but overall the St Andrews hand has a more professional appearance, demonstrated by the elaborate skeletal capitals at the start of each line, the regular lineation, and the semi-cursive, frequently ligatured lowercase letters. The third roll, now held at Hertfordshire Archives, closely resembles Ashmole 21 in terms of layout and colour, and particularly in its frequent use of red (Fig. 3).39 Conversely its scribal hand is much closer to the St Andrews hand, especially in terms of the formation of the small capitals, and in the variety of letter-forms in each scribe’s range. The textual and visual similarities between these three rolls, St, A2, and He, are strong enough to suggest that they emanated from the same centre of production where a number of individuals worked from the same model or template in order to create multiple copies with the maximum degree of efficiency. The work’s propagandist content suggests such a scenario, and by the second quarter of the fifteenth century there is evidence of the existence of an effective machinery for the production and distribution of public information. Royal proclamations and open letters were posted up in market places, churches and at town gates, and copies of statutes were distributed for publication in every shire.40 The modest dimensions of these rolls also accord with production for this kind of mass audience. 39 Hertfordshire Archives, Ref 15857A, part of the family papers and estate records of the Halsey family of Gaddesden Place, Great Gaddesden. 40 For details see R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (Stroud, 1981), pp. 217–28.

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THE ANONYMOUS ‘KINGS OF ENGLAND’

FIG. 2 BODL., ASHMOLE ROLLS 21, SECTION SHOWING HENRY III AND EDWARD I. © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

These are practically sized objects, of narrow width and usually not longer than three membranes, and as such they were highly portable, easy to display, and probably quick to produce.41

41 Those for which I have been able to ascertain dimensions are, from narrowest to widest: Do 1638 x 121mm; Y 1900 x 130mm; Ba 1308 x 140mm; Tk2 2350 x 187mm; St 1924 x 195mm; Tk1 3376 x 225mm; Sp 2667 x 311mm.

FIG. 3 HERTFORDSHIRE ARCHIVES AND LOCAL STUDIES (HALS), REF. 15857, SECTION SHOWING HENRY III AND EDWARD I. REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF HERTFORDSHIRE ARCHIVES & LOCAL STUDIES (HALS).

THE ANONYMOUS ‘KINGS OF ENGLAND’

The order of production for the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ entailed mapping out the illustrative programme first and contributing the textual elements subsequently. Occasional misjudgements in that process can be seen in the cramming in of text around the roundels, and there are places where the brown ink of the text overlaps the lines. Such a method of working, using a division of labour for maximum efficiency, would result in the consistency of layout and overall appearance evident in these three examples. It would also explain variations in the quality of script, since fully illustrated copies could be farmed out for completion by text-writers, some more professional, like the St and He scribes, and some less proficient, like the A2 scribe. A later copy such as the Somerset roll (So) was evidently modelled on the same format, though in a very different style and much more poorly executed (Fig. 4).42 In So the kings still have full length portraits but no mounds to stand on, and their sceptres look more like candles! Red ink is again favoured, but the connecting lines use colour inconsistently and tend to taper, and there are some squarer lines especially further down the roll; Yale, Takamiya 35 (Tk1) also has much squarer lines and no pictures. Some other copies interpret this threefold template of pedigree plus English and Latin texts differently, as in Yale, Takamiya 52 (Tk2) where the diagrammatic layout follows exactly the same pattern of lines and angles as St, A2 and He, but the overall appearance of the roll is strikingly different because of its very different use of colour and pictorial choices of crowns. Furthermore, in Tk2 the two textual elements are presented as parallel strands with the Middle English set off to the left in order to accommodate the Latin sequence more easily. The centralised layout is also displaced in Sp so that the pedigree of the Sudeley family can be presented in parallel. In the later Northallerton copy (N) the diagrammatic scheme is laid out ineptly as the scribe miscalculated the room needed to accommodate the text, and after an effort to represent William the Conqueror never attempted any more portraits. Other roundels on this roll contain only the kings’ names and the names of their offspring; the roundels are drawn at the customary points throughout the roll and this scheme was evidently laid out first, not always correctly estimating the amount of room that would be necessary to incorporate the stanza sequence. For example, at the top of the second membrane the scribe struggled to squeeze in the whole of the William Rufus stanza before the roundel for Henry I, and in the third membrane almost no space at all was left for the Edward I and Edward II stanzas necessitating their displacement to the right-hand side of the roll. Even failures in the execution of the design such as in N demonstrate that the three components of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ were intended to function together. Their symbiosis works most effectively 42 Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/SF/18/2/3, part of the collection of the Sanford Family of Nynehead.

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FIG. 4 SOMERSET HERITAGE CENTRE, DD/SF/18/2/3, SECTION SHOWING HENRY III AND EDWARD I. REPRODUCED WITH KIND PERMISSION OF THE SOUTH WEST HERITAGE TRUST.

THE ANONYMOUS ‘KINGS OF ENGLAND’

when the work is presented in roll format, which increases the likelihood that the work was designed with this form in mind, and that the first copies of the tripartite work were written on long strips of parchment which, like other pieces of contemporary propaganda, were intended for public display. Through successive phases of book production, and also as over time the roll format was naturally superseded by the codex, the illustrations and the Latin were gradually stripped away from the Middle English. The move from roll to codex caused the integrity of the material form to be lost, obscuring the true nature of the work which in its conception had inextricably combined function with form. That loss and obfuscation, already in progress during the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has been intensified by the further move of the text from manuscript to modern edition, and by the ways in which editors present medieval texts on the page. The eighteenth-century editor Thomas Hearne actually made great efforts to replicate the appearance of the copy available to him. He was working from Ar, a copy in a large folio volume, where the scribe gave the text a lengthy rubricated incipit: ‘A petegreu fro William Conqueror, of the crowne of Engelonde, lynnyally descendyng, vn to kyng Henry the vi, in the end of thys boke lymned in fygurs …’. Hearne replicated this, even (in the preface to his edition) employing red ink, and although in his transcription he omitted the roundels and king portraits he imitated the mise-en-page of the original by centring the kings’ names and those of their offspring, linking them to each other with lines as in a family tree.43 Different typefaces are also employed to emphasise the difference between the Latin text (in regular type, set to either side) and the Middle English (in black letter, set centrally), with initial capitals two lines high set at the start of each stanza, and a foliate initial ‘A’ four lines high used to introduce the very first stanza on William I. Such diplomatic imitation of the original manuscript now seems an old-fashioned and quaint approach but it did at least allow Hearne’s contemporary readers a glimpse of the material nature of the original artefact. Some vestiges of this desire to replicate characteristics of the medieval object on the printed page may be observed in MacCracken’s edition as well. MacCracken surrounded the kings’ names with those of their royal offspring, using a smaller font for the latter, and punctuated the kings’ names with emblems of crowns to replicate the use of crowns at the heads of each stanza in the roll copy from which he worked. Since that copy (Ba) does not contain the Latin text MacCracken did not have to worry about that element; however he added a few marginal commentary notes of his own in the same small font, for example ‘Edward II, a holy man (!)’, at line 110, and ‘Henry V, a

43 Hearne, Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, I, liv–lv (preface) and II, 585–95 (text). For a description of Ar see Catalogue of the Arundel Manuscripts in the Library of the College of Arms, ed. W. H. Black and C. G. Young (London, 1829), pp. 104–10.

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gracious king’, at line 160, and it is not clear from his presentation that these notes do not appear in the manuscript.44 Linne Mooney’s 1989 edition of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ was prepared to the high standards which have been defined by series such as the Early English Text Society and Middle English Texts, the field’s leading outlets for the publication of critical editions. Accordingly the Middle English verse was edited from a carefully chosen base text and supported with textual notes that record substantive variant readings across all other witnesses; a separate set of explanatory notes offers details of persons and places named in the text. Such modern editorial conventions, and the layout and fonts habitually used to express them, generate authoritative editions of Middle English texts in which readers and scholars may have confidence. Yet at the same time the application of such conventions brings undesirable effects because they privilege the Middle English text and relegate other elements. In the case of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ this is especially unfortunate because those other elements, the visual scheme consisting of king portraits or symbols and genealogical diagram, and the Latin text which offers more information about the kings’ reigns, are important and integral parts of its tripartite composition. Ironically then, comprehension of this work’s true nature is actually impeded by the modern editorial presentation of its text, and more broadly by the ways in which, as readers, we have become habituated to reading medieval texts via the format of the modern book.

44

MacCracken, Minor Poems, pp. 720–1.

JOHN BENET, SCRIBE AND COMPILER, AND DUBLIN, TRINITY COLLEGE, MS 516 WENDY SCASE

D

ublin, Trinity College, MS 516 (E. 5. 10), hereafter TCD 516, is an important fifteenth-century manuscript codex that contains prophetic, historical, political and other texts in Latin and Middle English. Among its items of particular interest are a unique Chronicle of English History from Adam to 1462, the only witness to The Five Dogs of London (DIMEV 6370, a mid fifteenth-century set of libels against the Duke of York), and an unusual glossed text of Ever is Six the Best Chance of the Dice (DIMEV 1215), a fifteenth-century prophetic poem.1 An ownership note and anathema on fol. 2v establish that the volume belonged to one John Benet.2 Benet was vicar of Harlington, 1443–71, a living in the gift of the

1 The Trinity College manuscripts catalogue, Trinity College Library Dublin, M&ARL Online Catalogue [accessed 26 November 2020], provides a very full description based on the entry in M. L. Colker, Trinity College Library Dublin: Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Latin Manuscripts, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 1991). Two forthcoming catalogues list the English contents in detail. J. Scattergood, with N. Pattwell and E. Williams, Trinity College Library Dublin: A Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Middle English and Some Old English (Dublin, 2021), lists the Middle English prose and verse. N. Pattwell, with the assistance of J. Scattergood, The Index of Middle English Prose for Trinity College Dublin (Cambridge, forthcoming), lists the Middle English prose. I am very grateful to Professor Scattergood and Dr Pattwell for providing me with advance copies of their entries for TCD 516 in these volumes. The title that I use for the Chronicle is that given in the Trinity online catalogue. 2 All references to folio numbers in TCD 516 are to the modern pencil numbering in the top right corner of recto pages.

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prior and convent of Dunstable.3 In 1471 he became rector of Broughton, Newport Pagnell, whose patron was John Broughton. He had died by November 1474 when the next incumbent took up the rectory.4 There is no definite evidence for his having attended Oxford or Cambridge.5 The hand of the ownership note also signs the manuscript several times, confirming beyond reasonable doubt that it is that of John Benet. Benet was responsible for copying many of the texts and for annotations to the texts. There is some possibility that Benet himself was author of the portion of the Chronicle of English History for the period 1399–1462 (fols. 154v–88r). Although some of the poems in TCD 516 have been edited from the manuscript and the Chronicle of English History has been edited and recently translated, Benet’s practice as a scribe-compiler and the copying culture to which the volume may belong have been neglected.6 Most commentary has focused on the Chronicle and on whether Benet is its author.7 As a manuscript that includes many prophecies, TCD 516 appears in Lesley Coote’s Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England as a volume that gives an idea of just how many prophecies were circulating around the time of the deposition of Henry VI.8 Coote suggests that Benet’s manuscript ‘demonstrates its owner’s passion for history’ but it is not partisan.9 John Scattergood has recently surveyed some of the contents in an attempt to fathom Benet’s ‘personal concerns’, describing the manuscript as a ‘clerical historian’s personal miscellany’.10 Scattergood takes the view that the volume contains information that Benet felt he needed to know; the volume is ‘severely utilitarian’.11 The present essay will examine the complex composition and compilation of the codex, and the traditions of copying and manuscript production to which it belongs. It will focus in particular on John Benet’s modes of organising his sources with a special focus on his handling of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden (d. 1364). It will also investigate the contribution of other and later hands. It will 3 G. L. Harriss and M. A. Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle for the years 1400–62’, Camden Society, 4th s. 9 (1972), 151–233 (p. 157). 4 Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 157. 5 Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 158. 6 Political Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (New York, 1959), nos. 46, 47, 77 and 78. The Chronicle is edited in Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, and translated by A. Hanham, John Benet’s Chronicle, 1399–1462 (Basingstoke, 2016). 7 Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’; A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, Volume 2: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London, 1974), pp. 266–7. 8 L. A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in later Medieval England (York, 2000), pp. 219–20. 9 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 219. 10 J. Scattergood, ‘Trinity College Dublin MS 516: A Clerical Historian’s Personal Miscellany’, in Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A. S. G. Edwards, ed. C. Meale and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 121–31 (first quotation at p. 121). I am very grateful to Professor Scattergood for providing me with a copy of this essay. 11 Scattergood, ‘Trinity College Dublin MS 516’, p. 125.

JOHN BENET, SCRIBE AND COMPILER

consider the audience for John Benet’s activities and how he may have understood his practice and look briefly at other examples of such books and the potential for further studies. STRUCTURE OF TCD 516 AND JOHN BENET’S HAND TCD 516 is a composite manuscript of three parts labelled by the online Trinity catalogue as A, B and C. Part A dates to the second half of the fifteenth century, B is first half of the fifteenth century (Scattergood dates the hand ‘about 1400’), and C is first half of the fourteenth century (‘several small anglicana hands of the early fourteenth century’, according to Scattergood’s catalogue entry).12 Part A, fols. 3r–75v, 108r–207v, consists of eighty-one plus sixty-three items. Part B, fols. 76r–107v, consists of one main item, Iohannes De Lignano, De bello. Part C, fols. 208r–19v, consists of forty-three items. This part came after fol. 118v at the time when the foliation in roman numerals was entered. The flyleaves, fols. 1r–2v, 220r–3v, derive from a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript. The Trinity online catalogue’s entry notes that Benet is responsible for ‘notes on 107v of (B) and for a note on 220: whence it appears that the separate parts of the codex were joined together in, or by, his time and possibly by him’. Harriss and Harriss take a similar view, noting that Benet annotates fol. 107v [part B] and fols. 208–19 [part C], and suggesting that therefore, ‘all the material in the book was collected by him’.13 Scattergood follows this view that Benet collected all of the material, describing the whole manuscript as, ‘[a] miscellany of mainly Latin texts assembled and largely written by John Benet, vicar of Harlington (Beds.) from 17 March 1443 and rector of Broughton (Bucks.) from October 1471 until 1474’; this conclusion is shared by Pattwell.14 The present study will be mainly concerned with part A. John Benet’s hand is the main one in the volume. It is easy to distinguish from the other hands in the manuscript. It is a fluent, cursive anglicana, legible but, when writing Latin, quite highly abbreviated. Features typical of Benet’s hand that make it easily identifiable in the volume include thickened long s, a forward-sloping aspect, a tendency to cramp material and a very cursive fluency. For example, his anathema (fol. 2v) has looped ascenders on h and d, kidney-shaped and long s, and two-compartment a and g. Another g (‘elongaueret’) is like a diamond-shaped o with a descender. Some letters slope slightly to the 12 Scattergood, with Pattwell and Williams, Trinity College Library Dublin: A Catalogue of Manuscripts. 13 Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 154. 14 Scattergood, with Pattwell and Williams, Trinity College Library Dublin: A Catalogue of Manuscripts; Pattwell, with Scattergood, Index of Middle English Prose for Trinity College Dublin (both entries consulted in typescript before publication).

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right. Long s is thickened in the middle. Benet’s hand is similar when he writes English, for example, on fols. 22v–3r, the Five Dogs of London (DIMEV 6370). Here again are the thickened long s (f is similar), and the forward-slanting slope. His w is of a complex anglicana form, typically having two overlapping compartments, the first of which is lower than the second and unbroken. This letter was probably formed in one continuous flowing stroke of the pen. Many other hands appear in the volume. Besides the earlier material bound with it, ‘[t]hroughout the volume additions have been made in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a dozen or more different hands’, according to Harriss and Harriss.15 One of the later hands foliated the volume, inserting roman numerals in the top right corner of recto pages and entering the table of contents on fols. 191r–2r. Harriss and Harriss note that throughout the volume there are ‘incidental additions in blank spaces by other hands’, and they hypothesise that nine blank folios at the end of his chronicle, which may have been intended for continuing the chronicle beyond 1462, were used ‘for further jottings by himself and his friends’.16 The final quire, fols. 193–207, contains material copied by Benet, together with items in later hands. The appearance of these other hands raises the question of their relationship to the production of the volume and to Benet. Scattergood takes the view that all of the material in later hands and the assembly of the volume took place after Benet’s death, ‘there is no evidence of anyone else intervening in the book until after the death of the original compiler’.17 We will return to this matter below, in relation to Benet’s compilation and copying practices. BENET’S COMPILATION AND COPYING METHODS An important part of Benet’s contribution to TCD 516 is a work that consists of extracts from Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, organised in alphabetical order (fols. 49r–53v, 56r–75v). It is clear from his annotations that Benet himself was responsible for compiling this work and not merely for copying it. On fol. 75v, Benet’s signature occurs after the last item from the Polychronicon extracts on the page. This page is the last of the first part of Part A. Benet signs and records the date and place that he finished his work on this text. He also records that he has carried out the work at times of labour and idleness. He notes the value of historical literature from the past to remedy the infirmities of short life, dullness of wit, defective memory and idleness that impede our access to knowledge; in our days the study of arts and law and the examples of noble deeds and of eloquence would not be known without it: 15 16 17

Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 153. Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 156. Scattergood, ‘Trinity College Dublin MS 516’, p. 121.

JOHN BENET, SCRIBE AND COMPILER

Explicit tractatus super policronicoun secundum ordinem alphabeti ex ocio et labore. Siquidem vita breuis sensus hebes animus torpens memoria labens invtile demum ocupacio nos impediunt multa scire nouercante semper oblivione memorie inimica sed in presenciarum artes et jura prorsus ruerent spectabilium accionum exemplaria non paterent loquendi et cetera Quod Benet apud Harlyngdoun anno domini moccccolxio dominicalis littera C.

The passage ‘Siquidem … loquendi’ comes from Polychronicon, Book I, Higden’s Preface. In the source, the passage subsumed under ‘et cetera’ by Benet continues, ‘quoque tropi et schemata penitus deperirent, nisi in remedium imperfectionis humanae litterarum usum divina miseratio providisset’.18 It appears that Benet has used an extract from his source to form his own explicit, to credit his sources and acknowledge his own frailty and debt to them. Here perhaps he merges his voice with Higden’s as both are compilers. Typically of Benet’s mark-up of the text, the explicit is in a smaller script than the rest of the material on the page and is more cramped. Further evidence for Benet’s practice as a scribe-compiler and how he understood his role is offered by his organisation and layout for his alphabetical Polychronicon. This is a large and complex topic, partly because we do not know precisely which version or versions he had access to, and partly because he includes material from other sources in his entries.19 18 Polychronicon Ranulphi Monachi Cestrensis with English Translations of John Trevisa and of an unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. C. Babington (vols. 1–2) and J. R. Lumby (vols. 3–9), 9 vols., RS 41 (London, 1865–86), I, 4. John Trevisa translates the whole passage, ‘For in þe makynge and bookes of stories, þat is to vs i-sent and byqueþe by grete besynesse of þe writers of cronicles, blaseþ and schyneþ clerliche þe riȝt rule of þewes, ensaumple of leuynge, clensynge of goodnes, þe metynge of þe þre waies of þe þre vertues of deuynyte, and þe metynge of foure weies of þe foure chief vertues of þewes of real cloþynge. Of þe whiche þinges our litel konnynge myȝte nouȝt take knowleche, noþer folwe þe foure, but besines of writers to oure vnkunnynge hadde i-holde and i-streyned mynde of olde dedes. For why schort lyf, dul witte, and slowe vnderstondynge, and ydel occupacioun letteþ vs to knowe many þinges; forȝetingnes all wey kypinge þe craft of a stepdamme, he is enmy of mynde. Also now, in our tyme, art, sciens and lawe al were i-falle, ensample of noble dedes were nouȝt i-knowe; nobilite and faire manere of spekynge were all i-lost; but þe mercy of God had i-ordyned vs of lettres in remedie of vnparfiȝtnesse of mankynde (Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby, I, 5). Hereafter this edition is cited as Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby; in the edition Higden’s Latin text is printed on even number pages facing Trevisa’s translation on odd number pages. 19 Harriss and Harriss speculate that Benet used two copies of the Polychronicon, one of which may have been that owned by his patrons the priory of Dunstable (now Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 181); Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 172 n. 35. This is a copy of the short version of the text. However, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain 3, based on N. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (London, 1941, 1964, 1978) [accessed 26 November 2020], does not include this manuscript, therefore calling the suggestion of Dunstable provenance into doubt. Benet’s patron John Broughton is another possible literary source, for he was ‘a book collector who purchased in London’ and may have housed some of his books at Toddington Hospital, in the parish that adjoined Benet’s at Broughton (Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 173). A late fifteenth-century book list in Bodl., MS Fairfax 10 has

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Only a few preliminary observations, therefore, can be made here. Our first example is Benet’s first alphabetical entry, ‘Adam’, fol. 49r–v. This passage corresponds with Polychronicon, Book II, Chapter 4.20 Higden’s chapter begins ‘Formatus itaque [‘igitur’ in some manuscripts] Adam homo primus de limo terrae extra paradisum in agro Damasceno sexto die saeculi et in paradisum translatus peccatoque eodem die commisso dejectus est post meridiem’. Benet’s entry begins, ‘Adam primus homo formatus est de limo terre extra paradisum in agro damascene sexto die seculi et in paradisum peccato que eodem die commisso deiectus est post meridiem’ (fol. 49r). Here, Benet sticks fairly closely to Higden, except that he reorders the words so that ‘Adam’ appears first, adapting the source to his alphabetical scheme. He includes Higden’s in-text references to his sources, writing them in an attempt at a display hand, for example, ‘Metodius’ (fol. 49r). Benet’s extract ends with the birth of Cain and Abel and Abel’s death rather than continuing to the end of the chapter (fol. 49v; Polychronicon, Book II, Chapter 4).21 Benet adds a reference to the source of the material in the Polychronicon. This careful and precise referencing of the source at the end of the extract is typical of Benet’s practice. Benet may be modelling his careful referencing on the example of Higden who provides both in-text references to his sources and a list of authors whom he has used at the beginning of the work (Book I, Chapter 2).22 Our second example comes from Benet’s letter section C (fol. 52v). The opening corresponds to Polychronicon, Book VII, Chapter 24.23 This extract displays more intervention on Benet’s part. The Polychronicon records that a vision of Christ on the cross was seen in the air at Dunstable in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Henry II (1188).24 Benet’s interest end papers concerning the Broughtons of Toddington and the hospital (A. I. Doyle and G. B. Pace, ‘A New Chaucer Manuscript’, PMLA 83 (1968), 22–34 (p. 25 n. 6)). The book list includes Boethius, De consolacione philosophiae, ‘Paruus liber predicacionis in gallico’, ‘The book of good maners’, ‘Le pilrinage [sic] de la Speculum Vite Christi’ and, most interestingly given Benet’s interests in Merlin prophecy, ‘Expositio propheciarum Merlini’ (R. J. Dean, ‘An Essay in Anglo-Norman Palaeography’, in Studies in French Language and Medieval Literature Presented to M. K. Pope (Manchester, 1939), pp. 84–5 (p. 85)). When comparing Benet’s extracts with the Polychronicon, I have taken account of the variant readings provided in the Babington-Lumby edition but have not had access to unpublished variants. For the versions of the Polychronicon see J. Taylor, ‘The Development of the Polychronicon Continuation’, English Historical Review 76, no. 298 (1961), 20–36. 20 Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby, I, 218, 220. 21 Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby, II, 220. 22 Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby, I, 22–6. For Higden and his sources see J. Taylor, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford, 1966) and for reflections on the genre of the Polychronicon see E. Steiner, ‘Compendious Genres: Higden, Trevisa, and the Medieval Encyclopedia’, Exemplaria 27 (2015), pp. 73–92 (esp. pp. 76–83). 23 Polychronicon, ed. Babington and Lumby, VIII, 66–80; the beginning of the extract corresponds to p. 74, line 5 up in the edition. 24 This vision was associated with crusades propaganda; for the story in the annals of Roger of Hoveden see J. Munns, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Image, Devotion (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 259–60.

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in this passage of the Polychronicon evidently derives from the mention of Dunstable, the site of his patrons’ priory. It seems likely that he anticipated that potential readers (from the priory?) would be interested in this passage also and that he chose to extract it for that reason. With the caveat that it is not known precisely which version or versions of the Polychronicon Benet used,25 it appears that he is paraphrasing and adapting quite freely. In part he paraphrases to adapt Higden’s chronological arrangement to fit in with his alphabetical organisation of the material. Where the passage in Higden reads, in some manuscripts, ‘Hoc anno ab hora meridiana usque ad noctem Christus visibiliter apparuit in aere cruce pendens apud Dunstapulum in Anglia videntibus multis’, Benet’s entry begins ‘Crucis signum in centro apud Dunstaple apparuit et cito primus visa est forma crucis’. Whereas the corresponding sentence in Higden has ‘Christus’ as its subject, Benet has used ‘Crucis’ for his first word for the C section. On the face of it this is an odd decision since both ‘Crucis’ and ‘Christus’ begin with c. One explanation is that it is part of his alphabetical planning. Benet uses Christus, spelt ‘Xps’, for his X headword (fol. 75v). He may have already made the decision to use Christus in that position and hence needed another C headword. In order to put ‘Crucis’ first in the C extract, he transfers the reference to the year and time of day of the vision to headings, so the year (slightly different from that given by Higden) is recorded in the top margin as ‘Anno Ricardus [I?]’ and the time of day forms a heading for the passage: ‘ab hora diei xii vsque ad noctem’. Below, he deviates from Higden, adding material from another source and denoting this with the side-note ‘Narracio’. He misses out Higden’s ‘in Anglia’, presumably because he anticipates that the fact that Dunstable is in England is unnecessary information for his expected audience – again this suggests he has a local audience in mind. He anglicises the spelling of Higden’s ‘Dunstapulum’, presumably reflecting local usage. He also paraphrases, changing Higden’s ‘visibiliter apparuit’ to ‘visa est’. As with the previous example, he references his source carefully at the end of the entry as Polychronicon, Book VII, Chapter 24 (fol. 52v). When copying the alphabetical extracts from the Polychronicon, Benet left gaps, presumably to provide space for the inclusion of more material. For example, between P and Q the bottom of a verso and the top of a recto are blank (fols. 66v–7r). Between R and S (fols. 69v–70r) a whole blank page occurs (fol. 69v) and the top half of the page where S begins is also blank (fol. 70r). Between the end of S and the beginning of T, a space of about thirteen lines appears. Harriss and Harriss suggest that Benet’s Polychronicon extracts might have been ‘compiled from a contemporary index to the work’.26 Manuscripts of both the Latin version and the Middle English translation by John Trevisa (d. 1402) included indexes: 25 26

See above, n. 19. Harriss and Harriss, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle’, p. 155.

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some manuscripts of Trevisa’s translation include both English and Latin indexes.27 But I would argue that while such indexes might indeed have helped him to locate material of interest, they also frame Benet’s practice and his understanding of what he is doing. The practice of leaving gaps between letter sections could have been modelled on the practice of some Polychronicon index scribes, where space has been left after letters, perhaps for the insertion of more headwords, for example in BL, MS Additional 24194. Possibly Benet anticipated that he himself might find more material to enter in the blank spaces. Evidence for this possibility is provided by places where he has entered additional material in a small cramped script, for example, seven lines of M material and four lines of N material have been crammed at the top of fol. 64r, in the margin and in a small space before the N section proper begins with its enlarged initial. Likewise he has squeezed a small amount of F material into the spare lines at the bottom of F, fol. 57v, before G starts on the next page, in a script that is smaller than that of the rest of the page. But it is equally possible that the spaces were also meant for others to fill. This is suggested by the explicit, discussed above, where he records the date on which he has finished the work and attributes its completion to times of work as well as idleness (fol. 75v). This explicit shows that he signed the work off as completed even though it had gaps. He may have been modelling this practice of leaving space for others to fill on that of some of the scribes of the Polychronicon indexes. An additional possibility is that Benet thought of his work as an index – albeit much fuller than those in the Polychronicon manuscripts – to aid consultation of the full text by others. This would partly explain his careful, detailed references at the end of extracts to the Polchronicon books and chapters from which he has drawn his material. Evidence for the proposition that he is compiling a finding aid for others to use in conjunction with a full text of the source is provided by side-notes that read ‘le lo’. ‘[L] e lo’ may mean, according to the Trinity online catalogue, ‘lege loco’. If so, the annotation instructs the reader to follow up the extract in the source, using the book and chapter references that occur at the ends of extracts. The note ‘le lo’ occurs beside an extract from the Polychronicon on fol. 56v, where the reference is to Book II, Chapter 17. The note ‘le lo’, bordered in ink, also occurs beside a Polychronicon extract on fol. 117v. The practice of referring the reader to the source is not confined to Polychronicon passages. A further example, underlined, occurs beside an extract from the epistle of Prester John on fol. 118v. Other examples occur on fol. 30v, beside a text about English kings, where a note in Benet’s hand adds ‘quere 27 For a recent discussion of Polychronicon manuscripts that contain indexes see A. Liira, ‘Paratextuality in Manuscript and Print: Verbal and Visual Presentation of the Middle English Polychronicon’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Turku, 2020), pp. 124–52 [accessed 26 November 2020].

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plus in finali’, and on fol. 48v, where the note seems to guide the reader to look at other Merlin prophecies. The side-note ‘le lo’ is one example of the notes and guidance for the reader that Benet provides. Evidence for Benet’s practice and for how he understood his role as scribe-compiler is also offered by his many other forms of mark-up of the text. He marks verse that occurs within a piece of prose with the marginal note ‘versus’; for example on fol. 51v a prophecy in verse is marked ‘versus Alani’ (fol. 48v). Sometimes these notes look like later mark-up: ‘le lo’ (fol. 56v) and ‘versus’ are entered in a smaller, fainter hand than the text. Benet also annotates his entries with symbols. For example, a symbol that looks like half of a pair of spectacles – a lens and a side arm – appears on fols. 34v and 71v. On fol. 40v a symbol that looks like a sword with a hilt appears beside a text extracted from the Polychronicon that is headed ‘contra symonicos [sic]’. Alongside symbols and notes like ‘le lo’ Benet provides navigational aids such as headers highlighted with pen-drawn frames, for example, ‘prophecia Sibille contra fratres’ (fol. 43r) and ‘hildegardis contra fratres’ (fol. 42r). Mark-up such as this suggests that Benet saw his role as helping readers to identify material, directing them to themes of particular interest, and on occasion guiding them to look at the source text. This last kind of instruction is of a piece with his careful referencing of his Polychronicon extracts. It may suggest that he thought of his role in part as providing a finding aid for readers to use with other texts, or perhaps as serving other scribe-readers who might use his work to help them make their own compilations. Benet also provides glosses. On fol. 118r, he has added the prophetic dice poem Ever is Six the Best Chance of the Dice (DIMEV 1215), a poem that describes the conditions that must prevail in the future for England to be ‘as paradice’ and when ‘ye schal haue a new king at a new parlement’.28 But there will be much wonder when the dead arise and the red rose and the fleur-de-lys shall be united under locks.29 The future predicted depends upon the relations among the sections of society, and that depends on the throws of the dice. Diagrams representing the faces of a die are inserted into the lines of verse, their sides and spots highlighted by Benet in red 28 Benet’s is the version of the poem printed by Robbins as ‘A Political Prophecy by the Dice’ (Political Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Robbins, p. 120, no. 46). Other political dice poems include DIMEV 6412, When Sunday goeth by D and C, and DIMEV 4522, S Missed in the Middle and Mark there a P (on these dice poems see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 196). 29 ‘The rede rose and the floure-de-lyce, the lockes schal vnder’. Robbins (Political Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Robbins, p. 316) suggests that ‘locks’ may be a figurative reference to prisons. Coote states that this is a motif shared by dice poems and suggests that it may be a reference to Margaret of Anjou and Henry VI (Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 197). Alternatively, perhaps the reference is to the hoped-for union of the Yorkists and the Lancastrians. For the conjoining of these two heraldic symbols on metalwork (in association with door locks) during the reign of Henry VII and later see W. Chaffers, Hall Marks on Gold and Silver Plate, 9th edn (London, 1905), pp. 165–6.

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(Fig. 1). Benet has added glosses for the throws of the die. According to his glosses, a throw of one stands for the king (‘rex’), a two is ‘bilingue’ (i.e. forked-tongued) people, a three stands for ‘proditores’, a four is ‘domini’, a five ‘religiosi’, and a six stands for the ‘vulgus’. These glosses do not occur in other manuscripts of the text. We do not know where Benet got them from, but his entering them is of a piece with his other efforts to provide his readers with editorial guidance and explanation via annotation.30 Another form of mark-up provided by Benet is signatures. He frequently signs with the phrase ‘quod Benet’. ‘Quod’ plus a scribe’s name is a common means used by scribes for claiming responsibility for work they have copied.31 Instances where his signature appears to be a conventional record that he copied the text occur on fol. 118v, where Benet has signed an extract from interpolation E of the Epistola Presbiteri Iohannis that begins ‘In extremis mundi partibus’ with ‘Explicit quod Benet’ in the lower margin.32 On fol. 121r, after an extract from Nennius, Benet has written his signature and a date and place for writing: ‘[?] quod Benet apud harlyngdoun anno domini m cccc lx viiio littera dominicalis B’. On fol. 189v, ‘quod Benet’ occurs at the end of another Latin prose prophecy. On fol. 195v, ‘quod Benet’ occurs in fainter ink at the end of a description of an English victory over the French at Whitby in 1451 (DIMEV 4949).33 On fol. 204r, Benet has signed some extracts on geographical matters in red ink ‘Explicit quod Benet’. As with the other kinds of mark-up, we will see several more examples where the ink of the signature is different from or fainter than that of the text, or the script is smaller; possibly Benet added his signatures and some of the other mark-up later.34 It is possible that, as well as recording that he copied the texts he has signed, Benet uses signatures to record his interventions. For example, on fol. 118r, after extracts on Frankish history from Book IV of the Polychronicon, Benet has written a note about his source: ‘Historia policratica in septem libris descripta secundum Ranvlphum monachum cestrensem Anglice Chester’. Below, Benet adds, ‘Notetur quod iste liber vocatus policratica abreuiatur in multis dictis’. To the side of these notes occurs the signature ‘quod Benet’, tipped and underlined in red (Fig. 1). The dice poem is separated from the material before and after by two large notae in what may be a much later hand. See Figure 1. 31 I discuss the sources and meanings of this formula in Wendy Scase, Visible English: Graphic Culture, Scribal Practice, and Identity, c. 700–c. 1550 (Turnhout, forthcoming), chapter 3. 32 Prester John: The Legend and its Sources, ed. K. Brewer, Crusade Texts in Translation 27 (London, 2016), p. 50. 33 On this text see J. Scattergood, ‘A Muted Triumph: French Prisoners at Whitby in 1451’, in J. Scattergood, Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Politics and Society (Dublin, 2010), pp. 185–212. I am very grateful to Professor Scattergood for providing me with a copy of this essay. 34 I am grateful to Professor Scattergood for checking the ink colour for me and confirming my impressions from my microfilm. 30

FIG. 1 TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN, MS 516 (E. 5. 10), FOL. 118R. THE BOARD OF TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, BY PERMISSION. IMAGE MAY NOT BE FURTHER REPRODUCED FROM SOFTWARE. FOR REPRODUCTION, APPLICATION MUST BE MADE TO THE HEAD OF DIGITAL RESOURCES AND IMAGING SERVICES, BY POST TO TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, COLLEGE STREET, DUBLIN 2, IRELAND; OR BY EMAIL AT [email protected].

