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Literary Codicologies: The Conditions of Middle English Literary Production, c. 1280-1415
by
Helen Marshall
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto
© Copyright by Helen Marshall 2014
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Literary Codicologies: The Conditions of Middle English Literary
Production, c. 1280-1415
Helen Marshall
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
2014
Abstract
This dissertation studies three important textual projects that speak to the conditions of Middle
English literary production from 1280-1415: the West Midlands collection of saints’ lives
compiled at the end of the thirteenth century known as the South English Legendary; NLS, MS
Advocates 19.2.1 (Auchinleck), a compilation of romances, historical and religious texts copied
by six scribes in London in the 1330s; and the Prick of Conscience, an anonymous penitential
treatise from the north of England and one of the most widely produced Middle English texts of
the second half of the fourteenth century. Central to this dissertation is a methodology that
connects techniques of bibliographic description including dialect analysis, comparison of layout
and booklet structure, and identification of scribal hands with a holistic examination of how texts
were produced and circulated. This dissertation argues, firstly, England’s vernacular literary
culture was shaped by the relationship between manuscripts and texts; secondly, that the
manuscript producing activities of secular and religious manuscript users, and of various
institutions (monastic, fraternal, civil), were interpenetrative rather than discrete; thirdly, that the
production of Middle English manuscripts was never isolated from other languages and other
kinds of textual production including documentary production and the production of religious
books; and, fourthly, that England’s vernacular literary culture at the national level depended
iii
upon and emerged from local instances of production, the circulation of manuscripts and texts
beyond their site of production, and the institutional and cultural ties that facilitated the resulting
networks of textual exchange. Although the textual projects under study in this dissertation differ
in date, genre, origin and form, they show how certain elements—local resources, the availability
of exemplars, the organization and training of scribes, and techniques of book-making—
contributed to and sustained the development of a national Middle English literary culture.
iv
Dedication
To my sister Laura who kept me company during the long, dark teatime of the soul.
v
Acknowledgments
I began writing the “Acknowledgements” to this dissertation on April 25th
, 2013—approximately
four months before I handed in my dissertation. I remember the date because it marked a turning
point for me in the way I considered the project: it was the moment at which I passed from the
stage I have almost fondly come to call the “scary middles” to the “end game”—when the date of
submission was set firmly in my mind and the light at the end of the tunnel seemed in sight. But
as I have continued to edit, redraft, reshape, expand, delete, and generally whip into shape this
dissertation, I have returned as much to my “Acknowledgements” as I have every other chapter.
This is because when I was in the “scary middles” it felt like I was alone, and it is only as I
approached the end of that struggle that I was able to see, genuinely, how many people were
there alongside me all the way through and the inexpressible debt of gratitude that I owe them.
This dissertation could not have been written without the tremendous support of my family and
friends who have kept me fed and clothed and as happy as a doctoral student can hope to be. I
want to single out as well the contributions of my adviser Alexandra Gillespie who continues to
amaze me with her dedication to her students and her impressive command of the field. She has
been both an inspiration in times of intellectual discovery and a cattle-prod in times of
exhaustion—in short, she is a force of nature, and it has been my pleasure and privilege to work
with her. Thanks also go to the many scholars who have helped me on my way and served as
guides in their own right at one stage or another in this process: Arthur Bahr, Simon Horobin,
William Robins, David Townsend and Daniel Wakelin. Further to this, I owe a tremendous
thanks to my fellow graduate students (of whom there are many I’ve benefited from), but most
specifically, Peter Buchanan, Emma Gorst, Kathleen Ogden and Christopher Pugh for your
encouragement, your help, and your inspiration. Lastly, I want to thank my those friends who
listened to me babble with both enthusiasm and distress about the project that I was undertaking,
and for providing the necessary hand-holding to get me to the finish line: Tricia George, Jennifer
McDermott, Sandra Kasturi, Michael Matheson, Sophie Roberts, Robert Shearman and Brett
Alexander Savory.
Lastly, I humbly acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council which awarded me an MA-level Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2006, a Ph. D-level
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Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2007, and a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement to
conduct research in England in 2009.
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Table of Contents
Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................... v
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii
List of Plates ................................................................................................................................... x
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ xi
List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................... xii
List of Appendices ....................................................................................................................... xiii
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
1 The Conditions of Middle English Literary Production ............................................................ 1
2 Understanding “English” Writing: The Iceberg Model ............................................................. 6
3 Rethinking England’s National Literary Cultures.................................................................... 12
3.1 National Cultures, National Communities ........................................................................ 13
3.2 National Literary Cultures and the Circulation of Texts .................................................. 15
4 Re-Imagining the Grounds of English Literature ..................................................................... 18
Chapter 1 Models of National Book Production ......................................................................... 24
1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 24
2 Books, Bookmen, and Book-Making in the Middle Ages ....................................................... 27
3 Fragmentation and Miscellaneity? Booklet Culture in Late Medieval England ...................... 45
4 Major Texts, Major Authors .................................................................................................... 56
Chapter 2 “Of Holi Dawes Maked”: Making Early South English Legendaries ........................ 67
1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 67
2 Contexts and Backgrounds ....................................................................................................... 69
2.1 The Authorship of the SEL ............................................................................................... 69
3 Producing the South English Legendaries ............................................................................... 78
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3.1 The “Redactionist” Approach and the “Fluid Corpus” Approach .................................... 78
3.1.1 The Redactionist Approach ................................................................................... 78
3.1.2 The “Fluid Corpus” Approach .............................................................................. 81
3.1.3 The SEL as an Open Compilation ......................................................................... 84
3.1.4 The SEL as a Fixed or Consolidated Compilation .............................................. 101
4 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 122
Chapter 3 “Of Freynsch No Latin Nil Y Tel More”: Assembling the Auchinleck
Manuscript, 1330-1340 .......................................................................................................... 125
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 125
2 Backgrounds and Contexts ..................................................................................................... 128
2.1 A Major Middle English Miscellany .............................................................................. 128
2.2 Chaucer, the Auchinleck Bookshop and Literary History .............................................. 134
2.3 From Monastery to Marketplace ..................................................................................... 141
3 Producing the Auchinleck Manuscript ................................................................................... 152
3.1 The Auchinleck Manuscript and Booklet Production ..................................................... 152
3.1.1 Speculative Production ....................................................................................... 153
3.1.2 Bespoke Production ............................................................................................ 155
3.1.3 Semi-Bespoke Production ................................................................................... 156
3.2 Booklets 2, 3 and 12 as Independent Units ..................................................................... 157
3.2.1 Booklets 2 and 12 ................................................................................................ 158
3.2.2 Collaborative Copying in Booklet 3 ................................................................... 161
3.3 A Model for Producing Auchinleck ................................................................................ 165
4 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 169
Chapter 4 “This Book Oute Blowen”: Disseminating the Prick of Conscience, 1380-1415 .... 173
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 173
2 Contexts and Backgrounds ..................................................................................................... 178
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2.1 Manuscripts and the Development of the Medieval Canon ............................................ 178
2.1.1 The Ripon Manuscripts ....................................................................................... 185
3 Producing the Prick of Conscience ........................................................................................ 195
3.1 Lichfield: A Centre of Vernacular Production? .............................................................. 195
3.1.1 Group IV of the Main Version Prick of Conscience ........................................... 195
3.2 Copying in the Vicinity of Lichfield Cathedral? ............................................................ 202
3.2.1 Producing a Corpus: The Rylands Scribe ........................................................... 203
3.2.2 Concerted Production: The Trinity Scribe .......................................................... 208
3.2.3 Canonizing the Prick of Conscience: The Creation of the Vernon and Simeon
Manuscripts ......................................................................................................... 220
4 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 229
Concluding Thoughts .................................................................................................................. 231
Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 237
Transcriptions of MSS Lm, C, N, Wh ................................................................................... 237
St. Alphege, ll. 39-116 ................................................................................................................. 237
Pilate, ll. 247-262 ....................................................................................................................... 240
St. Mary the Egyptian, ll. 1-64 .................................................................................................... 241
St. Bridget, ll. 5-25, 39-59 ........................................................................................................... 244
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 246
Primary Sources and Editions ................................................................................................ 246
Secondary Sources ................................................................................................................. 252
x
List of Plates
These have been omitted.
xi
List of Figures
Figure 2.1: BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 (Contents by Booklet) .................................................... 86
Figure 2.2: BL, MS Egerton 1993 (Contents by Booklet) ............................................................ 92
Figure 2.3: Quire 4 of BL, MS Egerton 1993 (Contents) ............................................................. 96
Figure 2.4: Alterations to the Banna Sanctorum in BL, MS Egerton 1993 .................................. 97
Figure 2.5: CCCC, MS 145 (MS C) (Contents by Booklet) ....................................................... 105
Figure 2.6: BL, MS Egerton 2891 (MS N) (Contents) ............................................................... 106
Figure 2.7: Leicester, Leicester Museum, MS 18 D 59 (MS Lm) (Contents) ............................ 109
Figure 2.8: Nottingham, University of Nottingham, MS WLC/LM/38 (MS Wh) (Contents) .... 109
Figure 2.9: Comparison of Paraphs ............................................................................................ 110
Figure 2.10: Comparison of Scripts ............................................................................................ 111
Figure 2.11: Comparison of Similar Letterforms ....................................................................... 112
Figure 2.12 Comparison of Different Letterforms ...................................................................... 112
Figure 2.13: Comparison of Dialect Profiles .............................................................................. 113
Figure 3.1: NLS, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (“Auchinleck”) (Contents by Booklet) ........................ 127
Figure 3.2: CCCC, MS 50 (Contents by Booklet) ...................................................................... 144
Figure 3.3: BL, MS Add. 45103 (Penrose Manuscript) (Contents by Booklet) ......................... 146
Figure 3.4: Other Independent Booklets (Contents) ................................................................... 157
Figure 4.1: BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix (Contents by Booklet)................................................... 185
Figure 4.2: BL, MS Harley 4196 (Contents by Booklet) ............................................................ 186
Figure 4.3: Description of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B (Contents) ................................... 207
Figure 4.4: Description of BodL, MS Douce 156 (Contents) ..................................................... 208
Figure 4.5: Characteristics of the Trinity Scribe in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B .............. 209
Figure 4.6: Characteristics of the Trinity Scribe in BodL, MS Douce 156 ................................ 212
xii
List of Abbreviations
BL London, British Library
BodL Oxford, Bodleian Library
Camb. Cambridge (for Cambridge colleges)
CCCC Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
CUL Cambridge, Cambridge University Library
EETS, ES Early English Text Society, Extra Series
EETS, OS Early English Text Society, Original Series
IMEV Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, eds., The Index of Middle
English Verse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); John L.
Cutler and Rossell Hope Robbins, eds., Supplement to the Index of Middle
English Verse (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965).
LAEME A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150-1325, Margaret Laing
and Roger Lass, eds., (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh, 2007),
<http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme1/laeme1.html>.
LALME Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas
of Late Medieval English (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985).
ME Middle English
ModE Modern English
MED The Electronic Middle English Dictionary (based on Robert E. Lewis,
gen. ed., Middle English Dictionary [Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of
Michigan Press, 1953-2001], The Middle English Compendium (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service,
2001), <http://ets.umdl.umich.edu.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/m/med/>.
NLS Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland
OED Oxford English Dictionary Online (based on Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd edn. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994]), (Oxford University
Press, 2005), <http://www.oed.com/>.
xiii
List of Appendices
Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 237
Transcriptions of MSS Lm, C, N, Wh ................................................................................... 237
St. Alphege, ll. 39-116 ................................................................................................................. 237
Pilate, ll. 247-262 ....................................................................................................................... 240
St. Mary the Egyptian, ll. 1-64 .................................................................................................... 241
St. Bridget, ll. 5-25, 39-59 ........................................................................................................... 244
1
Introduction
This dissertation studies three important textual projects that speak to the conditions of Middle
English literary production from 1280-1415: the West Midlands collections of saints’ lives
compiled at the end of the thirteenth century known as the South English Legendary; NLS
Advocates 19.2.1 (Auchinleck), a compilation of romances, historical and religious texts copied
by six scribes in London in the 1330s; and the Prick of Conscience, an anonymous penitential
treatise from the north of England and one of the most widely produced Middle English texts of
the second half of the fourteenth century. Although these textual projects differ in date, genre,
origin and form, they show how certain elements—local resources, the availability of exemplars,
the organization and training of scribes, and techniques of book-making—contributed to and
sustained the development of a national Middle English literary culture.
1 The Conditions of Middle English Literary Production
Over the last twenty years, studies conducted by manuscript scholars Ralph Hanna III, Derek
Pearsall, Julia Boffey, A. S. G. Edwards, Linne Mooney, Elaine Treharne, Kathryn Kerby-
Fulton, Susanna Fein and literary scholars interested in the physical form of texts such as Martha
Rust, Elizabeth Bryan, and Jessica Brantley have drawn attention to the “situatedness” of
medieval literature in a physical context different to that of modern editions. As Pearsall argues
in the introduction to New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies, “codices are no
longer treated as inert witnesses to a culture whose character has already been determined by the
modern scholar, but are active participants in a process of exploration and discovery.”1
Consequently, central to this dissertation is a methodology that connects techniques of
bibliographic description including dialect analysis, comparison of layout and booklet structure,
1 Pearsall, introduction to New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies, xi.
2
and identification of scribal hands with a holistic examination of how texts were produced and
circulated.
Approaches linking bibliographical and literary studies have shed light upon manuscript
production post-1350, a period commonly identified as
a watershed for literary history, when, in the wake of plague and seemingly endless
hostilities with France, a large number of Latin and French texts were newly translated,
and a great many writers who might previously have composed works in Latin or French
began to do so in English—the most famous of them, the well-connected Chaucer.2
Middle English literature emerges during this period, scholars working in this field claim,
because by 1350 English institutions had the cultural capital to underwrite the production,
standardization, and dissemination of texts in the vernacular. It is not until the 1350s, for
example, that scholars first identify the London guilds of the Textwriters and Limners in records,
and later still, in 1373 and 1403 respectively, that the Scriveners and Stationers organized and
amalgamated the interests of some book producers. The previous century and a half, by contrast,
has been remarkably neglected: although scholars such as Treharne and Christopher Cannon
have drawn attention to Middle English literature from 1066-1350 (often described as early
Middle English), few monographs have been devoted to a codicological examination of the
corpus produced in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries. When scholars address
early Middle English literature, they tend to characterize it as “singular and precarious,”
“[isolated] from immediate vernacular models and examples,” “fragmented” and made up of “the
débris of an old literature…mixed in with the imperfectly processed materials of a new.”3 In
current literary history, the “watershed” of the 1350s comes as a fait accompli: the study of the
conditions of literary production which produced this transition from limited to continuous
Middle English production in the fourteenth century remains a noticeable gap. An important goal
of this dissertation, then, is to come to a better understanding of the continuity between the
models for the production and circulation of Middle English texts before 1350 and after; but a
second and equally important goal of my research is to nuance claims regarding the singularity,
2 Gillespie and Wakelin, introduction to The Production of Books in England, 4.
3 Respectively, Hahn, “Early Middle English,” 91; Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 2; Hanna,
“Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 47; and Shepherd, “Early Middle English Literature,” 81.
3
isolation, fragmentation, miscellaneity and dearth of Middle English texts in England’s trilingual
literary culture.
When assessing the conditions of literary production from 1280-1415, I find two main sets of
characterizations that dominate our understanding of Middle English literary culture. The first, as
Cannon argues, identifies the “startling condition” of early Middle English texts in “their
profound isolation from immediate vernacular models and examples, from any local precedent
for the business of writing English.”4 Cannon builds upon the work of Thomas Hahn, who notes
that standard literary histories tend to describe early Middle English writing as “a distinctive,
self-contained phenomenon.”5 Both Cannon and Hahn use the apparent distinctiveness and
isolation of early Middle English writing to contest the persistent marginalization of early
Middle English texts for their general roughness and unfamiliarity to modern readers. For
Cannon, early Middle English texts appear individualistic, anomalous, and strange to the modern
eye because medieval literary categories and “informing” precedents are different from our own
and because early Middle English texts lack a direct or “lineal” relationship to one another.6
Other scholars maintain this sense of a fragmented Middle English literary tradition made up of
anomalous texts prior to 1350. Edwards and Boffey echo Cannon and Hahn when they state that
the extraordinary efflorescence of what has come to be termed “Ricardian poetry” (to
which could be added “Ricardian prose”) constitutes a sudden richness against which the
achievement of much earlier literature looks fragmented and relatively undistinguished.7
One consequence of this is that the division between early Middle English texts and late Middle
English texts has persisted, giving the (false) impression that early Middle English texts are
distinct in part because they were produced on their own: self-contained and isolated from a
tradition (or series of traditions) that would have produced a more commonly recognized and
replicable form.
4 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 2.
5 Hahn, “Early Middle English,” 61.
6 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 3.
7 Boffey and Edwards, “Middle English Literary Writings,” 381.
4
Hanna offers a second approach to understanding Middle English texts and the conditions of
their production which, despite its emphasis on codicological rather than literary forms, overlaps
usefully with Cannon’s. Hanna privileges surviving manuscripts as the fundamental points of
access to medieval literary cultures, and he argues that, in the fourteenth century, England’s
literary culture stemmed from two linked characteristics: vernacularity and miscellaneity. For
Hanna, vernacular modes of book production in the fourteenth century contrast with Latinate
modes of production, which tend to be
supported by clearly demarcatable transmission networks generally supported by one or
another sort of professional affiliation (schools, orders, legal institutions, etc.). These,
almost automatically, prescribe more fixed notions of appropriate literary production, of
canonical texts and presentations.8
Vernacular texts, on the other hand, have “no single literary canon and, consequently, no single
set of institutions to stimulate literary activity and to mandate various forms of more or less
standardized book production.”9 Middle English literature, he argues, constitutes a “fragmented
terrain” shaped by the efforts of “individuals variously inserted into discrete and fragmented
social positions.”10
Hanna’s perspective extends and concretizes Cannon’s approach. Whereas Cannon argues that
the “literary” form of vernacular texts manifests both process and attitude, Hanna sees the shape
of the text as an extension of identifiable physical processes: the dearth of readily available
exemplars forced scribes to alter their production methods, causing them to use, for example,
booklets as tools to divide up copying and delay decisions about the final contents and order of a
given manuscript.11
Likewise, the lack of “clearly demarcatable transmission networks”
contributed to the miscellaneous, anomalous nature of many late medieval English manuscripts
because the uses and reading contexts for those texts would have varied from instance to
instance. Here, Hanna uses the notion of “canonicity” to think about both the processes
motivating manuscript production and the result of those processes. The Latin “canon” of texts,
8 Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 48.
9 Ibid., 47.
10 Ibid., 47.
11 The use of “booklets” in Middle English literary production is a topic I will return to throughout this dissertation. I
lay out Hanna’s theory of booklets in more detail in Chapter 1, Section 3.
5
he suggests, was singular and fixed whereas the Middle English “canon” was fragmented and
shifting. Hanna’s desire to differentiate between Middle English and Latin “canons” (a
problematic term in its own right12
) finds general support, for example, in Rodney Thomson’s
research into the contents of medieval monastic libraries:
In looking at booklists and at the contents of surviving manuscripts of known locality
from [c. 1100-1150], one is immediately struck by the impression of sameness, and if
one’s view were extended to material of the same sort from the Continent, that
impression would not change. The making of books and collections in English religious
houses was part of a pan-European enterprise, in which the “core” books regarded as the
most desirable to possess varied little from centre to centre, or country to country.13
In contrast to the “core” of Latin books held by English religious houses, we cannot identify a
“core” or “canon” of Middle English texts similarly regarded as most desirable to possess.
Nevertheless, this dissertation will argue that the binary opposition between Latin and vernacular
bookmaking cultures represents an oversimplification, one that continues to persist in current
scholarship.
Cannon and Hanna offer useful contributions to our understanding of the conditions of Middle
English literary production, but they do so using frameworks that emphasize singularity,
isolation, fragmentation and paucity. I contrast these approaches with the approach Neil
Cartlidge brings to bear on two thirteenth-century miscellaneous manuscripts: Oxford, Jesus
College, MS NIS 29(II) and BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix. These two manuscripts share nine
Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts in common including the famous Owl and the
Nightingale, several hagiographical texts and a series of religious lyrics.14
Cartlidge notes
scholars frequently look for clues to the social contexts and circumstances of the production of
these two manuscripts in their contents. However, he concludes that the contents of a manuscript
alone are often insufficient to support assumptions about authorship or readership: “One may
speculate,” he writes, “that [these manuscripts] were read in a friary, a convent, a cathedral
chapter, a magnate’s court or the household of a country gentleman; but the contents of the
12 I recognize that the term “canon” has been used loosely in Middle English literary studies. In Chapter 4, Section
2.1 I outline in more detail how the concept of “canonization” might be applied specifically to manuscript
production.
13 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 140.
14 Cf. Cartlidge, “The Composition and Social Context.”
6
manuscripts are not specialized enough to support any of these hypotheses.”15
This conclusion
comes as a corrective to scholars such as Norman Blake who theorized that the contents of a
manuscript could point conclusively to the social forces which produced it.16
According to
Cartlidge, these two manuscripts illustrate the “fluidity of cultural and social identities in this
period.”17
Importantly, he argues,
Perhaps we too readily assume the existence of deep cultural divisions between various
groups in medieval society and should be more willing to recognize the mutual
interrelationship of different types of literary activity.18
Cartlidge’s willingness to open up the social contexts of the two manuscripts offers a different
understanding of Middle English literary culture in the thirteenth century. These two early
Middle English manuscripts were not singular and isolated productions: they were linked by the
circulation of shared texts. Nor do they privilege vernacularity as a special mode of writing, for
they were likely produced in a religious house of some kind where Middle English texts were
read alongside Anglo-Norman and Latin texts. Lastly, they do not show the specialized interests
of certain reading communities, for they may have circulated among the laity or the secular
clergy outside of the institutional setting in which they were produced. Manuscripts such as
Oxford, Jesus College, NIS 29(II) and BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix point toward a complex
literary milieu where the social situations of authors, producers and readers were interpenetrative
rather than discrete and fragmented.