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Here Benet appears to point out to the reader that he has abbreviated his source. His other material, as we have seen, is not simply the result of copying an exemplar but results from selection, rearrangement, paraphrase, mark-up and so on. When he signs, his signature may announce his own presence as compiler. There are several examples of signatures where there is strong evidence that Benet is concerned to distinguish his own interventions from those of his sources. Sometimes he seems to use a signature to demarcate his own additions. On fol. 43r, after Sybilline prophetic verses against the mendicants that end ‘domine peccatoribus miserere’, he signs ‘Amen quod Benet’ in a smaller and fainter script than that of the text (fols. 42v–3r). This could mean that he is signing the copy, but it could also mean that he says ‘Amen’ to the prophecy about the sinners. On fol. 26r the signature ‘quod Benett’, in Benet’s hand, appears at the end of Hail be Thou Mary the Mother of Christ (DIMEV 1691), which is also written in his hand. But rather than being a signature recording that he copied the text, it appears that ‘quod Benett’ was written at the same time as an attribution for two sayings (in Benet’s hand) that follow: ‘The gretter thy degre is the gretter is thy synne and thy trespace’ and ‘Be ware of feleschepe of womane Departe …’ (this text continues overleaf for six further lines, with a ‘nota bene’ in the margin in Benet’s hand). These texts are attributed by Benet as ‘Seynt Isidre saynges to enforme mon how he schal flee vices and folow vertues’.35 Another extract attributed to Isidore over the leaf is headed ‘Dispice of the world Isidre’, beginning, ‘If þu wilt be in reste desire nothing’ (fol. 26v). Another ‘despising of the world’ extract follows, this one attributed to Augustine. At the end of this extract appears ‘et cetera / quod Benet’ (fol. 27r). On fol. 112r, Benet signs ‘Explicit quod Benet’ at the end of a prophecy by John de Rupescissa. To the left of the explicit in Benet’s hand is the date 1461 and the record ‘Few lordes in yngloun [sic] or elles noune’.36 In red ink are added, probably also in Benet’s hand, ‘Vaticinum [sic]’ and a date of 1460. Perhaps Benet is signing these additions, rather than – or as well as – the John de Rupescissa prophecy. When he signs to signal his interventions as a compiler as well as his role as scribe, Benet may be modelling his practice on that of Higden. On fol. 39v, Benet copies an extract from the Polychronicon, Book I, Chapter 2, where Higden gives a list of authors upon whom his work draws. Benet ends the extract with a note, ‘Quando loquitur compilator, sub hac figura R’ littera scribitur. Hec de libro pollicornicon [sic] Capitulo primo. Explicit auctorum nomina. Quod Benet’. This note serves the purpose of explaining that material added in the voice of the compiler Higden is Possibly they are extracts from the Gathered Counsels of St Isidore. This Middle English historical note occurs again on fol. 118r, again in Benet’s hand, where it is associated with other prophecies in Middle English, including the glossed dice poem, DIMEV 1215. 35

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marked by the letter R (for Ranulphus) and therefore can be distinguished from the material gathered from the authorities in the list. Benet may have thought that his signature ‘quod Benet’ was equivalent to Higden’s R. Here too, Benet makes sure that we understand that the note is his own, not Higden’s, by signing it ‘quod Benet’ and demarcating it from the Higden text with a paraph mark. Arguably, Higden’s practice of signing his interventions provided a framework for Benet’s practice with ‘quod’ signatures. OTHER HANDS Other scribes took up the invitation to enter material in the blank spaces left by Benet among the material he copied. The interventions of other scribes appear particularly among the prophetic material copied by Benet. Some of them suggest that others had access to the material copied by Benet and were entering their own material while Benet still had access to the volume. For example, on fol. 38v, above a five-line verse prophecy in Benet’s hand that begins, ‘Flos florum patitur’, another hand has entered ‘Anno domini millesimo cccco quinquagesimo xo [?] caueat omnis homo’. The word ‘quinquagesimo’ has been crossed through and ‘sexagesimo’ entered above in what looks like Benet’s hand with its characteristically thickened long s, its cursive fluency, and its forward slope (compare ‘sexagessimo’ in his hand in a side-note on fol. 39r). Another example occurs on fol. 29v. On fol. 30r the Middle English stanzaic poem attributed to Lydgate, Verses on the Kings of England (DIMEV 5731), ends. The final stanza rejoices in Henry VI in the present tense, implying that Henry was on the throne at the point that the poem was composed. An annotator, probably Benet, has added ‘Amen’ (fol. 30r). On fol. 29v, a note in a hand that is probably not Benet’s (the strokes are thicker and the aspect more upright) has been inserted in blank space at the foot of the page. These three extra lines come after the heading for ‘Ricardus secundus’ and before the stanza about Richard which starts on the adjoining page. Although positioned here, they serve to update the content of the stanza about Henry VI on fol. 30r. The note on fol. 29v states that Henry VI reigned for thirty-nine years and Edward IV began his reign in 1461.37 This note must have been written after 1461 but before 1470 when Henry returned to the throne. It provides additional evidence that others may have had access to Benet’s materials and were contributing to them while Benet was still actively working with them, which was at least as late as

37 A much later hand (not Benet this time) has provided further updates on fol. 28v. Professor Linne Mooney, whom the present volume honours, has surveyed definitively the numerous manuscripts of Lydgate’s Kings and their updating (L. R. Mooney, ‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England” and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’, Viator 20 (1989), 255–89). See also Margaret Connolly’s essay in this volume.

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1471, three years before his death, if we can judge by his addition of this date on fol. 189v. Another example of Benet’s possible sharing of material with other scribes is provided by prophetic material on fols. 108r–13v. On the Times (1386) (DIMEV 4843, fols. 108r–10r) is not in Benet’s hand; it is signed with a conventional tag ‘Nunc finem feci, da mihi quod merui’ but with no scribe’s name. Lilium in meliori parte manebit (fol. 114r; following an unfoliated blank leaf) is not in Benet’s hand, but Benet adds When the Dead Arisen (DIMEV 6436) below on same page. On fol. 113v, a Latin prose prophecy attributed to John Tesolanus in Benet’s hand has been signed in a different hand and with a different name, ‘quod Conwey d. r [?]’. These examples where Benet’s and others’ hands are closely interacting on the page may reflect collaboration, sharing of material and networking with other scribe-compilers. Another complex example of possible interaction of Benet and other scribes occurs after Five Dogs (fols. 22v–3r, DIMEV 6370), which as we have seen is in Benet’s hand. This poem is followed by ‘Regnaciones Regum a conquestu Anglie’, a Latin list of the kings of England with the number of years of each reign, from William I to Henry VI originally (fol. 23r). ‘Regnaciones’ is not in Benet’s hand: distinguishing features are its upright, well-spaced aspect, and its w. As mentioned above, Benet’s w is a complex anglicana form consisting of two overlapping compartments that is probably formed in one stroke. The first compartment is lower than the second and unbroken. In the hand of the ‘Regnaciones’, w has the form of a looped l that is joined with a looped l or b. The first compartment of w in this hand is higher than the second and is divided horizontally by the loop. At the end of this text, ‘Edwardus quartus’ is added in what could be Benet’s hand (see the w and the forward slope of long r). Whether or not it is in Benet’s hand, this correction must have been written after the end of the reign of Henry VI, either 1461 or 1471. It could, therefore, coincide with the years in which Benet was still working on his material.38 It is not just hands that share pages with Benet’s hand that provide possible evidence of his collaboration and interaction with other scribes. The hand that writes the prophecies on fol. 16r, ‘This is the Prophecy that they have in Wales’ (DIMEV 5718) has similar letter forms to Benet, however, it is more upright. Long s and f are not thickened in the middle, and w is simpler with an open first compartment: this scribe is someone other than John Benet. It is hard to establish this hand’s relation with the Benet material. The leaf is not the same size as the others and some historical material on the verso in a different hand is upside down. Obviously

38 The number of years of Edward’s reign has been added below to the right; this must be by another, post-1483, hand.

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this leaf has been added at some stage.39 Was it among Benet’s papers, perhaps even an exemplar on loan from a fellow collector? Not all of the other scribal activity in the volume could be the result of sharing and collaboration. Some of the hands certainly or almost certainly post-date Benet’s death. At the end of ‘Regnaciones’, Edward IV’s reign has been added to the text in red ink in a different hand again. The correction that relates to Edward IV must date in or after 1483, the year of Edward’s death, well after Benet’s death. Other hands that post-date Benet’s death include the one that is responsible for the table of contents on fols. 190v–1v and for the foliation in roman numerals, and probably the hands that wrote the names William and Neville Danby and George Danby ‘de Latimer’ in a space on fol. 75r. COMPARABLE MANUSCRIPTS AND COMPILING ACTIVITY TCD 516 is one of dozens of manuscripts that bear witness to the collection of history and prophecy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Lesley Coote’s handlist of prophecy manuscripts of English provenance from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries includes some seventy-four that are dated, like Benet’s volume, probably or definitely to the fifteenth century, while many of the earlier manuscripts contain fifteenth-century additions.40 Coote suggests that Benet may have copied prophecies from cheaply-produced anthologies of prophecies produced from the 1440s, especially in London.41 But the presence of other hands in TCD 516 and Benet’s own evident expectation of sharing his work with other readers and perhaps scribe-compilers suggests that more informal modes of exemplar access may be relevant here. Following up some copies of Ever is Six the Best Chance of the Dice (DIMEV 1215) in other manuscripts provides many parallels with TCD 516 and further insight into contexts for the activities of John Benet as scribe-compiler. The manuscripts of DIMEV 1215 demonstrate that, as in TCD 516, this poem typically circulated in collections of prophecies and political material. One example is BL, MS Harley 559, a late, composite manuscript in many hands. In Bodl., MS Rawl. D. 1062, the poem is found amongst other political material in a late hand (on fol. 94v, a torn leaf). In BL, MS Lansdowne 762, the poem also occurs in a late, composite volume of prophecies and related material written in many hands, here amalgamated with another prophecy (fol. 96r–v, DIMEV 5213). It also 39 A codicological examination might shed some light on this question; unfortunately my consultation of the manuscript at Trinity was not long enough to carry one out and the coronavirus pandemic has prevented a return visit. 40 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 239–80. 41 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 202; for a brief list of the prophecies in TCD 516 see pp. 250–1.

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occurs among a similar assembly of prophetic texts in Bodl., MS Arch. Selden B. 8, fol. 271r. Another version of this set of texts occurs in BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iv, a collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century political and other materials, where it appears on one side of a small, formerly folded sheet of paper that is now bound into the volume (fol. 123v). Several versions of the text appear in sixteenth-century prophecy collection BL, MS Sloane 2578 (fols. 45v, 52v, 64v, 67r). Several contemporary and later hands have indexed the material in the volume, using codes in the margins of texts that cross-refer to the index. For example, the line from the poem ‘when [three] and [two] holde not one assent then shall we haue a newe kynge and a new parlament’ (fol. 64v) is coded ‘77.a’ which refers to the index heads ‘England devided’ (fol. 2v), ‘Preastes’ (fol. 4v) and, cryptically, ‘Lyon’ (fol. 3v), and ‘79.b’ which references the ‘Black flete of Norway’ (fol. 1r). The copy of DIMEV 1215 in BL, MS Harley 7332 is signed by ‘J M’ and dated by him 18 January 1623/4 (fol. 28v; DIMEV wrongly gives 29v). J. M. records in detail how he got hold of the text: ‘I exscribed this verbatim not altering the ortographie out of an old written paper sayd to have bin brought out of the Tower by Sir William Wade and stopt in a hole in a wall in his house where it was taken out after his death’.42 J. M. explains that the text dates to 1453, the year ‘when began ye warre betweene Yorke and Lancaster’. This manuscript history of DIMEV 1215 provides a suggestive context for John Benet’s activities in TCD 516. Clearly DIMEV 1215 circulated among collectors of prophecies and collection of this material was facilitated by sharing, collaboration and exchange: it was not a solitary pursuit. Collectors engaged with this material by arranging it in sequences, analysing its content, providing finding aids, and taking an interest in its provenance. Manuscripts that might particularly reward comparison with TCD 516 include those that contain Polychronicon extracts together with other historical or prophetic material, such as Bodl., MS Digby 196, produced in the late 1450s.43 This manuscript contains prophecies (fols. 18r–29r) and extracts from the Polychronicon (for example, fols. 56–64). Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 249/277, dated c. 1464 and copied by John Herryson (d. 1473) contains the Polychronicon and Historia regum Britanniae followed by prophecies;44 early fifteenth-century manuscript Durham UL, MS Cosin V.iii.19 contains referenced Polychronicon extracts with other historical notes. Polychronicon extracts in English occur in Bodl., MS Rawl. C. 86, fols. 39v–49v, BL, MS Harley 4011 (in a translation 42 Probably the Puritan William Wade or Waad (d. 1623) who was lieutenant of the Tower of London 1603–13. On Waad see G. M. Bell, ‘Waad, Sir William (1546–1623), diplomat and administrator’, ODNB Online [accessed 26 November 2020]. 43 On this manuscript see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 212. 44 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 226.

JOHN BENET, SCRIBE AND COMPILER

by Osbern Bokenham), Oxford, Trinity College, MS D 29, possibly copied from Caxton’s edition of Trevisa, and in San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 144, 54v–64v.45 CONCLUSION In this essay, I have sought to extend our knowledge of John Benet’s contribution to TCD 516 and of the literary and manuscript contexts for his activities. I have argued that John Benet models his activity on Higden and understands his interventions and his role with respect to the anticipated audiences for his work in this light. His activities and interventions such as signing, dating, giving references to his sources, annotating, compiling, alphabetising and leaving space for updating and additions, provide evidence for this claim. Part of Benet’s understanding – perhaps made sense of in relation to the Polychronicon – is that his literary and scribal activities take place within frameworks for sharing and collaboration. Benet collects and organises material and collaborates with other scribes – either in person or on the page – and his practice of leaving spaces and marking up copy presupposes the participation of others. Benet dates and signs to offer guidance about his treatment of the material and a history of his own intervention. Others have intervened, updating, adding material, and providing new modes of access and finding. We have seen that TCD 516 is one example of many dozens of manuscripts where scribes have collected and organised history and prophecy. The other manuscripts of the dice poem provide numerous other examples of the continuation of such activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scribes such as Herryson would repay examination as potential fifteenthcentury comparators. Arguably, for their scribes and readers, prophecy and history in TCD 516 and the numerous other manuscripts in this tradition are on a chronological continuum, a timeline upon which the individual scribe and reader are located. Reorganising and rewriting –rechronicling – are required as the position on the timeline of the scribes and of their readers changes. 45 For MSS Rawl. C. 86 and Harley 4011 see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Influence and Audience of the Polychronicon: Some Observations’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 17 (1980), 113–19 (p. 113). Edwards provides a useful survey of audiences for the Polychronicon and the work’s influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and beyond with special reference to English materials. For Trinity College D 29 and Huntington HM 144 see K. Harris, ‘Unnoticed Extracts from Chaucer and Hoccleve: Huntington MS HM 144, Trinity College, Oxford MS D 29 and the Canterbury Tales’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), 167–99 (pp. 168–9). For the possible exemplar for Trinity College D 29 see the relevant entry in S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, A Handlist of Manuscripts containing Middle English Prose in Oxford College Libraries, Index of Middle English Prose 8 (Cambridge, 1991). For continuations of the Polychronicon see Taylor, ‘The Development of the Polychronicon Continuation’.

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Benet fashioned his interventions in this tradition, made sense of what he was doing, and shaped his practice in relation to his understanding of Higden and as part of a community of scribes and readers with similar interests. It has only been possible to scratch the surface of the complexities and interest of TCD 516 in this essay. Much further work needs to be done.

THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK OF TEWKESBURY ABBEY (OXFORD, BODLEIAN LIBRARY, MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2): SCRIPTS AND TRANSCRIPTS SUSAN POWELL

A

s has been well documented, the dissolution of the monasteries brought about the dispersal and destruction of a large number of medieval manuscripts of varying (and now often unidentifiable) significance to the modern scholar.1 It also, however, led to a counter-movement, rooted in an antiquarian interest in recovering the past, which expressed itself in the searching out, preservation and transcription of medieval manuscripts for a variety of reasons: historical, political, genealogical, topographical, literary.2 In particular, the visits to religious houses made by John Leland from the year 1535, when the Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries came into force, resulted in the various folio and quarto volumes of his notes and transcripts which came to be known as 1 See, for example, N. R. Ker, ‘The Migration of Manuscripts from the English Medieval Libraries’, The Library, 4th s. 23 (1942), 1–11; D. G. Selwyn, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Dispersal of Medieval Libraries’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700, ed. J. P. Carley and C. G. C. Tite (London, 1997), pp. 281–94; N. Ramsay, ‘“The Manuscripts flew about like Butterflies”: The Break-Up of English Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’, in Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity, ed. J. Raven (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 125–44. 2 For the argument that this antiquarian interest existed before the dissolution: A. Gransden, ‘Antiquarian Studies in Fifteenth-Century England’, The Antiquaries Journal 60 (1980), 75–97.

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‘The Itinerary’.3 Leland’s notes often record material now lost, but both before and after his early death they had generated a spate of transcripts which have survived even when in some cases the original documents have not.4 This is the case with the two principal documents studied in this essay, both in a codex from the Benedictine Abbey of Tewkesbury (Glos.): the Charter of William Fitzrobert (1147–83), second earl of Gloucester, and the Chronicle of the Abbey. Into the twenty-first century these documents have been known to scholars only in transcripts of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries. Chronicles and charters were important to a monastic house because they confirmed rights and property. The Charter of William Fitzrobert was edited by Robert Patterson in his edition of Gloucestershire charters, using an early seventeenth century transcript (BL, MS Additional 36985).5 As for the Chronicle, William Dugdale’s edition in Monasticon Anglicanum (first published in 1655) has been, and still is, the standard source for those interested in the history of Tewkesbury, its Abbey, and the relation of its benefactors to the great families of the medieval west Midlands, the Clares, Despensers, Beauchamps and Nevilles; it has been provided with a translation since 1712.6 Dugdale based his edition on an Elizabethan transcript (BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iii) of a now-lost manuscript. In fact, however, medieval texts for both the Charter and the Chronicle can be found in what is known as the Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. d. 2), where they occur in the context of coloured images of the founders, from Oddo and Doddo through to Richard Neville, ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’.7 Although this manuscript

3 The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin Smith, 5 vols. (London, 1906–10). Toulmin Smith (see I, xix–xx) used the second edition (1744–5) of Thomas Hearne’s edition of Leland: The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1710–12). 4 The details of these volumes, first given by Toulmin Smith (I, xxviii–xxx, xxxvi; II, 117; V, xi–xv), were superseded by P. Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, I, Part 2 (London, 1980), pp. 299–310, which have in their turn been superseded by O. Harris, ‘“Motheaten, Mouldye, and Rotten”: The Early Custodial History and Dissemination of John Leland’s Manuscript Remains’, Bodleian Library Record 18 (2005), 460–501. 5 Earldom of Gloucester Charters, ed. R. B. Patterson (Oxford, 1973), no. 177 (with some errors of transcription); no. 287 for an analogue of the same charter (TNA, C 66/580, m. 2, in Addenda). In 1973 Patterson was unaware of the existence of the manuscript which is the focus of the present essay, but it is cited in his recent book (erroneously) as ‘the Register of Tewkesbury Abbey’: R. B. Patterson, The Earl, The Kings, and the Chronicler (Oxford, 2019), p. 58. For Patterson’s uncertainty over the relationships of the manuscripts studied in the present essay, compare pp. 17 (nn. 94, 95), 19 (n. 101), 58, 67, 82, 93 (n. 67), 99 (n. 109), 177 (n. 245). 6 W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum … by Sir William Dugdale, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis, and B. Bandinel, 6 vols. in 8 parts (London, 1846), II, 59–65 (history of the Abbey pp. 54–9, charters and other documents pp. 65–87); The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire: Sir Robert Atkyns, with a new introduction by B. S. Smith, 2 vols. (Wakefield, 1974), I, 725–37 (history pp. 713–25, charters and other documents pp. 737–62). 7 The Charter and Chronicle are digitised (only pages with decorated images) at Digital

THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK OF TEWKESBURY ABBEY

had been drawn to scholarly, if local, attention from as early as 1875,8 it was only through Julian Luxford’s detailed studies in 2003 and 2008, to which I am indebted,9 that it became more widely known, and is now set to be better known by the publication of a facsimile of the Charter and Chronicle from the Founders’ Book, edited and introduced by Julian Luxford, with Adrian Ailes writing on the heraldry of the manuscript, and myself responsible for the transcriptions, translations and commentaries.10 THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK (BODL., MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2) (FB) The Founders’ Book is a strange compilation, the Charter and Chronicle book-ended by incomplete material copied from other Abbey documents. The parchment is of variable quality, mostly sheepskin but with some calfskin later. The size is 245 x 175mm and the pages are foliated in pencil 1–46 to include the original flyleaves at front and back; three slips of inserted vellum are foliated 12, 16, and 38 (the first approx. 125 x 175mm, the second approx. 135 x 175mm, the third approx. 165 x 175mm). These insertions (the first in a neat secretary hand, the second and third consisting only of rubrics and images) all occur in the Chronicle. But what makes the manuscript unique (and what has led to the decision to produce a facsimile) is the illustrations of the founders/benefactors and their coats of arms, all but one of which occur in the course of the Chronicle, and the other in the Charter. In terms of the text of FB, there are four scribes at work, with interventions from a fifth. The Latin text (item 1, fols. 2r–5r, l. 17, Fig. 1) begins with material on early benefactors from Algiva, widow of Hayward Meaw (fl. 930x980) to Gilbert de Clare (d. 1230), fifth earl of Gloucester, and his wife Isabella (d. 1240); the material is covered in the main Chronicle Bodleian [accessed 18 May 2020]. 8 J. H. Blunt, Tewkesbury Abbey and its Associations (London, 1875), pp. 4–5; C. H. Bickerton Hudson, ‘The Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 33 (1910), 60–6. 9 J. M. Luxford, ‘The Founders’ Book’, in Tewkesbury Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, ed. R. K. Morris and R. Shoesmith (Little Logaston, 2003), pp. 53–64; ibid., ‘“Secundum originale examinatum”: The Refashioning of a Benedictine Historical Manuscript’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. M. Connolly and L. R. Mooney (York, 2008), pp. 161–79. See also n. 12 below. 10 The Founders’ Book: A Medieval History of Tewkesbury Abbey. A Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Top. Glouc. d. 2, ed. J. M. Luxford, with contributions by A. Ailes and S. Powell (Donington, 2021). The authors acknowledge the initiative and support in this enterprise of the Reverend Canon Paul Williams, Vicar of Tewkesbury Abbey, and the Friends of Tewkesbury Abbey. The present author wishes to record her gratitude to the Bodleian Library, in particular Richard Ovenden (Bodley’s Librarian), Martin Kauffmann (Head of Early and Rare Collections), and the conservator Andrew Honey, and to the benefactors of the Sassoon Visiting Fellowship which provided her with the opportunity to spend November 2018 in Oxford studying the manuscript.

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itself (fols. 8v–42r) but in a less discursive and expansive style. The text is written in a large, sprawling, anglicana hand with some secretary influence, probably late fifteenth century, with crude rubrication thickly applied to initials, proper names, numbers and marginal notes. The last few lines (fol. 5r, ll. 9–17) are clearly from a different source but may be written in the same hand using a finer nib; they provide some repetitive material about Isabella’s burial and her second marriage to Richard (d. 1272), first earl of Cornwall, with the record that Richard founded the (Benedictine) abbey at Hailes (Glos.) and that his son by his second marriage, Edmund of Almain (d. 1300), second earl of Cornwall, founded the (Bonhommes) priory of Ashridge (Herts.) and gave the Holy Blood to both institutions. This first scribe is followed on the same page (Fig. 2) by a neat secretary hand, at least late fifteenth century but perhaps later, attempting to imitate (very selectively) the hand of a twelfth-century copy-text (item 2, fol. 5r, l. 18 to fol. 5v).11 He writes in iron/oak gall ink which has faded to yellow; there is no rubrication. After details of relics left to Cranborne Priory (Dorset) by Hayward Meaw, with gifts of land by his widow, son and grandson,12 the text begins on the third line of fol. 5v in almost the exact words as item 1 (‘Vxor vero eius adhuc supertes [sic] quem uiuentem dilexerat …’, Fig. 1) and continues verbatim until the introduction of Hayward’s grandson Brihtric (cf. fol. 2r), inserting an addition on a dispute over land left to Cranborne and concluding with an addition on the bequest of land by Hugh, son of Grippus. It may be that this scribe mistakenly started copying the item 1 text again, and, as he did so, perhaps additional documents were brought to him for insertion. One cannot be certain, other than that the front (and also the back) of the manuscript seems to have been a location for late copying of loose text relating to the early history of the Abbey. At this point it comes as a surprise, in terms both of hand and content, to encounter a very neat late fifteenth century secretary hand which provides (item 3, fols. 6r–7v, Fig. 3) a coherent text of what is called the ‘Magna Carta’ of the Abbey, preceded by the coloured image of its originator, William Fitzrobert (1147–83), second earl of Gloucester, son of Robert Fitzroy (Robert the Consul), first earl of Gloucester and illegitimate son of Henry I.13 In armour with a feathered bonnet and a long crimson mantle, William wears a jupon bearing the arms quarterly (1 and

11 See M. B. Parkes, ‘Archaizing Hands in English Manuscripts’, in Books and Collectors 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, ed. J. P. Carley and C. G. C. Tite (London, 1997), pp. 101–41. 12 See J. M. Luxford, ‘The Cranborne Abbey Relic List’, Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries 35 (2003), 239–42. The monks moved from Cranborne to Tewkesbury, where they were established, under Robert Fitzhamon’s patronage, in 1102. 13 See Luxford, ‘The Founders’ Book’, Figure 6.2, and ‘“Secundum originale examinatum”’, Figure 1.

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4) of the earldom of Gloucester and (2 and 3) Fitzhamon (the founder); his shoulder badge is that of Clare.14 After a blank page the Chronicle follows (item 4, fols. 8v–42r), written in two hands. The first hand, which provides most of the text, is an awkward late fifteenth-century anglicana (Fig. 4), writing in variable stints, with varying dimensions of framing, where visible, but becoming more confident and accurate as it proceeds.15 On fol. 11v the scribe attempts an anglicana formata script (the most formal of the anglicana styles) for the obit of Matilda (d. 1083), wife of William the Conqueror. The other hand is the neat secretary hand of the Charter.16 The stints of the secretary hand suggest additions to the text of the other hand. They occur on one of the inserts (fol. 12r–v), complete two pages (fols. 22r, 37r) started in the anglicana hand, and finish the text of the Chronicle (fols. 37v–40v). It would appear from the fact that the secretary hand takes up the anglicana hand mid-sentence on fols. 22r and 37r, that the two scribes were working together, or at least at about the same time, despite the differences in hand and professionalism (the secretary hand is more polished, and the Latin is generally more accurate). Perhaps the secretary hand added material from different sources, which he was capable of sifting and editing (as the anglicana hand was not). If so, one might suggest that the secretary hand is that of the precentor of the abbey, who would be responsible for choir books, charters, and, in larger monasteries, the scriptorium (about which almost nothing is known for Tewkesbury).17 However, it may even be possible that they were working in different locations, or at different periods, the secretary scribe filling the gaps in the anglicana script. The Chronicle supplies a short text on each of the founders or benefactors of the Abbey, only going into fuller detail (fols. 27r–32r) when it reaches Isabella Despenser, the grand matriarch of the earls of Warwick, whose children Henry and Anne by her marriage to Richard Beauchamp (1382–1439), earl of Warwick, both married Nevilles. In particular it was Anne’s marriage to Richard Neville (1428–71), earl of Warwick and Salisbury, ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’, which established the dynasty: their daughters were Isabella, who married George (1449–78), duke of Clarence, and gave birth to Edward, earl of Warwick (1475–99), and Anne, who I am grateful to Adrian Ailes for this description. Fols. 9r–11v, 13r–22r (up to and including the first two words of line 8), 22v–7v, 28v–37r (up to and including the first word of line 7), 41r–2r (the annotations to heraldic arms). 16 Fols. 12r–v (an insert), 22r (from the third word of line 8 to the end of the page), 28r, 37r (from the second word of line 7)–40v (not fol. 38, an insert). 17 ‘It had almost certainly accumulated a considerable library, but almost no trace remains’: R. Sharpe, English Benedictine Libraries: the Shorter Catalogues, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 4 (London, 1996), p. 595 (five books recorded by Leland, p. 596, B98). See too N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books (London, 1964), p. 188; Luxford, ‘The Founders’ Book’, p. 53. 14 15

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married, first, Edward (1453–71), prince of Wales and son of Henry VI, and, second, Richard (1452–85), duke of Gloucester (Richard III), and gave birth to Edward (1474x6–84), briefly prince of Wales. After the Chronicle, the back material of the volume (item 5, fols. 42v–5v) is not a continuation of that at the start of the manuscript (despite being in the same archaising hand) but returns to the time of the founders of Tewkesbury Abbey, Robert Fitzhamon (d. 1107) and his wife Sybil, during the abbacy of Gerald (d. 1110). It provides fuller details of their involvement and beneficence in relation to the move from Cranborne to Tewkesbury. Confirmation and more grants of land were made by his son Reginald and his son-in-law Baldwin during the abbacies of Robert (d. 1123) and Benedict (d. 1124), and then by Walter Dunstanville (d. 1190) and Walter de Camel during the abbacy of Alan (1187–1202), after which the material continues (disregarding chronology) to list the lands and benefices granted to the Abbey, concluding in the time of Gerald.18 However, if not a continuation of the material at the front of the volume, these last folios, as noted above, are in the same archaising hand and yellow ink of item 2 at the front; the scribe tires, however, of the burden of this task and from the end of fol. 43r completes the material in his own hand, a late fifteenth-century secretary. As will be clear, the manuscript is very puzzling. How the material was put together cannot be verified from the make-up of the manuscript because each page has been single-guarded, presumably at the time of the nineteenth-century rebinding (see below). The manuscript would appear to be a single entity in that the rubrication of the Charter and Chronicle is in the same hand as that which rubricates the first item of the manuscript (fols. 2r–5r). Moreover, marginal rubrication from item 4, the Chronicle, e.g. ‘Quere in principio libri ubi inveniet 2’ (fol. 11r), cross-refers to marginal rubrication in item 1 (‘2 Nota’, fol. 2r). The five examples of this cross-referencing suggest that the codex was already in this form when the rubrication was applied. However, the rubrication occurs on pages in the anglicana hands (items 1 and 4), not in the secretary hands (items 2, 3, 4 and 5). This makes it a possibility that the anglicana hands were rubricated before the secretary hands filled gaps and added material.19 In his seminal article Julian Luxford described text and brush-trials on fol. 1v, including 18 The annals and cartulary are extant in BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra A.vii (annals fols. 9r–69v, cartulary fols. 70r–97r). Only the annals have been edited: Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 5 vols. (London, 1864–9), I, 43–180 (they begin with Edward the Confessor and end imperfect in 1263), 511–16. 19 However, the Charter, in the secretary hand, begins with the rubric and image of William earl of Gloucester and blue touches to the initial ‘W’ of the text (fol. 6r, Fig. 3), presumably added later. There are parts of the manuscript in the anglicana hand where shield outlines are incomplete and uncoloured (fols. 21v, 22r, 22v, 24v, 29r–30v, 32v), suggesting either material unavailable to the rubricator at the time or a lack of liaison between scribe (who sketched the shields) and rubricator.

THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK OF TEWKESBURY ABBEY

(under ultra-violet light) ‘Johannes Ewisham hunc librum fecit fieri’, i.e. John of Evesham had this book made.20 Given that John of Evesham was a pensioned monk at the abbey’s dissolution in 1539, he may have used (or salvaged) material from the abbey and had it copied, rubricated and assembled (perhaps not entirely in its present form). Nevertheless, even if all this was done in the sixteenth century, the content is no later than the 1490s and some of it much earlier.21 The date of the Chronicle in FB is established by internal evidence. As noted above, the text is illustrated by coloured figures of the ‘founders’ (largely benefactors, mostly earls of Gloucester) beginning with Oddo and Doddo (fol. 8v); each figure (sometimes a husband and wife image, e.g. Robert and Sybil Fitzhamon, fol. 13r) is surrounded by their arms on coloured shields, and most of the men (and one woman, Isabella Despenser) wear a tabard or jupon displaying their arms. The final such image (fol. 36v) is of Richard Neville (1428–71), earl of Warwick and Salisbury (Warwick the Kingmaker), who stands on a grassy mound holding a sheathed sword in his left hand and an upright drawn sword in his right hand. The defeat of Warwick at Barnet in 1471 and the death of Henry VI’s son Edward at Tewkesbury in the same year is recorded briefly in the text (fol. 37r–v). The final images in the manuscript are heraldic rather than figural (fols. 41r–2r), the many-quartered shield of George (1449–78), duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, and his son by Isabella Neville (1451–77), Edward (1475–99), and rows of shields displaying the Warwick ancestry from Guy of Warwick and his pre-history until Warwick the Kingmaker. The execution of Edward in 1499 supplies a terminus ante quem for the manuscript, while the mention on fol. 37v (in the secretary hand) of Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth (1485) and the grant of Great Marlow to the abbey (appropriated 11 August 1494) provides a terminus a quo. The material in the Chronicle seems to have been completed between 1494 and 1499. This does not mean that it was precisely copied during that period, and Julian Luxford has suggested c. 1510 on the basis of the costume design of the figural illustrations;22 this brings us into the sixteenth century and the last thirty years of monastic life for John of Evesham. THE ROLL (BODL., MS LAT. MISC. B. 2) (R) A brief digression is introduced here before the discussion of the manuscript’s fifth hand. The Roll is a vellum (calfskin) roll of nine membranes (approx. 5450 x 400mm) each glued to the next, written in two late fifteenth-century hands. On the recto is a pedigree-chronicle of the kings 20 21 22

Luxford, ‘The Founders’ Book’, p. 62. For a fuller description of the content see Luxford, ‘The Founders’ Book’, pp. 57–61. Luxford, ‘“Secundum originale examinatum”’, p. 164.

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of England to 1432, and on the dorse a pedigree-chronicle of the benefactors of Tewkesbury Abbey covering only six of the membranes.23 Its material is contemporaneous with that of FB in that both end in the lifetime of Edward, earl of Warwick (born 21x25 February 1475, executed 28 November 1499), son of George, duke of Clarence. The first four membranes are divided vertically into three columns, the text presented in blocks to left and right of a central section which presents names and shields within roundels and joins the roundels with a red ribbon-like band, beginning on the first membrane with two conjoined roundels (‘Oddo dux’, ‘Doddo dux’) with their arms in the roundel below. The red ribbon then leads down through all the benefactors and their arms as far as Henry Beauchamp (1425–46), first duke of Warwick, at the end of membrane 4 (cf. FB, fol. 32r). Henry was the son of Richard Beauchamp (1382–1439), earl of Warwick, and Isabella Despenser; he married Cecily (d. 1450), daughter of Richard Neville (1400–60), earl of Salisbury, and a red line leads to the couple. It was, however, Richard’s son, Richard Neville (1428–71), ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’, who provided the continuation of the family line through the alliances of his daughters, Isabella and Anne, and so a black line leads from one Richard to the next (cf. FB, fol. 36v), and on to the fifth membrane, which depicts the identical arms of Isabella’s husband, George (1449–78), duke of Clarence, and his brother, Anne’s husband, Richard (1452–85), duke of Gloucester,24 leading to the identical shields of their respective offspring, both named Edward, the one earl of Warwick (1475–99), the other briefly prince of Wales (1474x76–84).25 To the extreme left below and on the next membrane (the sixth and final one to be used on the dorse of the roll) is a vertical key to the quarterings of these shields, providing inscriptions and arms of the Warwick family tree. These shields with their key are reproduced in horizontal format in the Founders’ Book itself (cf. FB, fols. 41r–2r). As for the text of R, it is close to that of FB, sometimes verbatim and sometimes paraphrased,26 but it is a shorter text and, apart from other 23 The roll is digitised at Digital Bodleian [accessed 18 May 2020]. 24 Names are stamped onto the roll, with a space or small letter for the initial, e.g. ‘georgius dux Clarencie’ and ‘[I]sabella ducissa’ stamped to left and right of the first shield; ‘[A]nna’ and ‘[R]icardus dux Gloucestrie’ to left and right of the shield alongside it. 25 Edward, son of Richard, duke of Gloucester, is not accorded the same status in FB: after the shields of George and Richard (fol. 38r–v) is the shield of Edward, son of Henry VI (and briefly husband of Anne Neville before she married Richard), and before the key to the Warwick shields are the headings for George and his son Edward (by Isabella Neville) (fol. 41r). For a fuller discussion of the roll in relation to FB and the Warwick sources see Adrian Ailes’s contribution in the forthcoming facsimile. 26 An analysis of FB, fol. 17r–v, in comparison with R, shows that R lacks two long passages (King John’s divorce from his first wife Isabella and her later marriages; most of the material on William earl of Gloucester); what survives of the material on William is partly rendered verbatim and partly paraphrased. Importantly, what is omitted relates

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omissions or reductions, includes none of the material added to FB by the secretary hand. THE FIFTH HAND OF THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK The fifth hand which intervenes in FB is an editing hand which marked up FB for transcription at least a century after the completion of the manuscript. It is therefore the hand of an antiquary, or the secretary or assistant or employee of such a person. The editor (as we may call him) prepared his text by marking up alterations, omissions, additions and punctuation, most notably in item 1 of FB, with fewer and more orderly examples of intervention in items 2–5. For example, item 1 begins abruptly and without context (Fig. 1): ‘Vxor vero eius iam supertes quem viventem dilexerat …’ (fol. 2r, repeated fol. 5r). The later editor has deleted ‘eius iam’, inserted the missing of supertes, and scribbled above the line an essential clarification, ‘Haywardi Meawe, nomine Algiua, post decessum eiusdem Haywardi’. The result is intended to read: ‘Vxor vero Haywardi Meawe, nomine Algiua, post decessum eiusdem Haywardi superstes, quem viventem dilexerat …’ (the wife of Hayward Meaw, Algiva by name, surviving after the death of the same Hayward, whom she had loved when he was alive …). This at least provides a lucid introduction to material which had been copied straight from a mid-point in an earlier lost narrative. As noted above, after the list of relics in item 2, the text begins again with these selfsame words and continues verbatim apart from two new passages. The later editor was more aware than the scribe of item 2 that this involved repetition of item 1 material and omitted the repetitive material, retaining only the two extra passages. In addition he achieved greater coherence by correcting the often erroneous Latin grammar and spelling, by punctuating it with Early Modern punctuation marks not in use at the time of the original scribes (commas, colons, brackets, for example), and by restructuring the text where it would improve sense and logic. The editor also marked up the whole text into chapters, which he signalled in the margins of FB. All this is visible on the pages of FB and compromises the reading and transcript of the manuscript today, sometimes severely. However, the later editor’s intentions can be understood thanks to the survival today of the transcript for which he was editing FB.

mostly to the properties taken from or confirmed for Tewkesbury, i.e. cartulary material; what is significant for the roll scribe is the pedigree descent.