2 Understanding “English” Writing: The Iceberg Model
Building upon Cartlidge’s understanding of Middle English texts, this dissertation argues that the
production of Middle English literature in the period can better be understood according to an
“iceberg model.” Using this model, we can imagine England’s literary milieu(x) to consist of
complex and dynamic interactions between authors, producers and readers in multiple languages
and in a variety of social settings. If we view Middle English texts as self-contained objects (as
15 Ibid., 262.
16 Cf. Blake, The English Language in Medieval Literature, 61.
17 Cartlidge, “The Composition and Social Context,” 262.
18 Ibid.
7
Cannon and Hahn do), then they might appear as isolated outcroppings in the same way that the
spars of an iceberg visible above the surface of the water appear as isolated outcroppings.
However, if we look beneath the surface, we see a massive body that connects these
outcroppings. When we speak of the grounds of English literature, we cannot only look at the
outcroppings; we must take into account the vast set of interrelated activities which undergird
those manuscripts which survive today. I argue that the production of Middle English texts and
books ought to be seen as an extension of, firstly, the production of manuscripts and texts in
other languages such as Latin and Anglo-Norman, and, secondly, other kinds of textual
production including documents and religious manuscripts.
Toward the first point, I find that Cartlidge’s conclusions regarding the fluidity of cultural
boundaries suggest a similar dismantling of rigid paradigms of linguistic separation. For
example, critics such as David Lawton have criticized Cannon’s approach for neglecting
England’s “polyglot cultural space.”19
Elaine Treharne, in particular, has offered an extended
critique of Cannon’s approach: she argues that although Cannon highlights neglected texts of the
early Middle English period, nevertheless, he ignores English writings in over a hundred
surviving codices produced c. 1060-c. 1200.20
Illustrative of this neglect are Cannon’s comments
concerning the period post-Conquest:
Even in the twelfth century most of the survivals in English that we have been willing to
call literary are fragments, snippets of poetry which sneak into texts in other languages.…
No work of literature of any length has been identified until the middle of the twelfth
century (perhaps the earliest is the 700-line Proverbs of Alfred (c. 1150)), but even such
length provides no evidence that a significant vernacular impulse has taken home.21
In this passage, Cannon draws attention to the “fragmentation” of early Middle English texts,
their lack of literary value, and their appearance predominantly in manuscripts of other languages
as evidence that no “significant vernacular impulse” existed during this period. However,
Treharne has shown a significant impulse to produce in the vernacular, although it often takes
19 Lawton, review of The Grounds of English Literature, 821.
20 Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 96-97. For this corpus see Orietta Da Rold, Takako Kato, Mary Swan and
Elaine Treharne, The Production and Use of English, 1060 to 1220 (University of Leicester, 2010):
http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/.
21 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 19.
8
forms neglected by scholars such as Cannon: these texts, she writes “are not poetic; and most are
not original, since the texts are generally based on pre-existing works, particularly homilies and
particularly those of Aelfric.”22
She criticizes a perspective that responds to the modernist
prejudice against translation as an expression of cultural agency.23
Although this dissertation
does not address post-Conquest production (c. 1066-1200) in considerable detail, I want to
acknowledge that the justification for marginalizing works from this early period tend to also be
used by scholars studying the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
A framework that privileges the English vernacular can also skew our understanding of how
manuscripts and texts were produced in the period. Elizabeth Tyler and others have drawn
attention to scholarship spearheaded by Ian Short and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne that challenges
the notion that English literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was synonymous with
literature written in English.24
Ardis Butterfield has drawn attention to the fluidity of meaning of
“French” and “English” as cultural and linguistic categories in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries; Butterfield notes rigid models for understanding language categories like “French” and
“Anglo-French” fall apart into “shifting, porous and, most importantly shared forms.”25
Using an
approach that recognizes the fluidity of cultural and linguistic models, Butterfield addresses
Chaucer’s multilingualism, produced by his position as a francophone reader and by England’s
literary culture in general which she frames as the product of Anglo-French interchange.
Following Tyler, Short, Wogan-Browne and Butterfield, I argue we ought to put pressure on the
privileged place of the English vernacular. Medieval writers had developed specific attitudes
22 Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 95.
23 Lawrence Venuti is one voice critiquing this privileging of originality over adaptation in The Translator’s
Invisibility. Rita Copeland has also contributed to our understanding of how translation and commentary exist at the
ideological nexus of history, authority and power in her important monograph Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and
Translation in the Middle Ages.
24 Cf. Tyler, “Where is the Ground in Literature?” 408-411. For an examination of the role of French in England see,
importantly, Short, “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England” and the edited collection Language and Culture in
Medieval Britain. See also Kibbee’s monograph on a historical perspective of French instruction and usage in
England, For to Speke Frenche Trewely. For an analysis of the distinction between continental and Anglo-French
speakers, see Rothwell, “Arrivals and Departures.” The recent Cambridge Companion to Early Medieval English
Literature does a great deal to address the privileging of the English vernacular in the study of the early English
period by extending the frame of reference to include Latin, Anglo-Scandinavian, Gaelic, Welsh and Continental
literatures.
25 Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, 2.
9
toward vernacular writing, which, as Fiona Somerset points out, sometimes posited the
vernacular as a subaltern or local language or style, one accessible to a non-elite group that
simultaneously marked it negatively as provincial, rustic or rudimentary or, more positively, as
“kynde” or natural, granting the language a symbolic originary status. Nevertheless, Somerset
argues that, in practice, claims about the vernacular were volatile and functioned as rhetorical
devices rather than practical strategies for the creation of books or texts.26
Similarly, Alastair
Minnis argues that medieval Latin was diametrically opposed to Middle English in theory and
not necessarily in practice.27
Scholars including Wicker and Salter have argued that “the
interaction between English and other languages should be considered as complex cultural
processes instead of binaristic confrontations.”28
Although this dissertation takes Middle English
texts as a starting point, I will put these texts in conversation with texts and manuscripts in
Anglo-Norman and Latin in order to undo some of the assumptions regarding vernacular book
production as an inherently special or privileged field of study.
Toward my claim that Middle English literary production ought to be understood as an extension
of other forms of book production, manuscript scholars have become increasingly attentive
toward the interrelationship between documentary production, the production of religious books
such as missals, breviaries, Bibles and the like, and the production of manuscripts containing
literary or poetic texts. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed radical changes in the
spread of literacy, the increased production of civil documents and use of records, and the
corresponding increased production of liturgical books and literary texts first in Latin and Anglo-
Norman, but, by the early fourteenth century, in Middle English as well. Whereas approximately
2,000 charters and writs survive from Anglo-Saxon England, the thirteenth century alone
produced tens of thousands of such materials. The most extensive changes in the proliferation of
documents, Michael Clanchy argues, occurred by the end of the thirteenth century as the
initiative to use documents gradually made its way down the social scale: from kings to barons
26 Somerset and Watson, The Vulgar Tongue, ix-x. For a good discussion of the theory of vernacular writing in
Middle English texts, see Wogan Browne et al, The Idea of the Vernacular.
27 Minnis, Translations of Authority, x-xi.
28 Salter, introduction to Vernacularity in England and Wales, 3.
10
by 1200, to knights by 1250 and to peasants by 1300.29
With this rise of documents, a
corresponding rise in the production of books of both learned and literary works occurred as
religious and laypeople became more comfortable with the habit of using and possessing books
and literacy rates rose.30
Parkes claims that “by 1400 the principal difference between the court
and the increasing bourgeoisie was one of taste, not of literacy.”31
He concludes:
The extent of literacy among the laity of the Middle Ages must always be a matter for
debate, but in my opinion the tendency has been to underestimate it. The general pattern
of the evidence indicates that from the thirteenth century onward increasing reliance and
importance was placed upon the written word. This was accompanied by the growth of
the reading habit, checked only by the high price of a book or by the necessarity to write
it for oneself. The growth of the reading habit gave rise to an increasing literary
awareness.32
By the fifteenth century, for example, a class of gentry readers appears to have arisen including
members such as the Yorkshire landowner Robert Thornton, who assembled his own anthologies
of religious, medical and literary texts.33
I argue that just as we ought not to privilege the vernacular, so too we ought not to privilege the
literary as a fundamentally separate form of production. As I will show throughout this
dissertation, the production of Middle English manuscripts and texts tended to occur in areas
where other forms of book production were concentrated because those areas would be richest in
terms of commercial resources (parchment, vellum, ink), textual resources (available exemplars
and sources), and human resources (trained scribes, bookbinders, illuminators); these resources
would have necessarily been utilized in the production of a range of different kinds of texts and
books, of which literary or poetic texts would only have been a small subset. Speaking to this,
Linne Mooney and others have drawn attention to the potential overlap between categories of
copiers in late-fourteenth-century and early-fifteenth-century London:
29 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 76.
30 A. I. Doyle traced the production of manuscripts for courtly and noncourtly readers in “English Books in and out
of ‘Court.’” For fifteenth-century “middle-class” literacy, see Parkes, “Literacy of the Laity” and Radulescu,
“Literature” in Gentry Culture in Late-Medieval England.
31 Parkes, “The Literacy of the Laity,” 567.
32 Ibid., 571.
33 Cf. Thompson, Robert Thornton and the London Thornton Manuscript.
11
monastic scribes and clerics…. Writers of Court Letter or scriveners, who would be
regulated by the Scriveners’ Company and were notaries public and attorneys;
Textwriters, who would be members of the Textwriters’ and Limners’ Gild, later the
Stationers’ Gild; freelance scribes working full-time at copying but doing so in the
suburbs of London or in liberties within the walls, so they need not be members of the
Stationers’ Gild; and government scribes, who appear to have sometimes worked part-
time as textwriters to earn extra income.34
She emphasizes that those involved in the royal and civic bureaucracy of the city of London
played a major role in the circulation of Middle English texts:
Until mid fifteenth century, then, it appears that the scribes who produced copies of
vernacular literary texts in London and its vicinity were either men who worked freelance
outside the city’s jurisdiction or in liberties within the city, or men who worked as clerks
for various royal or civic offices, taking on copying in addition to their other jobs.35
These professional scribes include Adam Pinkhurst who worked for the Mercers’ Company and
as a clerk of the Guildhall; Thomas Hoccleve who may have worked as a clerk in the Office of
the Privy Seal; John Marchaunt, the Common Clerk of the City from 1399 to 1417, and Richard
Osbern, the Clerk of the Chamber of the City from 1400 to 1438. If we look earlier we may find
a similar connection between the production of books and the production of documents in the
figure of the scribe of BL, MS Harley 2253 who operated from 1314 to 1349. In addition to
copying two other manuscripts—BL, MSS Royal 12.C.xii and Harley 273—this scribe also
copied a number of legal documents. Carter Revard hypothesizes that he may have served as
parish chaplain in Virgin’s Chapel in the parish Church of St. Bartholomew.36
An underlying assumption in my approach, which emerges out of this research into
documentary, religious and literary manuscripts, is that we ought to expand our definition of the
category of “literary” texts to include texts such as the South English Legendary and the Prick of
Conscience which traditionally have been excluded due to assessments of their poor quality or
lack of merit. In his study of medieval English writers, Burrow, for example, eschews any direct
discussion of the Prick of Conscience because he would prefer to “leave grammarians to dispute
34 Mooney, “Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London,” 203.
35 Mooney, “Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and their Scribes,” 206.
36 Revard, “Scribe and Provenance,” 22.
12
whether the Prick of Conscience and the rest are literature.”37
Derek Pearsall too describes it as a
text of “vast length” and only “tediously competent execution,” unable to reconcile its lack of
literary merits with its wide circulation.38
However, over the last twenty-five years manuscript
studies have begun to challenge traditional assumptions about what constituted England’s
literary culture in the late medieval period and scholars such as Hanna have strongly advocated
using manuscript studies to “replace a spent Old Literary History.”39
I want to move away from
traditional evaluations of the literary quality of medieval texts in order to broaden the range of
what we might consider to be part of Middle English literary culture. Scholars such as Hanna and
Steiner have shown, for instance, that the bureaucratic and documentary culture of London
impinged upon literary authors such as Langland and Chaucer in important ways;40
Mooney and
Stubbs’s work on the London Guildhall as a repository for literary texts supports these
connections at a material level.41
Consequently, this dissertation posits that an understanding of
Middle English literary culture must take into account works which blur the distinction between
literary and non-literary categories.
3 Rethinking England’s National Literary Cultures
One final aspect to consider is how scholars think about the emergence of England’s “national”
literary culture in the late Middle Ages. The traditional account of the literary history (Hanna’s
“Old Literary History”) posits that Middle English literary culture developed on a national level
in the late medieval period, with Geoffrey Chaucer as the titular “Father of English Literature”
and England’s first national poet laureate.42
While I agree with many points of this narrative—
37 Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work, 20.
38 Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 139.
39 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 91. Steven Justice’s article “Literary History” in Fein and
Raybin’s edited collection Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches neatly lays out the way in which this has begun to
happen as interest in textual production, reproduction, and transmission have “dispersed settled and overconfident
notions of of both the literary work and its audience” (200).
40 See, for instance, Hanna, London Literature, especially Chapter 2 on London’s legal/bureaucratic culture, and
Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature for the rich intersection between legal
documents and the production of literature.
41 Cf. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City.
42 For an examination of Chaucer’s laureate status and the interdependence of political and poetic authority, see
Scanlon, “Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves.” It is useful to note, as Meyer-Lee does, that it was the poets
practicing after 1400—in particular, John Lydgate—who retroactively fashioned Chaucer as England’s first poet
13
that the circumstances of production at the end of the fourteenth century were different from the
beginning and that the works of Chaucer, at least by the mid-fifteenth century, had obtained a
special cultural status—nevertheless, this dissertation proposes that we re-examine what we
mean by “national” literary culture and how we imagine texts participated in that culture. Here, I
am interested in the mechanics of spread—how a text’s effect on the national literary landscape
must be viewed as related to its ability to reach an audience. I argue England’s vernacular
literary culture at the national level depended upon and emerged from local instances of
production, the circulation of manuscripts and texts beyond their original site of production, and
the institutional and cultural ties that facilitated the resulting network of textual exchange.
3.1 National Cultures, National Communities
When I refer to England’s “national” literary culture, I recognize that although I intend the term
in a primarily geographical sense, it is also inflected by the current critical assessment of
nationalism in the Middle Ages. Traditional assessments of the idea of a national literary culture
have taken as a starting point Benedict Anderson’s influential monograph which locates the
origins of modern nationalism in the late-eighteenth century when a “spontaneous distillation of
a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces” formed a “modular” conception of nationhood
“capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of
social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and
ideological constellations.”43
Medievalists, however, have critiqued Anderson’s characterization
of the medieval period in this study. Lesley Johnson, for example, in her article “Imagining
Communities: Medieval and Modern” criticizes Anderson for idealizing, homogenizing and
mythicizing the medieval past when he characterizes it as a period of pre-nationalist thinking and
imagining.”44
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, similarly, critiques the premise that the nation was only
“emergent” during the Middle Ages; she suggests nationalism in all its forms is always in
process and always emergent rather than contrasting medieval forms of nationalism with modern
laureate. See Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, 25. Cannon similarly demonstrates how historical evaluations of
Chaucer’s linguistic priority are both ambiguous and circular in The Making of Chaucer’s English.
43 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4.
44 Johnson, “Imagining Communities,” 5.
14
forms of nationalism.45
Thorlac Turville-Petre in his monograph England the Nation put forward
an influential expression of how England’s national identity had begun to express itself in the
mid-thirteenth century:
We have seen that the sense of national identity in the mid-thirteenth century expressed
itself in a rich diversity of forms. The nation had a territory, a history, a set of cultural
traditions, a body of legal practices expressed in the Common Law, a single economy
with a common coinage and taxation, and some concept of shared rights, even if that did
not extend very far down the social scale.46
In turn, he identifies this expression of national identity in both the use of English as a literary
language (“The use of English was a precondition of the process of deepening and consolidating
the sense of national identity.”)47
and in a number of important texts (“English texts from this
time are historical works, shaping a sense of nationhood by developing a consciousness of the
nation’s past.”).48
The work of these scholars has been useful for thinking about the emergence
of a Middle English national literary culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But
whereas Turville-Petre’s interest lies in the way elements of the English culture were expressed
or defined through the interrelated use of language (the vernacular) and texts (primarily
historical), my interest lies in how the material form of texts, the relationship of texts to the
means of production and dissemination and the resulting numbers of texts in circulation
contributed to the development of a national community of readers and writers.
My sense of the relationship between regional or national communities and literary production
grounds itself in the notion of “community” which, as Helen Fulton notes, creates “a sense of
common social and cultural identity which resists the territorialism of either nation or region.”49
Brian Stock models this in his study of interpretive communities, communities where the social
organization of a group in some way responds to the literary interpretation of texts. In this case,
the intersections of oral and literate understandings of texts create a network of
45 Akbari, “Orientation and Nation,” 122.
46 Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 8.
47 Ibid., 10.
48 Ibid., 14.
49 Fulton, “Regions and Communities,” 518.
15
interdependencies between the individual and the family, the group and the wider community.50
Both scholars suggest that the production and reading of texts offer a way of creating, sustaining
social relationships within communities. But my interest in this dissertation is not in the
mechanisms by which communities are created by reading, but rather the mechanisms of
production that enable those reading communities to exist—that is, writing communities. I argue
that a literary culture emerges as the production and circulation of texts creates and sustains a
sense of community through reading (or listening to) texts, and that a national literary culture
emerges when this sense of community extends beyond the local and the regional.
3.2 National Literary Cultures and the Circulation of Texts
I find three ways of looking at the relationship between the production and circulation of texts
and the emergence of a national literary culture particularly useful. Michael Sargent in his recent
essay “What Do the Numbers Mean?” questions how we might use the numbers of surviving
manuscripts of a single text to gauge popularity and importance. He suggests that using numbers
is difficult in part because numbers can only offer “a rough indication of the number originally
produced,” and it is difficult to use even the number originally produced “as a gauge of the
demand for copies in that age of bespoke book production.”51
In some cases this rough indication
may be skewed by factors affecting survival such as the durability of certain formats (bound
codices as compared to unbound codices or small-format manuscripts) and the interests of parties
with the resources to ensure a greater chance of survival (monastic libraries, for example). As
Sargent suggests, “the pattern of survival of the manuscripts of a medieval text is independent of
its original pattern of dissemination, to a greater or lesser degree, and for different reasons for
different texts.”52
Furthermore, he argues that production and demand cannot necessarily be
mapped directly onto popularity and cultural importance, and he draws attention to the fact that
the “Jack Straw” and “John Ball” verses were undoubtedly known by a greater number of the
50 Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 530. We might relate this to Fish’s argument: “Interpretive communities are
made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their
properties. In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what
is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” in Is There a Text in This Class?, 14. For a
discussion of reading communities in medieval England, see Scase, “Reading Communities,” 557-73.
51 Sargent, “What Do the Numbers Mean?” 207.
52 Ibid., 208-9.
16
people in England than the Canterbury Tales. Nevertheless, as his study of several texts with
high numbers of surviving manuscripts shows, a comprehensive examination of patterns of
survival and dissemination can offer a good starting point for such inquiries and, in some cases,
can offer insight into the nature of literary “best-sellers”53
in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, provided that we do not impose a “teleological narrative of the eventual ‘success’ or
‘failure’ of an author or text.”54
Secondly, Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs offer a model that maps the relationship of
manuscript production to cultural importance in their recently released book Scribes and the
City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375-1425
where they argue that one aspect of Chaucer’s positioning as the “Father of English Literature”
was that his works “were among those of his generation produced in sufficient numbers to reach
a wider audience.”55
From their work, we can see how the success of texts such as Piers
Plowman and the Canterbury Tales, which survive in high numbers, might be plausibly
connected to the means of production. In a ground-breaking article Mooney identified one of the
scribes working on the Ellesmere and Hengwrt copies of the Canterbury Tales as Adam
Pinkhurst, a professional who also worked for the Mercers Guild. She discovered his hand in a
number of other documents including the famous 1387/8 petition of the Mercers to the King’s
Council and the Common Paper of the London Company of Scriveners (1392). She posits that
Pinkhurst had a “close working relationship with Chaucer” and that Chaucer
established one model for control over the publication of his works through employing
over a long period of time [the mid-1380s to the end of his life] a single well-trained and
trusted scrivener, Adam Pinkhurst, to write out the first fair copies of his works.56
53 I recognize that in borrowing the phrase from Sargent I am making use of a somewhat anachronistic term in part
because the term “best-seller” suggests a specific way of thinking about the book trade that is largely shaped by the
advent of the printing press and the development of a “market” for books. In this case, then, I am using the term
“best-seller” to indicate the potential popularity of a text as inferred from the quantity of extant manuscripts. “Best-
seller” in this case does not necessarily imply literary quality (either positively or negatively), but rather suggests a
relationship between a text, the size of the potential audience, and the means of production.
54 Ibid., 222.
55 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, publisher’s blurb.
56 Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” 120, 122, respectively.
17
Edwards, Gillespie and Horobin have argued strenuously against the position that Pinkhurst was
Chaucer’s personal scribe, instead suggesting that he produced Chaucer’s works without direct
authorial oversight.57
Although scholars have noted that the evidence for Chaucer’s working
relationship with Pinkhurst is circumstantial, nevertheless, the identification of Adam Pinkhurst
prompted a renewed interest in the identification of scribes and the exploration of their
immediate milieu as a way to recover the network of producers, patrons and authors that might
allow an author to become a “best-seller.”58
In Chaucer’s case, we can imagine an individual
who was well-positioned to succeed because of his proximity to both cultural centres of power
(the court) and to an emerging network of copiers (the royal and civic bureaucracy, clerks of the
Guildhall, etc.).