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THE EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK (BL, MS ADD. 36985) (ADD.) This manuscript has been fully and carefully discussed by Julian Luxford in a volume co-edited by the honorand of the present Festschrift.27 It is a small vellum book (200 x 140mm) of 34 pp. in a limp embossed white kid cover. The elegant italic hand appears to copy a typographic model but is not in fact a type-facsimile but ‘an invented “typeface”, loosely modelled on an Italicised version of Garamond’.28 The date is indeterminable, since there appears to be nothing comparable to this style, and italic hands are notoriously hard to date. The copyist also reproduces the figures and shields, uncoloured but with skill and delicacy (Fig. 5). He intended to copy the whole of FB, but his transcript ends abruptly at the foot of fol. 34r with the catchword -iua (‘contemplati[ua]’), in the course of material on Isabella Despenser’s son Henry Beauchamp, first duke of Warwick (cf. FB, fol. 33r). In addition, fol. 30r, which introduces Isabella Despenser and her first marriage, to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Worcester, has been removed at some point. A reason for both these imperfections will be suggested below. There is no doubt that Add. is the result of the marking up of FB. The first lines of FB are cited above, together with the alterations made to the text by the later hand. These alterations are confirmed in the reading in Add. (fol. 1r), which is exactly as the editor had altered the FB text quoted above: ‘Vxor vero Haywardi Meawe, nomine Algiua, post decessum eiusdem Haywardi superstes, quem viventem dilexerat …’. Other alterations and omissions or additions are paralleled in the Add. text.29 As noted above, the later editor signalled chapter divisions in the margins of FB. In fact, these do not entirely tally with those he finally decided on in his transcript, and he seems to have found two extra divisions of the material, i.e. two extra chapters, more effective as his transcript proceeded.30 Since Add. is imperfect, what are marked in FB as the ninth, tenth and eleventh chapters (FB, fols. 36v, 41r, 42v) are missing altogether, as is the start of the eighth chapter (FB, fol. 26v), i.e. what would have been the tenth chapter in Add., by the loss of folio 30 in Add. Various dates have been suggested for Add. Most recently Julian Luxford has argued from the evidence of the binding (most common 1600–25), grotesque capitals (after 1563), and the provenance of FB itself that it was produced during the lifetime of Robert Spencer, first baron Luxford, ‘“Secundum originale examinatum”’. Richard Ovenden (personal communication). For type-facsimiles: A. T. Hazen, ‘TypeFacsimiles’, Modern Philology 44 (1947), 209–17. 29 For example, the repetitive material of fol. 5v (mentioned above) is not in Add. For further examples see the discussion by Luxford, “‘Secundum originale examinatum’”, pp. 170–1. 30 Compare Fig. 4 (FB) and Fig. 5 (Add.): Fig. 4 shows the editorial note, ‘Caput 7 de Despenserijs’, which is ‘Caput IX’ in Fig. 5. 27

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Spencer of Wormleighton (1570–1627), which means that it ‘cannot have been made much before 1590’.31 Luxford’s argument is convincing, but it is possible to be more specific. Inside the front cover of FB, on marbled paper, is the bookplate of John Fane, 11th earl of Westmorland (1784–1859) with the date 1857; he was clearly responsible for the binding.32 The verso of the original flyleaf (fol. 1v) has the signature of Sir Edward Greville (d. 1560) of Milcote (Warks.)33 and a Latin inscription citing Mary Neville, suo jure third baroness Despenser, and Robert Spencer, first baron Spencer of Wormleighton (1570–1627). Luxford does not quote this inscription which would have reinforced his argument: ‘Hunc librum tenet Honoratisima Domina Maria Baronessa Le Despencer sola filia et hæres Henrici Neuill Baronis Aburgavence ex dono Roberti Domini Spencer Baronis Wormeletoniæ cuius posteri coniuncti amant et gaudent’.34 Mary Neville (c. 1554–1626), daughter and heir of Henry, lord Bergavenny, was the second wife of Sir Thomas Fane (d. 1589), to whom she bore six children. In 1607, three years after she had succeeded (not without dispute) to the title of baroness Despenser,35 her son George (1582–1640) married Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Spencer of Wormleighton. This appears to have been the occasion referred to in the inscription, when Sir Robert (a Spencer) presented his daughter’s new mother-in-law, the recently legitimised baroness Despenser, who had been born a Neville, with the gift of the Founders’ Book, a book which chronicled the importance of the Despensers and Nevilles in the history of Tewkesbury Abbey and which linked (‘coniuncti’) the two families as (De)spensers. The link was not in fact very strong. Robert Spencer was primarily a very successful sheep farmer,36 but he was a prominent figure in Parliament, Northamptonshire, and Calvinist circles and was not without aspirations to gentry status: his father had acquired a pedigree which Luxford, ‘“Secundum originale examinatum”’, pp. 175–9 (p. 177). For his handwritten plates: D. Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History (Oxford, 2019), p. 47 (2.38). 33 C. H. Bickerton Hudson, ‘The Founders’ Book’, suggests that he was the son of John Greville (d. 1547/8) by his first wife, Elizabeth Spencer, and thus links the manuscript from this early date to the Spencers of Wormleighton. This would make sense but appears to be disputed by TNA and other evidence: see ‘TNA PROB 11/32/252’ on N. Green, The Oxford Authorship Site [accessed 6 July 2020]. 34 ‘The most honourable Lady Mary, baroness Despenser, only daughter and heir of Henry Neville, baron Bergavenny, owns this book by the gift of Robert, Lord Spencer, baron of Wormleighton, whose conjoined descendants love and rejoice’. 35 She had claimed the barony of Bergavenny against her cousin Edward Neville and lost, but with the compromise that she was by letters patent 25 May 1604 confirmed as baroness le Despencer suo jure. 36 His great-great-grandfather, Sir John Spencer (1455–1522), had made a fortune from sheep farming, from which he bought two estates, Wormleighton (Warks.) and Althorp (Northants.), to which the Spencers moved in 1508. (Lady Diana Spencer descended from him, and there is a brief but useful survey of the family on the Althorp website: [accessed 18 May 2020].) 31

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linked the family to the Despensers, and Sir Robert himself corresponded with William Camden (1551–1623), historian, headmaster of Westminster School, Clarenceux King of Arms and founder of the first Society of Antiquaries, about his family tree (the pedigree of which was questioned).37 The marriage of his daughter into a Despenser family must have given him pleasure and serves to explain the context in which FB was presented to baroness Despenser in or around 1607. Perhaps, as Luxford suggests, Sir Robert wanted to retain his own copy of the manuscript and so had his secretary or suchlike copy it as Add. However, there is further provenance evidence. Inside the front cover is a note by Thomas Hearne: ‘This MS belongs to Sir Justinian Isham Baronet. Tho: Hearne. Feb. 3. 1732–3’. Sir Justinian Isham (1687–1737) was fifth baronet Isham of Lamport Hall (Northants.), and the manuscript seems to have remained in the Isham family at least until 1875, when it was examined by John Henry Blunt.38 Thomas Hearne (1678–1735) had already done transcription work for Henry Dodwell (1641–1711), a friend of his patron Francis Cherry, before he entered on his productive but curtailed career at the Bodleian Library.39 As a private scholar he published much of antiquarian interest; in particular, in relation to Gloucestershire, he edited Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle (1724) and much on nearby Glastonbury (like Tewkesbury, a Benedictine abbey). With a wide circle of antiquarian friends and readers, he must have heard of Isham’s manuscript and so borrowed the manuscript (one assumes), shortly before his own and not long before its owner’s death. The seventeenth-century Ishams were a remarkable royalist, High Church, and Tory family, of whom Sir Justinian Isham (1610–75), second baronet, was the star, so much so that Justinian became a recurring family Christian name into the nineteenth century.40 Despite financial losses in his support of Charles I (both from defaulting royalist loans and parliamentary fines) he was wealthy enough after the Civil War to buy paintings and books and to establish a library at Lamport. An early member of the Royal Society, he was interested in science, mathematics and the classics, and well known to the scholarly circles of the day. The trunk of Shakespeare first folios and other valuable books which was discovered at Lamport Hall in 1867 (and went to the Huntington Library) was collected during the lifetime of one of these seventeenth-century baronets.41 It may 37 R. Cust, ‘Spencer, Robert, first baron Spencer (1570–1627)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. He was created baron in 1603 but refused to buy an earldom. 38 Blunt, Tewkesbury Abbey, pp. 4–5. 39 It is impossible here to do justice to Hearne and his wide scholarship and difficult life. For a detailed but concise account: T. Harmsen, ‘Hearne, Thomas (bap. 1678, d. 1735)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. 40 For the second and third baronets: R. Priestley, ‘Isham, Sir Justinian, second baronet (1611–1675)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. 41 It was discovered during the tenure of Sir Charles Isham, vegetarian, spiritualist,

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be that Add. was acquired from Spencer by the book-collecting second baronet, perhaps around 1645, when their manor at Wormleighton, only thirty miles from Lamport, was slighted to prevent its becoming a parliamentary stronghold. There is, however, another possibility, that the copying of Add. took place not before but after the presentation of FB to Mary Fane.42 It may be significant that the transcript stops after the material on Isabella Despenser has been copied, and that the removal of a page of the transcript reveals another particular interest in this female ancestor of Mary Fane: the text of the missing fol. 30r deals with Isabella Despenser and would have featured a fine drawing of her, wearing a robe displaying her coat of arms and kneeling before an image of the Virgin and Child (cf. FB, fol. 27r). A later production of Add., when the Founders’ Book was already in Fane hands, would also remove the problem of the Luxford hypothesis, which would posit Sir Robert allowing his secretary (or whoever) to deface by his editing what was intended as a gift for Mary Fane. The production of Add. reveals an antiquarian and genealogical interest in the Founders’ Book which is typical of the post-dissolution period, but which is enhanced in this case by a particular domestic and family interest in the material, perhaps particularly in the material relating to Isabella Despenser in the Chronicle. Without this specific family interest, it was Add. as a repository of chronicle material relating to Tewkesbury Abbey which must have prompted Thomas Hearne to study it in 1733, and it was the Add. version of the FB Charter which Robert Patterson used in his edition of Gloucestershire charters.43 It is a similar interest which explains the transcripts of the Chronicle made in the sixteenth century and later, one of which was printed by the antiquary and later herald, William Dugdale (1605–86), in Monasticon Anglicanum in the seventeenth century and formed the basis for all following discussion of the Chronicle. ANOTHER TEXT OF THE CHRONICLE (BL, MS COTTON CLEOPATRA C.III) (CC) As stated above, the Chronicle printed by Dugdale was not taken direct from the Founders’ Book (nor from Add.) but from an Elizabethan transcript (CC, fols. 210r–24v) of a now-lost analogue. This lost manuscript gardener and bringer of garden gnomes to England: B. A. Bailey, ‘Isham, Sir Charles Edmund, tenth baronet (1819–1903)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. 42 FB remained with the Fanes until it was acquired in 1892 by C. Bickerton Hudson who gave it and MS Lat. hist. e. 2 to the Bodleian Library: ‘Tewkesbury Abbey’, Gloucestershire Notes and Queries 5 (1892), 325–7 (no author); Bickerton Hudson, ‘The Founders’ Book’; R. Austin, ‘Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 60 (1938), 340–1. 43 See above and n. 5.

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can be traced back (as so much can) to John Leland (c. 1503–52), antiquary, cleric, and, most importantly, appointee of Henry VIII ‘to peruse and dylygentlye to searche all the lybraryes of monasteryes and collegies of thys your noble realme’.44 Leland first visited Tewkesbury Abbey in the summer of 1533, although James Carley suggests that the visit on which he saw the Chronicle must have been at some time between 1537 and late 1539, just before the dissolution.45 It may have been lack of time which prevented his doing more than making an abstract of the Chronicle, but this abstract was amongst the material copied by John Stow (1524/5–1605) when in 1576 he transcribed at least fifteen of Leland’s original eighteen volumes of notes into five volumes (Bodl., MS Tanner 464, vols. i–v).46 It is within the material now known as ‘the Itinerary’, which occupied Stow’s volumes ii, iii and v and had been transcribed mostly from those of Leland’s notebooks now shelved as Bodl., MSS Gen. Top. e. 8–15, that we find the abstract today, together with details of those killed at the 1471 battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, all of which Thomas Hearne later edited in his 1710–12 edition of Leland’s Itinerary.47 Stow’s invaluable transcripts of Leland’s barely legible and disorganised materials gave four London antiquaries access to his work: William Harrison (1535–93), Robert Glover (1543/4–88), Francis Thynne (1545?– 1608), and William Camden (1551–1623), as well, in 1588, as the young Robert Cotton (1571–1631).48 It is in BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iii (CC), a collection of the materials of Francis Thynne, antiquary and Lancaster Herald, that we find the full version of the Tewkesbury Abbey Chronicle printed by Dugdale. CC is a bulky volume made up of pages of minimally variable size (within the range 205–10 x 150mm), foliated 1–386.49 Its antiquarian material was originally in several booklets now bound together and refoliated, some of which were transcribed by Thynne himself between 1582 and 1584.50 Thynne assisted Stow in volumes two and three (1587) of 44 Quoted by J. Carley from The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, I, xxxvii: ‘Leland, John (c. 1503–1552)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. 45 John Leland: De uiris illustribus, On Famous Men, ed. and trans. J. P. Carley (Toronto, 2010), pp. lxxi n. 258, 817–210, and private communication. 46 For the abstract: The Itinerary, ed. Hearne, VI, 60–9 (pp. 69–70 for those slain at Barnet and Tewkesbury); The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, IV, 150–61 (pp. 136–41 for his notes on Tewkesbury, pp. 162–63 for those slain at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury). 47 Leland: Bodl., MS Gen. Top. e. 13, vol. vi, fols. 81r–94r. Toulmin Smith moved the abstract and list of slain from their position in Part VIII (p. 136) to an Appendix I(b): The Itinerary, IV, 150–163. 48 Harris, ‘“Motheaten”’, pp. 471–4; for the complex history of the dissemination of Leland’s manuscript material see Harris, ‘“Motheaten”’. 49 i (paper backed with card) + iii (paper) + 2 + 1 blank unfoliated + 3–20 = 7 unfol. + 21–49 + 1 unfol. + 50–6 + 4 unfol. + 57–98 + 1 unfol. + 99–159 + 1 unfol. + 160–228 + 1 unfol. + 229–386 + 3 unfol. + ii paper + i paper backed with card. Each page is guarded, and the manuscript has been disassembled and reconstituted with unfoliated pages separating sections of material. The present foliation is bottom right pencil, but there are several earlier foliations (that used by Toulmin Smith is no longer valid). 50 D. Carlson, ‘The Writings and Manuscript Collections of the Elizabethan Alchemist,

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his Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande,51 and the transcripts on fols. 281r–309v of CC are in Stow’s hand.52 The volume includes several items relating to Tewkesbury Abbey, such as the foundation and abbots (fols. 40r–1r) and the earls of Gloucester (fols. 352r–3r). However, the Chronicle of Tewkesbury Abbey is in an unidentified hand on what are now foliated 210r–24v, followed by a metrical epitome of the Chronicle in an italic hand (fol. 225r) and the details of those killed at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471 in the Chronicle hand (fols. 226r–8r).53 A comparison between Leland’s abstract of the Chronicle, Stow’s copy of Leland’s abstract, Hearne’s edition containing Leland’s abstract, and the full texts in CC and Dugdale, makes it plain that these all had their origin in the same manuscript, and that this manuscript was not FB.54 As an abstract, only the salient details of the Chronicle are included in Leland, Stow and Hearne (the abstract omits, for example, details of christening and funeral rites and property ownership), but cruxes at both beginning and end may be compared with the text of FB. Leland’s abstract (in all its incarnations) begins and ends: ‘Temporibus Ethelredi, Kenredi, et Ethelbaldi regum Merciorum fuerunt Oddo et Doddo duces in Mercia … Et post eujs obitum nupsit Richardo duci Glocestriae, filio Richardi ducis Eboracensis, et fratri Edwardi 4. regis, de qua genuit filium nomine [blank] apud castrum de Midlam ao D. 1476’.55 Here ‘Kenredi’ and the blank space are of interest, both readings confirmed in the full transcript of the Chronicle in CC and so in Dugdale. If we look at FB, however, ‘Kenredi’ is omitted (‘Temporibus illustrissimorum principum Ethelredi & Ethelbald regum Merciorum …’, fol. 9r), and the name left blank at the end of the Chronicle is present in FB: ‘de qua genuit filium nomine Georgium’, fol. 40v). If we leave aside the abstracts and concentrate on the full texts of the Chronicle, the CC transcript in Dugdale does not have several passages Antiquary, and Herald Francis Thynne’, Huntington Library Quarterly 52 (1989), 203–72 (pp. 253–4); for the material from Leland see Harris, ‘“Motheaten”’, pp. 473, 485–7 (Q2–4), 490 (Q9). 51 Carlson, ‘The Writings and Manuscript Collections’, pp. 212–14. For the Chronicles: see J. M. Ockerbloom, The Online Books Page: Online Books by John Stow [accessed 6 July 2020]. 52 But not from Leland, according to Harris, ‘“Motheaten”’, p. 464. 53 The metrical synopsis is in the italic hand of John Dee: C. G. C. Tite, The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library (London, 2003), p. 212 (entry for Cotton Cleopatra C.iii, with further provenance details), while the Chronicle and list of slain are in another hand. 54 Dugdale’s edition is not, therefore, ‘copied from the same original as the Lamport volume [i.e. BL, MS Additional 36985]’, as suggested by Blunt, Tewkesbury Abbey, pp. 4–5 (p. 5). 55 The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, IV, 150, 161. My translation: ‘In the times of Ethelred, Kenred and Ethelbald, kings of Mercia, Oddo and Doddo were dukes in Mercia … And after his [Prince Edward, son of Henry VI] death she [Anne Neville] married Richard duke of Gloucester, son of Richard duke of York, and brother of Edward IV, by whom she gave birth to a son [blank] by name at Middleham Castle in 1476’.

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found in FB, some minor, such as the epitaph to Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror (FB, fol. 11v), others major, such as the descent of Robert Fitzhamon from Rollo through various illustrious Normans (FB, fols. 11v–12v, partly on an insert), or a memorandum on the appropriation of Deerhurst priory in exchange for Goldcliff (fol. 36r), or the brief material on the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury and the Great Marlow grant (FB, fol. 37r–v),56 or the key to the heraldry (FB, fols. 41r–2r). These passages in FB are all either mostly copied in the secretary hand, or rubricated and drawn (CC has no rubrication or imagery); this would confirm what was suggested above, that the secretary hand had access to additional material to the main exemplar, which he mostly copied himself.57 However, exactly how close the two exemplars of FB and CC might have been originally is not precisely determinable. While the two cruxes discussed above (and there are others) indicate different exemplars, the degree of contamination in transcribing the Chronicle is hard to estimate. The text of the Chronicle in CC occasionally differs from that of FB in choice of syntactical constructions, and the orthography and morphology of the Latin are correct (unlike FB): however, these are differences which should probably be attributable to editorial decisions made by the CC copyist as he transcribed the original document, rather than to the original exemplar.58 Rearrangement and omission of material where FB is confused and repetitive (e.g., FB, fols. 36r–7v) may also be explained as editorial on the part of the later transcriber (it was noted above that the editor of Add. also ‘improved’ FB as part of his transcription procedure). This raises the issue of the methodology of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century copyists of medieval texts. The fact that the antiquaries transcribed their texts freely, rather than with a present-day academic editor’s precision, means that a forensic comparison of CC and FB cannot be a comparison of two medieval texts. For example, Leland in his abstract leaves the year of Hayward Meaw’s death blank (as it is in both CC and FB) but gives the date as 17 kalends January (not in CC or FB); Leland gives the date of Robert the Consul’s death as 1140, which Stow corrected to 1146 (both CC and FB have 1147);59 Leland omits the year of Edward II’s reign in which Gilbert III was killed (the eighth), although Hearne adds it as a footnote (CC has no year, but FB has ‘viiio’). For a rather different example, Leland says that Hugh of Mercia’s tomb can still be seen north of the Abbey nave, but this may be a

This in fact ends incomplete (‘Que …’, fol. 37v). Note the two uses of ‘mostly’: not everything extra in FB is copied in the secretary hand, e.g. the memorandum on fol. 36r is in the anglicana hand. 58 For example, later Latin is used (for ) and (for ); commas and paragraphs are inserted; all dates are arabic after the first few (fols. 210r, 211r), whereas the original document will have used only Roman numerals (as does FB). 59 The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, IV, 153 n. 56 57

THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK OF TEWKESBURY ABBEY

mere observation of Leland (it is not in CC or FB).60 In the example cited above from the end of the Chronicle, the name of the son of Richard, duke of Gloucester is left blank in Leland/Hearne, and in CC/Dugdale; however, Stow in his copy wrote ‘Georgius’, the name found only in FB.61 Where he found the name ‘Georgius’ is unclear: he might have seen FB, but this seems unlikely;62 there might indeed have been a first-born son, George, but this is not recorded elsewhere; Leland might have baulked at copying ‘Georgium’ from his exemplar, knowing it to be erroneous, but Stow consulted the exemplar and supplied it (unlikely). In his publication of Leland’s Itinerary, Thomas Hearne seems to have been careful to reproduce Leland’s words and even page-layout (but not punctuation) closely.63 However, Dugdale seems to have been more free in his preparation of CC for the Monasticon, so that a comparison of the printed text with the manuscript reveals several differences, e.g. Richard de Clare died ‘MCCvj’ (Monasticon II, 61), whereas CC has ‘1211’;64 John, son of Gilbert III, died before his father ‘immatura morte’ (II, 61), whereas CC (fol. 215r) and FB (fol. 20r) have the erroneous ‘matura’; Gilbert II had three daughters, Eleanor, Elizabeth and Margaret (II, 61), whereas both CC (fol. 215r) and FB (fol. 19v) name Isabella instead of Margaret. In the last example, ‘Isabellam’ has been cancelled in CC and ‘Margaretam’ inserted in the margin by a later hand. Further analysis is perhaps unnecessary. The antiquaries (like presentday historians) were interested in content, not precise spelling and text. So much borrowing, transcribing and altering went on amongst them that any attempt to distinguish between even the same text as copied by different hands is largely pointless. However, it is to be hoped that enough has been said to demonstrate that the current edited texts of the Charter of William Fitzrobert and the Chronicle of Tewkesbury Abbey are inadequate. They are later transcripts, copied for genealogical/personal/ historical reasons. The Charter edited by Patterson from the transcript in Add., the Chronicle edited by Dugdale from the transcript in CC. The Founders’ Book: A Medieval History of Tewkesbury Abbey will provide a new edition of both, with translations of both and with studies of the manuscript and heraldry, all in a facsimile of the text which displays the The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, IV, 151, 153, 156, 151 respectively. The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, IV, 161 n. 62 However, A. J. Pollard, who noted the blank in Dugdale, was willing to consider that ‘this might be a reference to a second son, also born at Middleham, who died at birth’: ‘Edward [Edward of Middleham], prince of Wales (1474x6–1484)’, ODNB Online [accessed 18 May 2020]. 63 He was a ‘careful and conscientious transcriber, making but few errors’; for help he looked at transcripts by Burton and Gale [Thomas Gale, 1635/6–1702] until he later acquired Stow’s transcripts: The Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, I, xxx–xxxi (p. xxx). 64 Here the original reading ‘MCCxjo’ (FB, fol. 17v; CC, fol. 214v) may have been misread as ‘MCCvjo’; the CC date has been subpuncted and ‘1219[?]’ written above. The correct date is 1217. 60 61

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stunning images of the founders/benefactors and their arms. Intriguing as the actions of later antiquaries are, and much as they are to be venerated for often preserving records otherwise lost, for the medievalist editor the earliest texts must be preferred to their later copies. APPENDIX: CONTENTS AND HANDS OF THE FOUNDERS’ BOOK OF TEWKESBURY ABBEY (BODL., MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2) Item 1, fols. 2r–5r, l. 17 (Hand 1), Early benefactors from Algiva, widow of Hayward Meaw (fl. 930x980), to Gilbert de Clare (d. 1230), fifth earl of Gloucester, and his wife Isabella (d. 1240). Item 2, fol. 5r, l. 18 to fol. 5v (Hand 2), Relics left to Cranborne Priory by Hayward Meaw, with gifts of land by his widow, son and grandson; repetition (fol. 5v, l. 3) of item 1, fols. 1r–2r with two additions. Item 3, fols. 6r–7v (Hand 3), The ‘Magna Carta’ of the Abbey with coloured image and heraldry of William Fitzrobert (1147–83), second earl of Gloucester. Item 4, fols. 8v–42r (Hands 3 and 4), Founders/benefactors of the Abbey from Oddo and Doddo to the earls of Warwick, with coloured images and heraldry. Item 5, fols. 42v–5v (Hand 2), Grants of Robert Fitzhamon (d. 1107) and his wife Sybil, Reginald and his son-in-law Baldwin, Walter Dunstanville, and Walter de Camel, during the abbacies of Gerald (d. 1110), Robert (d. 1123) and Benedict (d. 1124), and Alan (1187–1202); lands and benefices granted to the Abbey up to the time of Gerald.

Manuscripts and Printed Texts of the Above Items 1–4 (incomplete), BL, MS Additional 36985 (incomplete transcript of Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. d. 2). Item 3, Earldom of Gloucester Charters, ed. R. B. Patterson (Oxford, 1973), no. 177. Item 4, BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iii, fols. 210r–224v (transcript of lost analogue of MS Top. Glouc. d. 2), printed in W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum … by Sir William Dugdale, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis, and B. Bandinel, 6 vols. in 8 parts (London, 1846), II, 59–65, translated in The Ancient and Present State of Glostershire: Sir Robert Atkyns, with a new introduction by B. S. Smith, 2 vols. (Wakefield, 1974), I, 725–37 (history pp. 713–25, charters and other documents pp. 737–62). Item 5, unpublished.

FIG. 1 BODL., MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2, FOL. 2R (HAND 1). © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

FIG. 2 BODL., MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2, FOL. 5R (HANDS 1 AND 2). © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

FIG. 3 BODL., MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2, FOL. 6R, THE CHARTER (HAND 3). © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

FIG. 4 BODL., MS TOP. GLOUC. D. 2, FOL. 21R (HAND 4). © BODLEIAN LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

36985, FOLS. 22V–23R. © THE

FIG. 5 BL, MS ADDITIONAL

PART IV CHAUCERIAN CONTEXTS

WHEN IS A ‘CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT’ NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT? 1 DANIEL W. MOSSER

T

he answer to the question posed by my title may surprise those coming at it as ‘Chaucerians’: in fact, texts other than the Tales appear in these manuscripts nearly half the time. While a number of manuscripts do contain only the Tales, some thirty-five of the eighty-three surviving manuscripts (counting Ox1 and Ox2 as one), or about 42%, contain texts other than the Canterbury Tales. Fifty-four manuscripts contain oncecomplete or near-complete copies of the Tales, while twenty-nine (again, 1 ‘Penning’ this essay reminds me just how unfailingly generous Linne Mooney has been to other scholars. My contribution to a festschrift for Linne is direct consequence of her arranging a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship for me at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York in fall of 2007 and 2008. The gist of this essay was originally developed as a ‘Leverhulme Lecture’ that I delivered in several venues as part of that appointment. During that period I also began collaborating with Linne on the project now known as the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV), on which she had already been at work for many years. Additionally, we produced together five articles/ chapters between 2004 and 2016 (see ‘Linne R. Mooney: List of Publications’ in this volume). I happily preceded her in retirement, a state into which I now warmly welcome her. A complete listing of texts other than the Canterbury Tales found in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales is included in Appendix 2 at the end of this essay. Manuscript sigils are expanded in Appendix 1. Full descriptions and bibliography for individual manuscripts can be found in D. W. Mosser, Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts and Incunables of the Canterbury Tales (Birmingham, 2010); which is superseded by D. W. Mosser, with D. H. Radcliffe, A Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts and Incunables of the Canterbury Tales, 2nd edn (2014) [accessed 24 August 2020].

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counting Ox1 and Ox2 as one) either contain extracts or are too fragmentary to resolve the question of their original scope. Among these ‘Canterbury Tales manuscripts’, aside from the Canterbury Tales proper, I count some 240 Middle English verse texts, 65 Middle English prose texts, 16 Latin prose texts, 10 Latin verse texts, and a single French verse text. While many of these occur only once or twice in Canterbury Tales manuscripts, we can get a sense of what comprised at least one version of the fifteenth century’s ‘greatest hits’ by looking at the remaining texts that occur in three or more manuscripts. Of surviving manuscripts containing later Middle English verse, those containing the text of the Canterbury Tales number second only to those with The Prick of Conscience.2 While it is well-known that Lydgatian texts appear frequently with texts by Chaucer and are often attributed to Chaucer, the wide range of both secular and religious texts speak to the varying perspectives from which Chaucer’s texts were read and received. Two texts make five appearances in Canterbury Tales manuscripts: John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (Ad1 Ch Cn En3 Ll1) and Chaucer’s ‘Truth’ (Balade de Bon Conseyl: Ad4 Gg Ha3 Ph4 Pp[2]). The inclusion of the Siege of Thebes should not be too surprising, since Lydgate composed it as a Canterbury Tale, told by himself as the first homeward tale. Five texts appear in four Canterbury Tales manuscripts: Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (Gg Ha3 Pp[1] Tc3), Chaucer’s ‘An ABC’ (Gg Hl2 Pp[1] Pp[2]), Benedict Burgh’s ‘Cato Minor’ and ‘Cato Major’ (Ha3 Hl2 Hn Pp[1]), Lydgate’s Churl and Bird (Ch Cn Hn Tc3), and extracts from Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Dl Ee Ha3 To2). A dozen texts are found in three Canterbury Tales manuscripts, almost all of them by Chaucer or Lydgate: Anelida and Arcite (Chaucer): Ha3 Ph4 Pp(2) ‘A Dietary’ (Lydgate): Bo2 Hl2 Ra4(2) ‘The Horse, Goose and Sheep’ (Lydgate): Hl2 Hn Ra4(2) ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror’ (Lydgate): Bo2 Ha3 Hl2 Legend of Good Women (Chaucer): Gg Pp(1) Tc3 ‘The Legend of St Margaret’ (Lydgate): Bo2 Ct Ds1 Life of Our Lady (Lydgate): Ct Hl3 Hn Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund (Lydgate) with ‘Prayer to St Edmund on behalf of Henry VI’ (Lydgate): Ct Ee Ha3 See DIMEV 1953, 5398, and 5399; for an abridged and altered text see 788; for extracts see 1099, 5628; for a versified list of contents in one manuscript see 5562. For the claim of the Pricke’s ‘number 1’ status, see the Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse (SIMEV), ed. R. H Robbins and J. L. Cutler (Lexington, 1965), p. xii; The Index of Middle English Verse, ed. C. Brown and R. H. Robbins (New York, 1943), Appendix V, p. 737.

2

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The Long Charter of Christ (B Text): Ee Hl3 Ii ‘A Song of Vertu’ (Lydgate): Hl2 Ph4 Ra4(2) Stans puer ad mensam (Lydgate): Bo2 Hl2 Ra4(2) The Three Kings of Cologne: Hl1 Pp(1) St

This leaves a very large number of texts that appear in only one or two manuscripts, including a number of unique witnesses. It is perhaps axiomatic that manuscripts containing only extracts of the Tale are more likely to have numerous other texts, at times making it difficult to locate the Canterbury Tales material in a listing of contents.3 As has often been observed, the tales that appear as extracts in fifteenth-century witnesses bespeak a taste quite different from that of present-day readers: Melibee and Prioress’s Tale appear in five manuscripts; Clerk’s Tale in four; Parson’s Tale in three; the Monk’s and Second Nun’s Tales each make two appearances; and the Man of Law’s Tale, Knight’s Tale, and the Retraction each appear a single time as extracts. The Parson’s Tale is one of forty-eight texts in Ll2, all of which have a spiritual focus, many by, or associated with, Richard Rolle, and many in prose, including Walter Hilton’s On Mixed Life. Parson’s Tale is untitled and lacks any attribution to Chaucer or its affiliation with the Canterbury Tales; in other words, the text would seem to have been included for its content, not its associations with Chaucer or the Tales. There is nothing to suggest the manuscript was produced for use in a clerical context. The main scribe writes in an Anglo-Irish dialect and also copies Bodl., MS e Musaeo 232, a short collection of spiritual texts.4 Ct, another collection of spiritual texts, was produced by a cleric, who, in a series of colophons, provides his name – William Cotson – the date – 1485–90 – and the claim that he was an Augustinian canon in the priory of Dunstable (Bedfordshire). The manuscript is primarily concerned with hagiography, marked by the inclusion of the lives of Mary (Life of Our Lady), St Cecilia (Second Nun’s Tale), the Prioress’s martyred youth, St Margaret, St George, and the Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund. Three of the texts (the two Tales and Life of Our Lady) derive from Caxton editions.5 3 See, e.g., D. S. Silvia, ‘Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. B. Rowland (London, 1974), pp. 156–7. 4 On the scribe’s language, see LALME, I, 272; A. McIntosh and M. L. Samuels, ‘Prolegomena to a Study of Mediæval Anglo-Irish’, Medium Ævum 37 (1968), 1–11. See also Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, Edited From MS Longleat 29 and Related Manuscripts, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS OS 293 (Oxford, 1988), pp. xv; xxxiv–xxxv. 5 N. F. Blake, ‘MS Chetham 6709 and Some Manuscript Copies of Caxton Prints’, in Language and Civilization: A Concerted Profusion of Essays and Studies in Honour of Otto Hietsch, ed. C. Blank (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1992), pp. 239–54; R. A. Klinefelter, ‘Lydgate’s “Life of Our Lady” and the Chetham MS. 6709’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 49 (1952), 396–7; D. W. Mosser, ‘The Use of Caxton Texts and Paper Stocks in

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The same two Tales are extracted in Hl3, again accompanied by Life of Our Lady, and with a similar focus on saints’ lives (including the Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund) and the Passion of Christ. Ee is another miscellany manuscript that includes the lives of St Edmund and St Fremund, but this time the only Tale in the manuscript is the extracted Man of Law’s Tale, whose subject is the fortitude of the ‘secular saint’ Custance. Ee is one of four manuscripts cited above that include extracts of Gower’s Confessio. Kate Harris argues that the Confessio texts in Ee are affiliated with the extracts in the large anthology volume, Dl.6 Both Hl1 and St present copies of The Three Kings of Cologne and The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, but the Tale that appears in the former is the Prioress’s Tale (given the rubricated title ‘Alma redemptoris mater’), while St has Melibee (untitled in the manuscript). Neither, in other words, indicates that these are Canterbury Tales and part of a frame-narrative structure, or that Chaucer is their author. Hn and To2 are copied by the same scribe, who is connected with an Augustinian Priory located in Bisham Montague, Berkshire. Hn contains 22 mostly-religious texts, along with the Monk’s Tale and Melibee. Harris characterises the contents of To2 as ‘a complex (and rebarbative) prose cento, an agglomeration of extracts from many sources assembled to form a prose history beginning with the time of Adam and now ending defectively with that of Hannibal’.7 Lori Dixon perceives an organisation of texts in Hn that treats ‘man’s right relationship with God’ in the first half (texts such as Lichfield’s ‘Complaint of God’ and Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady), while in the second half the organisational principle shifts to focus on ‘man’s right relationship with the world’ (Melibee, Monk’s Tale, ‘Cato Minor’ and ‘Cato Major’, ‘Churl and Bird’, ‘The Horse, Sheep, and Goose’), though she does suggest that in the manuscript’s final folios ‘it appears that the scribe included materials that he considered valuable to the reader but not integral to the ordinatio’.8 Np has only seven texts, a mix of saints’ lives (including, as its only Canterbury Tale, the ‘secular saint’s life’ of Griselda) and romances, that Dixon suggests can be grouped as ‘Christian romances’.9 Besides the Clerk’s Tale, Np presents Sir Beuys of Hampton, the Life of St Alexis, Libeaus Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. G. Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 161–77 (pp. 165–6). 6 K. Harris, ‘John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” and the Virtues of Bad Texts’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 34–40. 7 K. Harris, ‘Unnoticed Extracts From Chaucer and Hoccleve: Huntington MS HM 144, Trinity College, Oxford MS D 29 and “the Canterbury Tales”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), 167–99 (pp. 168–9, and n. 4). 8 L. J. Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies: A Contextual Study of Manuscripts Anthologizing Individual Canterbury Tales’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1995), pp. 78–82. 9 Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, p. 116.