But the numbers of texts and even position to centres of power and networks of production are
insufficient alone to explain Chaucer’s success. A third aspect which interests me is how
elements of the material form of texts condition their reception as cultural objects. Within
fourteenth-century literary production, these aspects of the text would have been performed by
the physical manuscript.59
The configurations of spatial representation, the deployment of titles,
running headers, images, initials, the inclusion of attributions, authorial or authoritative—these
elements of book form condition a text to be read as either canonical or spurious. My reading of
the function of the material form of the text takes a cue from Gillespie’s argument that
representations of Chaucer and Lydgate as authors mediated the process by which books were
produced in commercial contexts and shaped the culture of late medieval England. Drawing
heavily upon Bourdieu, Chartier, and Lerer, she posits that the figure of the author “organizes
57 For the debate regarding the significance of the identification, see Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words to
Adam,” Edwards, “Chaucer and ‘Adam Scriveyn’” and Roberts, “On Giving Scribe B a Name.” For further
modifications to Mooney’s proposal, see Horobin, “Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt
Manuscript” and “Manuscript and Scribes.”
58 For a guide to identifying hands, see Mooney, “Professional Scribes?” in New Directions in Medieval Manuscript
Studies. For an important exchange regarding the criteria for identifying scribal hands, particularly in relationship to
Pinkhurst, see Fletcher, “The Criteria for Scribal Attribution” and Horobin’s rebuttal and re-examination in “The
Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Reconsidered.” Of particular interest in the work of Gillespie, Roberts, and Fletcher
is the way in which a notion of “canonicity” has become attached to the copying of Adam Pinkhurst, a topic I return
to in Chapter 4.
59 I acknowledge that these aspects of the text might also have been performed by oral/aural/performative
dimensions of texts, which are in many cases not as easily recovered. For an excellent study of the fragments of oral
poetics discoverable in the poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition.
18
and markets textual material, assigns it value, licenses it, sanctions it, or marks it out as illicit.”60
Printers made use of the idea of Chaucer as author to assign “a particular value to the goods they
sold” but, at the same time, this value was not fixed; it was “available for the multiple
determinations of multiple customers, for the assignment of new values and the overturning of
intended ones.”61
It must be noted that the dynamics of commercial book production in print
culture are different in important ways from the dynamics of manuscript culture. In a period in
which many texts were anonymous, however, other features of the book performed the function
of organizing, marketing, sanctioning and assigning value to the text. Although these differences
in context must be noted, Gillespie’s approach shows features of the book conditioned its
cultural value and allowed for participation in England’s literary culture.
The approaches offered by Mooney and Stubbs, Sargent and Gillespie, when placed in
productive conversation with one another, begin to sketch out a way to understand the conditions
of book production that supported the slow and uneven emergence of Middle English literary
culture in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sargent suggests that although the
numbers of surviving manuscripts can only be a rough guide to “popularity” and “importance,”
nevertheless a holistic approach to a text’s manuscript tradition offers some indications of the
places and periods in which production was most concentrated. Mooney and Stubbs show that
underpinning these concentrated moments of production are recoverable networks of textual
exchange between poets, patrons and producers. Lastly, Gillespie argues elements of the book
itself speak to how producers envisaged the cultural status of the texts they copied and the books
they made.
4 Re-Imagining the Grounds of English Literature
In many ways, then, this sense of the development of England’s national literary community
throughout the fourteenth century comes as a corrective to Cannon’s sense of literary history
developed in The Grounds of English Literature. For Cannon, the twelfth, thirteenth and early
60 Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, 5. Her framework depends particularly upon Bourdieu who
argues “it can only be an unjustifiable abstraction...to seek the source of the understanding of cultural productions in
these productions themselves, taken in isolation and divorced from the conditions of their production and
utilization” in Homo Academicus, xvii. Gillespie augments the conclusions of Lerer’s study Chaucer and his
Readers in which he elucidates how Chaucer was created as a “canonical” figure in the fifteenth century.
61 Ibid., 16.
19
fourteenth centuries offered works produced in “splendid isolation” which are to be valued by
scholars “above all for [their] rarity.”62
From the mid-fourteenth century onward, and
exemplified by the production of the Auchinleck romances, he argues, the “richness” of English
literature came to an end
as literary variety was replaced by a single idea of literature and, thus, a single, normative
form.…Such a dramatic change was only possible as English writing came to assume
some aggregated shape, as there was finally enough writing in English for all of that
writing to constitute a form—in short, for literature in English to have achieved that
“primitive accumulation” sufficient to produce a “revolution.”63
Like Cannon, I argue that England’s Middle English literary culture arose (or accumulated)
slowly and unevenly throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, fostered in areas such as
London, York, Worcester and Gloucester, to name a few, where there existed sufficient
resources and sufficient demand to produce books in numbers.64
A national literary community
emerged as these local or regional pockets of production became connected through the
circulation of manuscripts and texts and the movement of scribes and as an effort was made to
stabilize and replicate the form of some texts. However, Cannon frames his discussion of this
change from variety to a single, normative form through the study of Middle English romances,
which he argues are important because “for the first time after the Conquest, some writing in
English actually knows of such multiplicity.”65
My approach differs from Cannon’s in that I do
not believe it was only during the fourteenth century that English writings were sufficiently
numerous in a single genre to form an aggregated shape, but that this appears to have happened
with more frequency in the late Middle Ages.66
Nor do I believe that this aggregated shape ever
62 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 11, 9, respectively.
63 Ibid., 13.
64 The scholarship regarding regional production of English books in the Middle Ages is substantial. A selective list
I have found particularly useful includes Scase’s edited volume Essays in Manuscript Geography; Hughes, Pastors
and Visionaries; Friedman, Northern English Books; and Hanna, London Literature. Certain regions including the
West Midlands (Chapter 2), London (Chapter 3) and the north (Chapter 4) will be discussed in more detail
throughout this dissertation.
65 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 173.
66 Here, again, I would refer the reader to Treharne’s comments on the presence of over 200 manuscripts containing
English homilies in the post-Conquest period in Living Through Conquest.
20
fully replaced literary variety or produced a single, normative form; rather, this aggregated shape
was flexible, in flux, continually produced and continually resisted.
Thus far, I have laid out four central premises which constitute my understanding of England’s
vernacular literary culture from 1280-1415. To summarize briefly, they are as follows:
1. England’s vernacular literary culture was shaped by the relationship between
manuscripts and texts.
2. The manuscript-producing activities of secular and religious manuscript users, and of
various institutions (monastic, fraternal, civil), were interpenetrative rather than
discrete.
3. The production of Middle English manuscripts was never isolated from other
languages and other kinds of textual production including documentary production
and the production of religious books.
4. England’s vernacular literary culture at the national level depended upon and
emerged from local instances of production, the circulation of manuscripts and texts
beyond their site of production, and the institutional and cultural ties that facilitated
the resulting networks of textual exchange.
There were numerous obstacles to the development of this national Middle English literary
culture including dialect difference, the limited production resources employed for Middle
English texts, and an initial absence of certain elements that might condition a text to be received
as canonical such as the attribution of the text to an author. Nevertheless, certain texts such as
Piers Plowman, the Prick of Conscience and the Canterbury Tales reached a critical threshold
where they were produced in substantial numbers to overcome those resistances to a lesser or
greater extent.67
Throughout this process, texts—even those texts produced in sufficient numbers
that they began to achieve a certain recognizable cultural or “canonical” status68
—remained in
flux as they were rewritten, reshaped and their cultural status re-imagined in response to local
67 For a discussion of the numbers and circulation of these texts, see Sargent, “What do the Numbers Mean?”
68 For a sense of the “canonization” of certain medieval texts or authors, we can examine, for example, the lists of
romances in the Auchinleck King Richard (ll. 7-28), or the Speculum Vitae (ll. 40-45) or the Laud Troy Book (ll. 15-
21). We might also turn to John Lydgate’s list of authors comparable to Chaucer in the “An Envoy to Duke
Humphrey” (ll. 3401-14) from Book 9 of the Fall of Princes.
21
reading communities. This “accumulation” of texts—witnessed both by the extant manuscripts
and from what we can glean about their production and circulation—does not represent the end
of experimentation, but rather the point at which authors began to react increasingly to literature
written predominantly in English as opposed to in French or Latin, although Middle English
literature still remained in dialogue with the literatures of those languages well into the fifteenth
century. As such, England’s national literary culture was never singular nor stable: rather it was
the shifting and contested aggregate of a series of local moments of textual production and
transmission.
Chapter 1 entitled, “Models of National Manuscript Production,” builds upon these four premises
by examining in more detail the institutions and individuals who produced English manuscripts
and texts in the late Middle Ages, thereby laying the groundwork for the analysis of individual
textual projects in the subsequent three chapters. By examining the roles and practices of
religious and lay scribes from 1100-1400, I argue that the same models used to produce Latin
and Anglo-Norman manuscripts were also used to produce Middle English manuscripts. One
model which I will attend to in some detail involves the production and circulation of small-
format manuscripts—sometimes called booklets—alongside full codices. I argue that “booklet
theory” as put forward by Pamela Robinson, Hanna and Gillespie offers us a way to imagine
England’s lost culture of ephemeral texts, a culture that is frequently neglected because fewer
small-format manuscripts survive. In the final section of this chapter, I demonstrate the way in
which the models for producing and disseminating several important Middle English texts such
as the Ormulum, the Ancrene Wisse, Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne and Story of England
and, lastly, the works of Richard Rolle may have determined or restricted their participation in
England’s literary culture.
Chapter 2 examines early Middle English literary culture (1280-1350) by means of the South
English Legendary, a text for which early survival rates are particularly high in comparison to
other Middle English texts from the first half of the fourteenth century. The chapter will address
how the circulation of the South English Legendary in the Southwest Midlands models two ways
of regarding Middle English books: as “open” compilations subject to intervention, emendation,
revision, and addition at various stages of production, and as “closed,” “fixed” or “canonical”
entities to be reproduced and circulated in a single, consolidated form. I argue that the adaptation
of both ways of thinking about Middle English texts contributed to the success of the collection,
22
on the one hand by allowing adaptation to local circumstances and on the other by facilitating
reproduction, likely within the context of an institutional setting. In the final section, I argue that
two manuscripts and two fragments of the South English Legendary produced from 1310-20 may
have originated in an Augustinian scriptorium.
In Chapter 3 I turn from a single text that circulated widely with many extant witnesses to a
single major Middle English miscellany: NLS, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (Auchinleck). The chapter
reacts against scholarship which frames the Auchinleck manuscript as an “originary” or
“anticipatory” moment in the history of English literature as a precursor to Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales. Discussions of its codicology and possible circumstances of production have been used to
support a narrative of English literary history which sees the rise of middle class consumers, the
development of a bold and confidant vernacular voice and the triumph of secular literature over
monastic literature: that is, a transition from the monastery to the marketplace. This chapter will
broaden Auchinleck’s context by positioning it as an extension of Anglo-Norman and Latin
book-making activities rather than an isolated phenomenon and also by demonstrating how
books like Auchinleck were commissioned, produced and read by religious as well as laypeople.
Lastly, this chapter will re-examine the booklet structure of Auchinleck to suggest that four
booklets may have been initiated outside of the original plan for the codex, further linking the
manuscript to a “compilatory” culture in which small-format manuscripts were used to build up
larger codices.