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

Disconus, and a fragment of Sir Isumbras. In a more cryptic fashion than in Ct, the scribe provides his name (‘More’, though this requires substitution of adjacent vowels ‘o’ for ‘p’ and ‘e’ for ‘f ’ in what he writes, ‘Mprf ’) and the date, 1457.10 Ll1 contains the only extract of the Knight’s Tale, appearing in company with Clerk’s Tale, Ipomedon, and verse biblical paraphrases (DIMEV 1553). Preceding the Knight’s Tale is Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, thus compiling a full history of the Matter of Thebes and its aftermath. Ipomedon also connects with the Theban matter, leaving Clerk’s Tale as a bit of an anomaly insofar as concerns the construction of a coherent compilatio. This manuscript has a more noble provenance than the other manuscripts examined here. On fol. 98v is the inscription ‘tant Le desieree | R Gloucestre’, identified as the signature of Richard III while Duke of Gloucester.11 Five large anthology manuscripts share a complex web of affiliations: Ra4, Ph4, Pp, Tc3, and Ha2. As Boffey and Meale observe, the extracted ‘Legend of Dido’ from the Legend of Good Women in Ra4 is textually related to the copy of the complete poem in Pp(1). The Clerk’s Tale in Ra4, as well as Lydgate’s ‘Song of Vertu’, and ‘The Testament of Dan John Lydgate’ are connected with copies in Ph4. Lydgate’s ‘As a Midsummer Rose’, ‘Testament’ (Part 5 only), and Prioress’s Tale (also found in Ra4) are included in the ambitiously expansive contents (ninety texts) of Hl2, though none of these is textually affiliated with the other manuscripts listed in this paragraph.12 Tc3 and Ra4 both include copies of Piers of Fulham and Gilbert Banester’s Guiscardo and Ghismonda. The contents of these manuscripts resemble the anthologies described by Julia Boffey and John Thompson: ‘The nucleus of such manuscripts was generally formed by an assortment of Chaucer’s minor poems, around which were fitted attempts to re-distil the influential “aureat licour” – Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight, Clanvowe’s Cuckoo and Nightingale, Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid’.13 Ra4 consists of four sections, likely of discrete origin. The manuscript is also disordered in its present binding so that the second and third sections, containing forty-eight of the volume’s fifty-three items, need to be reconfigured to provide any sense of the compiler’s intentions. Ra4 was constructed over the course of several decades, c. 1462–1510. While the Manly and Rickert, I, 378. Manly and Rickert, I, 341–2: ‘On f.98b is “tant Le desieree R Gloucestre”. This has been carefully compared with the known autographs of Richard III in the British Museum and is certainly the same’. 12 J. Boffey and C. Meale, ‘Selecting the Text: Rawlinson C. 86 and Some Other Books for London Readers’, in Regionalism in Late Mediaeval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of a Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, ed. F. Riddy (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 143–69 (pp. 164–5 and nn. 74, 75). 13 J. Boffey and J. J. Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1474, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 279–315 (p. 280). 10 11

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second booklet could not have been finished until after 1483, based on internal references, it could have been begun, and the first gathering of it completed, as early as 1469, based on the paper evidence, with the majority of work carried out by a single scribe.14 Another hand supplied some replacement leaves and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, the final item in section two. Section three is by yet another scribe, with some items added by the hand that supplements section two. Sections one and four are each copied by hands separate from those in sections two and three. Despite Boffey’s and Meale’s observation that ‘[s]pecific references in some of the contents to the London area do … hint at a metropolitan provenance’, all of the scribes in Ra4 reflect linguistic associations with East Anglia and the North. In fact, there is remarkable overlap in some of the dialect features in all of these scribes.15 Ph4 is also made up of materials that were likely originally intended as discrete compilations, with fols. 93–170 being joined to the rest in the early sixteenth century.16 Fols. 1–92 are copied on a single paper stock, anthologising texts that are all by Chaucer and Lydgate. As McClellan observes, ‘For the most part in the first five quires of the first booklet, the different scribal work stints coincide with the quire divisions … . The continuing presence of scribe 2 at key junctures in the writing indicates that he probably functioned in a supervisory role in the transcription of the first booklet, or at least in the medial or later stages of it’.17 The manuscript’s concluding booklet has a very different tenor, beginning with The Life of Job, and continuing with The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri (Latin), ‘Life of St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins’, ‘xj Ml virgyns he that wille honour’, Qualibet ergo die qui sex triginta per annum pater noster et ave vult offere pie celi dabitur si stannum [?] antiphona commemoracio (Latin prayer to St Ursula), ‘Moral Advice to Apprentices’, [The Profits of Tribulation/The Six Masters], ‘Ther been Also sex principal thoughtes that euery man and woman shuld haue in mind’, ‘This Seynt Hillarie Bisshop drewe these psalmes folowynge oute of the Sawter by the which a man shulde pray oure lorde for speciall thynges’ (prose), and ‘Here folowen seuen thynges whiche a man or woman must haue forto be Able forto gete pardon’ (prose). Dixon suggests that texts 14 For a discussion of the time-span and other dating evidence, see Mosser, A Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts, entry for Ra4. In the same place, I discuss the dialect evidence alluded to in this paragraph. 15 Boffey and Meale, ‘Selecting the Text: Rawlinson C. 86’, p. 143. On the scribal dialects, see the relevant entry in Mosser, A Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts. 16 W. McClellan, ‘The Transcription of the “Clerk’s Tale” in MS Hm140: Interpreting Textual Effects’, Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994), 89–103; W. McClellan, ‘A Codicological Analysis of the Quire Structure of MS HM 140 and Its Implications for a Revised Ordinatio’, TEXT 9 (1996), 187–98. See C. W. Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts the Unpublished Tracings and Paper, 2 vols. (San Marino, 1989), I, 197–293 for a detailed listing of contents and description of HM 140/Ph4. 17 McClellan, ‘The Transcription of the “Clerk’s Tale” in MS Hm140’, p. 91.

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

such as ‘The Libelle …’ and ‘Moral Advice to Apprentices’ point to a metropolitan, mercantile readership.18 In the first booklet, Lydgate’s ‘A Prayer upon the Cross’ is followed by lines 211–350 of Anelida and Arcite, the text of Anelida’s complaint. The Ph4 copy of the Clerk’s Tale omits lines IV 1163–76, with their reference to the Wife of Bath, ends at IV 1212, and is followed immediately by ‘Truth’, with no indication that these are separate texts. Seth Lerer argues that: With the lines from Chaucer’s Truth now appended to its end, the Tale fits neatly into the anthology’s Lydgatean patterns of stanzaic, exemplary stories. Beginning with Lydgate’s Life of St. Albon and St. Amphibalus, moving through Clerk’s Tale, a selection of Lydgate’s didactic ballads, the Complaint from Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, and concluding with an anonymous Middle English Life of Job, the first portion of HM 140 stands as a thematically and formally coherent assembly.19

Hl2 and Tc3 are associated with the ‘Hammond Scribe’.20 Hl2 contains ninety texts of a primarily secular nature, though it includes a number of spiritual texts and only one Canterbury Tale, that of the Prioress. The only material from the Canterbury Tales included in Tc3 is a conflation of extracts from Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale (copied from Caxton’s first edition) and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, given the title Bochas (Boccaccio).21 Almost certainly some of the booklets in Tc3 were copied at approximately the same time as some of the booklets in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.21 (copied by the main scribe in Tc3, except for fols. 34r–49v, which are copied by the Hammond Scribe, who copied all of Hl2). Tc3 and R.3.21 share several paper stocks and the same medieval hand foliated the booklets individually in both manuscripts. The outer leaves of the booklets tend Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, pp. 162–3. S. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton, 1993), p. 100. 20 E. P. Hammond, ‘Two British Museum Manuscripts (Harley 2251 and Add. 34360): a Contribution to the Biography of John Lydgate’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 28 (1905), 1–28; E. P. Hammond, ‘A Scribe of Chaucer’, Modern Philology 27 (1929), 27–33; L. R. Mooney, ‘A Middle English Text on the Seven Liberal Arts’, Speculum 68 (1993), 1027–52; L. R. Mooney, ‘More Manuscripts Written By a Chaucer Scribe’, Chaucer Review 30 (1996), 401–7; L. R. Mooney, ‘A New Manuscript By the Hammond Scribe Discovered By Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, V. Gillespie, and R. Hanna (London, 2000), pp. 113–23; L. R. Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets of Trinity College, Cambridge, Manuscripts R.3.19 and R.3.21’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions, Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. J. Minnis (York, 2001), pp. 241–66; L. R. Mooney, ‘John Shirley’s Heirs’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), 182–98; L. R. Mooney, ‘The Seven Liberal Arts’, in Sex, Aging, & Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Text, Language, and Scribe, ed. T. M. Tavormina (Tempe, 2006), II, 701–36; D. W. Mosser, ‘Dating the Manuscripts of the “Hammond Scribe”: What the Paper Evidence Tells Us’, The Journal of the Early Book Society 10 (2007), 31–70; S. Horobin, ‘Linguistic Features of the Hammond Scribe’, Poetica 51 (1999), 1–10. 21 See Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, pp. 327–8 for a description of the Bochas text. 18

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to be more soiled than the inner ones, suggesting that they existed as discrete booklets for some time before being bound together in these two sister volumes. Items 7–17 [Q 2] were all copied on a paper stock from the mid 1470s (this stock is shared by MS R.3.21 in its Booklet IV). Booklet VII, the last part of Booklet I, Booklet X, and all of the first gathering of Booklet IX except for the added outer bifolium share a paper stock with MS R.3.21 found in its Booklets V–VIII; it is reasonable to suspect texts in both MSS were all copied at about the same time, but the watermark has not been precisely dated. The paper stock of the central bifolium of Q [24], part of the booklet containing the Bochas compilation, also appears in one central bifolium in a gathering of four in MS R.3.21 (fols. 230+231). This paper can be dated to 1474–77 (i.e., very close to the date of Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales), with the later date from an example that may be identical to that in the Caxton edition. Finally, the paper stock of Q [21] is also found in a Caxton edition of about 1477; this, in turn, suggests that paper stock 3, which precedes paper stock 11 in the same booklet, can be dated to approximately the same period.22 Dixon’s collation of the Fall of Princes extracts in Tc3 against those in 2 Hl determines ‘that the texts may share a common exemplar’.23 The texts in Tc3 are characterised by Bradford Fletcher as ‘being heavily secular’ but, he continues: ‘It would be a mistake … to take this secularity as representative of any particular trend in taste, both because the main scribe was involved in the production of the very religious R.3.21 and because surviving secular miscellanies are so rare that this is one of fewer than two score from its half century’.24 Mooney notes that Tc3 and R.3.21 ‘have the common characteristic of having been created from several booklets apparently produced separately, certainly foliated separately, and perhaps used separately before having been bound together’.25 She suggests that these collections of texts ‘remained as twenty-six distinct booklets through the end of the fifteenth and well into the sixteenth century, and that they might be John Stow’s compilations, bringing together booklets of similar content from his purchases from print shop stock and private libraries’.26 The vast majority of ninety texts in Hl2 are by Lydgate, but Chaucer is represented (without attribution) by ‘Fortune’ (accompanied by the envoy of the Complaint of Venus), Gentilesse, the ‘ABC’, Prioress’s Tale (number forty in the series of texts), and ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’. Hl2 includes a series of extracts from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 22 For a more detailed discussion of the paper stocks used by the Hammond scribe, see Mosser, ‘Dating the Manuscripts of the “Hammond Scribe”’, pp. 31–70. 23 Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, pp. 188; 392–6. 24 B. Fletcher, ‘Introduction’, in Manuscript Trinity R.3.19: A Facsimile, Facsimile Series of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 5 (Norman, OK, 1987), p. xv. 25 Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 241. 26 Mooney, ‘Scribes and Booklets’, p. 266. See further Holly James-Maddocks’s essay in this volume.

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

as noted above. One of these extracts has been characterised as ‘markedly antifeminist in tone, so much so that a contemporary annotator (possibly the scribe himself) has added from fol. 138r a series of marginal annotations disagreeing with the text’.27 Dixon notes that ‘the text in this section is heavily edited, with stanzas drawn from all over Book 1 and knitted together to form a single extended indictment of women and their many faults’.28 But Dixon argues that the compiler of Hl2 systematically and ironically undercuts the antifeminist expression of the text through canny rearrangement of text and glossing commentary, not just in the Fall of Princes sections, but also in a ‘four-poem section on the relationship between men and women’ beginning with ‘Looke well about ye that louers be’ and including also ‘The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage’, ‘Another Version of the Four Things’, and ‘A Wicked Tunge Wille Sey Amys’. This last poem, Dixon contends, reverses the import of the previous three, by linking ‘antifeminist sentiment to malicious gossip … . In this manner, the scribe posits traditional antifeminist attitudes only to undercut them for comic effect, in much the same way as the compiler of the antifeminist section in the Fall of Princes extracts undercuts his texts’.29 She cautions that the scribe/commentator is not a consistent champion of women, however, and concludes that the manuscript seems to divide into three thematic sections, ‘balanced first to discredit the conventions of courtly rhetoric, next to undermine traditional criticism of women, and finally to posit a view of marriage in accordance with the teachings of the Church and the preoccupations of the middle class’.30 Pp is yet another composite manuscript, joining two, originally separate collections in a single binding in the seventeenth century. Although the two parts were likely compiled separately, the language of all of five scribes points to East Anglia or possibly a more northerly linguistic provenance.31 Both parts reflect a focus on the works of Chaucer and Lydgate, with several texts appearing in both that appear to share textual correspondences. Brusendorff notes that: Most of the Chaucerian contents of the second half of the MS. were evidently copied from the same sources as the first half, as proved by the textual agreements, not only between the two ABC-fragments, but also between the copies of Mars and Venus. That the sources were a number of independent booklets, is indicated by their textual connection with a set

27 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘John Lydgate, Medieval Antifeminism, and Harley 2251’, Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972), 32–44 (p. 33). 28 Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, p. 245. 29 Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, pp. 249–50. 30 Dixon, ‘The Canterbury Tales Miscellanies’, p. 252. 31 See the Language entry in the Pp description in Mosser, A Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts.

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DANIEL W. MOSSER

of small printed booklets, issued by Caxton and containing works by Chaucer, Lydgate and others.32

In my revised collation of Pp,33 I suggest that Pp(1) is made up of four booklets, with the first booklet containing nine works by Chaucer and Lydgate, beginning with the Complaint of the Black Knight and concluding with the Parliament of Fowls. The second booklet includes only The Three Kings of Cologne; the third the Serpent of Division and its Envoy; and the fourth ‘Cato Major’ and ‘Cato Minor’. Pp(2) reflects no use of booklet structure. It begins with Melibee and the Parson’s Prologue and Tale, followed by the Retraction. The explicit to Melibee reads ‘Here endeth Chauceres owne tale of Thopas and | of Melibee and Prudence his wyfe’, but there is no indication that Thopas was ever included. The rubric introducing Melibee reads simply, ‘Here begy[n]neth Chaucers tale of Melibee’. It is clear that these are extracts from a complete copy of the Canterbury Tales and the reference to Thopas is probably just residue of that context. As noted in the Brusendorff quotation above, the ‘ABC’ in both parts of Pp ends at line 59, with a spurious line following; the Complaint of Mars and the Complaint of Venus in both parts also seem to be copied from the same sources. All of the manuscripts in the preceding discussion are characterised as miscellanies and as containing only extracted Tales. Two other manuscripts are noteworthy compendia, containing complete texts of the Canterbury Tales in company with a number of other texts. Ha3 encompasses fortyseven texts in addition to the Tales, most by Lydgate and Chaucer, but also including the Middle English prose Brut, extracts of Gower’s Confessio, and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes.34 Despite its associations with St Mary de Pratis (Pré), a house of Austin Canons at Leicester, Ha3 has a primarily secular focus. However, the text of the Canterbury Tales has been sanitised, as if to accommodate the sensibilities of its Austin Canon copyists, though not consistently. In Reeve’s Tale, Malyne’s grandfather is a swansherd instead of a parson (I 3943), and her mother was raised in a dairy instead of a nunnery (I 3977).35 Pardoner’s Tale ends at VI 918, omitting his attempt to sell his relics and pardons to the company of pilgrims. Shipman’s Tale is missing entirely (with its unflattering portrait of monks). A. Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford, 1925), p. 195. For a complete listing of the contents and structural make-up of Pp see D. W. Mosser, ‘Corrective Notes on the Structures and Paper Stocks of Four MSS Containing Extracts from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’, Studies in Bibliography 52 (1999), 97–114 (pp. 103–10); and the Pp description in Mosser, A Digital Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Manuscripts. 34 The most complete study of Ha3 is B. R. Kline, ‘A Descriptive Catalog of British Library MS. Harley 7333’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1990). 35 Cf. the treatment of the Cook’s Tale in Bo2, as discussed in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. J. M. Bowers (Kalamazoo, 1992), p. 34 (e.g., the apprentice’s wife ‘played for his sustenaunce’ rather than ‘swyved for her sustenaunce’). 32 33

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

The garden scene in Merchant’s Tale is missing, but eight folios have been lost (according to the contemporary foliation) from where the tale breaks off (IV 2118, the end of a quire, with catchwords indicating the following line should be consecutive) and the next surviving text on the following page (III 1377). The remainder of Merchant’s Tale (300 lines) plus the Epilogue (22 lines), along with the missing text from Fragment III could all have been accommodated by the missing eight folios, with room to spare, so we will never know what the copyists did with text of the garden scene, or whether their copy text included the elaboration of the coupling of Damian and May in the pear tree characteristic of the b text.36 As Parkes and Beadle observe, Gg ‘is the only surviving example of a fifteenth-century attempt to collect Chaucer’s major poetical works in one volume’, including several of his lyrics, as well as Troilus and Criseyde, Canterbury Tales, Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls, and Lydgate’s Temple of Glas.37 The first quire, containing the first five items – ‘ABC to the Virgin’, ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan’, ‘Truth’, ‘Birds’ Praise of Love’, De amico ad amicam and Responcio – was probably copied separately. Hanna hypothesises that Gg’s Troilus exemplar was borrowed from a London stationer in batches (each comprising 164 stanzas in two quires), as a means to account for its mixed textual affiliations.38 There is, however, little evidence of exemplars-as-booklets in the physical construction of Gg; the copying of the bulk of the manuscript appears to have been consecutive, ‘each new item beginning in the middle of a quire’, except for Troilus, Miller’s Prologue, Clerk’s Tale, and Prioress’s Prologue, which all begin new gatherings.39 As executed, the manuscript had an ambitious program of illustration, of which notable representatives survive, but with a lamentable loss being the illustration that once opened the Troilus. It is worth noting that the Canterbury Tales is not given pre-eminence in this collection. Parkes and Beadle characterise the text of the Canterbury Tales as an ‘A-text’, but this is in error. Gg does arrange the Tales in an a-order, but it does not present the a-text. Recent analysis of Gg’s affiliations led Peter Robinson to postulate a g family: ‘This group was first identified using the [Miller’s Tale] data. In the past it has been unclear whether some of the g witnesses were descended directly from the archetype of the whole tradition or whether they had a common hyparchetype. The g group appear

For the text of these elaborations in the b text, see D. W. Mosser and L. R. Mooney, ‘More Manuscripts by the Beryn Scribe and his Cohort’, Chaucer Review 49 (2014), 39–76 (p. 51 n. 17). 37 M. B. Parkes and R. Beadle, ‘Commentary’, in The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Facsimile of Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27, ed. M. B. Parkes and R. Beadle, 3 vols. (Norman, OK, 1979), III, 1–67 (III, 1). 38 R. Hanna III, ‘The Manuscripts and Transmission of Chaucer’s Troilus’, in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. J. M. Dean and C. K. Zacher (Newark, 1992), pp. 173–88. 39 Parkes and Beadle, ‘Commentary’, III, 2, 39. 36

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to be formed by the pairs Ha4 Ii and Ad1 En3 (possibly with Gg Ps)’.40 But Gg’s affiliations are variable and elsewhere Robinson suggests it might belong with the o manuscripts and e manuscripts.41 The Prologue of the Legend of Good Women is the only witness of the ‘G’ text of the Prologue, generally thought to be a later, revised version after the death of Richard’s Queen Anne, though Joseph Dane suggests that the scribe was working from a damaged exemplar and that much of the rearranged text may result more from accident than intention.42 The manuscripts treated in this essay illustrate the rich contexts in which extracted Tales and even complete versions of the Canterbury Tales circulated in the fifteenth century. The extracts are frequently incorporated into a conscious thematic compilation, whether that be governed by spiritual/clerical sensibilities or courtly/secular ones. These collections also tend to present the extracted Tales without overt reference to their author or their place in a larger framework, with Pp(2) constituting an obvious exception. It is often Lydgate, and not Chaucer, whose works and sensibilities dominate the collection. While a small number of these manuscripts have clerical origins and associations, the audience for these readerly compilations is implicitly the middle, mercantile class (Gg and Ll1 are obvious exceptions to this general rule), for whom the contents provided both spiritual and secular inducements to reading. APPENDIX 1: MANUSCRIPTS, INCUNABLES, AND TEXTUAL FAMILIES OF THE CANTERBURY TALES Canterbury Tales MSS Complete or Once Complete (‘+’ indicates additional texts)=54 MSS BL, MS Additional 5140 (Ad1) + BL, MS Additional 35286 (Ad3) Bodl., MS Bodley 414 (Bo1) Bodl., MS Bodley 686 (Bo2) + Bodl., MS Barlow 20 (Bw) Oxford, Christ Church, MS 152 (Ch) + Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center, MS 143 (‘Cardigan’= Cn) + Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198 (Cp) 40 Parkes and Beadle, ‘Commentary’, III, 3; see C. A. Owen, The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1991), p. 24 n. 4; the quotation is from: P. Robinson, ‘g variants: The Group’, The Miller’s Tale on CD-ROM, ed. B. Bordalejo (Leicester, 2004). 41 B. Bordalejo and P. Robinson, ‘Stemmatic Commentary’, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale on CD-ROM, ed. P. Thomas (Birmingham, 2006); P. Robinson, ‘A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century Witnesses to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers Volume II, ed. N. Blake and P. Robinson (Oxford, 1997), pp. 69–132. 42 J. A. Dane, ‘The Notions of Text and Variant in the Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: Ms Gg, Lines 127–38’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (1993), 65–80.

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

CUL, MS Dd.4.24 (Dd) New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 32 (olim ‘Delamere’=Dl) + New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 24 (olim ‘Devonshire’=Ds1) + San Marino, Huntington Library, MS El 26.C.9 (‘Ellesmere’=El) BL, MS Egerton 2726 (En1) BL, MS Egerton 2863 (En2) BL, MS Egerton 2864 (En3) + Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 181 (Fi) CUL, MS Gg.4.27 (Gg) + Glasgow, UL, MS Hunter 197 (olim MS U.1.1=Gl) + BL, MS Harley 1758 (Ha2) BL, MS Harley 7333 (Ha3) + BL, MS Harley 7334 (Ha4) BL, MS Harley 7335 (Ha5) Princeton, UL, MS 100 (olim ‘Helmingham’=He) Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392 D (‘Hengwrt’=Hg) Holkham, Holkham Hall, MS 667 (Hk) Bodl., MS Hatton donat. 1 (Ht) CUL, MS Ii.3.26 (Ii) + BL, MS Lansdowne 851 (La) Lichfield, Cathedral Library, MS 29 (Lc) Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 600 (Ld1) Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 739 (Ld2) Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 110=A.4.18 (Ln) Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS English 113 (Ma) + Chicago, University of Chicago Library, MS 564 (olim McCormick=Mc) Morgan, MS M. 249 (Mg) CUL, MS Mm.2.5 (Mm) Oxford, New College, MS 314 (Ne) Alnwick, Alnwick Castle, MS 455 (Nl) + Geneva, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 48 (olim Phillipps 8136=Ph2) Philadelphia, The Rosenbach, MS 1084/1 (olim Phillipps 8137=Ph3) BN, MS fonds anglais 39 (Ps) Leconfield, Petworth House, MS 7 (‘Petworth’=Pw) London, Royal College of Physicians, MS 388 (olim MS 13=Py) Bodl., MS Rawl. poet. 141 (Ra1) Bodl., MS Rawl. poet. 149 (Ra2) Bodl., MS Rawl. poet. 223 (Ra3) BL, MS Royal 17 D.xv (Ry1) + BL, MS Royal 18 C.ii (Ry2) Bodl., MS Arch. Selden B. 14 (Se) BL, MS Sloane 1685 (Sl1) BL, MS Sloane 1686 (Sl2)

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Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.3 (Tc1) Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 (Tc2) + Oxford, Trinity College, MS 49 (To1) Canterbury Tales MSS Containing Extracts or Otherwise Incomplete=29 MSS BL, MS Additional 25718 (Ad2: possibly two MS fragments conjoined?) BL, MS Additional 10340 (Ad4) BL, MS Arundel 140 (Ar) Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun. A.4.104 (olim Chetham 6709=Ct) Bodl., MS Douce d.4 (Do) Chatsworth, Chatsworth House, Devonshire Collection, Devonshire Fragment (Ds2) CUL, MS Ee.2.15 (Ee) BL, MS Harley 1239 (Ha1) BL, MS Harley 1704 (Hl1) BL, MS Harley 2251 (Hl2) BL, MS Harley 2382 (Hl3) BL, MS Harley 5908 (Hl4) San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 144 (Hn) CUL, MS Kk.1.3 (20) (Kk) Warminster, Longleat, MS 29 (Ll2) Warminster, Longleat, MS 257 (Ll1) Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 21972 D (olim Merthyr Fragments=Me) Naples, Royal Library, MS XIII.B.29 (Np) Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS English 163 (Ox1)+ Philadelphia, The Rosenbach, MS 1084/2 (Ox2) Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center, MS 46 (olim Phillipps 6570=Ph1) San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 140 (olim Phillips 8299=Ph4) New York, Columbia UL, MS Plimpton 253 (Pl) Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2006 (Pp: two conjoined MSS, Pp[1] and Pp[2]) Bodl., MS Rawl. C. 86 (Ra4) New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 22 (olim Sion College Arc.L.40.2/E.23=Si) BL, MS Sloane 1009 (Sl3) Stonyhurst, Stonyhurst College, MS B.XXIII (St) Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19 (Tc3) Oxford, Trinity College, MS D 29 (To2) Incunable Editions Caxton’s first edition, c. 1476/7 (Cx1) Caxton’s second edition, c. 1483/4 (Cx2)

299

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

Pynson’s first edition c. 1492 (Pn) de Worde’s 1498 edition (Wy) Primary Textual Groups a b c d

Dd, and the two subgroups Cn-Ma En1-Ds He Ox1-Ox2 Ne Cx1 Tc2 Cx2 Pn Wn Cp La Sl2 A large group, including Pw Mm-Gl Ph3 Ra2 En2-Ll1 Ry2-Ld2 Lc-Mg Dl Ha2 Sl1

APPENDIX 2: TEXTS OTHER THAN THE CANTERBURY TALES IN ‘CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPTS’ I. Middle English Verse43 Title/First Line

DIMEV

NIMEV

MSS

1.

‘ABC’

414

239

Gg Hl2 Pp(1) Pp(2)

2.

‘The Abuses of the Age’

1506

239

Hl2

3.

[Advice to Apprentices]

976

596

Ph4

4.

‘A knight that is hardy as a lion’

81

55

Tc3

5.

‘All hayle Mary ful of grace’

332

183

Hl2

6.

‘Almyghty god fadyre of heuyn’

417

241

Ll2

7.

‘Alone walkyng’

453

267

Tc3

8.

‘Al synnes shal þou hate’

361

200

Ll2

9.

‘Amor Vincit Omnia Mentiris Quod Pecunia’

1160

698

Hl2

10.

Anelida and Arcite

4949, 5823

3670

Ha3 Ph4 Pp(2)

11.

‘Another Version of the Four Things’

6798

4230

Hl2

12.

Appeal of Christ to Man

3032

1841

Ra4(2)

13.

‘As a Midsummer Rose’

3058

1865

Hl2 Ph4

14.

Assembly of Gods

6393

4005

Tc3

15.

The Assumption of Our Lady

122

2165

Hl3

16.

Ave Iesse Virgula

1698

1056

Hl2

17.

Ave regina celorum

1725

1056

Hl2

18.

Balade au tres noble Roy H[enry] le quint

6045

3788

Tc2

43 Alphabetising infers present-day spellings. Where the NIMEV omits a record due to its more constrained scope, reference is made to the SIMEV (n. 2).

300

DANIEL W. MOSSER

19.

‘Balade moral of gode counseyle’

4346

2737

Ra4(2)

20.

‘The Balet of the Kynge’

4464

2808

Ry1(2)

21.

‘A Ballade of Jak Hare’

45

36

Hl2

22.

‘A Ballad on Hypocritical Women’

4225

2661

Tc3

23.

‘Ballade on a New Year’s Gift of an Eagle, Presented to King Henry VI’

5693

3064

Hl2

24.

Benedic Anima Mea Domino

4078

2572

Hl2

25.

‘Beware of deceitful women’

3184

1944

Hl2 Tc3

26.

‘Birds’ matins’

611

357

Hl2

27.

‘Boke of Kervyng & Nortur’

2556

1514

Ry1(2)

28.

‘Bycorne and Chychevache, þe deuise of a peynted clothe’

4032

2541

Hl2 Tc3

29.

‘Cato Major’

1418

854

Ha3 Hl2 Hn Pp(1)

30.

‘Cato Minor’

6321

3955

Ha3 Hl2 Hn Pp(1)

31.

‘The Child Jesus to Mary, the Rose’

3595

2238

Hl2

32.

The Child of Bristowe

1880

1157

Hl3

33.

Criste qui lux es et dies

1005

614

Hl2

34.

‘A Christmasse game made by Maister Benet Howe’ 4364

2749

Ha3

35.

Churl and Bird

4420

2784

Ch Cn Hn Tc3

36.

Colyn Blowbol’s Testament

6416

4020

Ra4(2)

37.

‘The complaynte ageyne Hope’

627

370

Ha3

38.

‘Complaint þat Christ maketh of his Passioun’

3388

2081

Ha3

39.

‘Compleint d’amours’

2312

1388

Ha3

40.

Complaint of the Black Knight

2541

1507

Pp(1)

41.

‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’

6044

3787

Ha3 Hl2 Pp(2)

42.

‘Complaint of God’

4312

2714

Hn

43.

The Complaint of God

5707

3612

Ra4(2)

44.

Complaint of Mars

1518

913

Ha3 Pp(1) Pp(2)

45.

‘Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune’

1432

860

Ha3 Hl2

46.

Complaint of Venus

5590

3542

Hl2 (Envoy only) Pp(1) Pp(2)

47.

‘Complaint unto Pity’

4375

2756

Tc3

48.

Confessio Amantis (fragments)

4229

2662

Dl Ee Ha3 To2

49.

Consulo quisque eris

2156

1294

Hl2

301

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

50.

The Court of Love

6756

4205

Tc3

51.

‘Wo worth debate þat neuer may haue pease’ (Stanza 67 of Lydgate’s Court of Sapience)

6775

4215

Hn

52

The Court of Sapience, lines 71–516

5365

3406

Hl2

53.

The Craft of Lovers

5990

3761

Hl2 Tc3

54.

‘Dance of Macabre’

4105

2590

Bo2

55.

De amico ad amicam and Responcio

19

16, 19

Gg

56.

De Regimine Principum/Regiment of Princes

3581

2229

Ha3

57.

‘Devoute & vertuos wordes’

5584

3538

Hl2

58.

‘A Dietary’

1356

824

Bo2 Hl2 Ra4(2)

59.

‘Do Merci bifore thi Jugement’

5577

3533

Hl1

60.

‘Eight goodlie questions with their answers’

4978

3183

Tc2

61.

‘xj Ml virgyns he that wille honour’

1185

720

Ph4

62.

Envoy to Lydgate’s ‘Doubleness’

5793

3656

Np

63.

Lenvoy de Chaucer à Scogan

5965

3747

Gg Pp(2)

64.

Envoy to Serpent of Division

5729

3625

Pp(1)

65.

‘Evidens to be ware’

6539

4074

Ha3

66.

Epitaphium eiusdam Ducis Glowcestrie

5013

3206

Hl2

67.

‘Everything draweþe to his semblable’

6063

3800

Hl2

68.

‘On the Evils of Prosperity’ (John Walton [extract from his translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae])

4490

2820

Hl2

69.

‘The Expedition of Henry V into France’

1591

969

Ra4(2)

70.

‘Fabula duorum mercatorum’

2490

1481

Hl2

71.

Fall of Princes (extracts)

1904

1168/13a, 1592

Hl2 Tc3

72.

‘Festum Natalis domini’ (Tronos celorum Continens)

6065.5

3807

Tc3

73.

‘The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary’ (Lydgate)

843

447

Bo2

74.

Filius regis mortuus est

667

404

Ra4(2)

75a.

‘Fortune’ (with the envoy of Complaint of Venus)

5803

3661

Hl2

75b.

‘Fortune’ (envoy only)

5590

3542

Pp(1) Pp(2)

76.

Gaude Virgo Mater Christi

757

464

Hl2

77.

Gentilesse

5277

3348

Ha3 Hl2

78.

‘A Gentlewoman’s Lament’

283

154

Hl2

79.

Gloriosa Dicta sunt de Te

4271

2688

Hl2

80.

‘Go little book and submit the / Unto all them’

1534

Ø [SIMEV 927.5]

Ct

81.

‘The good wyfe taughte hyr dowghtere’

1098

671

Tc3

82.

Prologue to Guiscardo and Ghismonda

6534

4082

Ra4(2)

83.

Guiscardo and Ghismonda

5116

3528

Ra4(2) Tc3

302

DANIEL W. MOSSER

84.

Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick

1464

875

Ha3

85.

‘Gy of Aleste xxxti M[ylis] from Anyone’ (fragment of 37 lines of Spiritus Guidonis)

4730

3028

Dl

86.

‘Help me to Weep’

4103

2588.5

Tc3

87.

‘Here begynneth the Boke callyd Assemble de Damys’

2575

1528

Tc3

88.

‘He that wyll in Eschepe ete a goose so fat’

1910

1172.5

Tc3

89.

‘The high Astrapotent auctor of all’

5324

3376

Hl2

90.

‘Honour and Ioy helth and prosp[er]yte’

2053

1238

Tc3

91.

‘Horns Away’

4169

2625

Hl2 Ra4(2) Tc3

92.

‘The Horse, Goose and Sheep’

1075

658

Hl2 Hn Ra4(2)

93.

House of Fame

1620

991

Pp(1)

94.

‘I haue a lady where so she be’

2169

1300

Tc3

95.

‘Impingham’s Proverbs’

3693

2290

Ha3

96.

‘In þi most welth wisely be ware’

598

345

Hl1

97a.

Peter Idley’s ‘Instructions’ (excerpts, lines 64–7; plus four distichs: ‘ffolus lade polys wisemen ete ye fysshe’; ‘Who so in youthe no vertue vsith’; ‘Deame þe best in eu[er]y dowte’)

6137

1792

Ra4(2)

97b.

‘It is þe properte of a gentilman’

2745

1636.8

Ra4(2)

98.

Interpretacio Misse

6820

4246

Hl2

99.

‘In the season of ffeuer when hit was full colde’

2624

1562

Tc3

100.

‘I sigh and sob both day and night’

3275 (part)

2007

Ll2

101.

‘Isopes Fabules’

6701

4178

Hl2 Tc3

102.

‘Hit is ful harde to knowe ony estate’

2729

1629

Hn

103.

‘I wiyte my silf myn owne woo’

2551

1511

Ra4(2)

104.

Jack and his Stepdame

1599

977

Ra4(2)

105.

‘Iacob and Ioseph’

6688

4172

Dl

106.

‘Iesu Crist kepe oure lyppes from pollucioun’

2814

1682

Hl2

107.

‘Ihesu goddis son lord of mageste’

2854

1715

Ll2

108.

‘Ihesu swet nowe will I synge’

5077

3238

Ll2

109.

‘[I]hesu þat hast me dere j boght’

2915

1761

Ll2

110.

‘The Judgement of Paris’

4997

3197

Tc3

111.

‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror’

5731

3632

Bo2 Ha3 Hl2

112.

La Belle Dame sans Mercy

1761

1086

Tc3

113.

‘Lady of pite for þy sorowes þ þu haddest’

3027

1383

Tc3

114.

‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’

4990

3190

Ha3

t

303

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

115.

A lament of the Blessed Virgin

2442

1447

Ra4(2)

116.

‘A lamentacioun of our lady Maria’

6561

4099

Hl2

117.

‘The Legend of Dan Joos’

4089

2579

Hl2

118.

Legend of Good Women

177

100

Tc3 (‘Dido’ only) Ra4(2)

119.

The Legend of Ipotis

383

220

Ar

120.

Life St Alban and St Amphibal

5966

3748

Ph4

121.

‘The Legend of St George’

4108

2592

Bo2 Ct

122.

‘The Legend of St Margaret’

720

439

Bo2 Ct Ds1

123.

‘Legend of Wulfryk the priest’

2667

1590

Hl2

124.

‘Let Pyte Comfort Your Daungerness’

344

190.5

Tc3

125.

‘Letter to Gloucester’

4500

2825

Hl2

126.

Libeaus Desconus

2824

1690

Np

127.

The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye

5509

1690

Ph4

128.

The Life of Job

3551

2208

Ph4

129.

Life of Our Lady

4080

2574

Ct Hl3 Hn

130.

Life of St Alexis

4923

3156

Np

131.

‘The Life of St Augustine of Canterbury’ (South English Legendary)

4543

2854

Ee

132.

Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund (with ‘Prayer to St Edmund on behalf of Henry VI’)

5422, 3911

3440, 2445

Ct Ee Ha3

133.

The Long Charter of Christ (B Text)

6650

4154

Ee Hl3 Ii

134.

‘Look in Thy Merour’

6059

3798

Ra4(2)

135.

‘Love is lif þat lesteth ay’

3275

2007

Ll2

136.

‘The Lover’s Book’

3953

2478.5

Tc3

137.

‘A Lover’s Envoy’

3953

2478.5

Tc3

138.

Macaronic verses lamenting the Evils of the Age

4853

3113

Ra4(2)

139.

‘Mary modyre wel þe be’

3433

2119

Ll2

140.

‘Mary of help both day and nyght’

3434

2121

Ll2

141.

‘Merciless Beauty’

6879

4282

Pp(2)

142.

‘Myghtffull Mari y crownyed quene’

3496

2169

Ll2

143.

‘Myne hert is set uppon a lusty pynne’

3506

2179

Ra4(2)

144.

‘Moral Balade’ (stanzas 2–3, conflated with ‘Cato Major’)

3645

2264

Hl2

145.

‘A Mumming at Windsor’

3555

2212

Hl2

146.

‘The .IX. ladyes Worthy’

4398

2767

Tc3

147.

The Northern Passion (the A Version)

3124

1907

Ra4(1)

148.

‘Now fresshe floure to me that ys so bryght’

3733

2311

Tc3

149.

‘O beauteuous braunche flour of formosyte’

3830

2384.8

Tc3

304

DANIEL W. MOSSER

150.

‘Of Hawks’

6542

4090

Ra4(2)

151.

‘Of the Four Complexions’

4168

2624

Hl2 Tc3

152.

‘Of the Sodein Fal of Princes in oure Dayes’

813

500

Hl2

153.

‘O man thow marrest in thy mynd’

3983

2503

Hl2

154.

‘O mosy Quince hangyng by your stalke’

4006

2524

Tc3

155.

‘On the Death of Edward IV (1483)’

6495

4062

Ma

156.

‘On the English title of Henry VI to the Crown of France’

6066

3808

Ha3

157.

‘On the folly of heaping up riches’

3168

1936

Hl2

158.

‘On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage’

5913

3718

Hl2

159.

‘On Kissing at Verbum caro factum est’

6819

4245

Hl2

160.

‘On the Redemption’

2269

2719

Ra4(2)

161.

‘On Worldly Worship’

6787

4228

Hl2

162.

Oracio ad Sancta Mariam (An orison to the Blessed Virgin extracted from the Speculum Christiani)

3433

2119

Hl3 Ll2

163.

‘The Order of Fools’

5428

3444

Hl2

164.

‘The worlde so wyde the ayre so remeuable’ (stanza 23 of Lydgate’s A Pageant of Knowledge)

5534

3504

Ha3 Hn

165.

‘The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage’

1525

919

Hl2

166.

Parliament of Fowls

5373

3412

Gg Ha3 Pp(1) Tc3

167.

‘Parce michi domine’

924

561

St

168.

Parthenope of Blois (Version B)

6533

4081

Dl

169.

Passio Sancti Erasmi

318

173

Hl3

170.

Piers of Fulham

112

71

Ra4(2) Tc3

171.

Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede

1086

663

Tc2

172.

‘Pilgrim’s Song’

3466

2148

Tc3

173.

Plowman’s Prologue & Tale (‘Item de Beata Virgine’ by Thomas Hoccleve)

6603

4122

Ch

174.

‘Birds’ Praise of Love’

2540

1506

Gg

175.

‘A Praise of St Anne’

1869

1152

Hl2

176.

‘A Prayer for King, Queen and People, 1429’

3563

2218

Hl2

177.

‘A Prayer upon the Cross’

6132

3845

Ph4

178.

‘The Prentise unto Woe’

3579

2227

Ma

179.

Prick of Conscience (East Midlands recension)

5399

3429

Ar

180.

‘Procession of Corpus Christi’

5697

3606

Hl2

181.

Prophetia Regis Anglie (The Prophecy of Merlyon)

4140

2613.5

Hl3

182.

‘Proverbes of Salomon’

5530

2668.44/3502

Ll2

305

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

183.

Querela Senis (Henry Scogan’s ‘Moral Balade’)

3645

2264

Hl2

184.

Quia amore langueo

2461

1460

Ra4(2)

185.

A Prisoner’s Reflections

718

437

Tc3

186.

Regina celi letare

4074

2570

Hl2

187.

‘Regina celi qwene of thy sowth’

4455

2803

Hl2

188.

‘Remembryd by scriptures we fynde and Rede’

4465

2810

Hl2

189.

‘Rex salamon summus of Sapience’

4474

2816

Hl2

190.

‘Ryght as a Rammes Horne’

359

199

Bo2 Hl2

191.

‘Ryme without Accord’

390

223

Hl2

192.

‘Roundel on the Coronation of Henry VI’

4458

2804

Ha3

193.

De sancta Maria contra pestilenciam

3931

2549

Ct

194.

‘A Saying of the Nightingale’

2525

1498

Hl2

195.

‘The Sayings of Old Philosophers’

5502

3487

Hl2

196.

Secrees of old Philisoffres

1544

935

Hl2 Tc3

197.

Thomas Brampton’s version of the ‘Seven Penitential Psalms’, stanzas 62–116

2668

1591

Hl1

198.

Seven Sages of Rome (the A-text, lacking the first 950 lines)

4984

3187

Ar

199.

‘Seven Wise Counsels’

939

576

Hl2

200.

Siege of Thebes

6276

3928

Ad1 Ch Cn En3 Ll1

201.

Sir Beuys of Hampton, the A Text

3250

1993

Np

202.

Sir Isumbras, fragment

1934

1184

Np

203.

Sir Landevale

5002

3203

Ra4(2)

204.

‘So as the Crabbe Goth Forward’

5792

3655

Bo2 Hl2

205.

‘Sumtyme was a monk in Savenay’

4991

3191

Ll2

206.

‘A song of Iust Mesure’

951

584

Hl2

207.

‘A Song of Vertu’

663

401

Hl2 Ph4 Ra4(2)

208.

Speculum Gy de Warwyke (variously titled Speculum Mundi and Speculum vtile istius mundi)

1782

1101

Ar

209.

Speculum Misericordie

2450

1451

Dl

210.

Stans puer ad mensam

3588

2233

Bo2 Hl2 Ra4(2)

211.

‘The Stasyons of Ierusalem’

1613

986

Hn

212.

Stella celi extirpauit Que lactauit Dominum

5826

3673

Ct Hl2

213.

‘Story of the adulterous Falmouth Squire’

3348

2052

Dl

214.

Supplicacio Amantis

275

147

Gg

215.

‘Surge mea sponsa so swete in sighte’

5059

3225

Hl2

306

DANIEL W. MOSSER

216.

The Tale of Beryn

6270

3926

Nl

217.

The Tale of Gamelyn

3090

1913

Bw Ch Cp Dl En2 Fi Gl Ha2 Ha4 Ht Ii La Lc Ld1 Ld2 Mg Mm Ph3 Pw Ra2 Ry1 Ry2 Sl1 Sl2 To

218.

Temple of Glas

1403

851

Gg Pp(1)

219.

‘The .X. Commaundment[es] of loue’

965

590

Tc3

220.

‘The Testament of Dan John Lydgate’

3937

2464

Hl2 (Part 5 only) Hl3 Ph4 Ra4(2) Tc3 (Parts 2 & 4)

221.

‘That Now is Hay Some Time was Grass’

5575

3531

Ra4(2)

222.

‘Thoroughfare of Woe’

3080

1872

Hl2

223

‘Thy ioy be euery dele’

5940

3730

Ll2

224.

Timor mortis conturbat me

5712

3743

Ll2

225.

‘Tyed with a Line’

5410

3436

Ha3 (first stanza only) Hl2 Hn (first stanza only)

226.

‘Treachery of Fortune’

4096

2584

Ra4(2)

227.

‘A Tretise for Lauandres’

4240

2668

Hl2

228.

Troilus and Criseyde

5248

3327

Gg Ha1

229.

‘Truth’ (Balade de Bon Conseyl)

1326

809

Ad4 El (later addition) Gg Ha3 Ph4 Pp(2)

230.

‘Unto the holy and undivided Trinity’

6115

3830.5

Ct

231.

‘A Valentine to Her That Excelleth All’

4769

3065

Hl2

232.

‘Verses against Haste’

335

186

Hl2 Ra4(2)

333.

Verse paraphrase of Old Testament history

1553

944

Ll1

234.

‘Verses on the Kings of England’

727

444

Ra4(2)

235.

‘The Visions of Tundale’

2866

1724

Dl

236.

A warning against the fickleness of Fortune (one couplet only)

6621.7

Ø IMEV 4137

Ra4(2)

237.

The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnel

3130

1916

Ra4(2)

238.

‘Whan faithe faileth in prestes sawes’

6299

3943

Tc2 (16 C)

307

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

239.

‘When þi hede quakes’

6443

4034.77

Ll2

240.

‘A Wicked Tunge Wille Sey Amys’

1070

653

Bo2 Hl2

241.

‘The wyseman sayd vnto hys sonne’

5530

3502

Tc3

242.

‘The world so wyde the ayre so remeuable’

5533

3503

Hl2 Ra4(2)

II. Middle English Prose44 1.

Abbey of the Holy Ghost (IPMEP 39): Hl1 St

2.

Ave Iesu Criste Verbum patris (IPMEP 278): Ll2

3.

Boece (IPMEP 43): Ad4

4.

Booke of Haukynge (Voigts and Kurtz 2101.00; IPMEP 743): Hn

5.

Middle English Prose Brut (IPMEP 374): Ha3

6.

‘Chronicle of the Saints and Kings of England’: Cn En3

7.

The Commandment (IPMEP 660): Ll2

8.

Confessio in anglicis (English translation of the confession; Jolliffe 1974, C.20): Ll2

9.

‘Declaration upon Certayn Wrytinges Sent Oute of Scotteland’ (IPMEP 10): Ry1(2)

10. De contemplacione (Jolliffe 1974, M.5/0.15; IPMEP 5): Sl3 11. Desire and Delight (IPMEP 863): Ll2 12. Ego Dormio (IPMEP 160): Ll2 13. ‘Fifteen Ooes’ (IPMEP 489): Ll2 14. The Form of Living (IPMEP 351): Ll2 15. A genealogy from Adam to King Lamedon (English prose): Ra4(2) 16. Extracts from the Gesta Romanorum (IPMEP 172): Ha3 17. Ghostly Gladness (IPMEP 253): Ll2 18. ‘Her[e] bene contenet ix vertues þe whiche our lord ih[es]u crist shew | et to an holy man wily to do þt þynge deuoutly þt shold plese god’ (Jolliffe 1974, I.12(b): Ll2 44 ‘IPMEP’ in the following list abbreviates the Index of Printed Middle English Prose, ed. R. E. Lewis, N. F. Blake, and A. S. G. Edwards (New York, 1985); ‘Voigts and Kurtz’=L. E. Voigts and P. D. Kurtz, Scientific and Medical Writing in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (Ann Arbor, 2000); ‘Jolliffe’=P. S. A. Jolliffe, Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance (Toronto, 1974).

308

DANIEL W. MOSSER

19. ‘Here folowen seuen thynges whiche a man or woman must haue forto be Able forto gete pardon’ (Jolliffe 1974, E.5): Ph4 20. ‘here yn ben specifyed the occacions and verry causes of the grete Inco[n]venyentis and Mishyfes that falle in this land in the daies of kyng Edward the ijde kyng Richard the ijde kyng harry the vjth ’: Ii 21. ‘Here begynneth the Stori of the blyssyd Passion of Christ Ihesu And the grete soruis of his blissid modyr Marie’: Hn 22. ‘Here begynnthe þe lamentacioun of oure lady seynt Mary’ (IPMEP 828): Ll2 23. ‘A History of the Old Testament from Adam to Ptolemy Philopator, collected from Peter Comestor, Methodius, Josephus, Isidore, and other writers sacred and profane’: To2 24. Ipomedon (IPMEP 615): Ll1 25. ‘Laddre of Heuyn’ (Jolliffe 1974, H.6): Ll2 26. ‘Life of Adam’ (IPMEP 25): Hl1 27. ‘Life of St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins’ (IPMEP 719): Ph4 28. ‘Loue of kynde and car me byndeth’: Ll2 29. Mandeville’s Travels (the B-Text; IPMEP 233): Ar 30. ‘Marche The sonne arisith iii quartirs of an houre before vii & goth to rest iii quartirs of an houre aftyr v the iiiithe day of Marche vppon E’: Hn 31. Two medical recipes (‘ffor þe ffarciou[n] probatum est’; ‘ffor þe Mygryin’); three medical recipes (‘ffor the Ache and yche’; ‘ffor the Stone’; ‘ffor þe hete in a mannys vysage’; Voigts and Kurtz 5705.00 & 5336.00); Two medical recipes (‘ffor þe Mygryin’; ‘ffor þe paulsey’; Voigts and Kurtz 5705.00); medical recipe (‘A good medecyne for þe peynes of a horsse’; Voigts and Kurtz 5705.00); medical recipe (‘ffor þe Ache in fote or Arme of a man’; Voigts and Kurtz 5981.00); medical recipe (‘ffor þe Ache of Govte’; Voigts and Kurtz 5981.00); medical recipe (‘ffor the Govte’); medical recipe (‘ffor the pykys[?] Ache’): Ra4(2) 32. On Mixed Life (IPMEP 147): Ll2 33. Prescription for toothache: Ry1(2) 34. Medical recipes: the first: ‘to helpe a woman in travel of childe | Take a dark stone and schave it to powder . and yeve it to to [sic] a traveling woman to | drinke wtwyne . and she shalbe deliuerid anon . also take the Iuse of lek[es] and yeve | hur to drinke . or els yeve hur to drinke detany’ (Voigts and Kurtz 4663.00): Np

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

35. Meditation on the Lord’s Prayer in Middle English: Ll2 36. Excerpt from a meditation on the Passion: Ll2 37. Memoriale Credencium (IPMEP 448): Sl3 38. Mirk’s Festial (IPMEP 734): Ee 39. Novem Virtutes (IPMEP 410): Hl1 40. ‘Now of the Resurrexion of Crist Ihesu I purpos sumwhat to telle’ (‘The Gospel of Nicodemus’, here in the English P group version): Hn 41. ‘[O] Benigne ihesu’ (English prose prayer): Ll2 42. ‘[t]her be vj thynges þt will bring a mannys soule to hevyn’ (‘Of the Six Religious Duties’; Jolliffe 1974, I.36): Sl3 43. ‘[O] Myghtful ihesu’ (English prose): Ll2 44. ‘[O] þanked be ye holy fadyr’ (English prose prayer): Ll2 45. ‘O thou soul myn whi art þu sorowful’: Ll2 46. Passage attributed to Hugh of St Victor: Ll2 47. Extract from the English prose translation of De Guilleville’s Pelerinage de l’ame (IPMEP 75): Ha3 48. The Petigrew of Englond: Tc3 49. Excerpts from John Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Polychronicon (IPMEP 605): Hn Ra4(2) 50. ‘prayour & good lyuynge may wtdrawe | all bad p[re]destinacion. & bothe Man and | woman may stonde in the state of grace | AMEN’: Hn 51. [The Profits of Tribulation/The Six Masters] (Jolliffe 1974, J.2(c); IPMEP 287) Ph4 52. ‘The Quantitey of the Earth’ (‘She sayth some thow hast shewed the veritie | The smallest sterre, fixte in the firmament … maketh habitation. Desunt nonnulla’, sixteenth-century addition): St 53. Reclusorium Anime [extract] (‘[w]E knoweth well by comyn exp[er]ience …’ (Jollife 1974, I.41): Sl3 54. ‘Remedies Against Temptations’ (a translation of William Flete, De Remediis contra Temptaciones; Jolliffe 1974, K.8[b]; IPMEP 230): Ll2 55. ‘A Revelation shewed to an holy womman’ (IPMEP 50): Ll2 56. Serpent of Division (IPMEP 835): Pp(1) 57. ‘Seven points a man should consider to avoid eternal punishment’ (attributed to St Bernard): Ll2

309

310

DANIEL W. MOSSER

58. ‘Somnium vigilantis’ (IPMEP 539): Ry1(2) 59. ‘Than aftir that Jesus was closyd in his Sepulcre ye shul here the stori of Joseph of Aramathye and Nichodemus’ (IPMEP 397): Hn 60. ‘Ther been Also sex principal thoughtes that euery man and woman shuld haue in mind’ (IPMEP 709): Ph4 61. ‘Ther ben in Englond xxxvj shyres …’ (notes on the shires and churches of England): Ra4(2) 62. ‘This meditacioun is good to sey euery day’ (English prose prayer): Ll2 63. ‘This Seynt Hillarie Bisshop drewe these psalmes folowynge oute of the Sawter by the which a man shulde pray oure lorde for speciall thynges’: Ph4 64. The Three Kings of Cologne (IPMEP 290): Hl1 Pp(1) St 65. ‘The Tytle of France’ (‘Phillyp kyng of ffraunce hade Issue iij sonnys …’): Ra4(2)

III. Latin Verse 1.

‘Þanswer of deþe agayne vn to man’ (Dialogus Mortis cum Homine45): Ha3

2. ‘Apes videre vel cap[er]e lucru[m] sig[nifica]t’ (Somniale): Sl3 3.

Dum vivas et bene stas (two Latin couplets): Ra4(2)

4.

Four lines of Latin verse (‘Clara dies Pauli …’): Ra4(2)

5.

Latin verses on Fortune (four lines): Ra4(2)

6.

‘On the Death of Edward IV’: Ra4(2)

7.

Latin quatrain, ‘O tu puricia …’: Hl3

8. ‘Veni creator spiritus’ (Latin Pentecostal hymn attributed to Rabanus Maurus): Ll2 9. ‘Versus | Da tua dum sunt Post mortem tunc tua no[n] sunt’46: Ha3 10. ‘Versus Memoriales | Sunt tria que vere faciunt me sepe dolore’47: Ha3

45 H. Walther, Initia Carminum ac Versuum Medii Aevi Posterioris Latinorum (Göttingen, 1969), no. 16058. 46 H. Walther, Carmina Medii Aevi Posterioris Latina, II/1: Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Göttingen, 1963), no. 4561. 47 Walther, Carmina Medii Aevi Posterioris Latina, II/1, no. 61; Walther, Initia Carminum ac Versuum Medii Aevi Posterioris Latinorum, no. 18886.

NOT JUST A CANTERBURY TALES MANUSCRIPT?

IV. Latin Prose 1. ‘Articuli passionis Christi’: Ma 2. ‘Computacio Danielis Prophete’: Sl3 3. ‘Confiteor tibi pater’: Ll2 4. ‘Cur mali bonis habundant’: Ll2 5.

Two extracts from Augustine, De civitate Dei, books 16 and 22 (added by a later hand):48 Ct

6.

Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, lines 1–5049: Ph4

7.

Latin sayings attributed to Gregory, Isaiah, Daniel, Bernard, and Johannes Chrysostam: Ll2

8. ‘Leges Edward’: Hl1 9.

A list of kings from Edward I to Richard III, beginning, ‘[E] Primus memorand[um] qd Rex E prim[us] post conq[uestum] filius Regis Henrici t[er]cij obijt die …’, and ending ‘E vtus Md [=‘memorandum’] qd Rex E vtus cessauit a regimine xxvjto die Iunii Anno regni sui | primo Et Rex Ric[ard] us t[er]cius incepit regnare’: Ma

10. ‘Merita visionis corporis Cristi’: Ll2 11. ‘Nonnulla de hominum natura prava’: Sl3 12. ‘O omnipotentissime’: Ll2 13. ‘Periculum animarum perjuratorum secundum diversos auctores’: Ma 14. Qualibet ergo die qui sex triginta per annum pater noster et ave vult offere pie celi dabitur si stannum [?] antiphona commemoracio (Latin prayer to St Ursula): Ph4 15. ‘Qualiter homo debet’: Ll2 16. ‘Rubrica De vita & honestate Clericor[um]’: Sl3 17. St Patrick’s Treatise on Purgatory: Gl

V. French Verse 1.

Charles d’Orleans, ‘Mon cuer chaunte Ioyeuxsement’: Ha3

48 N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. III: Lampeter–Oxford (Oxford, 1983), p. 346. 49 G. A. A. Kortekaas, Historia Apollonii regis Tyri (Groningen, 1984).

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CAMBRIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE, MS R.3.15 AND THE CIRCULATION OF CHAUCERIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY SIMON HOROBIN

T

rinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.15 [Tc2] is a late fifteenth-century copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales whose text is very closely affiliated to that of Caxton’s first edition, although critics disagree as to the exact nature of this relationship.1 The presence of individual lines in Caxton’s edition that are not found in Tc2 rules out the possibility that the manuscript served as Caxton’s exemplar, but it remains possible that the manuscript was copied from the printed text. N. F. Blake included Tc2 in his listing of ‘Caxton prints for which a copy-text survives, or which were used as a copy’, suggesting that the manuscript may have been copied from Caxton’s first printed edition.2 C. A. Owen Jr considered Tc2 to have used the exemplar employed by Caxton for his edition as its copytext,3

1 For descriptions of the manuscript see Manly and Rickert, I, 527–31; M. R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: a Descriptive Catalogue, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1900–4), II, 65–6. The scribe of Tc2 was forced to switch to a copytext affiliated to the group of manuscripts containing Bodl., MS Rawl. poet. 149 during the Clerk’s Tale, presumably the result of damage to his original exemplar. 2 N. F. Blake, ‘Manuscript to Print’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375– 1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 403–29 (p. 419). 3 C. A. Owen Jr., The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 85–7.

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while D. W. Mosser concludes that the precise nature of the association is impossible to determine.4 In addition to its text of the Canterbury Tales, Tc2 contains several other Middle English works, copied by a secretary hand of the sixteenth century, as follows: 1.

(folios 1r–2r) ‘Eight goodlie questions with their answers’ (NIMEV 3183/1)

2.

(folios 2r–3r) ‘Balade au tres noble Roy H[enri] le quint’ (Hoccleve NIMEV 3788/1)

3.

(folio 3r) ‘Whan faithe faileth in prestes sawes’ (NIMEV 3943/10)

4.

(folios 317r–28r) Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede (NIMEV 663/1)

The three items that precede the Canterbury Tales in Tc2 appear in this same position in William Thynne’s edition, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer (STC 5068), first issued in 1532, and scholars have consequently assumed that they were copied directly from this edition. Collation of Thynne’s version of these texts with those in Tc2 confirms that they are very close to the printed text. Variants shared by both witnesses include the following readings in the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales, added by the sixteenth-century copyist as a replacement for a missing leaf: 2 droghte] drought; 5 sweete] sote; 6 in] om.; 10 the] om.; 13 for] om.; 19 Bifil] it befel; in that] om.; 21 wenden] go; 22 ful] om.; 23 At] That.5 The secretary hand that copied these texts from the printed edition was also responsible for adding the fourth supplementary text at the end of the manuscript: Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. This poem is not found in Thynne’s edition; its first appearance in print was in Reyner Wolfe’s edition of 1553 (STC 19904) and it was subsequently reprinted as part of Owen Rogers’s edition of Piers Plowman (STC 19908), published in 1561. Wright thought that the Tc2 copy of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede was copied from the printed version, but Skeat demonstrated its independence, arguing that it was based upon an earlier manuscript no longer extant.6 Skeat’s collation 4 D. W. Mosser, ‘The Use of Caxton Texts and Paper Stocks in Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. G. A. Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 161–77. 5 The lemma is the text as printed in Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford, 1988). 6 Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS OS 30 (London, 1867). Skeat’s view that all three texts descend from a single exemplar has been corrected by A. I. Doyle, who points out that lines 184–5 of the printed version are not found in the Trinity or Royal manuscripts, although they have since been added by a later hand in the Royal manuscript (‘An Unrecognized Piece of Piers the Ploughman’s Creed and Other Work by Its Scribe’, Speculum 34 (1959), 428–36, at p. 435). It is possible that the omission was independently introduced by the scribes of the Trinity and Royal manuscripts due

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of the extant versions of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede showed that the lost Tc2 source was an authoritative copy of the poem, accurately transmitted by the sixteenth-century scribe who added it to Tc2. Skeat noted a small number of mistakes introduced by the Tc2 scribe, but was otherwise struck by the scribe’s fidelity to his source, which extended to the preservation of thorn and yogh, describing him as ‘a scrupulous and painstaking antiquary’. The errors introduced by the Tc2 scribe were mostly caused by confusion of the letters y and þ, suggesting an unfamiliarity with the medieval graph, or perhaps more likely indicative of a hand in which y and þ were written identically, a common feature of the handwriting of medieval scribes writing in Northern and East Anglian dialects.7 Thus we find the Tc2 scribe writing theth ‘they’ and frathnyng ‘fraynyng’ in lines 25 and 27. The scribe’s wrappe for wraþþe at line 527 shows confusion between p and þ, while willen for wissen (line 233) and lewden for seweden (531) testify to difficulties in distinguishing long-s and l. The Tc2 reading wymien at line 850, where the other witnesses read wynnen, implies difficulties in reading words comprised of a number of consecutive minim strokes. On the whole such mistakes are few and more common at the beginning of the text, suggesting that the scribe improved as he progressed through the text. Skeat’s view of the accuracy and authority of the Tc2 copy of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede has been confirmed by the poem’s subsequent editors, James Dean and Helen Barr, who have continued to adopt it as the basis for their editions.8 The hand that was responsible for these additions is a distinctive secretary script of the latter half of the sixteenth century, which can be identified as that of the prolific manuscript collector and annotator Stephan Batman (c. 1542–84). Batman employed a repertory of different contemporary and archaic scripts in his manuscript annotations, including two varieties of humanist script.9 His additions to Tc2 are in his secretary hand, showing the same combination of features seen in the plate taken from Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.2.7, signed by Batman and dated to 1575, included by P. R. Robinson in her Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 737–1600 in Cambridge Libraries.10 Particularly distinctive features of to eyeskip, but it is more likely indicative of a shared source, distinct from that of the printed edition which includes these lines. 7 For the distribution of this feature see M. Benskin, ‘The letters and in later Middle English, and some related matters’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 7 (1982), 13–30. 8 Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. J. Dean (Kalamazoo, 1991). The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. H. Barr (London, 1993). 9 For a discussion of the range of scripts employed by Batman see M. B. Parkes, ‘Stephan Batman’s Manuscripts’, in Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of Tadahiro Ikegami, ed. M. Kanno et al. (Tokyo, 1997), pp. 125–56 (p. 131). 10 P. R. Robinson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 737–1600 in Cambridge Libraries (Cambridge, 1988), plate 384. Further facsimiles of Batman’s secretary hand and a discussion of its characteristic features can be found in K. McLoughlin, ‘Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498 and Stephen Batman’s Reading Practices’, Transactions of the

THE CIRCULATION OF CHAUCERIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Batman’s secretary found in both Trinity R.3.14 and B.2.7 are the letter g, which has a horizontal tail with a slight turn at the tip (see Fig. 1, line 7 yonge), two types of d, one with a heavy ascender and another with an ascender which is looped (Fig. 1, line 2 drought, and line 13 strondes), h with a right-handed curved ascender and descender (see Fig. 1, line 1 his), upper-case L with two loops (see Fig. 1, line 12 Longen). Stephan Batman was the author of a number of works including A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (1569), The Travayled Pylgrime (1569), thought to have been a source for Spenser’s Faerie Queene,11 and a version of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum: Batman uppon Bartholome (1582), which served as a standard encyclopedia in Elizabethan England. Batman was born in Bruton, Somerset, the eldest son of Henry Batman or Bruer, an immigrant from the Netherlands, and Elizabeth Whithorne. Batman spent most of his ecclesiastical career as rector of St Mary’s church, Newington Butts, situated a mile south of London bridge, between Lambeth and Southwark. He was instituted to the rectory at St Mary’s in January 1570 and then a year later he was collated by the archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, to the rectory of Merstham, Surrey; he held both livings until his death in 1584. The connection with Matthew Parker suggested by the collation to the rectory of Merstham is further apparent from his employment as one of Parker’s domestic chaplains. In addition to serving in the archbishop’s household, Batman was closely involved with other members of Parker’s circle in identifying and salvaging the contents of monastic libraries following the dissolution.12 Batman boasts of having collected some 6,700 volumes for Parker, comprising a range of subjects: ‘of Diuinitie, Astronomie, Historie, Phisicke, and others of sundrye Artes and Sciences’.13 A substantial number of these, extensively annotated by Batman, are now part of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College Cambridge.14 In addition to volumes that he collected on behalf of Parker, Batman assembled a substantial collection of manuscripts for his own use. More than twenty extant manuscripts

Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1994), 525–34 (p. 527 and plates 13–16); The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle from Magdalene College, Cambridge, MS Pepys 2498, ed. A. Zettersten, EETS OS 274 (London, 1976), frontispiece. 11 A. L. Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Chivalric Restoration: From Bateman’s Travayled Pylgrime to the Redcrosse Knight’, Studies in Philology 86 (1989), 166–97. 12 For an account of Stephan Batman’s life see R. Zim, ‘Batman, Stephan (c. 1542–1584)’, ODNB Online [accessed 13 May 2020]. 13 See his The Doome Warning all men to the Judgemente (1581; STC 1582), pp. 399–400; quoted in C. E. Wright, ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries and the Beginnings of Anglo-Saxon Studies. Matthew Parker and his Circle: A Preliminary Study’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 (1951), 208–37 (p. 220). 14 For a list of manuscripts in the Parker Library collection that can be connected with Batman see S. Horobin and A. Nafde, ‘Stephan Batman and the Making of the Parker Library’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 15.4 (2015), 561–82.

315

FIG. 1 CAMBRIDGE, TRINITY COLLEGE, MS R.3.15, FOL. 3V. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF TRINITY COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE.

THE CIRCULATION OF CHAUCERIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

have been linked with Batman’s ownership, a collection which witnesses to a particular concern with Middle English devotional literature.15 The later provenance of Tc2 helps to confirm the association with Batman established on the basis of palaeographical evidence. M. R. James noted the use of red chalk in the pagination and stated that the manuscript ‘seems to have belonged to Abp Parker’.16 Manly and Rickert also referred to the red crayon foliation and linked its ownership with Matthew Parker.17 The earliest known provenance of Tc2 is its donation to Trinity College by Thomas Nevile, Master of the college from 1593–1615. Manly and Rickert noted its appearance as number 65 in a list of the books given by Nevile in 1614, recorded in the Memoriale Collegii Trinitatis.18 The manuscript’s ownership by Thomas Nevile in turn strengthens the likelihood that it belonged to Parker; Parker’s son John gave a number of manuscripts to Nevile which he subsequently donated to the Trinity College library. A memorandum book owned by John Parker, now LPL MS 737, includes a list of manuscripts owned by him at Bekesbourne, Lambeth and Cambridge. In her edition of the list Sheila Strongman identified number 106, listed among the books housed at Cambridge and simply titled ‘Chawcer written’, as Trinity R.3.15, on the basis of pagination in red crayon and its association with Thomas Nevile.19 One further inscription strengthens the link with the Parker circle: on folio 5r appear the initials ‘TW’ in red crayon. These initials are found on a number of manuscripts in both Trinity College library and the Parker library at Corpus Christi College. M. R. James suggested that they were either an abbreviation for the surname of the Canterbury schoolmaster and antiquary John Twyne, or the initials of another Kentish antiquary Thomas Wooton.20 The evidence of the red crayon marks, the initials, and the list of volumes owned by John Parker, all indicate that the manuscript was owned by Matthew Parker, perhaps the result of a gift from Batman, and that it subsequently passed to Thomas Nevile via Parker’s son John, who in turn donated it to Trinity College. Further support for this reconstruction of the manuscript’s sixteenth-century provenance can be found 15 For a list of manuscripts owned by Batman see Parkes, ‘Stephan Batman’s Manuscripts’, pp. 139–50. More recent identifications are discussed in A. S. G. Edwards and S. Horobin, ‘Further Books annotated by Stephan Batman’, The Library, 7th s. 11 (2010), 223–7; S. Horobin, ‘Stephan Batman’s Manuscripts of Piers Plowman’, The Review of English Studies 62 (2010), 358–72; A. B. Kraebel, ‘A Further Book Annotated by Stephan Batman, with New Material for his Biography’, The Library, 7th s. 16 (2015), 458–66. 16 James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, II, 65. 17 Manly and Rickert, I, 531; on Parker’s use of red crayon see R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and his Books (Kalamazoo, 1993). 18 Manly and Rickert, I, 531. The Memoriale Collegii Trinitatis is now Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.17.8. 19 S. Strongman, ‘John Parker’s Manuscripts: An Edition of the Lists in Lambeth Palace MS 737’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7 (1977–80), 1–27 (p. 25). 20 M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1909–13), I, xxi.

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in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.33, a manuscript also owned by Batman, and subsequently passed to Nevile via Parker and thence to Trinity College.21 The association of Tc2 with Stephan Batman has a number of interesting implications for our understanding of the circulation of copies of Chaucer’s works during the sixteenth century. I noted above Batman’s close involvement in the activities of the Parker circle in assembling a collection of medieval books to support the establishment of the Anglican Church. In addition to his work on behalf of Matthew Parker, Batman assembled his own personal library of medieval books containing a variety of works, especially Middle English religious and devotional texts. Batman’s interest in such texts can be seen in his ownership of a manuscript of the Book of Privy Counselling, CUL MS Ii.6.31, and his transcription of this same text into his commonplace book, now Cambridge Mass., Houghton Library, MS Eng. f. 1015. Batman also owned Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2498, a substantial collection of Middle English devotional works, as well as copies of The Chastising of God’s Children, The Prickynge of Love, The Doctrine of the Heart and the C-text of Piers Plowman. In addition to these interests in devotional literature, Batman owned a substantial number of Chaucer manuscripts. Francis Thynne, son of the Chaucerian editor William Thynne, recalls in his Animadversions how he gave a number of his father’s copies of the works of Chaucer to Batman: in those many written Bookes of Chaucer, whiche came to my fathers hands, there were manye false copyes … of whiche written copies there came to me after my fathers deathe some fyve and twentye; whereof some had moore and some fewer tales, and some but two and some three. whiche bookes beinge by me … partly dispersed aboute xxvj years agoo, and partlye stoolen oute of my howse at Popler: I gave divers of them to Stephen Batemanne person of Newington, and to divers other, whiche beinge copies unperfecte and some of them corrected by my fathers hande.22

None of these manuscripts has so far been identified, although A. S. G. Edwards noted that Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2006 is one of a small number of surviving copies that meet Thynne’s description of manuscripts containing ‘some but two, and some three’ tales. According to Edwards, Batman’s ownership of another volume now in the Pepys library, MS 2498 discussed above, creates a ‘circumstantial basis

21 For a list of manuscripts now in the library of Trinity College Cambridge formerly owned by Matthew Parker see James, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, I, xxv. 22 F. Thynne, Animaduersions vppon the Annotacions and Corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS OS 9 (London, 1875), p. 8.

THE CIRCULATION OF CHAUCERIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

for associating Pepys 2006 with Thynne’.23 Richard Beadle has suggested that a manuscript once owned by John Selden but since lost may have been one of the volumes referred to by Thynne.24 The sole extant copy of Chaucer’s work known to have been owned by Batman is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 61, a copy of Troilus and Criseyde with the famous frontispiece apparently depicting Chaucer reciting the poem to an assembled audience.25 This manuscript can be linked with Batman thanks to an inscription on folio 150v in his hand: ‘This is my booke / SB / geven to me by Mr Cari the xvij of Decembre Ano 1570’. But, while this inscription clearly indicates Batman’s ownership of the manuscript, it also names its source. Corpus 61 did not come from Francis Thynne but from William Cary, a London cloth worker who was a collector of manuscripts known to the Parker circle.26 The form of this inscription makes it likely that the manuscript was part of Batman’s own collection, while the subsequent addition of the words ‘ex dono’ in the same hand presumably records his later gift of the volume to Parker, who subsequently donated it to Corpus Christi College along with the rest of his substantial collection. Corpus 61 is included in the register of books drawn up for the indenture at the time of Parker’s bequest to Corpus and has been in the college library since 1575. An interesting additional piece of evidence of the manuscript’s sixteenth-century provenance that has not previously been noticed is that the inscription on folio ii verso that reads ‘Thys ys the Booke of Troilus and Criseyde’ is in the hand of the antiquarian and Chaucerian editor John Stow. It is not clear how Stow got access to the manuscript; it may have been through his association with Batman and the Parker circle (see below), although it may also have been from his own connections in the London book trade. Stow’s personal collection of manuscripts included a number that were previously associated with the fifteenth-century scribe and manuscript compiler John Shirley. Since Corpus 61 also includes a couplet in Shirley’s hand, this is another possible means by which Stow could have got access to this manuscript. Although there is nothing in Tc2 to connect it to William Thynne and the collection of manuscripts given to Batman by Francis Thynne, it seems likely that it was part of Thynne’s collection passed on to Batman. Despite the large number of manuscripts to which Thynne must have had access 23 Manuscript Pepys 2006: a Facsimile, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman, OK., 1985), p. xxx. 24 R. Beadle, ‘“I wol nat telle it yit”: John Selden and a lost version of the Cook’s Tale’, in Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuki Ando, ed. T. Takamiya and R. Beadle (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 55–67 (p. 57). 25 For a description of this manuscript and its association with Batman see Troilus and Criseyde: a facsimile of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS.61, ed. M. B. Parkes and E. Salter (Cambridge, 1978). 26 For William Cary see A. G. Watson, ‘Christopher and William Carye, collectors of monastic manuscripts and “John Carye”’, The Library, 5th s. 20 (1965), 135–42.