In Chapter 4 I address one of the most overlooked texts in Middle English studies: the penitential
treatise known as the Prick of Conscience, which emerged from the north of England in the mid-
fourteenth century. Despite the survival of over 120 manuscripts and fragments—forty of which
likely date from the fourteenth century alone—few monographs have been devoted to its study
exclusively and little has been done to gauge its participation in and effect on England’s
vernacular literary culture.69
This chapter argues that the Prick of Conscience was one of the first
Middle English texts to achieve sufficient “critical mass” to become a “national text” in the sense
that I have been using the term. The earliest surviving manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience
69 The first and only edition for close to one hundred and fifty years was Richard Morris’s The Pricke of Conscience
(Stimulus Conscientiae).This has been aided by the recent publication of a TEAMS edition, from which I draw all
my quotations, edited by James H. Morey and a soon to be published edition undertaken by Hanna and Sarah Wood,
both of which, one hopes, will greatly facilitate scholarly engagement with the text.
23
were a regionally coherent group whose production and dissemination were centred in Yorkshire
and the north, but it is clear that the manuscripts of the second half of the fourteenth century
quickly spread throughout England, showing large concentrations in the West Midlands near
Lichfield, and as far south as Wiltshire and Sussex.70
I will examine two clusters of scribes
copying multiple manuscripts including the Prick of Conscience in the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries. Firstly, I will look at a cluster of canons identified by Ralph Hanna who
collaborated on four manuscripts of northern religious texts in Ripon. Secondly, I will turn to
Lichfield, one of the most active copying clusters of the period. I will use these two examples to
discuss the models by scribes who selected, replicated and disseminated the Prick of Conscience
as a cultural object with increasing prestige attached to it in England’s literary culture. My
investigation into the Lichfield scribes will, in turn, shed light upon Richard Scrope, Bishop of
Lichfield and Chester from 1386 to 1398, as a possible patron for the production of the Vernon
and Simeon manuscript, two of the largest and most elaborately decorated Middle English
manuscripts of the fourteenth century.
It might be noted that in choosing these three textual projects, I have avoided two of the most
well-known texts of the period: Langland’s Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
This choice is deliberate. The corpus of scholarship investigating the textual traditions and means
of production of these two texts is deservedly extensive and has, in many ways, framed or
underwritten my study; however, in choosing the South English Legendary, the Auchinleck
manuscript and the Prick of Conscience I have purposefully selected texts that might be seen to
occupy the interstitial space between literary and non-literary, between secular and religious,
between commercial and non-commercial paradigms. In studying these three works, I have come
to understand medieval literary production as a complex phenomenon which continually thwarts
rigid schematization and rewards a flexible and interdisciplinary approach grounded in an
understanding of the particular “situatedness” of medieval texts in their manuscript context.
70 This understanding of manuscript production and dialect spread is common. Linne Mooney describes it as the
“big bang” of distribution of Middle English texts: that is, earlier copies originated closest to the author and then
spread further if the work attracted sufficient attention to warrant it. See Mooney, “Vernacular Literary Manuscripts
and their Scribes,” 206.
24
Chapter 1 Models of National Book Production
1 Introduction
This chapter aims to provide an overview of the models of national manuscript production in
England, and, thereby, to lay the groundwork for the analysis of individual vernacular textual
projects in Chapter 2 on the South English Legendary, Chapter 3 on the Auchinleck manuscript,
and Chapter 4 on the Prick of Conscience. The argument I pursue in this chapter has three related
components: firstly, that the production of Middle English books did not necessarily take place
on the margins of English society but rather it tended to originate from areas where other forms
of book-making were centralized; secondly, that the models used to organize the production of
Middle English manuscripts and texts were in many cases similar to the models used to organize
the production of Latin and Anglo-Norman books; and, thirdly, that the ad hoc production,
circulation and compilation of small-format manuscripts both invigorated Middle English literary
culture and provided the connective tissue between sites of production.
Toward the first point, a key theme I want to pursue in this chapter is the idea of the
“marginalization” of Middle English book production. Here, I take Boffey and Edwards’s
comments below as reflective of a general trend in medieval studies to frame Middle English
writing as inherently marginal. When analysing the Auchinleck King Richard, Boffey and
Edwards note that Middle English authors tend to preface their use of the vernacular in the form
of an apology:
Such comments reveal a consciousness of marginalization that is reflected geographically
in terms of the evidence of manuscript production for literary texts in English. This
evidence suggests that these texts, at least in the early part of our period, very often
originated in those areas farthest removed from the influence of Anglo-Norman culture,
in particular remote from London and the surrounding area. It is only towards the end of
the period that metropolitan networks and processes can be perceived as dominant
models for the manufacture of manuscripts, and as significant alongside the linguistic and
25
literary aspects of cultural production. Up to this point, monasteries and other religious
institutions had remained important as preservers and transmitters of a vernacular cultural
heritage.71
What interests me about Boffey and Edwards’s comments is the way they position the
production of texts in monasteries and other religious institutions as geographically marginal
(and, thereby, culturally marginal) in comparison with the metropolitan networks and processes
of book production established for Middle English texts by the end of the fifteenth century. This
perspective is not entirely uncommon, particularly if we limit our field of inquiry to traditional
Middle English “literary” texts such as the works of Chaucer or Langland—in which case, even a
cursory glance at the evidence reveals that London is the major centre of production at the end of
the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth century.72
The studies of textual networks in
London conducted by Linne Mooney, Estelle Stubbs, and Simon Horobin in their Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project to identify the scribes involved in major
late-medieval English manuscripts tend to bear out this research. Increasingly, it seems possible
to understand London’s literary milieu as a community of identified people such as John
Marchant and Richard Osbarn whose relationships can be pinpointed with more precision.73
Within these studies, London continues to play a significant role, although Mooney, Stubbs,
Horobin and others would agree that London was not the only place where Middle English
literary production occurred.74
As early as the 1980s, A. I. Doyle recognized that the
metropolitan book-trade overlapped with other forms of manuscript production that did not take
place in London.75
Further to this, one might argue, as Hanna does, that up until the mid-
71 Edwards and Boffey, “Middle English Literary Writings,” 382.
72 For this position, see Mooney, “Locating Scribal Activity” and also Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City.
73 Important among these are the Late Medieval English Scribes project, based at the University of York and
directed by Mooney, Horobin and Stubbs (http://www.medievalscribes.com/); the Manuscripts of the West Midlands
project, based in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham and directed by Wendy Scase
(http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/mwm/); the Manuscript Studies in an Interoperable Digital Environment project based
at the University of Toronto,and John Hopkins Univerity and directed by Alexandra Gillespie and Stephen Nichols
(http://www.stanford.edu/group/dmstech/cgi-bin/drupal/). For the identifications and discussions of the Guildhall
scribes, see Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City. To the manuscripts indicative of networks of production
identified by these projects, I would add Hanna’s useful handlist in “Pre-Fifteenth-Century Scribes.”
74 For one example, see Horobin’s identification of a Chichester scribe responsible for copying Piers Plowman in
“The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137.”
75 Doyle, “Retrospect and Prospect,” 145.
26
fourteenth century, the great majority of book production took place outside of London.76
It took
place where the resources necessary for book production were most concentrated: in the twelfth
century, it took place chiefly in areas where religious institutions had established concerted
programmes of book-making; in the thirteenth century, it had expanded to include centres such
as Oxford and, to a lesser extent, Cambridge, where the book trade developed in response to the
demand for texts associated with the university; and in the fourteenth century it expanded again
to include other centres of the civic bureaucracy such as London in addition to those locales
previously mentioned.
I want to return to Boffey and Edwards’s comment, then, that the production of Middle English
texts within religious houses during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was somehow a
geographically or culturally marginal activity. To me, this does not seem to be the case because
religious houses were major centres of textual culture before metropolitan book production
became the dominant paradigm. As a result, I would like to reformulate this characterization to
stress that Middle English texts produced in religious houses were not at the periphery of
England’s literary culture but were, instead, at the centre of it. My point is not to criticize Boffey
and Edwards’s excellent overview; rather, I suggest there is a danger in the way that critics
commonly define the “centres” and the “margins” of book production in the Middle Ages. In this
chapter, one of my goals is to dismantle to some extent the paradigm that frames Middle English
book production as marginal and, instead, to position these book-making activities as more
closely aligned to the centres of intellectual thought than we typically credit.
My investigation of models of book production begins in the eleventh- and twelfth-century
monasteries and cathedrals during the heyday of the monastic scriptoria when major
programmes of production and acquisition saw the development of the models of book-making
that would stock the great libraries of Britain with books over the space of several hundred years.
As part of this line of inquiry, I will examine the role of professional scribes in the production of
books within religious scriptoria and in commercial centres. Throughout this examination, I
track the trajectory of Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts within monasteries and religious
institutions to show how they are an extension of England’s predominantly Latinate culture of
76 This is one of the central theses of Hanna’s monograph, London Literature.
27
book production. In the subsequent section of this chapter, I pursue a related line of inquiry: that
an important way of producing and circulating Middle English texts in the late Middle Ages was
by means of small-format manuscripts such as rolls, unbound quires or booklets. Small-format
manuscripts, I will argue, provided the connective tissue between production in different
localities because they could be produced cheaply and they could circulate easily.
2 Books, Bookmen, and Book-Making in the Middle Ages
The most well-known model for manuscript production in the Middle Ages is the monastic
scriptorium. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed major programmes of pan-European
book production in scriptoria; consequently, it was during this period that the majority of those
early institutional libraries were stocked with Bibles and liturgical books, the major texts of the
Church Fathers, Latin classics, histories, scholastic textbooks and a range of Latin literary
texts.77
By the thirteenth century, monastic book production had slowed as the need to provide
large quantities of new books for the libraries themselves had generally diminished.78
Book
production during this phase ceased to be, as Thomson calls it, a “corporate enterprise”—that is,
a concerted and regular effort to produce new books sponsored at the institutional level.79
Instead, production shifted out of scriptoria and into lay workshops most frequently found in
urban centres such as London, York and Oxford.
There are two general, related qualifications to this narrative that I will pursue throughout this
section. The first is a terminological one: that although monastic scriptoria did flourish during
77 Examples of this phase of production can be seen, for example, in the Benedictine monastic cathedral at Rochester
which saw the initial phase of production occur between 1107-1123, under the guidance of Archbishop Ernulf who
expanded the library and scriptorium. See Richards, Medieval Library of Rochester Cathedral Priory and Waller’s
unpublished dissertation, The Library, Scriptorium and Community of Rochester Cathedral Priory. For other
examples, see Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral; Gibson et al, The Eadwine Psalter and
Mynors, Durham Cathedral Manuscripts.
78 This view was put forward by Denholm-Young in Handwriting in England and Wales and by Bell in “Monastic
Libraries: 1400–1557.”
79 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 168. Institutions like the Cistercian abbey of Buildwas and
the Augustinian priory of Llanthony Priory, for example, appear to have produced fewer and fewer books as
demonstrated by a survey of surviving book lists and catalogues. On Buildwas, see Sheppard, The Buildwas Books.