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when compiling his edition of Chaucer’s Workes, just five manuscripts and one printed text can be linked to Thynne with any degree of certainty.27 The clearest instances of manuscripts owned by Thynne are Glasgow UL, MS Hunter 409, preserving the sole extant complete copy of the Romaunt of the Rose28 and Warminster, Longleat MS 258 containing various shorter poems, and Caxton’s printed edition of Boece now in Longleat. Each of these contains casting off marks that correspond to the layout of the columns in Thynne’s edition, attesting to their use by Thynne when setting up his text of these works for his edition. Other manuscripts can be more tentatively linked with Thynne, including ones now at Longleat, the seat of the Thynne family, purchased by his cousin John Thynne in 1541. No complete manuscript of the Canterbury Tales can be definitively linked with Thynne, although another manuscript now at Longleat, MS 257, which includes the Knight’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale alongside a variety of other works such as Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, recalls Francis Thynne’s reference to manuscripts with just two or three tales, and likely formed part of his father’s collection. Manly and Rickert suggested that San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 144, an extensive miscellany containing the Tale of Melibee and the Monk’s Tale, was in Thynne’s possession, on the basis of an inscription which they considered to be in his hand. This inscription provides a title for the Tale of Melibee at the top of folio 81r: ‘Chaucers talle of melebe’. However, the hand that supplied this note is probably not that of Thynne, but rather that of John Stow, whose hand also appears on folios 1r and 9v, adding a heading and an explicit to William Lichfield’s ‘The Complaint of God to Sinful Man and the Answer of Man’. So, while it seems likely that Thynne did own a considerable collection of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, no extant copy of the complete work can be definitively linked with him. Chaucerians particularly lament the loss of a manuscript which Francis Thynne claimed was overseen by Chaucer himself: ‘one coppye of some part of his woorkes came to his handes subscribed in diuers places withe “examinatur Chaucer”’.29 We have seen above that Batman’s primary concern with this copy of the Canterbury Tales was to make good its omissions by comparison with the printed edition. The addition of the three supplementary texts found preceding the Canterbury Tales in Thynne’s edition shows his desire to extend the collection beyond the Tales. Batman also transcribed the first 27 For a recent discussion of manuscripts and printed texts used by William Thynne for his edition of the Canterbury Tales see R. Costomiris, ‘The Influence of Printed Editions and Manuscripts on the Canon of William Thynne’s Canterbury Tales’, in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400–1602, ed. T. A. Prendergast and B. Kline (Ohio, 1999), pp. 237–57. 28 For a digital facsimile of this manuscript which allows collation with Thynne’s printed edition see The Digitisation of Middle English Manuscripts: The Romaunt of the Rose, ed. G. D. Caie [accessed 13 May 2020]. 29 Animadversions, p. 6.

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fifty-six lines of the General Prologue on folios 3v–4v, to make good an omission following the loss of the opening leaves of Tc2. As we might expect, the text of these lines is very close to that of Thynne’s edition, suggesting that, as with the additional poems, it too was copied from the printed source. There is, however, one reading which varies from the text found in Thynne. At line 48 Tc2 reads ‘so ferre’ where Thynne omits the ‘so’. The addition of the ‘so’ could simply be the result of scribal error; it is perhaps significant, however, that Stow’s edition of 1561, which is largely a reprint of that of his predecessor, shares the reading ‘so farre’ with Tc2. The very close relationship between Stow’s edition and that of Thynne, which extends to the printing of the same set of additional poems before the Canterbury Tales, means that it is likely that it was Stow’s edition that Batman used for these additions. The later date of Stow’s edition would also fit better with Batman’s recorded activities. In his Animadversions, written in 1599, Francis Thynne noted that he disposed of his father’s Chaucer manuscripts some twenty-six years earlier, i.e. 1573. If Tc2 was indeed one of the manuscripts given by Thynne to Batman, then the copying activity we have been examining must have taken place after 1573 and before Batman’s death in 1584. Batman’s concern with the completeness of his text extends to the addition of the Adam stanza in the Monk’s Tale (VII 2007–14/B2 3197–3204). This stanza was not included by the Tc2 scribe; Batman added it in the margin with a mark indicating its correct place of insertion. Although this is the sole instance of an addition of this kind, it is remarkable that Batman should have noticed the omission, given that there is no indication that it was missing in the manuscript. An awareness of this lacuna must be the result of Batman’s own knowledge of the text, or a collation of Tc2 with another source, perhaps the edition of Stow used for the supplementary texts. It may even be that Batman was prompted to make this addition by contact with another copy of the poem like the Hengwrt manuscript, where the stanza has been added in the margin by a different hand in a similar way. The copy of Stow’s edition used by Batman can also be identified: it is currently in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where it has the shelfmark Ad C393 C56L sa. Joseph Dane and Alexandra Gillespie first associated this volume with the Parker circle, on the basis of signatures in the hand of John Parker, the archbishop’s son, which are found on the title page.30 The book appears to have originally belonged 30 A. Gillespie and J. Dane, ‘Back at Chaucer’s Tomb – Inscriptions in Two Early Copies of Chaucer’s Workes’, Studies in Bibliography 52 (1999), 89–96. Conor Leahy has recently identified a second copy of Stow’s edition of Chaucer’s works owned by Batman. I am very grateful to Dr Leahy for informing me of this discovery and allowing me to read a draft of his article before publication. C. Leahy, ‘An Annotated Edition of Chaucer Belonging to Stephen Batman’, The Library, 7th s. 22 (2021), 217–24.

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to Stow himself, as is suggested by the presence of his initials ‘I. S.’ on the binding, while a note of the price paid for the volume in Parker’s hand may indicate that he purchased the volume for his collection.31 It is clear from these inscriptions that this copy of Stow’s edition was owned by Parker himself, and thus would have been available to Batman. But there is more direct evidence of Batman’s use of the volume. We saw above the way that Batman supplemented the manuscript copy of the Canterbury Tales by transcribing additional texts from the printed edition. The copy of Stow’s edition exhibits further evidence of this tendency in the addition of the Retraction to the Canterbury Tales, not included by Stow in the edition itself, but added on the verso of the title page in a distinctive secretary hand that can be identified as that of Stephan Batman.32 This addition in Batman’s hand cements the link between Tc2 and the Harry Ransom copy of Stow’s edition, demonstrating that it was this printed copy that Batman used as his source for the additions in Tc2. A number of distinctive errors found in Batman’s transcription of the Retraction in the copy of Stow’s works strengthens the likelihood that its source was the text found in Tc2. The most telling shared error is a major omission in line 1082: ‘and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge’; the result of eyeskip, prompted by the repetition of ‘konnynge’. Both witnesses also omit ‘and enditynges’ at line 1085 and have the following variant readings: 1087 many another book] many othir bookis; that Crist] that that Crist; 1089 and to studie to the salvacioun] that it may stonde vn to the saluacioun.33 But this printed edition was not the only source that Batman used in making his additions to Tc2. Having copied the opening 56 lines of the General Prologue from this copy of Stow, Batman subsequently introduced a number of corrections to the text derived from Stow, which indicate that he collated this copy with another textual source. Comparison of these readings with other manuscripts of the General Prologue reveals that the supplementary manuscript used for correction was closely related to three extant copies: New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 24, the Devonshire manuscript [Ds1], BL MS Egerton 2726 [En1] and Manchester,

31 On Parker’s purchase of this volume see Alexandra Gillespie’s comments in the Introduction to John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (London, 2004), pp. 1–11 (p. 7). 32 I am indebted to Alexandra Gillespie for providing me with a photograph of the relevant folio which enabled me to make this identification and for helpful discussion of this volume and its association with Stow and Parker. 33 Caxton’s first edition of the Canterbury Tales shares these variants and thus could have been the source of the addition. However the close links between Tc2 and this copy of Stow’s edition, via Batman and Parker, make it likely that Tc2 was the source. For the text of Caxton’s first edition see Caxton’s Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies on CD-ROM, ed. B. Bordalejo (Leicester, 2003).

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John Rylands Library, MS English 113 [Ma]. Examples of these corrections include the following: 30 And shortly when the sonne was at /went to/ rest went to] Ds1, En1, Ma 34 To take oure waie there as I /shall/ you devise shall] Ds1, En1, Ma 37 Me think it accorda/unt/ […] [it] /were/ to reason were] En1, Ma 41 And eke in /of/ what araie/ that they were in eke] om. Cx1, Cx2, Ht, Pn, Wy of] Ds1, En1, Ma No single one of these manuscripts can be definitely linked with the process of collation described above, although it is intriguing to note that En1 contains numerous instances of a corrector’s mark: ‘ex’. The presence of this mark in En1, as well as in the Cardigan manuscript, led Manly and Rickert to suggest that one of these could have been the manuscript referred to by Francis Thynne as containing the note ‘examinatur Chaucer’.34 In his assessment of William Thynne’s editorial activities and the manuscripts he owned James Blodgett considers the possibility ‘intriguing’, but argues that there is no concrete evidence to associate either En1 or Cn with Thynne.35 Although the evidence remains circumstantial, the fact that Batman obtained a number of Thynne’s manuscripts, including one closely related to En1, means that it is possible that Thynne did indeed own En1 and that this was the manuscript to which Francis Thynne referred. The early history of En1 is unknown, although references to ‘my lord Cobham’ on folios 158v and 229r and the name ‘Brotherton’ on folio 1r led Manly and Rickert to associate it with the Cobham family of Kent and a Richard Brotherton, vicar of West Chalk in 1575.36 They do not note, however, the well-documented connections between Lord Cobham and Francis Thynne. William Brooke, Lord Cobham, was one of Francis Thynne’s patrons: he was the recipient of one of the deluxe manuscript copies of Thynne’s contribution to the revision of Holinshed’s Chronicles concerning the history of the Lords of Cobham, as well as one 34 ‘In this connection, it may be remembered that Francis Thynne said that his father had a MS marked “Examinatur Chaucer”. As the “ex” is rare in literary MSS, it seems possible that Thynne was mistaken about the “Chaucer” and that Cn – or En1, which is also so marked – is the MS he had in mind’. See Manly and Rickert, I, 73. 35 J. E. Blodgett, ‘William Thynne (d. 1546)’, in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. P. G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK, 1984), pp. 35–52 (p. 40). 36 Manly and Rickert, I, 134.

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of a group of influential men responsible for Thynne’s appointment as Lancaster Herald in 1602.37 Batman’s treatment of Tc2 shows him supplementing its copy of the Canterbury Tales with additional shorter texts included by Stow in his edition, supplying text omitted by the original scribe and remedying subsequent omissions caused by the loss of leaves, as well as correcting his own transcriptions through collation with another manuscript of the Tales. Batman’s concern with ensuring a complete and accurate text of Chaucer’s works was not confined to the manuscript; he also supplemented the printed edition by adding the Retraction, using Tc2 as a source. While the additional texts added by Batman at the beginning of Tc2 are not by Chaucer, their presence in Stow’s edition would have been sufficient justification for him to include them here, whether he regarded them as authentic or not. Despite this focus on Chaucer’s works, or at least works attributed to him by contemporary editors, Batman did not include other works found in Stow’s edition. Instead, he followed the Canterbury Tales with the decidedly unChaucerian Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. This poem was first printed in 1553 by Reyner Wolfe and then again in 1561, where it follows Piers Plowman in Owen Rogers’s reprint of Robert Crowley’s third edition of 1550. Batman could have had access to either of these versions when he copied the poem into Tc2 some time after 1573. There is evidence from a manuscript of Piers Plowman which belonged to Batman that he did have access to a copy of Rogers’s edition of 1561.38 This manuscript is now Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.14, a copy of the A version with a C version continuation, to which Batman added lines from the B version in a form that shows they were taken from either Crowley’s third edition or that of Rogers. But, despite his apparent access to a copy of Rogers’s edition, Batman’s copy of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede is not taken from that source, but from a manuscript no longer extant. Rogers’s decision to append Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede to Piers Plowman produces a much more understandable collocation than Batman’s decision to include it after the Canterbury Tales. In the only other manuscript copy of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, BL MS Royal 18 B.xvii, the text precedes a copy of the C Version of Piers Plowman. James Simpson has commented on the way that sixteenth-century readers of this poem saw it as ‘a companion to its greater predecessor’, claiming that ‘the 1553 print as 37 L. A. Knafla, ‘Thynne, Francis (1545?–1608)’, ODNB Online [accessed 13 May 2020]. Francis Thynne’s antiquarian interests and his connections with Lord Cobham are further described in D. Carlson, ‘The writings and manuscript collections of the Elizabethan alchemist, antiquary, and herald Francis Thynne’, Huntington Library Quarterly 52.2 (1989), 203–72. For a more recent and more comprehensive account of Thynne’s activities and Chaucerian scholarship in general in this period, see M. L. Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 (Philadelphia, 2019). 38 Horobin, ‘Stephan Batman and his Manuscripts of Piers Plowman’.

THE CIRCULATION OF CHAUCERIAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

well as the two sixteenth-century manuscript copies all append the poem to Piers Plowman’.39 His mistaken characterisation of Trinity R.3.15 as a copy of Piers Plowman shows just how natural this conjugation appears to modern, as well as sixteenth-century, readers of the poem.40 Batman’s interest in the text of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede fits with other evidence that shows his openness to the value of reading medieval texts, extending even to devotional works of a distinctively Catholic tenor. We have already seen that Batman owned two copies of Piers Plowman, a manuscript and a printed copy, and a third copy, Bodl. MS Digby 171, containing the C Version, can be clearly linked with him via an inscription on the title page. The more marked anticlericalism of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, and its more distinctly Lollard character, would seem to fit well with the interests of Batman and the Parker Circle. The collecting activities of Matthew Parker and his associates were primarily concerned with the justification of the newly-formed Anglican Church; Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede would surely have held great relevance within such strongly reformist circles. Of the works associated with the Piers Plowman Tradition, Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede is the most outspoken in its support for Wyclif and refers sympathetically to the lollard Walter Brut, tried for heresy in 1393. It is easy to see how the heightened polemical tone of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede would have appealed to Batman and Parker, although it is striking that Batman made no attempts to edit its more conservative attitudes towards charged doctrinal issues such as the value of penance and confession. I noted above Skeat’s recognition of Batman’s accuracy in transmitting the text of his manuscript exemplar, which extended even to the preservation of the medieval letters thorn and yogh. This respect for the integrity of the text contrasts strikingly with its handling by its editors for their printed editions. Helen Barr has noted that a number of the more distinctive readings found in the printed edition suggests that it was ‘“doctored” for ideological reasons’.41 For instance, in lines 748 and 756 the printed edition reads ‘abbot’ where both manuscripts have ‘bishop’, and omits lines 817–18 and 823–5 which are concerned with the eucharist: And in the sacrement also that sothfast God on is, Fullich his fleche and his blod, that for vs dethe tholede. (817–18) For Crist seyde it is so, so mot it nede worthe; Therfore studye thou nought theron, ne stere thi wittes, It is his blissed body, so bad he vs beleuen. (823–5) 39 J. Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), p. 376. 40 Barr also claims that both manuscripts append the poem to copies of Piers Plowman. See The Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 8. 41 Barr, Piers Plowman Tradition, p. 9.

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In their place the printed edition interpolates five spurious lines: The communion of sayntes, for soth I to the sayn; And for our great sinnes forgivenes for to getten, And only by Christ clenlich to be clensed; Our bodies again to risen, right as we been here, And the lijf everlasting leve ich to habben. Amen.

Batman shows no such editorial tendencies, preferring rather to reproduce the text faithfully, even though he very likely had access to the printed edition with its revised text. Batman’s fidelity to the original and his tolerance of Catholic doctrine is apparent from his treatment of other medieval texts, including Piers Plowman. This attitude is well characterised by his comments at the beginning of one of his copies of Piers Plowman, Digby 171, where he commends the text to careful and sensitive readers, opposing those who would condemn such works as being simply ‘papisticall’: This Booke is clepped: Sayewell, / Doowell.Doo Better & Doo Best / Souche a booke, az diserveth the Reeding. Bookes of Antiquiti are welbe stowed one those whose Sober staied mindes can abyde the redyng / but commonly Frantik braines suche az are more readye to be prattlers than / parformers / seing this book to be olde / Rather take it for papisticall / then else. & so many bookes com to confusion / S.B. Minister.

Skeat characterised the scribe of Trinity R.3.15 as a ‘scrupulous and painstaking antiquary’ and this is in many ways a fitting testimony to Batman’s contributions to this and other manuscripts. But it does not fully do justice to Batman’s collecting and copying activities, which were concerned with making accurate copies of medieval texts available to a sixteenth-century audience. For Batman these works were not merely antiquarian curiosities, but rather texts that had spiritual value for contemporary readers who were willing to make the necessary effort to sift the wheat from the chaff. Studies of Batman’s annotation of other medieval works owned by him, especially copies of devotional texts, have stressed his willingness to engage with such works despite their clear support for Catholic doctrine. A. S. G. Edwards’s discussion of Batman’s marginalia in his copy of the Book of Privy Counselling, CUL MS Ii. 6. 31, and his transcription of this same text into his commonplace book, Houghton Library, MS Eng. f. 1015, stresses Batman’s ‘remarkably unpolemical’ attitude towards Catholic doctrine.42 Kate McLoughlin has noted Batman’s ‘positive assimilation’ of the texts found in another compilation of Middle English devotional texts annotated in his hand, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498. Batman’s willingness 42 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Editing and Ideology: Stephen Batman and the Book of Privy Counselling’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. G. A. Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 267–78.

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to approach this manuscript, containing texts such as Ancrene Riwle and the Middle English translation of Robert Gretham’s Anglo-Norman Miroir, on its own terms, rather than through the lens of post-reformation ideologies, enabled him to ‘educe and utilize its wisdom’.43 Batman’s access to a manuscript copy of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and his interest in the poem can be usefully contrasted with the only surviving fifteenth-century manuscript witness to the poem: a single leaf now bound up with poems by Chaucer, Wyatt and Surrey in BL MS Harley 78, an anthology formerly owned by John Stow.44 The single leaf preserves lines 172–207 and was copied in the third quarter of the fifteenth century by a prolific scribe responsible for numerous copies of the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, Hoccleve and others, known to scholars as the Hammond scribe, just one of the many scribes about whom Linne Mooney has written.45 The Hammond scribe had access to a number of manuscripts owned by John Shirley, including some no longer extant, and several manuscripts in his hand subsequently formed part of Stow’s collection.46 It is not clear whether this single leaf of Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed is the sole survivor of a once-complete copy or an extract from the poem. A. I. Doyle speculated that the scribe or his director might have had a particular interest in this passage for its description of the London house of the Blackfriars, likely based on the poet’s first-hand knowledge. Given Stow’s historical interests in London and its buildings, it is easy to imagine that he had a similar antiquarian interest in these lines. Stow’s enthusiasm for medieval literary writers, especially Chaucer and Lydgate, is well documented, but there is surprisingly little evidence that he was sympathetic to alliterative verse.47 Given the numerous literary manuscripts that can be linked with Stow, it is striking that only two copies of Piers Plowman bear traces of his spidery hand. These notes, found in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 and Bodl., MS Rawl. poet. 38, tend, however, to confirm his lack of interest in the poem. In both manuscripts, Stow’s only addition 43 McLoughlin, ‘Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498 and Stephen Batman’s Reading Practices’, p. 533. 44 See Doyle, ‘An Unrecognized Piece of Piers the Ploughman’s Creed’; see further Doyle’s discussion of manuscripts of alliterative poetry: ‘The Manuscripts’, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. D. Lawton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 88–100. 45 For the most up-to-date list of manuscripts attributed to this scribe see L. Mooney, ‘A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Essays in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, R. Hanna, and V. Gillespie (London, 2000), pp. 113–23. 46 For the Hammond scribe’s access to manuscripts copied by Shirley and other Shirleyderived compilations, and connections between manuscripts owned by Shirley and John Stow, see M. Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 178–85. 47 See A. S. G. Edwards, ‘John Stow and Middle English Literature’, in John Stow (1525– 1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (London, 2004), pp. 109–18 (p. 111).

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is the word ‘Stratford’, which appears alongside Langland’s description of the practice of delivering bread into London by cart from Stratford. Similarly, Stow’s ownership of this single leaf of Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed appears to owe more to his interests in the history of London and its buildings, than an engagement with the text itself. By contrast, Batman’s ownership of two manuscripts of Piers Plowman and one printed copy of the work suggest his greater sympathies with alliterative verse, while his decision to incorporate Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed within an anthology of Chaucerian works implies his sense of the centrality of such verse to the Middle English literary canon. Writing of Chaucer’s reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, James Simpson has noted the shifting between two contradictory impulses. Literary writers responding to the ‘remembered presence’ of the author were prompted to compose new works, while philologists, conscious of the poet’s ‘buried absence’, embarked on a process of textual recovery and monumentalisation.48 Early editors such as Caxton and Thynne sought to reconstruct the authorial text from its corrupt remains, to free it from spurious accretions and to package the author, his life and works, as a national literary monument. Batman’s collation of his copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and his additions and corrections clearly situate his response within the ‘buried absence’ tradition. Yet the addition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed suggests a departure from the impulse to present a single authorial canon, stripped of apocryphal additions. Furthermore, Batman shows no desire to promote the figure of the author: at no point do his additions associate these texts with Chaucer. Batman’s concern with manuscripts rather than printed texts further distances his activities from the ‘buried absence’ model. The personalised idiosyncrasy of individual manuscripts stands them in opposition to the standardised format of the printed edition. Where printed books represented a technological break with the medieval past, manuscripts stood for continuity, providing a physical link with that past and bridging the divide between remembered presence and buried absence. By reconstructing the sixteenth-century afterlives of Chaucer manuscripts we are able to trace the networks of patronage and friendship across which these volumes were exchanged and the various ways in which they functioned, in Stephanie Trigg’s phrase, as ‘tokens of social affinity and love’.49

48 J. Simpson, ‘Chaucer’s presence and absence, 1400–1550’, in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. P. Boitani and J. Mann (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 251–69. 49 S. Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis, 2002), p. 142.

AFTERWORD: A PERSONAL TRIBUTE †DEREK PEARSALL

I

first met Linne Mooney in 1974 at the University of Toronto, where I had been invited to give a lecture and where she was newly embarked on a Ph.D. She was very young. Later she took up a post at the University of Maine in Orono, and when I left York to go to Harvard in 1985 I began to see more of her when she came down to attend our weekly medieval seminar, and on other occasions. At this time she was preparing an edition of the Kalendarium of John Somer, which was published in 1998 in the Chaucer Library Series. She was also working on some of the most complex and difficult of fifteenth-century literary manuscripts, most of them miscellanies, almost as if she were choosing them because they were difficult and therefore more interesting. She gave a talk at the Harvard seminar on one occasion about the lyrics in the famous miscellany in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, beginning to make proper sense of them for the first time. She was also doing ongoing and never-ending work on the many manuscripts of Lydgate’s Verses on the Kings of England, trying to establish some sort of order and coherence to their bewildering variety. Lydgate’s Verses is not a work of great literary interest, to say the least, but Linne was not much worried by this, in fact she seemed to revel in it. I had to learn that my own interest in manuscripts, chiefly as valuable repositories of important literary texts, was not everyone’s. I went to a talk a long time ago by one of Linne’s eminent predecessors as a codicologist and palaeographer, devoted to a description of a particular MS. I asked her afterwards, in my old-fashioned way, what was the text in the MS? ‘I don’t know’, she said, ‘I don’t do that sort of thing’. In 1999 I organised a conference at Harvard called ‘New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies’, and one of the speakers I invited, keen to give her a larger hearing, was Linne. Her talk was about her work in identifying the hands of fifteenth-century vernacular scribes which appear

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in more than one manuscript. Ian Doyle, her great mentor and model, who was at the conference, had long ago recognised that this was the essential key to a fuller understanding of late medieval scribal culture and manuscript production. Her talk was like a manifesto, and she has spent much of the last twenty years fulfilling Ian’s predictions. He himself, of course, with Malcolm Parkes, had provided the first inspiration for what was to be Linne’s work in the famous article of 1978 on early manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis and the Canterbury Tales, where several examples were given of multiple manuscripts in the same hand, most notably the famous Scribe D. Linne’s talk at the 1999 conference was not greeted with universal warmth. There was no proof, muttered the sceptics: it is all subjective speculation. I talked to Linne about the problem, and she explained to me very simply that we all have the same basic intuitive capacity for recognising the same hand in different contexts. She gave me the example of addresses on the envelopes of letters from relatives and friends. It doesn’t happen so often these days, but when it does you instantly recognise who they are from without knowing how you know. Linne, essentially, knows how to show how. She has carried forward and developed her practice, working with hands much more difficult to recognise as the same because they are all so much the same, being professional and highly developed scripts. Linne has demonstrated how it is possible to show, especially through comparison between sophisticated photographic detail of individual key letters, how they are most likely to be the same. Anyone who has been to one of Linne’s lectures on the subject will know how compelling these arguments are, if they are followed with care and a desire to understand. The great triumph of her method was the publication in Speculum in 2006 of her essay on Adam Pinkhurst, whom she identified as the London scribe of both the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, by far the most important and authoritative of the earliest manuscripts of the poem. Chaucer even wrote a laughingly abusive little poem ‘To Adam his own Scriveyn’, which suggests a joke between friends. There were nay-sayers even at this quietly remarkable demonstration of her method: sceptics were said to be patrolling the corridors, directing people elsewhere, when the lecture that preceded the essay was being given at the Chaucer conference at Glasgow in 2004. But there was, most unusually, an outbreak of spontaneous applause from the large audience. Linne became famous, but she remained herself, and the talk itself bore no marks of triumphalism. Since then the search for the same hands in different manuscripts has gone on undiminished. Linne published with Estelle Stubbs a book called Scribes and the City in 2013 – there was a popular TV programme at the time, as it happened, called ‘Sex and the City’, but of course no connection. The book identified six scribes by name, several of them Guildhall clerks,

AFTERWORD

all of them responsible for several manuscripts, including the famous Scribe D, now materialised in person as John Marchaunt, Clerk of the City of London. Linne’s identifications, backed up by her careful programme of documentation and illustration, are widely trusted. The latest scribe or rather scribes to come to the fore are the ‘hooked-g scribes’, on whom she works in collaboration with Dan Mosser. There was only one originally, but, with the increasing sophistication of fineness of discrimination, there are now four, I think, the last of whom does not actually use a hooked-g. Don’t ask me. Linne is not only an excellent codicologist and palaeographer: she is also an excellent teacher of those subjects, as many here will testify. There is a booklet that she gives to her students which has a wealth of photographs of pages from manuscripts, with instructions to her students as to what to do with them. If I had had access to such a booklet when I was young I might have become a manuscript expert myself. But truly, it’s a gift. Linne was very successful in securing scholarships and fellowships to enable her to travel and work in English libraries, but it was hard work to get the necessary funding, and a great relief when she was appointed at York in 2004 and could be based where she most needed to be. During these years, Linne continued with her work on scribes and on a wide range of manuscript questions and problems, whilst also visiting libraries here and in the US and elsewhere to collect material for the ongoing Digital Index of Middle English Verse, digital presentation having proved, as was indeed obvious, the best form for an Index that needs constant updating. For her, it is also a way of remaining in close contact with the hundreds of manuscripts that she needs for her research. Meanwhile, I myself have incurred a large debt to Linne. For many years I had been working on a Descriptive Catalogue of the manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, originally in collaboration with other scholars, but more recently alone. It was not, to be honest, my forte, and I was on the point of giving up the project when Linne, by now in York, volunteered to help with the remainder. In fact, she more or less took over, and not only revised what I had done but also provided expert descriptions of all the others ensuring that scribes, handwriting, collation and all aspects of the material manuscripts received proper attention. Linne, like any great codicologist, has a passion for taking manuscripts apart, metaphorically, that is, though if she were a librarian I think many of the manuscripts in her care would find themselves, more than metaphorically, periodically dismembered. She has an extraordinary ability to work out the structure and collation of even the most fiendishly complex manuscripts, even paper manuscripts, which can be a real headache. Linne remains an unostentatious person, not exactly quiet, but certainly unassuming. She is a fine scholar, an inspiring teacher, and a good friend.

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She will throw herself into retirement with her usual energy, now with two dogs and a large house and a large garden as well as a husband to look after. She will continue her research wherever it leads to a better understanding of the material evidence of book culture and manuscript production. We wish her well.

LINNE R. MOONEY: LIST OF PUBLICATIONS DARYL GREEN

‘Additions and Emendations to The Index of Middle English Verse and its Supplement’, Anglia 99 (1981), 394–8. ‘A Medieval Latin Mnemonic for Finding the Date of Easter’, Notes and Queries 30 (1983), 391–2. ‘A Middle English Verse Compendium of Astrological Medicine’, Medical History 28 (1984), 406–19. ‘Lydgate’s “Kings of England” and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’, Viator 20 (1989), 255–89. L. R. Mooney and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Is the “Equatorie of the Planetis” a Chaucer Holograph?’, The Chaucer Review 26.1 (1991), 30–41. ‘A Middle English Text on the Seven Liberal Arts’, Speculum 68 (1993), 1027–52. ‘An English Record of the 1358 Founding of a University in Dublin’, Irish Historical Studies 111 (1993), 225–7. ‘The Cock and the Clock: Telling Time in Chaucer’s Day’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993), 91–109. L. R. Mooney and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘A New Version of a Skelton Lyric’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1994), 507–11. ‘Diet and Bloodletting: A Monthly Regimen’, in Practical and Popular Science of Medieval England, ed. L. M. Matheson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 245–62. The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist XI: Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1995). ‘More Manuscripts Written by a Chaucer Scribe’, The Chaucer Review 30.4 (1996), 82–7.

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‘Almanacks from Script to Print’, in Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, ed. J. Scattergood and J. Boffey (Dublin, 1997), pp. 11–25. ‘The Chronicle of John Somer, OFM’, ed. J. Catto and L. R. Mooney, in Chronology, Conquest and Conflict in Mediaeval England, Camden Miscellany 34 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 197–285. ‘“A Woman’s Reply to her Lover” and Four Other New Courtly Love Lyrics in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.19’, Medium Aevum 67 (1998), 235–56. ‘Editing Astrological and Prognostic Texts’, in A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. V. P. McCarren and D. Moffat (Ann Arbor MI, 1998), pp. 123–32. The Kalendarium of John Somer, ed. L. R. Mooney (Athens GA, 1998). ‘Chaucer and Interest in Astronomy at the Court of Richard II’, in Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. G. Lester (Sheffield, 1999), pp. 139–60. ‘Middle English Verse in London, Lincoln’s Inn, MS Hale 90’, Journal of the Early Book Society 2 (1999), 182–3. ‘A Late Fifteenth-century Woman’s Revision of Chaucer’s “Against Women Unconstant” and other Poems by the Same Hand’, The Chaucer Review 34 (2000), 344–9. ‘A New Manuscript by the Hammond Scribe Discovered by Jeremy Griffiths’, in The English Medieval Book: Essays in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, R. Hanna, and V. Gillespie (London, 2000), pp. 113–23. ‘Manuscript Fragments of Middle English Verse’, in Interpreting and Collecting Fragments of Medieval Books, ed. L. L. Brownrigg and P. Smith (Los Altos Hills CA, 2000), pp. 137–50. ‘Professional Scribes?: Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript’, in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. D. Pearsall (York, 2000), pp. 131–41. ‘Verses Upon Death and Other Wall Paintings Surviving in the Guild Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon’, Journal of the Early Book Society 3 (2000), 182–90. L. R. Mooney, A. C. Barbrook, B. Bordalejo, C. J. Howe, P. Robinson, and A. Spencer, ‘Manuscript Evolution’, Trends in Genetics 17.3 (2001), 147–52; reprint: Endeavor 25.3 (2001), 201–6. ‘Scribes and Booklets of Trinity College, Cambridge, MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21’, in Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. Minnis (York, 2001), pp. 241–66. L. R. Mooney, A. C. Barbrook, C. J. Howe, and A. Spencer, ‘Stemmatic Analysis of Lydgate’s “Kings of England”: A Test Case for the Application of Software Developed for Evolutionary Biology to Manuscript Stemmatics’, Revue d’histoire des textes 31 (2001), 275–97.

LINNE R. MOONEY: LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘Two Fragments of Lydgate’s Troy Book in the Bodleian Library’, Journal of the Early Book Society 4 (2001), 259–66. ‘A Fragment of the Cursor Mundi in the Sutherland Collection on Deposit in the National Library of Scotland’, Journal of the Early Book Society 6 (2003), 143–7. L. R. Mooney, A. C. Barbrook, B. Bordalejo, C. J. Howe, P. Robinson, A. Spencer, L. Wang, and T. Warnow, ‘Analyzing the Order of Items in Manuscripts of “The Canterbury Tales”’, Computers and the Humanities 37.1 (2003), 97–109. L. R. Mooney and L. M. Matheson, ‘The Beryn Scribe and his Texts: Evidence for Multiple-Copy Production of Manuscripts in FifteenthCentury England’, The Library, 7th s. 4.4 (2003), 347–70. ‘John Shirley’s Heirs: The Scribes of Manuscript Literary Miscellanies Produced in London in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), 182–98. L. R. Mooney and S. Horobin, ‘A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe and its Implications for London Standard English’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004), 65–112. L. R. Mooney, A. C. Barbrook, B. Bordalejo, C. J. Howe, P. Robinson, and A. Spencer, ‘The Effects of Weighting Kinds of Variants’, in Studies in Stemmatology II: Kinds of Variants, ed. P. van Reenen, A. den Hollander, and M. van Mulken (Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 225–37. L. R. Mooney and D. Mosser, ‘The Hooked-G Scribe and Takamiya Manuscripts’, in The Medieval Book and A Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, ed. T. Matsuda, R. Linenthal, and J. Scahill (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 179–96. R. F. Green and L. R. Mooney, ed., Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 2004). A. G. Little, revised by L. R. Mooney, ‘Kyngesbury [Kyngusbury], Thomas (fl. 1351–1396), Franciscan friar’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) . ‘Manuscript Evidence for the Use of Utilitarian Writings in Late Medieval England’, in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A. G. Rigg, ed. R. F. Green and L. R. Mooney (Toronto, 2004), pp. 184–202. ‘A New Scribe of Chaucer and Gower’, Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), 131–40. L. R. Mooney, A. C. Barbrook, C. J. Howe, and P. Robinson, ‘Parallels between Stemmatology and Phylogenetics’, in Studies in Stemmatology II: Kinds of Variants, ed. P. van Reenen, A. den Hollander, and M. van Mulken (Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 3–11. ‘Somer, John (d. in or after 1409), Franciscan friar and astronomer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) .

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L. R. Mooney and M.-J. Arn, ed., The Kingis Quair and other Prison Poems (Ann Arbor MI, 2005). ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum 81 (2006), 97–138. ‘The Scribe’, in Sex, Aging and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R.14.52, Its Language, Scribe, and Texts, ed. M. T. Tavormina (Phoenix AZ, 2006), pp. 55–63. ‘The Seven Liberal Arts’, in Sex, Aging and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R.14.52, Its Language, Scribe, and Texts, ed. M. T. Tavormina (Phoenix AZ, 2006), pp. 701–36. L. R. Mooney and M. Green, ‘The Sickness of Women’, in Sex, Aging and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R.14.52, Its Language, Scribe, and Texts, ed. M. T. Tavormina (Phoenix AZ, 2006), pp. 455–568. ‘Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007), 293–340. Design and Distribution of Later Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. M. Connolly and L. R. Mooney (York, 2008). ‘Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medieval London’, in Design and Distribution of Later Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. M. Connolly and L. R. Mooney (York, 2008), pp. 183–204. L. R. Mooney and D. W. Mosser, ‘The Belvoir Castle (Duke of Rutland) Manuscript of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009), 161–72. Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne, with C. Collette, M. Kowaleski, L. R. Mooney, A. Putter, and D. Trotter (York, 2009). L. R. Mooney, D. W. Mosser, D. Radcliffe, and E. Solopova, The DIMEV: An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse (2010) . ‘Introduction’ to Ranulph Higden, Translated by John Trevisa, Polychronicon, facsimile edition of Tokyo, Senshu University Library, MS 1, ed. T. Matsushita (Tokyo, 2010), pp. v–viii. ‘A Holograph Copy of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011), 263–96. S. Horobin, L. R. Mooney, E. Stubbs, and M. Pidd, Late Medieval English Scribes (2011) . L. R. Mooney and E. Stubbs, ‘A Record Identifying Thomas Hoccleve’s Father’, Journal of the Early Book Society 14 (2011), 233–7. ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and Their Scribes’, in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. A. Gillespie and D. L. Wakelin (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 192–211. L. R. Mooney and D. W. Mosser, ‘Another Manuscript by the Scribe “Cornhill”’, Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012), 277–87.

LINNE R. MOONEY: LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘Pinkhurst, Adam (fl. 1385–1410), scribe to Geoffrey Chaucer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (on-line update, 2012) . L. R. Mooney and E. Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375–1425 (York, 2013). S. Horobin and L. R. Mooney, ed., Middle English Texts in Transition: A Festschrift Dedicated to Toshiyuki Takamiya on his 70th Birthday (York, 2014). L. R. Mooney and D. W. Mosser, ‘More Manuscripts by the “Beryn” Scribe and his Cohort’, The Chaucer Review 49.1 (2014), 39–76. L. R. Mooney and D. W. Mosser, ‘The Case of the Hooked-g Scribe(s) and the Production of Middle English Literature c. 1460–c. 1490’, The Chaucer Review 51.2 (2016), 131–50. ‘A Scribe of Lydgate’s Troy Book and London Book Production in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century’, in Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna, ed. S. Horobin and A. Nafde (Turnhout, 2017), pp. 29–42. ‘Thomas Hoccleve in Another Confessio Amantis Manuscript’, Journal of the Early Book Society 22 (2019), 225–38. L. R. Mooney and D. Pearsall, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, 2021). REVIEWS Review of Jacqueline de Weever, Chaucer Name Dictionary: A Guide to Astrological, Biblical, Historical Literary, and Mythological Names in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Speculum 65 (1990), 968–9. Review of John B. Friedman, ed., John de Foxton’s “Liber Cosmographiae” (1407): An Edition and Codicological Study, Speculum 67 (1992), 165–7. Review of Kari Anne Rand Schmidt, The Authorship of the “Equatorie of the Planetis”, Speculum 71 (1996), 197–8. Review of Juhani Norri, Names of Body Parts in English, 1400–1550, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Humaniora 291, Medium Ævum 68 (1999), 331–3. Review of Lister M. Matheson, ed., Death and Dissent: Two FifteenthCentury Chronicles. “The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis”, Translated by John Shirley and “Warkworth’s Chronicle”, the Chronicle Attributed to John Warkworth, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Speculum 76 (2001), 1076–7. Review of Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England, Speculum 76 (2001), 147–9.

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Review of Susanna Fein, Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, Speculum 77 (2002), 910–12. Review of Kathleen L. Scott, Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders, c. 1395–1499, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003), 405–7. Review of David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004), 191–4. Review of Ralph Hanna, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Medieval Manuscripts of St. John’s College, Oxford, Speculum 79 (2004), 498–500. Review of P. R. Robinson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 888–1600 in London Libraries, 1: The Text; 2: The Plates, Speculum 81 (2006), 1247–9. ‘“Insular Background”, review of Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500’, The Times Literary Supplement 5387 (2006), 31. Review of Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, ed., Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales II, Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (2006), 244–6. Review of Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557, Journal of the Early Book Society 11 (2008), 239–42. Review of Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies, Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009), 271–3. ‘“Copied Out”, review of M. B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes’, The Times Literary Supplement 5533 (2009), 30. ‘“Lines of Descent”, review of Kathleen L. Scott, Tradition and Innovation in Later Medieval English Manuscripts’, The Times Literary Supplement 5492 (2009), 28. Review of The Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel, De Gulden Passer 90 (2012), 219–20. Review of Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, ed., Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, Journal of the Early Book Society 18 (2015), 307–11. Review of Daniel Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510, The Review of English Studies 66, issue 276 (2015), 767–9. Review of Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic, ed., Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey, Journal of the Early Book Society 22 (2019), 289–94.

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS Page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations and their captions. Aberdeen Aberdeen University Library 21  212, n.25 Aberystwyth National Library of Wales 21972 D (Merthyr Fragment) 298 Peniarth 392 D (‘Hengwrt’)  5, 14, 15, 214, 297, 321, 330 Alnwick Alnwick Castle 455  12, 297 Austin, TX University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center 46 298 143 (‘Cardigan’)  8 n.31, 286, 296, 323 Aylesford Earl of Aylesford (Warwick CRO Z 155)  226, 232 Berkeley, CA Bancroft Library UCB 150 (‘Heller Hours’)  153 n.18 Beverley East Riding Record Office DDX1904/1  228 n.23 Bristol Public Library 9  156, 176 Brussels Archives de l’État en Belgique mss. divers 1972, item 88  117 Bibliothèque royale 2544–5  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 198 Cambridge, MA

Harvard University, Houghton Library Eng. f. 1015  318, 326 Widener 2  152, 158, 161, 177 Cambridge Corpus Christi College 61 319 198  143 n.60, n.61, 145 268  185 n. 4, 185 n.9, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 198 296  125, 126, 128–33, 137, 144 405  46, 60 n.50, 62 Fitzwilliam Museum 56  153, 161, 176 McClean 181  297 Gonville and Caius College 249/277 256 Magdalene College F.4.17  185 n.8, 199 F.4.34  161 n.32 Pepys 2006  286, 287, 289, 293–4, 296, 298, 318–19 Pepys 2498  318, 326 Pembroke College 307  200 n.1, 218, 219 St John’s College C.13  156, 176 G.35  185 n.5, 194, 195, 198 Trinity College B.2.7 314–15 B.15.17 327–8 B.15.18  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 196, 199 B.15.33 318 O.3.11  9, 142 n.56, 147 n.4 O.7.47  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 193 n.43, 194, 199

340

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Trinity College (continued) R.3.2  5, 11, 13, 14, 125 n.3, 127 n.10, 203 n.10, 210 n.22 R.3.3 298 R.3.14 324 R.3.15  298, 312–28 R.3.19  8, 14, 92, 146–79, 286, 289, 291, 292, 298, 329 R.3.21  8, 14, 146–79, 291–2 R.14.52  147 n.4, 172 University Library Additional 2823  73 n.20 Additional 6578  187 Additional 6686  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 187, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Dd.4.24 297 Dd.5.55  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 188, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Ee.2.15  286, 287, 288, 298 Ee.4.30  185 n. 4, 185 n.9, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 196 n.54, 198 Ff.1.33 13 Ff.5.40  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 188, 193 n.43, 198 Gg.1.7  73 n.20 Gg.1.14  73 n.20 Gg.4.27  286, 295–6, 297 Hh.1.12  186 n.11 Ii.3.26  287, 297 Ii.6.31  318, 326 Kk.1.3 298 Mm.2.5 297 Mm.4.42  82, 92, 94 Canterbury Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, Dean and Chapter Archive Chartae antiquae CCA-DCcChAnt/K/4 96 Chatsworth Devonshire Collection Chatsworth Scale  185 n.4, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 197, 198 Devonshire Fragment  298 Chicago University of Chicago Library 564 (olim McCormick)  297

Dijon Archives de la Cote d’Or 12 B 11898  118 Dublin Trinity College 244  126, 128–30, 133–4, 137, 144 516  20, 241–58 Durham University Library Cosin V.ii.13  88, 114 n.74 Cosin V.iii.8  186 n.11 Cosin V.iii.9  11 Cosin V.iii.19  256 Ushaw College 5 190 Düsseldorf Hauptstaatsarchiv Urkunde Kurköln 1927  94 Edinburgh National Library of Scotland 3178 177 6126  185 n.5, 194 n.46, 195, 199 Advocates’ 19.2.1 (‘Auchinleck’) 8 Florence Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Plutei. 38.20  117 Geneva Fondation Martin Bodmer Cod. Bodmer 48  297 Cod. Bodmer 178  204 n.16, 210 n.22 Glasgow Glasgow University Library Hunter 7  218 Hunter 59  210 n.22, n.23 Hunter 197  12, 297 Hunter 409  320 Hertford Hertfordshire Archives Ref 15857A  225, 230, 234, 236, 237 Holkham Holkham Hall 667 297 Kew The National Archives C 66/580  260 n.5 C 81/1365/1  108, 110 C 81/1365/2  108 C 81/1365/3  108 C 81/1365/4  108

341

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

C 81/1365/5  108 C 81/1365/6  108 C 81/1365/8  108 C 81/1365/9  108 C 81/1365/10  111, 112 C 81/1365/11  108 C 81/1365/15  108 C 81/1365/16  108 C 81/1365/17  108 C 81/1365/18  88, 89, 91 C 81/1365/19  111 C 81/1365/20  108 C 81/1365/21  111 C 81/1365/22  111 C 81/1365/23  111 C 81/1365/25  108 C 81/1365/26  111 C 81/1365/27  108 C 81/1365/28  103, 104 C 81/1365/29  108 C 81/1365/30  108 C 81/1365/31  103 C 81/1365/32  103 C 81/1365/33  111 C 81/1365/34  108 C 81/1365/35  111 C 81/1365/36  108 C 81/1365/37  111 C 81/1366/1  108 C 81/1366/5  111 C 81/1366/8  111 C/81/1366/9 88, 90, 91 C 81/1366/10  111 C 81/1366/12  111 C 81/1366/13  108 C 81/1367/1  101, 102 C 81/1367/17  87, 93 C 81/1367/18  93 C 81/1367/20  93 C 81/1367/33  103, 105, 106 C 81/1368/20  93 C 81/1370/10  98 C 81/1370/28  98 C 81/1370/31  98 C 81/1370/33  108, 109 C 81/1370/34  101 C 81/1370/42  98, 99 C 81/1370/44  98 C 81/1370/51  106 C 81/1370/57  98 C 81/1370/58  106

C 81/1370/64  108 C 81/1370/70  108 C 81/1371/3  98 C 81/1371/5  93 C 81/1371/11  96 C 81/1371/16  96, 97 C 81/1371/20  108 C 81/1371/21  98 C 81/1371/22  108 C 81/1371/35  106, 107 C 81/1371/44  96 C 81/1371/51  101 C 81/1372/1  96 C 81/1375/11  95, 96 C 81/1375/12  101 C 81/1375/15  96 C 81/1375/17  100, 101 C 81/1375/18  101 C 81/1376  96 C 81/1537/4  94 C 143/317/18  70 n.9 C 146/9532  137 n.33 E 28/33/5  111 E 101/188/10/1  108 E 101/188/10/2  103 n.50 PROB 11/4/334  94 n.35, 101 n.45, n.46 SC 1/43/159  111 SC 1/43/160  108 SC 1/44/13  93 SC 8/20/997  15 n.59 Leconfield Petworth 7 297 Lichfield Lichfield Cathedral Library 29 297 Lincoln Lincoln Cathedral Library 91 (‘Lincoln Thornton’)  72 n.16 110 297 Lincolnshire Record Office Misc Don 1774/1–11  228 n.23 Liverpool University Library F.4.9 76–7 F.4.10  185 n.5, n.9, 193 n.43, 194, 199 London British Library Additional 5140  94, 286, 296

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INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

London, British Library (continued) Additional 10340  286, 298 Additional 11748  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 188–9, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Additional 22283 (‘Simeon’)  185–6, 194, 195, 199, 212, 213 Additional 22558  73 n.20 Additional 24194  212, n.25, 248 Additional 24203  77 Additional 25718  298 Additional 29901  147 n.4 Additional 33995  71–3, 75, 77, 78 Additional 34360  147 n.4, 168, 172 Additional 35286  296 Additional 36985  260, 268–71, 273 n.54, 275, 276, 281 Additional 59495 (‘Trentham’)  202 fn.8, 210 n.22, 211 Arundel 38  214 Arundel 59  147 n.4 Arundel 140  298 Cotton Claudius A.viii  147 n.4 Cotton Cleopatra A.vii  264 n.18 Cotton Cleopatra C.iii  271–6 Cotton Cleopatra C.iv  256 Cotton Galba B.i  108 Cotton Galba E.ix  72 n.16, 80 n.35 Cotton Julius D.viii  225, 226, 232 n.31, 233 Cotton Julius E.iv  225, 232, 233 Cotton Tiberius A.iv  210 n.23 Cotton Tiberius E.vii  78 Egerton 913  11 Egerton 1991  203 n.10, 216, 217, 218 Egerton 2726  297, 322–3 Egerton 2863  297 Egerton 2864  286, 297 Harley 27  13 Harley 78  147 n.4, 225, 233 n.37, 327–8 Harley 330  185 n.7, 191, 194, 195, 198 Harley 372  147 n.4, 223 Harley 559  255

Harley 913  45–6, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58–9, 60 Harley 1022  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 188–9, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Harley 1035  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 191, 193 n.44, 194, 195, 198 Harley 1239  298 Harley 1704  287, 288, 298 Harley 1706  170, 171, 174 Harley 1758  289, 297 Harley 2251  147 n.4, 168, 172, 173, 286, 287, 289, 291–3, 298 Harley 2253  12–13, 47 Harley 2382  286, 288, 298 Harley 2387  185 n.4, 191, 194, 195, 196, 198 Harley 2397  185 n.8, 185 n.9, 190, 196, 198 Harley 2946  214, 216 Harley 3724  60 n.50 Harley 3869  204 n.16, 210 n.22 Harley 4011  257 Harley 4205  225, 232, 233 Harley 4605  38–9, 44 Harley 4999  147 n.4 Harley 5908  298 Harley 6291  210 n.23 Harley 6573  185 n.6, 193 n.44, 194, 195, 198 Harley 6576  196 Harley 6579   185, n.6, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198 Harley 7332  256 Harley 7333  286, 294, 297 Harley 7334  212, n.25, 216, 217, 221, 297 Harley 7335  297 Lansdowne 285  12 Lansdowne 362  185 n.5, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Lansdowne 418  59 Lansdowne 762  255 Lansdowne 851  297 Royal 15 E.vi  118, 121 Royal 16 F.vii  114 n.74 Royal 17 C.viii  73 n.20, 76, 81 Royal 17 D.xv  147 n.4, 173, 297 Royal 17 D.xviii  11 Royal 18 A.xiii  190 n.27 Royal 18 B.xvii  324

343

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Royal 18 C.ii  297 Sloane 1009  298 Sloane 1685  297 Sloane 1686  297 Sloane 1986  225 Sloane 2578  256 Stowe 951  76 College of Arms Arundel 58  225, 232, 233, 239 Warwick Roll (‘Latin Rous Roll’)  28 n.10 Guildhall Library 5370  15 n.59 Inner Temple Library Petyt 524  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 189–90, 193 n.43, 194, 197, 199 Lambeth Palace Library 186 152, 157, 160, 177 265  161 n.35 472  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 189–90, 193 n.43, 194, 197, 198 557  46, 60, 62–3 737 317 Royal College of Physicians 388  147 n.4, 297 University of London, Senate House Sterling V.88  212, n.25 Victoria & Albert Museum, National Art Library Reid 42  37–9, 41 Malibu, CA Getty Museum 5 153 Manchester Chetham’s Library Mun. A.4.104 (olim Chetham 6709)  286, 287, 289, 298 John Rylands Library English 113  297, 322–3 English 163  285–6, 298 Naples Royal Library XIII.B.29  288, 298 New Haven, CT Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Osborn a14  225, 232, 235 n.41 Osborn fa1  210 n.22 Osborn fa46  186 n.11

Takamiya 3 (olim Luttrell Wynne)  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 193 n.43, 196, 199 Takamiya 22  298 Takamiya 24 (olim ‘Devonshire’)  286, 297, 322–3 Takamiya 32 (olim ‘Delamere’)  286, 288, 297 Takamiya 35  225 n.11, 225, 232, 233, 235 n.41, 237 Takamiya 40  177 Takamiya 52  226, 232, 233, 235 n.41, 237 New York Columbia University Library Plimpton 253  298 Plimpton 257  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 186, 194, 195, 199 Plimpton 271  186 n.15 Morgan Library & Museum Glazier 9 (‘Berkeley Hours’)  39–41, 44 M.46  25, 29–41, 44 M.47 177 M.105  42, 43–4 M.125  190, 218 M.249 297 M.314  25–9, 34, 36, 43–4 M.690 200–21 M.775 190 M.817  15, 212, n.25 M.1000 42 M.1122.4 178 New York Public Library Spencer 193  225, 232, 233, 235 n.41, 237 Northallerton North Yorkshire CRO ZDV V 55  226–8, 230, 237 Nottingham Nottingham University Library WLC/LM/8  204 n.16, 210 n.22 Oxford All Souls College 25  185 n.4, 191, 194, 195, 198 98  210 n.22, n.23 Bodleian Library Additional E. 7  224, 225, 229, 232, 234 n.38, 235 n.41, 239

344

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Oxford, Bodleian Library (continued) Arch. Selden B. 8  256 Arch. Selden B. 14  297 Ashmole 764  114 n.74 Ashmole 789  88 Ashmole Rolls 21  225, 229, 230, 233–4, 235, 237 Barlow 20  296 Bodley 100  185 n.4, 191, 192 n.34, 193 n.43, 194, 197, 198 Bodley 131  225, 226, 232 n.31, 232 n.35 Bodley 283  160, 161, 162, 176 Bodley 294  200 n.1, 203 n.10, 210 n.22, 221 Bodley 414  296 Bodley 592  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 189–90, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 197, 198 Bodley 596 (I)  171 n.82 Bodley 686  286, 287, 294 n.35, 296 Bodley 693  203 Bodley 902  203 n.10 Digby 171  325–6 Digby 186  225, 226 Digby 196  256 Don. c.13  80 n.35 Douce 104  48–9, 51 Douce 322  149, 152, 154, 158, 167, 168, 170–2, 174, 178 Douce d. 4  298 Douce g. 2  225, 232, 235 n.41 Dugdale 45  88 e Musaeo 232  287 Eng. poet. a. 1 (‘Vernon’)  185–6, 194, 195, 199, 212, 213 Eng. poet. d. 5  75–6 Fairfax 3  5, 201–202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213, 218 Fairfax 10  246 n.19 Gen. Top. e. 8  272 Gen. Top. e. 13  272 n. 17 Gen. Top. e. 15  272 Gough London 10  178 Hatton 92  210 n.23, 211 n.23 Hatton donat. 1  297 Lat. misc. b. 2  265–7

Laud Laud Laud Laud

Misc. 557  153 Misc. 570  41 Misc. 600  297 Misc. 602  185 n.4, 187 n.17, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Laud Misc. 609  203 Laud Misc. 739  297 Lyell 28  73 n.20 Rawlinson A. 387b  190 Rawlinson A. 389  72 n.16 Rawlinson C. 86  225, 226, 232 n.31, 232 n.35, 257, 286, 287, 289, 290, 298 Rawlinson C. 285  185 n.6, 185 n.9, 188, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 199 Rawlinson D. 913  147 n.4 Rawlinson D. 1062  255 Rawlinson poet. 38  327–8 Rawlinson poet. 141  297 Rawlinson poet. 149  297 Rawlinson poet. 175  72 n.16, 80 n.35 Rawlinson poet. 223  297 Selden Supra 53  10 Tanner 464  272 Top. Glouc. d. 2  259–76, 277, 278, 279, 280 Christ Church 148  200 fn.1, 203, 214, 217, 218 152  286, 296 Corpus Christi College 67  203, 214, 216, 218 198  212, n.25, 296 Magdalen College 181  245 n.19 New College 314  88, 297 St John’s College 209 230 266 (‘Thorney Sammelband’)  149, 153, 159, 161, 162, 164, 175 Trinity College 49 298 73 178 D 29  257, 286, 288, 298 University College 28  185 n.5, 193 n.43, 194, 199 85 160

345

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Wadham College 13  210 n.22 Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 5070 30 Bibliothèque Nationale Baluze 11  88 Dupuy 760  88, 114, 115 fonds anglais 39  297 français 1584  208 fn.19, 210 français 1586  208 fn.19 français 4054  88, 92, 93, 114, 115, 116, 122, 123 français 5964  118 français 20327  118, 119 français 20978  118, 120 latin 8685  85 n.4, 88 latin 8838  113 Philadelphia The Rosenbach 1084/1 297 1084/2  285–6, 298 University of Pennsylvania Library Codex 218 (olim Stonor)  185 n.4, 185 n.9, 186 n.11, 187, 193 n.43, 194, 199 Preston Lancashire Record Office DDHK/11/3/1 224–5 Princeton, NJ Princeton University Library 57 232 100 (‘Helmingham’)  297 Taylor 5  203, 204 n.16, 210 n.22, 221 Taylor 11  77 San Marino, CA Huntington Library EL 26.A.17 (‘Stafford’)  201, 203, 204 n.16, 213, 214, 218 EL 26.C.9 (‘Ellesmere’)  5, 14, 15, 221, 297, 330 HM 112  185 n.5, 185 n.9, 194, 195, 198

HM 114  13, 15, 136 HM 140  286, 287, 289, 290–1, 298 HM 144  257, 286, 288, 298, 320 HM 266  185 n.4, 190, 193, 194 n.45, 195, 196, 197, 198 HM 932  114 n.74, 191 n.29 Somerset Somerset Heritage Centre DD/SF/18/2/3  226, 230, 235 n.41, 237, 238 St Andrews University of St Andrews 38660  226, 227–8, 230, 231, 233–4, 237 Stonyhurst Stonyhurst College 31  185 n.5, 194, 195, 199 B.XXIII  287, 288, 298 Warminster Longleat 29  50, 287, 298 257  286, 289, 296, 298, 320 258 320 298  185 n.5, 193 n.43, 194, 198 Wellesley, MA Wellesley College 8  72 n.16, 78 Westminster Westminster School 4  185 n.4, 191, 193 n.43, 194, 195, 196, 199 Worcester Worcester Cathedral Library F.172  147 n.4, 185 n.5, 185 n.9, 187–188, 191, 194, 195, 196 n.54, 199 York Borthwick Institute Reg. 11  67–8, 71 n.12 Reg. 12  68

GENERAL INDEX Page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations and their captions. Abbey of the Holy Ghost  288, 307 Adys, Miles  178 Agincourt, battle of  26 Alan (1187–1202), abbot of Tewkesbury  264, 276 Aldfield, John de, papal notary  69–70 Aldfield, Thomas, scribe  19, 68–75, 77, 78, 81 Aldfield (Yorks.)  70, 74, 76 Allerton Mauleverer Priory (North Yorks.) 106   Alnwick, William, bishop of Lincoln and Lord Privy Seal  103 anchoress  184, 191 Ancrene Riwle  186, 327 Andrew, Richard  111 Andrew, Thomas, clerk  88, 89, 90, 91 Andrews, Thomas  176 Anglesey 139 Anglican Church  318, 325 Anglicana see under script Anglo-Irish  46, 48–9, 54, 57, 287 Anglo-Norman 229 Annunciation, Feast of  184 Annunciation, illustration of  27, 30, 31, 34, 39, 40 Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ verse chronicle 222–40 ‘Another Version of the Four Things’  293, 299 Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus homo 184 anthologies  15, 146–79, 185, 212, 255, 289 Ardmulghan (Ardmulchan, Co. Meath) 47 Arma Christi (in art)  34

Arma Christi (verse) 189 Arnold, Thomas  128–9, 143 n.60 Articles presented to the King and Parliament  129 artisans  47, 52, 53 artists English  32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39 of MS Bodley 283  160–2, 176, 177 of Oxford, University College MS 85  160, 163 ‘Owl artist’ (Owl-illuminator)  159–61, 163, 177 Flemish 39, 40, 41, 44 French  25, 36 39, 41, 153 See also border artists; illuminators; illustrators. See also under decoration. Arundel, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury  221, as bishop of Ely 184 Ashby, George (the elder, d. 1475), poet and clerk  82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 91–4, 96, 122 Active Policy of a Prince  82, 91–2, 94 A Prisoner’s Reflections  82, 91–2, 122, 148, 173, 305 Ashby, George (the younger), clerk  94 Ashby, John, clerk  94–6, 98, 101 Ashridge Priory (Herts.)  262 Asloan, John, scribe  14 aspect see under script Assembly of Gods  148, 149, 165, 299 Astley, John, Ordonances of Chivalry  190

347

GENERAL INDEX

Athelney Abbey  98 Aubert, David, scribe  44 Augustinian (Austin) canons  184, 287, 288, 294 Augustinian (Austin) friars  11–12, 226 Avicenna, Canon medicinae  157, 178–9 Banester, Gilbert, Guiscardo and Ghismonda 289 Bank, Robert, of Colne (Lancs.)  75, 77, 81 Barking Abbey  106, 226 Barnet, battle of  265, 272, 273, 274 Baron, William  149, 168, 171, 175, 178 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum  156, 165, 176, 315 Batman, Henry  315 Batman, Stephan  21, 314–5, 317–28 Batman uppon Bartholome 315 A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation 315 The Travayled Pylgrime 315 Beauchamp family  260 Beauchamp, Anne  263 Beauchamp, Henry (1425–46), duke of Warwick  263, 266, 268 Beauchamp, Richard (1382–1439), earl of Warwick  15, 263, 266 Beauchamp, Richard, earl of Worcester 268 Beaufort, Edmund, duke of Somerset 115 Beaufort, Henry, cardinal and bishop of Winchester 118 Beaumaris Castle  139 Beauvale charterhouse (Notts.)  184 Beckington, Thomas, bishop of Bath and Wells  103, 108 Bedford, John, duke of  11, 36, 114 n.77 Bekesbourne (Kent)  317 Benedict (d. 1124), abbot of Tewkesbury  264, 276 Benedictine, order  53 houses  26, 34, 106, 226, 260, 262, 270 Benet, John  241–58 Berkeley (Glos.)  233 Bermondsey Abbey  226 Beryn scribe  10, 12, 18 Beverley (Yorks.)  76, 227 butchers’ guild  228

Bible English  135, 187, 192, 197 binders  9, 163, 176 birds in illustration  171 n.79, 191 in verse  52, 53, 55 ‘Birds matins’  300 ‘Birds’ Praise of Love’  295, 304 Bisham Montague Priory (Berks.)  288 Bishop’s Lynn Friary (King’s Lynn, Norfolk) 12 Blake, Edmund, clerk  97, 118 Blake, Norman F.  312 Blakeney, John, clerk  96, 98, 99, 108, 122 Bliss, A. J.  193, 194, 195 Blunt, John Henry  270 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron 30 Bochas see Lydgate, John, Fall of Princes Bodleian Library  270 Bolton Abbey (Yorks.)  68 Bolton, James, prior of Watton  227 Book of Daniel  208 Book of Privy Counselling  318, 326 booklets  133, 165–75, 188, 290–1, 294 construction in  8, 146, 147, 149, 152, 167, 171, 174, 292 used for teaching  36 books of hours  25–44, 152–3, 158, 177–8 Berkeley Hours  39–41 calendars in  26, 29, 30, 34, 43, 44, 178 Farmor Hours  44 Heller Hours  153 Playfair Hours  44 printed  155, 159, 163, 179 Yester Hours  44 bookshops see shops border artists Border Artist A of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56  161, 176, 178 Border Artist A of MS Widener 2  161, 177 Border Artist of HM 932  191 n.29 Border Artist of London, Inner Temple, Petyt 524  190 Border Artist of Oxford, University College MS 85  160 n.29, 177–8 See also artists; illuminators; illustrators

348

GENERAL INDEX

border decoration see under decoration Bosworth, battle of  265 Boucicaut Master  41 workshop  41 n.28 Bourges 14 Bovill, Sewal de, archbishop of York  68 Bowdon, John, clerk  98, 100, 101 Boyle, Leonard  183 Bracciolini, Poggio  111 Brembre, Nicholas  127, 141, 143 breviaries 214 Brittany  26, 124 Brooke, William, Lord Cobham  323, 324 n.37 Broughton (Bucks.)  242, 243, 246 Broughton, John  242, 245 n.19 Bruer, Henry see Batman, Henry Brugges, Walter de  51 Brusendorff, Aage  4, 8, 293 Brut chronicle (prose)  10, 294, 307 Brut, Walter, lollard  325 Bruton (Somerset)  315 bureaucrats  46, 48, 56 Burgh, Benedict ‘Cato Major’  286, 288, 294, 300, 303 ‘Cato Minor’  286, 288, 294, 300 Burgh, Walter de  57 Burgundy 124 Burgundy, Philip, duke of (‘the Good’) 30 Burrow, John  11 Bury, Pittancers Register’  13 Bury, Richard  232 Butler, James, earl of Ormond  50 Byland Abbey (Yorks)  68, 72 n.16, 77 Calais  43 n.33, 118 calendars see under books of hours Calot, Laurence  113, 117 Cambridge  2, 7, 8, 184, 317 University  136, 242 Cambro-Norman language  46, 50 Camden, William (1551–1623), antiquary  270, 272 Camel, Walter de  264, 276 Capgrave, John  11–12 Carmelite-Lapworth Master  210 Carpenter, John  15, 125, 136, 137, 212 n.25 Carthusian order  184, 196–7, 198 houses  12, 149 n.8, 184, 187, 191, 196

Cary, William  319 Cashel (Ireland)  60 Catterick (North Yorks.)  79 n.33 Catto, Jeremy  6 Cauchon, Pierre, bishop of Beauvais 117 Caudray, Richard  85 Caxton Master  161, 162 Caxton, William  9, 153, 161–70, 175, 176, 328 exemplars  148, 151, 164–5 illustrators  153, 159, 161, 162, 167, 175 printed works  149, 153, 154, 161, 162, 170, 257, 292, 294 Boece 320 Canterbury Tales  149, 153 n.19, 169, 291–2, 298, 312, 320, 322 n.33 Confessio Amantis 161 Dictes or Sayeingis of the Philosophres  7, n.24, 161 Eneydos  151 n.14 Godfrey of Boloyne 164 Golden Legend  167 n.60 History of Jason 169 Life of Our Lady  153, 287 Pilgrimage of the Soul 153 Quattuor sermones 149 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye  153 Troilus  149, 153, 154 translations 161 type 44 workshop  149, 161, 163–4, 170 Cayton, William, prior of Watton  227 Chamberlain, of London  132, 140, 178 Champagne 117 Chancellor, of England  83, 93, 94, 221 Chancery  83, 84, 124, 159 at Rouen  117, 118 chanson de geste  47 Chaplais, Pierre  94 Charles VII, king of France  93 charter hand see under script charters  20, 68, 135, 143, 260, 263 Gloucestershire  260, 271, 276 Chastising of God’s Children  318 Chaucer, Geoffrey  15–16, 50, 134–5, 138, 140, 142, 320, 327–8

349

GENERAL INDEX

‘ABC to the Virgin’  286, 293–4, 295, 299 Anelida and Arcite  286, 291, 299 Balade de Bon Conseyl see ‘Truth’ Boece, 307, 320 Canterbury Tales Clerk’s Tale  287, 288, 289, 291, 295, 312 n.1, 320 General Prologue  26, 143, 321, 322 Knight’s Tale  287, 289, 320 Man of Law’s Tale  287, 288 manuscripts  4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, 94, 134 n.23, 143, 145, 147 n.4, 212, 216, 221, 285–311, 312–13, 320–4, 328, 330 Merchant’s Tale 295 Miller’s Prologue 295 Miller’s Tale  55–6, 295 Monk’s Tale  148, 169, 287, 288, 291, 320, 321 Pardoner’s Tale 294 Parson’s Tale  287, 294, printed editions  149, 153 n.19, 169, 291–2, 298–9, 312, 320, 322 n.33 Prioress’s Prologue  295 Prioress’s Tale  287, 288, 289, 291, 292 Reeve’s Tale 294 Retraction  287, 294, 322, 324 Second Nun’s Tale 287 Shipman’s Tale 294 Tale of Melibee  287, 288, 294, 320 Tale of Sir Thopas  294 ‘Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’  292, 300 Complaint of Mars  293, 294, 300 Complaint of Venus  292, 293, 294, 300, 301 Gentilesse  292, 301 Legend of Good Women  148, 286, 289, 295–6, 303 ‘Legend of Dido’  289, 303 ‘Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan’  295, 301 Parliament of Fowls  148, 286, 294, 295, 304

‘To Adam his own Scriveyn’  16, 330 Treatise on the Astrolabe 12 Troilus and Criseyde  15, 143, 164, 212, 295, 306, 319 printed editions  149, 153, 154 ‘Truth’ (Balade de Bon Conseyl)  286, 291, 295, 306 Chaucer, Thomas  221 Cherry, Francis  270 Cheshire  189, 191 Chester  226, 252 ‘Child Jesus to Mary, the Rose’  300 Chronicle of English History from Adam to 1462  241, 242 Chronicle of London to 1470  178 Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester  270 chronicles  7, 11, 20, 229, 230, 260 Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande 273 Churl and Bird  148, 286, 288, 300 Cistercians, houses of  77, 226 Clanvowe, Sir John, Cuckoo and Nightingale  289 Clare family  263, 275 badge of  263 Clare, Gilbert de (d. 1230), fifth earl of Gloucester  261, 276 Isabella (d. 1240), wife of  261, 276 Clare, Gilbert de, II (d. 1295), seventh earl of Gloucester  275 daughters of  275 Clare, Gilbert de, III (d. 1314), eighth earl of Gloucester  274, 275 John, son of  275 Clare, Richard de (d. 1217)  275 Clare, Richard de (d. 1272), first earl of Cornwall 262 Clarence, George, duke of (1449– 78)  263, 265, 266 Edward, son of, see Warwick, Edward, earl of (1475–99) Clarence, Thomas, duke of (d. 1421)  200 n.1 Clerk, John, scribe  196 clerks chamber  125, 126 n.3, 127, 131, 132, 136, 139 chief recording  51 legal  47, 60 singing 60

350

GENERAL INDEX

Cloud of Unknowing 188 Clovis II, king of the Franks  26 Cluniac, order  226 Cobham family, Kent  323 codicology  1, 126, 183 Cok, John, scribe  12 Cologne 161 Colop, John  197 Comestor, Peter  308 common profit books  189 communion 56 compilations  20, 39, 41, 159, 169 Chaucerian  149, 290, 292, 296 devotional  154, 185–9, 197, 326 historical  242, 244, 249, 261 Complaint of God 300 Complainte to the King and Parliament  129 conferences, academic  2 Early Book Society  5 Harvard ‘New Directions’  329–30 New Chaucer Society, Glasgow  330 York ‘Manuscripts’  5, 73 n.19 Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God  187 Cook, Sir Thomas, draper and mayor  10, 172, 173, 187 Cornburgh, Avery  172 Beatrice, wife of  172 n.90 Cornhyll scribe  10 Cotson, William, cleric and scribe  287 Cotton, Robert (1571–1631), antiquary 272 Council, at Blackfriars (Earthquake)  132, 133 Council, Common  135, 138, 141 Council, King’s  15, 83, 141, 221 clerks of  84–5, 122, 124 courts Commissary, of London  140 n.48 of the Exchequer (Dublin)  51 of Husting (Common Pleas)  80 n.35, 124, 135, 138 Mayor and Sheriffs  135 Courtenay, William, archbishop of Canterbury 132 Coventry charterhouse  191, 196 Cranborne Priory (Dorset)  262, 264, 276 Cremona, Gerard of, translator  178 Cromwell, Ralph, Lord Treasurer  108

Crosby, William, clerk  94, 98, 101, 102 Crowley, Robert, printer  324 Danby, George  255 Danby, Neville  255 Danby, William  255 Dartford Priory (Kent)  149, 178 Dated and Datable Manuscripts series 3 De amico ad amicam  295, 301 De varietate fortunae 111 decoration, of manuscripts borders  27, 40, 43, 44, 159–60, 167, 177–9, 190–2, 212–19 English  39, 40, 160 French  36, 39 152 graphic layout  230 miniatures  25, 27, 29, 30, 34, 41, 152–3, 177, 202–4, 208, 210, 212, 219 penwork initials  191, 204 roundels  227, 229–30, 232, 234, 237, 239, 266 roundels, leaf  213, 214 decorators  8, 44, 77, 210, 214 see also artists; border artists; illuminators; illustrators Deepham, manor of  108 Depeden, John, clerk  103, 104 Depeden, Sir John, of Healaugh (North Yorks.) 75 Derbyshire  189, 191 Despenser family  260, 269, 270 Despenser, Isabella (1400–39), countess of Warwick  263, 265, 266, 268, 271 diagrams 249 genealogical  230, 232–3, 237, 240 Dictes or Sayeingis of the Philosophres  7, n.24, 161 didactic writing  2, 6, 150, 222, 223 Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV)  18, 62, 72 n.15, 224 n.7, 225, 285 n.1, 331 digitisation 2 diplomatics 1 Dissolution, Act of (lesser monasteries) 259 Dissolution, of monasteries  140 n.50, 259, 265, 272, 315 Doctrine of the Heart 318

351

GENERAL INDEX

Doddo  260, 265, 266, 273 Dodesham, Stephen, scribe  12 Dodwell, Henry (1641–1711)  2 Dominican order  178 Domrémy-la-Pucelle (Vosges, France) 117 Donaldson, E. Talbot  5 Dorset  189, 191 Dorward, Rosemary  194, 195 Douce limner (illuminator of MS Douce 322) 152–62 work of  176–8 Doyle, A. I.  4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16–17, 20, 67, 71, 125, 126, 171, 327, 330 Drogheda (Ireland)  54, 55 Dublin 48 merchants’ guilds  47 Dublin Pale  20 Duchy of Lancaster, Chancellor of  108 duct see under script Dugdale, William, Monasticon Anglicanum  260, 271, 275 Dunstable (Beds.)  246 Dunstable Priory  242, 245 n.19, 287 Dunstanville, Walter  264, 276 Durham 26 Early Book Society  5 Early English Text Society  5, 19, 193 n.41, 240 Ebesham, William, scribe  12 Edinburgh Middle English dialect survey 2 editing  3, 5, 6, 7, 267, 271 Lachmannian method  4 Edmund of Almain (d. 1300), second earl of Cornwall  262 Edmund-Fremund scribe  12, 13 Edward I, king of England  237 Edward II, king of England  237, 239, 274 Edward III, king of England  83, 227, 230 n.27 jubilee year of  142 Edward IV, king of England  164, 166, 227, 253, 255, 265, 273 n.55 Edward the Confessor  30, 264 n.18 ‘Eight goodlie questions with their answers’  301, 313 Eltham 98 Ely, consistory court of  184

Eneydos  151 n.14 Equatorie of the Planetis 18 ‘Erthe upon Erthe’  174 Est, Thomas  101 estates satire  54, 56, 58 Ethelbald, king of Mercia (d. 757)  273 Ethelred, king of Mercia (d. 704)  273 n.55 eucharist, teaching on  132–3, 168 n.62, 325 Ever is six the best chance of the dice  241, 249, 250 n.30, 255, 257 Evesham, John of  265 Exchequer English  83, 149, 176, 184 Irish 50–1 barons of  51, 52 exemplars  73, 83, 171–2, 173, 252, 255 in booklets  146, 148–9, 166, 168–72, 174, 295 of Chaucer  169, 295–6, 312 of Gower  201 n.5, 202, 219 at the Guildhall  133, 136, 219 of Hilton  186, 188–9 of lollard tracts  126–7, 129, 131 of Lydgate  292 of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede 313, 325 of Tewkesbury Abbey Founders Book 274–5 in Yorkshire  72 n.16, 73, 77–9, 81 n.39 see also stock; see also under Caxton, William; Shirley, John; Worde, Wynkyn de Exeter 26 Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies 6 Exton, Nicholas  135, 141 facsimile reproduction  2, 3, 4, 261, 268, 275, 320 n.28 Fane, George (1582–1640)  269 Elizabeth, wife of  269 Fane, John, 11th earl of Westmorland (1784–1859) 269 Fane, Sir Thomas (d. 1589)  269 Mary Neville, wife of  269, 271 Fastolf Master  41–3, 153 Fastolf, Sir John  12, 41, 43