Sheppard notes that the last major copying campaign at Buildwas took place between 1200-1230 (liii). For
Llanthony Priory, see Bennett, The Book Collections of Llanthony Priory.
28
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, even during this phase there was no singular model for what a
scriptorium might look like, how it might be organized, what physical space it might occupy,
who worked there and how its book-making activities might relate to purchasing, lending and
donation of other manuscripts used by the members of the monastery. Rodney Thomson offers a
good description of what an eleventh-century scriptorium, broadly designated, might entail:
In some instances, notably at St Albans Abbey, it could mean an actual room or building,
dedicated staff who might be paid professionals, not themselves monks, and continuously
operating infrastructural support, such as specially allocated revenues. A scriptorium of
this sort might operate, more or less continuously, for fifty years or more, and it might
produce work on commission, for other communities or for individual prelates who were
not members of the house itself. But this was probably rare. In most cases, one suspects,
copying was done by the monks themselves, each new generation trained up by an older
and skilled man, and the work ceased as soon as the community was felt to have adequate
library resources, maybe after two to four decades.80
Thomson admits a fair amount of flexibility in his usage; instead of defining a scriptorium in
terms of its physical location, he draws attention to the sense of organization and training that
would have gone on in these communities. As Parkes argues, rooms described literally as
scriptoria were rare. In the eleventh century, the abbot of St Albans built what he identifies as a
“scriptorium” above the chapter house to accommodate itinerant scribes, but otherwise the word
is not commonly used.81
In many cases scribes would not have worked together in a single room.
Some copying may have taken place in a scribe’s cell as is the case for Carthusian monks.82
Copying may also have taken place in individual carrels, each of which would have been
furnished with a seat, desk and bookshelf or cupboard. For example, in St. Peter’s Abbey,
Gloucester, stone partitions for scribal carrels were built in the south aisle of the cloister at the
end of the fourteenth century.83
All of these activities might be broadly considered to take place
within a scriptorium as many scholars use the term today. Even at St Albans where a
“scriptorium” did exist, monks did not only produce manuscripts for their own use. Matthew
Paris, a monk of St Albans, was a notable producer of manuscripts and texts in the thirteenth
century: he produced books both for the monastery itself and was involved in the production of
80 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 141.
81 Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes, 24.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
29
books for aristocratic households such as that of the Countess of Winchester, for whom he may
have acted as a commissioning agent or consultant.84
As Rickert suggests, he may have directed
the St Albans scriptorium in addition to working with outside artists.85
The problem with the usage of this general term can be seen when the model of the scriptorium
is adapted to a lay environment. David Ross, for example, theorizes that two manuscripts—BL,
MS Lansdowne 782 and Camb., Trinity College, MS 0.9.34—“point to a single workshop as
their place of origin” and, thus, they appear to offer evidence of “the existence of a lay
establishment specialising in the copying and illustration of secular Anglo-Norman literature in
the second quarter of the thirteenth century.”86
Here, Ross implicitly adapts the model of the
religious scriptorium in the traditional sense—that is, a single, self-contained place of
production—to a lay establishment.87
Similarly, Laura Hibbard Loomis posits that the
Auchinleck manuscript was produced in a lay operation modelled upon a monastic scriptorium,
which she designates as a bookshop:
For convenience, this hypothetical lay centre where went on, whether under one roof or
not, the necessarily unified and directed work of compiling, copying, illuminating, and
binding any book, is here called a bookshop.88
I discuss both of these examples in more detail in Chapter 3, but the point I want to make here,
following upon the excellent work done by Parkes and Doyle on the metropolitan commercial
production of books in the early fifteenth century, is that the term scriptorium is often used
imprecisely, suggesting predominantly some form of “corporate enterprise” or organized
collaboration; however, the kind of production that resulted in each of these manuscripts was
likely of a different sort than the kind of production that Thomson describes.89
For example,
84 See, for example, Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS E.I.40, which includes inscriptions in Matthew Paris’s own
hand in French relating to the lending of books to the Countess of Winchester.
85 Rickert claimed that the scriptorium at St Albans was “under the tutelage of Matthew Paris” in Painting in
Britain, 122.
86 Ross, “A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman Workshop,” 693, 694.
87 Taylor, however, notes that these manuscripts were as likely to have been produced in a “scribal quarter” as in a
“single large-scale workshop” in “Manual to Miscellany,” 4.
88 Loomis, “A Possible London Bookshop,” 597.
89 Doyle and Parkes have argued against adapting the idea of a lay scriptorium to the production of English literary
works, suggesting instead that production was ad hoc rather than organized, with scribes working in small
30
although the Auchinleck manuscript was produced as a result of the collaboration of six scribes,
we do not know how this collaboration was organized and whether or not it was monitored, and
there is little evidence of “in-house” training.90
Mooney and Stubbs argue that whereas
previously scholars speculated that the manuscripts of Chaucer, Gower, Trevisa and Langland
were copied in lay scriptoria, in fact they were produced in an ad hoc fashion by clerks at the
London Guildhall rather than through an organized program of book-making.91
Likewise, the
most we can say about the two manuscripts Ross draws attention to is that they exhibit similar
styles of decoration. In this case, it might be better to describe the production arrangement as that
of an atelier. We might liken the production arrangement responsible for these manuscripts to
that of the artists from the Queen Mary Psalter group who worked on a number of books
including the London manuscript Liber legum antiquorum regum in 1321. There is, at this point
in time, little evidence for a joint, shared space. It is likely that rather than a full-scale workshop,
these books were decorated by two painters, one of whom was a peripatetic atelier from East
Anglia.92
In the case of Ross’s “workshop,” we might say, instead, that these artists were part of
the same “school” or were trained together although these terms themselves are imprecise and
warrant further discussion in Chapter 2 where I examine a possible scriptorium which may have
produced multiple manuscripts of the South English Legendary.
In order to bring more precision to my own use of the term scriptorium, I follow Jean-Pascal
Pouzet who suggests we attend to the “multiple and shifting” sites of book production and think
of scribal space itself as “mobile and flexible.”93
Consequently, my own usage throughout this
dissertation ought to be understood to mean
not so much a fixed physical space but rather as a conjunction of “scriptorial facilities”,
defined as the ad hoc resources which an individual or group of individuals undertake to
workshops of one or two on a freelance basis. See Doyle and Parkes. “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury
Tales and the Confessio Amantis.”
90 For a summary of the current scholarship regarding the production of the Auchinleck manuscript, see Chapter 4.
91 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 1.
92 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 96.
93 Pouzet, “Book Production Outside Commercial Contexts,” 228.
31
invest in book production. These can be moveable and versatile, single-handed or
cooperative, and may depend on institutional support or talent.94
Even in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when these “scriptorial activities” were most
organized, there was still no single model for a monastic scriptorium.
The second, related qualification I wish to make is that many traditional accounts of monastic
scriptoria tend to insist too firmly on Hanna’s distinction between the stability, fixedness and
organization of Latin manuscript production contrasted against the untidiness of vernacular
production. While I have noted that there is a general impression of uniformity in the holdings of
medieval monastic libraries, nevertheless, the processes by which the monasteries came to
acquire these books and the rate at which they acquired them could have been quite different.
Thomson argues that even during the heyday of monastic production, the facts relay
an impression of random, uncoordinated book-making.…At some places copying of
books and the building up of a substantial collection scarcely seems to have begun before
the early twelfth century. At others a start was made very quickly.95
As a result, we ought not to depend too heavily upon rigid schema for our understanding of how
monastic book production operated. Ker, for example, suggests that it appear there were two
types of scribes who participated in monastic book production: scriptores (professional scribes
who were not members of enclosed communities but who often wrote books for them) and
claustrales (scribes who lived inside the community). Ker notes that in Abingdon in the
beginning of the twelfth century six scriptores were employed to copy patristic manuscripts
while the claustrales mainly copied “missals, graduals, antiphonaries, tropers, lectionaries, and
other ecclesiastical books.”96
Although this division is a good starting point, such a schematic
distinction is not possible in many other locations. Talent may have been drawn predominantly
from the monks or canons themselves, or may have involved hiring professional scribes from
outside the establishment; there was not always a distinction between what kinds of books were
copied by whom. In eleventh-century Exeter, many of the early books were either made in
94 Ibid.
95 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 137.
96 Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century After the Norman Conquest, 11.
32
Normandy or were the work of Norman professional scribes.97
In Salisbury in the eleventh
century Bishop Osmond (1078–99) copied books himself and also involved many of his canons,
some of whom may have been recruited from the royal household and would have been used to
doing clerical work for the king.98
In Durham, a precentor and chronicler known as Symeon may
have been master of the scriptorium, collaborating with a Norman scribe, supervising the work
of others, rubricating, correcting and numbering quires to produce more than thirty manuscripts
and seven charters.99
In these three eleventh-century examples, we cannot easily distinguish
between the work of scriptores and claustrales on the basis of a manuscript’s genre. Although
the production of Latin books may create a sense of more uniformity and regularity,
nevertheless, production was still in many cases ad hoc, involving a mixture of “in-house”
scribes and itinerant craftsmen.
To move forward with our narrative, in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries the
output of monastic production became increasingly irregular as the majority of religious houses
completed the initial phase of stocking their libraries. Institutions fostered short-term efforts of
upkeep, acquisition and renewal. Such was the case at Worcester Cathedral Priory where, in
1314-15, Bishop Walter Maydenstone requested funds to renew and repair books.100
Books may
have been obtained through donation or purchase in some cases, but in other cases they may
have been copied anew through scriptorial activity. During the fourteenth century, Worcester
Cathedral Priory continued to acquire books as monks studying abroad at places such as
Gloucester Hall, Oxford returned with their works of study.101
The Cistercian abbey of Beaulieu
and the cathedral priory at Norwich both had bursts of activity in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.102
These campaigns of production likely reflected brief moments of activity spurred on
by the need of a house to acquire new materials or remedy some gap.
97 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 139. See also Drage, “Bishop Leofric and the Exeter
Cathedral Chapter, 1050-1072.”
98 See Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral, 8-30.
99 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 147.
100 Thomson, Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library, xiv-xv.
101 Several books were added by, for example, Richard of Bromwich and John of Dumbleton, both Oxford graduates
and members of the Cathedral Chapter 1302-1340 or 1350, of which some autographs remain. See ibid., xv.
102 Hockey, The Account-Book of Beaulieu Abbey, 195-8 and Ker, “Medieval Manuscripts from Norwich Cathedral
Priory.”
33
Because these programmes of book production tended to be limited, the organization of monastic
book-making became more ad hoc. We can see the way the organization of an institution’s
scriptorium may have changed over time when we examine the output of Salisbury Cathedral.