352

GENERAL INDEX

Faversham (Kent)  26 Fèvre, Raoul le History of Jason 170 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye  153 Fisher, John  202, 203 Fishlake, Thomas  195 ‘fit’ technique  19 Fita, Pey de la, scribe  38–9 Fitzalan, John, earl of Arundel  36, 43 Fitzgerald, Maurice  57 Fitzhamon, arms of  263 Fitzhamon, Robert (d. 1107)  264, 265, 274, 276 patronage of  262 n.12 Sybil, wife of  264, 265 Fitzhamon, Reginald  264, 276 Fitzhugh family  79 Fitzhugh, Henry (c. 1363–1425)  80 Fitzrobert, William (1147–83), second earl of Gloucester  260, 262, 275, 276 Fitzroy, Robert (d. 1147), first earl of Gloucester 262 Five Dogs of London  241, 244, 254 Flanders  20, 25, 30, 44, 47, 161 Flemish, speakers of  46, 47 Forsham, Adam de  139 Fortescue, Thomas, book owner  177 Fountains Abbey  70, 77, 78 France English military campaigns  83 English document production  20, 82–124 manuscript production  25, 39, 43, 44 Franceys, Richard (Ricardus Franciscus), scribe  88, 114 n.74 Frankenbergh, Henry  163 French Secretary, office of  84, 113–22 friars, orders of Austin 226 Carmelite  53, 226 Franciscan  45, 52 Williamite 53 Gaelic-Irish  47–8, 53, 57–9 Gardner, Helen  193, 195 Garland, John of, Integumenta 211 Garter, Order of the  26

Gaunt, John of, duke of Lancaster  125, 131–3, 141–3 Gaytryge, John  67, 79 n.33, 188 ‘The Lay Folks’ Catechism’  67–70, 71 n.12, 75, 80 n.35, 187 See also under Thoresby, John Gedney, William  103, 105 Geertz, Clifford  77 Geraardsbergen (Flanders)  30 Gerald (d. 1110), abbot of Tewkesbury  264, 276 Gerberoy, fortress of (Picardy)  36 Ghent  20, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 39, 44 Glastonbury Abbey  270 Gloucester 233 Gloucester, Humphrey, duke of  83, 92, 94, 200 n.1 Gloucestershire 270 dialect of  191 Glover, Robert (1543/4–88), antiquary 272 Godfrey of Boloyne 164 Golden Legend  167 n.60 Goldstone, Thomas, III, prior of Canterbury Cathedral Priory 96 Goliardic verse  52, 54, 56–7 Gospel of Nicodemus  187, 309 Gower III scribe  218 Gower, John  5, 19, 134–5, 142, 200–2, 208, 210–12, 218–20 Confessio Amantis  201, 208, 218–21, 286, 288, 294 extracts from  286, 288, 294, 300 manuscripts  3, 4, 5, 11, 15, 19, 20, 190, 200, 203, 205, 206, 212, 214, 216, 218–21, 288, 294, 330, 331 miniatures: Ages of Man statue  203, 204 n.15, 208, 209, 220; Confessor 203, 208 n.17; Dream of Nebuchadnezzar 203, 204, 207, 208 printed edition  161 Cronica tripertitai  203, 210, 211 n.23 H. aquile pullus  211 n.23 late state theory  200, 221 O recolende  211 n.23 Quicquid homo scribat  211 n.23

353

GENERAL INDEX

Rex celi Deus  211 n.23 Traitié Selonc Les Auctours Pour Essampler Les Amantz Marietz  210, 211 Vox clamantis 202 works of  4, 200, 201, 202, 210 Gray, James, scribe  14 Great Marlow (Bucks.)  265, 274 Grenehalgh, James  191, 196 Grete Sentence  126 n.6, 132 Gretham, Robert de, Anglo-Norman Miroir 327 Greville, John  269 n.33 Greville, Sir Edward (d. 1560), of Milcote (Warks.)  269 Griffiths, Jeremy  9, 73 Gueyenne, duke of  117 Haarlem (Holland)  26 Hail be Thou Mary the Mother of Christ  252 Hailes Abbey (Glos.)  262 Hammond, Eleanor Prescott  4, 8, 9, 147, 173, 174 Hammond scribe  9–10, 146–9, 165–6, 168–76, 187, 291, 292 n.22, 327 Hare, Robert, book owner  177 Harewood (West Yorks.)  68 Harfleur (Normandy)  43 Harley scribe  12 Harlington (Beds.)  21, 241, 243 vicar of  21, 241, 243 Harrison, William (1535–93), antiquary 272 Harrogate (North Yorks.)  68, 78 Harvard University  329 Hearne, Thomas (1678–1735), antiquary  239, 270–5 Hegessipus, Historia de Bello Iudaico  111 Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe see Trinity R.3.2, Scribe B Henry I, king of England  233, 237, 262 Henry II, king of England  64, 227, 230 n.27, 246 Henry IV, king of England  83, 91, 139, 200, 201, 227 sons of  221 Henry V, king of England  20, 50, 80, 82, 91, 103, 221, 239

campaigns in France  23, 83–4 as Prince of Wales  200 n.1, 221 Henry VI, king of England  43, 96, 101, 103, 229, 233, 249 n.29, 285 administration in France  20, 82–4, 113 deposition of  242 letters for  85, 92–4, 113, 115, 117–8, 120, 122, 123 readeption of  227 reign of  108, 253–4 Henry VIII, king of England  94, 140 n.50, 272 heralds  10, 175, 271, 272, 324 Lancaster Herald  272, 324 Herrera, Ruy Flores de, secretary of the Inquisitor 36 Herryson, John, scribe  256, 257 Hethe, John, clerk  83, 91, 117 ‘Heyl, God’  62 Higden, Ranulph, Polychronicon 242, 244, 246–50, 252–3, 256–8, 309 Hilton (Hunts.)  183 Hilton, Walter  183–93, 195 n.49 Angels’ Song 188 Benedictus, commentary on  189 Bonum est  186, 189, 190 De Imagine peccati 184 De Utilitate et prerogativis religionis  184 Eight Chapters on Perfection  189, 190 On Mixed Life  184–6, 188–90, 287, 308 ‘On Proper Will’  188 Qui habitat  186, 189 Scale of Perfection  19, 183–99 Charity passage  193–5 Holy Name passage  193–5 transmission in Yorkshire  184–9 Hinton charterhouse  196 Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri  290, 311 Historia regum Britanniae 258 Hoccleve, Thomas  11, 203 n.10, 304, 307, 327 ‘Balade au tres noble Roy H[enri] le quint’ 313 Letter of Cupid 289 Regiment of Princes (De Regimine Principum)  10, 11, 147 n.4, 214, 294, 301

354

GENERAL INDEX

Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles 323 hooked-g scribe  13, 18, 331 Horsley, Adam  184 Horwood, Eliza  190 Hoveden, Roger of  247 n.24 Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey, poet 327 Hugh, earl of Mercia, tomb of  274 Hugh, son of Grippus  262 Hundred Years War  20, 84 Hungerford, Walter  103 Huntington Library  270 illumination  19, 25, 27, 34, 36, 38, 159, 167 n.60, 197 Flemish  29, 34 full-border 190–1 Owl-illuminating group  159–60, 162–3 illuminators  8, 9, 147 152, 159, 162, 163, 164, 176 Owl-illuminator (‘Owl artist’)  159–61, 163, 177 See also artists; border artists; Douce limner; illustrators illustrations Flemish  25, 30, 44, 152 French 44 illustrators  50, 161, 162, 176 English 38 French 160 of rolls  234 Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII 25 Index of Middle English Prose  2 Index of Middle English Verse  7, 18, 224 indexes, medieval  248, 256 Ingilby family  79 Inns of Court  140, 159 Middle Temple  176 instructional writing  6, 222 Ipomedon  289, 308 Ireland  26, 45–9, 51, 57, 64 Irish see Anglo-Irish; Gaelic-Irish Isham family  270 Isham, Sir Justinian (1610–75), second baronet 270 Isham, Sir Justinian (1687–1737), fifth baronet 270 Isle of Axholme (Lincs.)  228

James, M. R.  3, 29, 46, 125, 129, 317 Jean II, king of France (‘le Bon’)  208 Jerome, Commentariorum in Danielem  208 n.18 Jervaulx Abbey (North Yorks.)  77 Joan of Arc  113, 117 John, king of England  266 n.26 Jubilee Book  135, 142 justification, doctrine of  184 Kane, George  5 Kenred, king of Mercia  273 n.55 Ker, Neil R.  3, 4 Kildare (Ireland)  47, 54 ‘Kildare Lyrics’  52 Kildare, Michael of  52 Killingwick, John de  75, 76, 77 Killum, John, grocer  189 Kingis Quair  7 Kirby, John  84, 91 Knaresborough (North Yorks.)  75–9 Knights Hospitallers (Knights of St John)  47, 57, 62, 64 Knights Templar  57, 62, 63, 64 Lamport Hall (Northants.)  270 Lancaster, Duchy of  76, 79, 108 Lancaster, Humphrey of see Gloucester, Humphrey, duke of Lancaster, John of see Bedford, John, duke of Lancaster, Thomas of see Clarence, Thomas duke of Langford, Henry, organmaker  189, 190 n.27 Langland, William  58, 134, 135, 142, 328 Piers Plowman  325, 326 early printed editions  313, 324 manuscripts  51, 212, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328 modern editions  4 n.10, 5 versions  A-text 186; C-text 318, 324; illustrated 48–9 Langley, Thomas  94 Late Medieval Scribes, website  17 law, merchant  53 lawyers  53, 56, 126 n.6, 137 ‘Lay Folks’ Catechism’ see under Gaytryge, John Leeds 75

355

GENERAL INDEX

Leicester Abbey (St Mary de Pratis) 294 Leland, John (c. 1503–52), antiquary  259, 272 Itinerary  260, 273–5 Lepainteur, scribe  13–14 letters (correspondence)  20, 84, 114, 124, 234, 330 See also under Signet, Office of Lettou, Johannes, printer  159, 163, 164 n.44 printed works Nova Statuta  159, 163 Tenores novelli  159, 164 n.44 Year-books 159 Libeaus Disconus  288–9, 303 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye  290, 291, 303 Liber de observantiis Papae 111 liberal arts  140 Lichfield (Staffs.)  72 n.16, 77 Lichfield, William ‘The Complaint of God to Sinful Man and the Answer of Man’  150, 288, 300, 320 Life of St Alexis  288, 303 Life of Job  290, 291, 303 ‘Life of St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins’  290, 308 Lignano, Iohannes de, De bello 243 Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English  2, 19 lists books  246 n.19, 317 deaths in battle  272–3 English kings  62, 254, 311 lands and benefices  264 relics 267 Littleton, Sir Thomas, Tenores novelli manuscript  156, 159, 176 print  164 n.44 lollards 139 scribal activities  125, 128, 137 writings  125, 127–8, 129 lollardy  126 n.6, 135, 137 Lombard, John, of Waterford  51 London charterhouse  149 n.8 London, common clerk of  125, 131, 132, 136, 139 London, Common Serjeant of  128, 138, 140, 142

London, Guildhall  15, 16, 18, 20, 128, 141 Chapel  136 n.31 clerks  125–8, 131, 133–8, 140, 142–3, 145, 203, 222, 330 Close 138–9 manuscripts produced at  219–21 texts kept at  131, 133, 136 London, locations Bishopsgate 191 Blackfriars  10, 327 Fleet Bridge  159, 164 n.44 Holborn  159, 162, 164 Paternoster Row  172, 175 St Bartholomew’s Close  171 St Bartholomew’s Hospital  12, 168 St Lawrence Jewry  138 St Paul’s  135, 141 Long Charter of Christ  287, 303 Loomis, Laura Hubbard  8 Love, Nicholas, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ  187, 190, 191, 192 Lucas, Thomas  139–40 Ludlow (Shropshire)  13 Lutterworth (Leics.)  132 Lydgate, John ‘As a Midsummer Rose’  289, 299 Complaint of the Black Knight 289, 294, 300 ‘Dietary’  223, 286, 301 Fall of Princes  160, 169, 177 extracts from  148, 169 n.72, 291, 292, 293, 301 Guy of Warwick  151, 302 ‘Horse, Goose and Sheep’  286, 302 ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror’  7, 150, 151,166, 222–5, 253, 286, 302, 329 ‘Legend of St George’  151, 287, 303 ‘Legend of St Margaret’  286, 287, 303 Life of Our Lady  150, 286, 287, 288, 303 printed edition  153, 287 Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund  12, 286, 287, 288, 303 ‘Prayer for King, Queen and People’  166, 304

356

GENERAL INDEX

Lydgate, John (continued) ‘Prayer to St Edmund on behalf of Henry VI’  286, 303, ‘Prayer upon the Cross’  291, 305 Serpent of Division  294, 301, 310 Siege of Thebes  12, 149, 153, 161, 165, 286, 289, 305, 320 ‘A Song of Vertu’  287, 289, 305 Stans puer ad mensam  223, 287, 305 Temple of Glas  295, 306 ‘Testament of Dan John Lydgate’  289, 306 ‘Title and Pedigree of Henry VI’ 223 Troy Book 10 Verses on the Kings of England see ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror’ ‘A Wicked Tunge Wille Sey Amys’  293, 307 works of  13, 146–7, 150, 169, 223, 290, 292–4, 296, 327 Lyon, Council of  60, 61–2 lyrics early Middle Hiberno English  45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 57, 60–2 Harley manuscript  13 Middle English  20, 148, 150, 295, 329 Macaulay, G. C.  4, 201–3 MacCracken, Henry  223–4, 229, 239–40 Machaut, Guillaume de, Remède de Fortune 208, 210 Machlinia, William de  159, 160, 162, 163, 175 printed works Horae ad usum Sarum  155, 159, 163, 179 Speculum Christiani  163 n.39 Tenores novelli  159, 164 n.44 Magnus, Albertus  168 n.62 Magnus, Thomas, warden of Sibthorpe 226 Maine, University of (Orono)  329 Makculloch, Magnus, scribe  14 Manly, John M.  4, 8, 317, 320, 323 Manning, Thomas  101 Mansion, Colard, scribe and printer  44

manuscript fragments  3, 13, 51, 73 n.20, 178, 179, 210, n.22, 289, 298, 300 Marchaunt, John  15, 125–34, 136–40, 142–5, 203, 204, 212, 214, 216, 218, 221, 331 Marchaunt, Nicholas  138–9 Marches, Irish  47, 54, 59 Margaret, of Anjou, Queen to Henry VI  92–3, 249 n.29 Markenfields (North Yorks.)  79 Masham (North Yorks.)  73, 78 n.29, 79, 101 Matheson, Lister  10 Meaw, Hayward  261, 262, 267, 274, 276 Algiva, wife of  261, 267, 276 Brihtric, grandson of  262 ‘Meditation on the Five Wits’  187 Meditationes vitae Christi 192 mercers 58 Mercers’ Company, of London  15 accounts 16 merchants  53, 135 Mercia, kings of  34, 273 n.55 Merlin, prophecies of  62, 246 n.19, 249 Merstham (Surrey)  315 Merton, Walter de, bishop of Rochester 140 Mets, Guillebert de, Master  29–30, 31, 34, 36, 39 microfilm  226 n.16, 232 n.34, 250 n.34 microform 27 Middle English Dictionary 2 Middle English Texts, series  5, 240 Middle Temple see Inns of Court Middleham (North Yorks.)  73 Milet, Jean, scribe  114 Minoresses, order of (Franciscans)  189 Minories, Aldgate  189, abbess of  190 miscellanies  20, 173, 329 booklet-based  152, 171, 175, 292 Chaucerian  149, 294, 320 historical 242–3 Lydgatian  147–8, 168, 172, 288 missals Carmelite Missal  210 n.21 manuscripts  177, 190 Moers, Dietrich II von, archbishop of Cologne 94 ‘Moral Advice to Apprentices’  290–1 Mortimer, Roger de, household of  47

357

GENERAL INDEX

Mount Grace charterhouse  187 Multon, John  172–3 Multon, Robert  172 n.86 Naples 25 Nasmith, J.  125 Navarre 124 Netherlands  30, 315 Nevile, Thomas  317–8 Neville family  79, 80, 260, 263, 269 Neville, Alexander, archbishop of York, register of  68 Neville, Anne, Princess of Wales, Duchess of Gloucester  263, 266, 273 n.55 Neville, Cecily (d. 1450)  266 Neville, Isabella  263, 265, 266 Neville, Mary (c. 1554–1626)  269, 271 Neville, Richard (1400–60), earl of Salisbury 266 Neville, Richard (1428–71), earl of Warwick and Salisbury, ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’  260, 263, 265–6 New Index of Middle English Verse 225 New Ross (Ireland)  47, 57, 58, 59 Newington Butts, London  315 Nivernais (France)  114 Norfolk, dialects of  188 Normanvilles, of Kilnwick  76, 78 n.30 Northampton, John of  127, 142–3 Norton, family  78 n.30, 79, 80 Norton, Richard, of Norton Conyers  80 n.36 Norwich 12 notaries 80 Dublin 50 papal  20, 69, 70 notebooks  20, 272 Nova Statuta manuscript:  147 n.4, 160, 167 print  159, 163 Oddo  260, 265, 266, 273, 276 Of Feigned Contemplatif Life  129, 130 ‘Of Frere Michel Kyldare’  53 ‘Of noman liche makeȝ hap’  62–3 Offord, John, clerk  83 Old English, texts in  6 On the Times 254

Osbarn, Richard  15, 131, 136, 139, 140 n.51 Osbern, Robert, clerk  98, 106, 107 Otway-Ruthven, J.  84, 88, 96, 101, 108 Ovide moralisé  161, 162, 211 Owen, Charles A.  296 n.40, 312 Oxford 138–41 University  132, 136, 242 Balliol College  138–9 Merton College  138, 139, 140 ‘Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage’  293, 304 palaeography  1, 16, 18, 21, 212 Panofsky, Erwin  36 paper  stocks  153, 161, 163–4, 169, 172–5, 290–2 marbled 269 writing support  1, 8, 172, 187, 224–5, 256, 331 ‘Parce michi domine’  150, 167, 170–1, 174, 304 Paris  30, 41, 42, 117 Paris, Michel de, secretary  88, 93, 113, 114, 115–16, 118, 122 Parker Library, Cambridge  125, 315, 317 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury  138 n.41, 315, 317–19, 322, 325 circle of  315, 317–19, 321, 325 John, son of  317, 321 Parkes, Malcolm B.  4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 13, 20, 71, 85, 125 n.3, 183, 295, 330 Parliament English  125, 131, 132, 135, 137, 141, 143, 269 ‘Good’  127 n.11 Speaker of  221 Irish 60 Paston, Sir John, Grete Book 12 Patay, Battle of  43 Pateley Bridge (North Yorks.)  76 Pater noster, tract on  189 patrons, of manuscripts  25, 44, 118, 129, 132 Peasants’ Revolt  132, 135 pecia system  136 pedigree  233, 237, 255, 267 n.26, 269, 270 Pensax, Margery, anchoress  191

358

GENERAL INDEX

Percy, Henry, Lord  141 Petigrew of Englond  169, 309 ‘Petition of the Folk of the Mercerie’  15, 127, 135 Petition to the King and Parliament  125, 129, 130, 131–4, 137, 143–4 petitions  15, 122, 127 n.11, 131, 135, 137 Petworth scribe  218 Petworth, Richard  111 ‘Pety Job’  150, 167, 170–1, 174 Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede  304, 313, 314, 324–5, 327 Piers of Fulham  148, 289, 304 Pigot, family  79 n.34, 80 Pilgrimage of the Soul 153 Pinkhurst, Adam  14, 15–16, 72, 126–7, 131, 133, 135, 136–8, 142, 143, 145, 203 n.10, 330 Pizan, Christine de Epistre d’Othea  41, 211 Le livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie  38, 44 Livres des quatre vertus  41 Pleasance (Greenwich)  93 Plummer, John  40 Plumpton, family  76 Plumpton, Sir William  76 Poer, le, family  59 Pole, Catherine de la, abbess of Barking 106 Pont l’Évêque, Roger de, archbishop York 68 Porter, Sir William, of Lincolnshire  42, 43 portraits 42 kings  230, 232, 234, 237, 239, 240 satirical  52, 55 Prick of Conscience  72, 75, 77, 78, 187, 198 n.56, 286, 304 Prickynge of Love  185, 186 n. 11, 187, 318 Privy Seal, office of  83, 84, 85, 122, 124 clerks  11, 83, 84–5, 88, 91, 94, 114, 117, 122, 124 keeper of  103 script used in, see under script propaganda  7, 58, 222, 223, 229, 239, 247 n.24 prophecy  246 n.19, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 305

psalters Bosworth Psalter  26 manuscript 152, 157, 173 n.90, 177, 214 Plantagenet Psalter  37 Wyclif ’s translation  187 Public Record Office  11 Puy (guild)  136 n.31 Pynkhurst, Adam see Pinkhurst, Adam Pynson, Richard (printer)  299 Quattuor sermones 149 Ravensworth (North Yorks.)  81 Reading Abbey  93 Red Book of the Exchequer  49, 50 Redman family, of Harewood  80 Reformation, in England  21, 71 n.11 Repynghale, Robert, clerk  101, 108, 109 Responcio  295, 301 Revard, Carter  13 Reynel (Champagne, France)  117 Richard I, king of England  230 n.27 Richard II, king of England  200–203, 221, 227, 230 n.27, 233, 253, 308 Anne, wife of  296 deposition of  135, 201 Richard III, king of England  289 (as duke of Gloucester), 311 Richard of St Victor Benjamin minor 188 De eruditione hominis interioris 208 n.8 Richmondshire 79–80 Rickert, Edith  4, 8, 317, 320, 323 Rigg, A. George  2 Rillington (North Yorks.), parish church 68 Rinel, Jean de, secretary  88, 113, 114, 115 n.81, 117–18, 119–20, 122 Scriptum magistri Johannis Rinell contra ducem Burgundie  117 Ripon (North Yorks.)  20, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78–80 Ripon Minster  70, 77 Robbins, Rossell Hope  45 Robert (d. 1123), abbot of Tewkesbury 264 Rochester Cathedral  140 n.50 Rogers, Owen, printer  313, 324

359

GENERAL INDEX

Rokeby (North Yorks.)  82 n.39 Rolle, Richard  50, 147 n.4, 184–6, 188, 287 The Commandment  186, 188, 307 Ego dormio  186, 307 Emendatio vitae  187, 188, 189 Form of Living  186, 188, 189, 307 Oleum effusum  188, 189 rolls  47, 230–40, 265–6 account 226 format of  20, 225, 227–9, 239 of Richard Bury  232 Roman de la Rose 58 Rouen  36, 41, 41 n.28, 43, 44, 114, 118, 153 English chancery at  117, 118 siege of  43 royal library  111 Rule of the Life of Our Lady  188, 189 Rusch, Adolf, printer  157, 162, 163, 178 St Albans Abbey  18 St Andrews  227 University 1 saints  52–3, 56 Alban  30, 34, 36, 43 Allowin see St Bavo Anne  27, 29 Batildis (Bathild)  26 Bavo (Allowin)  26, 34 Brendan the Navigator  26 Cecilia 287 Chad 178 Christopher  53, 54 Clement 26 Crispin 26 Crispinian 26 Cuthbert  34, 43 David (Dewi)  26, 178 Dominic 53 Dunstan 43 Edmund (of England)  34, 43 Edward the Confessor  30, 264 n.18 Eloi (Eligius, Loy)  26 Erkenwald  29, 30, 33, 34, 38, 43 Etheldreda  29, 30, 34, 43 Francis  52, 53, 54 Frideswide 43 Gatian, bishop of Tours  36 George  26, 30, 287 Jerome  34, 39

John of Beverley  43, 178 John of Bridlington  43 John the Baptist  36 John the Evangelist  27, 36 Margaret 287 Mary  27, 287 Mary Magdalene  27, 53, 56, 57 Michael 53 Milburga (Milburge), abbess  26, 34 Osytha 34 Remi (Remigius)  26 Richard 34 Robert Flower  76 Sexburga, abbess  34 Thomas Becket  26, 30, 34, 43 William of York  43 Winifred of Wales  43, 178 saints, English  25, 26, 30, 34, 43 saints, lives of  11, 288 saints, Scottish  44 Salter, Elizabeth  5 sammelband  149, 153, 159, 161–2, 164–5, 175 ‘Satire on Sinful Townsfolk’  51–3, 58 Scarborough (North Yorks.)  226, 227 Scotland  26, 71 n.11 Scots 47 scribes Scribe A of Morgan 690  212 n.26 Scribe B of Morgan 690  212 n.26 Flemish  29, 34, 36, 44 French  13–14, 39, 43, 44, 86, 114 n.74, 118 Scottish 14 See also Beryn scribe; Gower III scribe; Hammond scribe; hooked-g scribe; Petworth scribe; Selden scribe; Trevisa-Gower scribe. See also under Trinity Anthologies; Trinity R.3.2 script aspect  71, 86, 93, 94, 98, 117, 118, 192, 243, 253, 254 duct  86, 93, 94, 224, 227 grades of  84, 85, 86, 88, 91 script, types of Anglicana  82 n.2, 86, 122, 124, 243, 244, 254, 262, 263, 264, 274 chancery  82 n.2

360

GENERAL INDEX

script, types of (continued) charter hand  46, 60, 62, 64 lettre bâtarde  85–6, 88, 118 lettre courante  83, 85–6, 88, 113, 115, 118, 122 lettre curialle  118 secretary  82–6, 88, 91, 93–4, 96, 98, 101, 106, 113–4, 122, 124 English  114, 224, 227, 261–5, 267, 274, 313–15, 316, 322 privy seal  83, 85–6, 124 signet  84–6, 88, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98, 101, 106 textura 52 university cursive  52 scriveners  53, 131, 137, 145 Scriveners’ Company, of London  14–15 Common Paper of  15, 72 Scrope, of Bolton, family  79 Scrope, of Masham, family  78 fn.30, 79 seals  64, 83 Secreta secretorum 50 secretary (script) see under script Sedbergh (Cumbria)  77 Selden, John  319 Selden scribe  10 sermons, Wycliffite  80 n.35, 125 Seven Liberal Arts  6, 222 ‘Sex and the City’, TV series  330 Shaftesbury Abbey  191 Shakespeare, William First Folio  270 Henry V  26 Sheen charterhouse  12, 196 Sheen, documents dated at  93, 96 Shirley, John  8–9, 12, 13–14, 15, 147, 171, 172–3 books owned by  14, 319, 327 exemplars derived from  9, 147–8, 165, 168–73, 327 Shiryngton, Robert, clerk  108, 110 Shiryngton, Walter  108 shops booksellers 149 illustrators  39, 41, 159–61 Flemish 27 printers  149, 152, 161, 163 173, 292 scribal production in  8–9, 134, 149, 160, 165, 169, 170–5 Sibthorpe (Northants.), secular college 226

signatures  15, 84, 92–3, 106, 114, 250, 252, 253, 321 Signet, Office of  83–5, 124 clerks  20, 83–5, 88–113 script used by  84–8 letters 84–97, 99, 102, 103–11, 112, 114 signets  85, 92 sins, seven deadly  184 Sir Beuys of Hampton  288, 305 Sir Isumbras  289, 305 Skeat, W. W.  4, 313, 314, 326 Smith College (Massachusetts)  2 Somer, John Chronicle 6 Kalendarium  6, 222, 329 Spain 36 Speculum Christiani  163 n.39, 303 Speculum Vitae  19, 71, 72 transmission in Yorkshire  73–81 Spencer, Robert, first baron Spencer of Wormleighton (1570–1627) 268–9 Elizabeth, daughter of  269 Spencers, of Wormleighton, family  269 n.33, 269 n.36 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene 315 Spirleng, Geoffrey  12 Thomas, son of  12 Spofforth (North Yorks.), barony of  76, 79 Stafford, John  93 Staffordshire  189, 191 Stanlaw Priory (Ches.)  226 Stapleton family, of Carlton-by-Snaith (West Yorks.)  76 Stimulus amoris  186 stock of manuscript workshops  27, 148–9, 151, 152, 165–72 of print shops  151, 152, 166, 167, 171–3, 292 See also exemplars Stow, John (1524/5–1605), antiquary and printer  8, 21, 168, 292 annotations by  150–1, 274–5, 319, 320, 328 books owned by  8, 147 n.3, 168 n. 67, 173 n.90, 319, 321–2, 327–8

361

GENERAL INDEX

Chaucer’s Works  21, 321–2, 324 transcripts by  146–8, 272–3 Stratford 328 Strode, family, of Strood (Kent)  140 n.49 Strode, Ralph  128, 133, 134, 136–8, 140–3 Emma, wife of  140 n.48 Strood (Kent)  140 Sudbury, Simon, archbishop of Canterbury 141 Sudeley family, pedigree of  233, 237 Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse  7, 224 surnames  14, 47 Swaledale (North Yorks.)  79 Syon Abbey  80, 191 Tabula cronicarum Regum Anglie 230 Tale of Beryn  12, 306 TEAMS editions  5, 6, 7 Tempest, Sir William, of Studley  78 n.29 Terence, Comedies 117 Tewkesbury (Glos)  260, 264 Tewkesbury Abbey  260, 262 n.12, 263, 264, 269–70, 272–3 abbots  273, 276 chronicle  260, 271–5 Founders’ Book  21, 259–76, 277–80 Roll of benefactors  265–7 Tewkesbury, battle of  265, 272–3, 274 textual criticism  1, 185 Thoresby, John, archbishop of York  67, 68, 69, 70 catechism of  67, 69 register of  71, 72 Thorney, Roger  148, 149, 150, 153, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171 books owned by  149, 153, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 175 widow of  148 n.6 Three Kings of Cologne  287, 288, 294, 310 Thurgarton Priory (Notts.)  184 Thynne, Francis (1545?–1608), antiquary  21, 272, 318, 319, 321, 323 Animadversions  318, 321 Thynne, John  320

Thynne, William, printer  318, 319–21, 323, 328 Workes of Geffray Chaucer 313, 320–1 Tipperary (Ireland)  60, 61 n.56 Tiptoft, Sir John  221 Toddington Hospital (Beds.)  245 n.19 Toly, William, clerk  111, 112 Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies  2 Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 183 University  1, 329 Toul (France), diocese of  117 Tournai (Belgium)  25, 26, 34 Tours, Robert of, scribe  85 n.14, 88 ‘Treatise on Deadly Sin’  188 Trevisa-Gower scribe  203, 212 Trevisa, John manuscripts of  221 translations De proprietatibus rerum 165 n.50, 176 Polychronicon  165 n.50, 212 n.25, 247–8, 309; indexes to 247–8 Triana, Castle of (Seville)  36 Trinity Anthologies (Trinity College Cambridge MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21) illustrator (‘Illustrator B of Fitzwilliam Museum MS 56’)  149, 152–9, 161–4, 175, 177 scribes Scribe A  8, 9, 14, 146–7, 149, 151–2, 159, 162, 164–75, 178 Scribe B  146 Scribe C  146–7, 149, 153, 159, 164, 165, 169, 175 Scribe D  146–7, 174 Scribe F  148, 173–5 Trinity Gower Scribe B see Trinity R.3.2, Scribe B Trinity R.3.2 (Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.3.2), scribes Scribe A  13 Scribe B  13, 14, 126 n.8 see also Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe; Pinkhurst, Adam

362

GENERAL INDEX

Trinity R.3.2, scribes (continued) Scribe C  13 Scribe D  13, 15, 125, 139, 203, 330, 331 see also Marchaunt, John Scribe Delta  13, 212 n.25 Scribe E  11, 13, see also Hoccleve, Thomas Troyes, Treaty of  117 Twelve Patriarchs  188, 189 Twyne, John, antiquary  317 Underhill, Evelyn  193, 195 universities  136, 242 curriculum 6 Ure, River, valley of  77 Uses, liturgical Rome  25, 26, 29, 30 n.13 Sarum  25, 26, 29, 34, 39, 43, 159, 163, 179, 190 Usk, Thomas  142 Utrecht 161 Vale, John  172, 187 Valor Ecclesiasticus  226 Venus 218–9 Verneuil (France)  36 Vulre, Gervais le, secretary  93, 98, 114, 115 n.81, 118 hand of  113–4, 122, 123 Wales  26, 47, 254 Wales, Edward, Prince of (d. 1471)  91, 96, 264, 265, 266 n.25, 273 n.55 Wales, Edward, Prince of (d. 1484)  264, 266, 275 n.62 Wales, Gerald of, Expugnatio Hiberniae 50 Walle, Roger, scribe  211 n.23 ‘Walling of New Ross’  52, 57 Ware, James  59 warrants  83, 88, 124 Warwick, earls of Edward (1475–99)  263, 265, 266 see also under Beauchamp; Neville Warwick, Guy of  265 Warwick the Kingmaker see Neville, Richard (1428–71) Waterford (Ireland)  20, 47, 54, 59, 62 manuscripts  50, 62 mayor of  51, 52, 59

See also ‘Yung Men of Waterford’ Watton Priory (East Yorks.)  227 Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell  290, 307 Weiss, Roberto  111 Welsh 47 Wensleydale (North Yorks.)  72 n.14, 77, 79 Westminster  88, 135, 137, 171 n.82 documents dated at  68, 115, 123 printers  159, 161–2, 164, 165 scribal production  15, 83, 134, 161 n.35, 162 Westminster Abbey  221 Sanctuary of  12 Westminster, Edward of see Wales, Edward, Prince of (d. 1471) Westminster School  270 Westwyk, John  18 ‘What faithe faileth in prestes sawes’  307, 313 When the Dead Arisen 254 Whitby, naval battle (1451)  250 Whithorne, Elizabeth  315 Wickliff, John see Wyclif, John William I, king of England (William the Conqueror)  223, 229–30, 237, 239 Matilda (d. 1083), wife of  263, 274 reign of  226 William II, king of England (William Rufus)  224, 237 Winchcombe (Glos.)  233 Windsor  88, 103 Windsor Castle  83, 93–4, 103 Witham 12 Wolfe, Reyner, printer  313, 324 Wooton, Thomas, antiquary  317 Worde, Wynkyn de, printer  165, 166, 167, 170 binding 153 exemplars  146, 149, 164–5, 168–70, 173, 175 inheritor of Caxton  149, 165, 167 printed works Assembly of Gods  149, 151, 165 Canterbury Tales 298 Scale of Perfection  195, 199 Siege of Thebes  149, 151, 165 Trevisa  165 n.50 workshops see shops

363

GENERAL INDEX

Wormleighton, manor of (Northants.) 271 Wren Library, Cambridge  7, 8 writs  13, 20, 124, 137 Wyatt, Thomas  327 Wyclif, John  125, 128, 132, 134, 138–43, 325 tracts 125–8, 130, 133–4 See also Petition to the King and Parliament Wycliffism 128 Year-books  159 Yeats, W. B.  46 Yonge, James, notary  50, 58 York  26, 68, 69, 72, 80, 226, 227 Centre for Medieval Studies  5, 285 n.1 churches All Saints Pavement  68 n.3

St Mary and the Holy Angels (Minster Yard)  68, 70 n.10 St Peter ‘le litell’  68 Corpus Christi Guild  227 diocese  20, 69 document dated at  94 St Mary’s monastery  67 see of  184 University  1, 5, 21, 329, 331 Vale of  72 n.16, 74 Yorkshire  74, 75, 78–9 East Riding  76 North Riding  75 n.21, 79, 81 textual transmission in  73–81, 184–9, 227–8 West Riding  78, 189 ‘Yung Men of Waterford’  59 Zouche, William, archbishop of York 70

TABULA GRATULATORIA

Mary-Jo Arn Alexandra Barratt Alana Bennett Johan Bergström-Allen Pete Biller Linda L. Brownrigg Margaret Connolly Orietta Da Rold Martha W. Driver Susanna Fein & David Raybin Richard Firth Green Joel Fredell Daryl Green Monica H. Green Carrie Griffin Ralph Hanna Simon Horobin Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Holly James-Maddocks Michael Johnston Maureen Jurkowski Takako Kato William Marx Daniel W. Mosser Ann Eljenholm Nichols Peter Nicholson Veronica O’Mara Caroline Palmer

Niamh Pattwell † Derek Pearsall Matti Peikola Oliver Pickering Nancy P. Pope Susan Powell Nigel Ramsay Kari Anne Rand Sherry Reames Jane Roberts Martha Dana Rust Michael G. Sargent Corinne Saunders Daniel Sawyer Wendy Scase Sebastian Sobecki Estelle V. Stubbs Toshiyuki Takamiya Andrew Taylor Dan Terkla Elaine Treharne Mari-Liisa Varila Daniel Wakelin Teresa Webber Malcolm White Jocelyn Wogan-Browne R.F. Yeager Lydia Zeldenrust

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