During the eleventh century, Salisbury Cathedral had a group of approximately seventeen scribes
actively working to produce books within the space of twenty years (probably during the
episcopacy of Bishop Osmund from 1078-99).103
Of these, Ker has pointed out how scribe i
acted as a director who not only corrected a number of the books but also determined the layout
of several by commencing the copying of the first text.104
Several decades later at Salisbury
Cathedral, we can already see evidence of a decline in organization. During the twelfth century, a
second group of approximately nineteen scribes produced about forty books. While these books
were still likely produced “in house,” none of the Group II scribes appears to have acted as a
director, and the script and practices employed by the Salisbury scribes are less consistent.105
Similar patterns of production to those employed by monasteries can also be found for secular
cathedrals although the evidence for “in-house” production is markedly sparser. In English
cathedrals the canons were often mobile. Thomson suggests that cathedrals may have relied on
hired personnel or on professional ateliers already present in the town.106
Hanna suggests that a
group of canons associated with Ripon Cathedral may have produced a group of four
manuscripts containing Middle English religious texts such as the Prick of Conscience, the
Speculum Vitae and the Northern Homily Cycle at the end of the fourteenth century, though it is
unclear whether this was organized through the cathedral itself or was initiated outside any sort
of institutional control.107
In the thirteenth century the canons regular and newly established
fraternal orders must have engaged in book-making endeavours of similar kinds. The
Augustinian priories at Cirencester and Leicester both built up the substantial body of their
libraries in the twelfth century through a combination of “in house” production and purchase,
103 Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral, Ch. 1, esp.
104 Ker, “The Beginnings of Salisbury Cathedral Library.”
105 Webber, Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral.
106 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 159-160.
107 Cf. Hanna, “Yorkshire Scribes.”
34
occasionally employing lay scribes to work alongside the trained scribes of the house.108
Contemporary catalogues show that Augustinian houses such as those at Southwick, Leicester
and Llanthony Secunda owned a large number of pastoralia which may have been produced in
response to the Fourth Lateran Council’s interest in pastoral care.109
Dominican and Franciscan
ownership of manuscripts has also been well-documented, but their patterns of book-making are
less regularized. The Dominican Order, in particular, seldom encouraged its friars to copy books
because the time involved would have drawn them away from studying, preaching and the
salvation of souls. But libraries and personal collections were built up in a variety of ways, and
some copying by friars did occur. Friar William of Nottingham, a lector at the Franciscan
convent in Oxford, copied five volumes containing the Postills of Nicholas Gorran OFM for the
Order at the expense of Sir Hugh of Nottingham, a clerk in the royal exchequer, and this might
be an example of copying for payment.110
Friar William Herebert of the Hereford convent
drafted translations of Latin hymns and antiphons into English verse and annotated Eccleston’s
De adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam, and a copy of works by Roger Bacon OFM.111
In
other cases, provisions might be made for a commercial scribe to copy out the necessary texts, as
is the case of Adam Wodeham, the lector at the Oxford convent from 1330-1332, who recorded
that he often visited his scribe in the city.112
Generally, we do not see the kind of organized
production associated with the monastic scriptorium. The Orders built up their holdings through
donation, purchase and some private copying. They would allocate books to individual friars
and, subsequently, take possession of them once more in order to reallocate them to another friar
or to a convent in need.113
108 Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes, 98-100. See in particular his description of Radulfus de Pulleham who
worked alongside eight canons to produce several books.
109 Andrew Reeves tracks the number of copies of Alexander Ashby, Templum Dei, and Qui bene present owned by
Augustinian canons in “Teaching the Creed,” 109-112. See also Watson and Webber, The Libraries of the
Augustinian Canons and Webber, “The Books of Leicester Abbey,” 127-34.
110 Parkes, Hands Before Our Eyes, 26.
111 This is BL, MS Add. 46919. Parkes argues he also annotated BL, MSS Cotton Nero A.ix, Egerton 3133, and
Royal 7 F.vii-viii. Ibid., 26. See also Reimer’s edition of The Works of William Herebert, OFM.
112 Ibid., 27. See also Courtenay, Adam Wodeham, 179-80.
113 Parkes, Hands Before Our Eyes, 25.
35
The manuscripts of friars tended to be vademecum books: small, portable volumes containing
praedicabilia and other material necessary for worship or study.114
Model sermons, artes
praedicandi, distinctiones, concordances—all of which would have been useful for drawing up
new sermons—survive in mendicant manuscripts of English provenance. One of these—Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 511—is a collection of sermons, exempla and distinctiones
made sometime in the third quarter of the thirteenth century by English Dominicans.115
The
marginal notes accompanying several of the sermons indicate where they might have been used.
Ten of these were preached at the nunnery of Elstow in the early 1270s. Another example is
Oxford, New College, MS 88, a Dominican vademecum book studied by Siegfriend Wenzel,
which contains sermons and sermon aids.116
A Durham manuscript of friars’ sermons dated to
the thirteenth century offers another possibility: its quires would have been lent to different
friars, and, when returned, were apparently placed in a container, possibly a bag.117
Throughout my discussion thus far, I have focused predominantly on the production of Latin
books in the period; however, books created and used within the religious houses of the monks,
canons and friars were not always written in Latin. Tony Hunt argues that the early florescence
of Anglo-Norman copying likely occurred in monastic scriptoria and about half of the surviving
twelfth-century manuscripts containing French come from English Benedictine houses.118
In the
thirteenth century, Anglo-Norman was used increasingly as a language of instruction and
literature for those who might have struggled with Latin. This ignorance of Latin would not have
been limited to parish priests or laypeople. Monks and nuns struggled as well. David Bell notes
that after 1300 bishops frequently included a version of their Latin injunctions in French or
English.119
In monasteries, too, episcopal injunctions had to be read in lingua vulgari et
materna.120
The Chasteau d’amour by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253,
114 See D’Avray, “Portable Vademecum Books,” 60-4.
115 Cf. O’Carroll, Preacher’s Handbook.
116 This manuscript is described in Wenzel, “A Dominican Preacher’s Book from Oxford.”
117 Humphreys, Friars’ Libraries, xviii.
118 Hunt, “The Anglo-Norman Book,” 369.
119 Bell, What Nuns Read, 64.
120 See, for example, the texts translated in Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages. He refences a fourteenth-century bishop
with little Latin on 1:39-47, 86-7, and a fourteenth century abbot with the same problem in 4:280-1.
36
the Mirour de Seinte Eglyse, the Anglo-Norman version of the Speculum Ecclesiae by Edmund
of Abingdon (d. 1240), and the Manuel des pechez (c. 1260) by William of Waddington were all
drafted to contain the foundational Christian doctrines contained in the Articles of Faith, and to
make them available for readers who might have struggled with Latin.121
Biblical paraphrases
like the rhymed Genesis found in the thirteenth-century manuscript BL, MS Harley 3775 or
psalters with interlinear translations in Old French or Anglo Norman supplemented these
penitential treatises.122
Hagiography, in particular, was a well-represented genre: numerous
examples survive including the lives of St. Alban, St. Edmund, St. Edward the Confessor, and
the life of Thomas Becket by the Benedictine monk of St. Albans, Matthew Paris, to name a few.
The Vie de saint Alexis, for example, was copied as part of the St. Albans Psalter made in 1120-
30 for the anchoress Christina of Markyate.123
Middle English texts were also copied in monasteries as shown by the activities of the
“Tremulous Hand of Worcester” who updated the language of several Old English manuscripts
and also copied the Middle English Soul’s Address to the Body.124
Treharne has identified over
one hundred manuscripts containing vernacular texts which were produced between 1060 and
1220 in England, many of which are homilies and most of which are based on pre-existing
works.125
She suggests that many of these emanated from Benedictine Houses, and that the
production of extensive compilations such as CCCC, MS 303, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian D. xiv,
CUL, MS Ii. 1. 33, and BL, MS Cotton Vespasian A.xxii from Kent; BodL, MS Hatton 116,
BodL, MS Bodley 343, and London, Lambeth Palace, MS Lambeth 487 from the West
Midlands; as well as CCCC, MS 302, BL, MS Cotton Faustina A. ix and Camb., Trinity College,
MS B. 14. 52 from eastern England indicate “an ongoing intellectual and pastoral venture.”126
In
many cases, the presence of these works in monastic libraries tends to escape notice for several
121 Reeves provides an excellent introduction to the use of these three texts in programmes of pastoral care in
“Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England,” esp. 172-197.
122 See the description of the Oxford Psalter, the Arundel Psalter, the Orne Psalter and the Cambridge Psalter in
Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature, 239-244.
123 Cf. Geddes, The St. Albans Psalter.
124 See Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester. For the latter text, see Moffat, The Soul’s Address to the Body.
125 Treharne, Living Through Conquest, 95.
126 Ibid., 131.
37
reasons. Some Anglo-Norman texts, for example, were bound with Latin books or omitted from
catalogues all together. Thus in Leicester several French books including romances were entered
under the heading “Decretalia,” and the “Chanson de Roland” which belonged to Oseney appears
in N. R. Ker’s list as a “dialogue of Plato.”127
Many of these early Middle English texts have
been omitted because they are copies of earlier texts rather than newly composed texts.
Thus far, I have begun to sketch out some of the ways in which religious institutions may have
organized their “scriptorial facilities” in order to produce books for their respective orders. At
this point I want to explore the role of professional scribes in the production of manuscripts. As I
have shown, professional scribes were employed as early as the eleventh century, sometimes
hired to assist with a particular craft, sometimes employed over a longer period of time to
produce multiple books. Scribes and illuminators were, as M. A Michael argues, among the most
widely travelled medieval artisans precisely because they did not require large workshops to ply
their trade.128
I have already noted the way that a group of artists working in a similar style may
have produced the Liber legum antiquorum in London in 1321 for the fishmonger and city
chamberlain, Andrew Horn. A second example of an itinerant professional scribe can be found
when one studies the lavish sister compilations of Middle English religious texts known as the
Vernon and Simeon manuscripts (BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a. 1 and BL, MS Add. 22283,
respectively). Vernon Scribe A, who completed the majority of the Vernon manuscript and also
collaborated with two other scribes on the Simeon manuscript, likely made his living as a
professional scrivener. He copied several parchment manuscripts containing the Prick of
Conscience, discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, as well as a cartulary for the Cistercian abbey
of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. The preface to the cartulary was written by a retired abbot named
Thomas Pype who refers to the fact that his successor at Stoneleigh, Thomas Halton, sent him a
writer, an exemplar and copied text.129
This preface gives us a clue as to the sort of production
arrangement that Vernon Scribe A may have worked in at some point in his career.
127 See Legge, Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters, 112. The manuscript containing the “dialogue of Plato” is BodL, MS
Digby 23, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3.
128 Michael, “Urban Production,” 174.
129 Doyle, introduction to Vernon Manuscript, 12.
38
Not all professional scribes and artists were itinerant, and particular attention needs to be paid to
the activities of professional scribes in several major cities in England in the later Middle Ages.
Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth century, lay centres of production grew around the
emerging university centres in Oxford and Cambridge, with Catte Street in Oxford as one
notable location for scribal activities, and the law courts and Paternoster Row near St Paul’s
Cathedral in London as another. The Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans: 1300-
1500 locates one hundred thirty-six craftsmen within the immediate area of St. Paul’s
Cathedral.130
These include parchmeners, limners, binders and textwriters, to name a few of the
trades associated with the production of books. The high numbers of tradesmen in London
suggests that scribes trained in other centres of production may have migrated to the city where
they could find work more easily. The Auchinleck manuscript, for example, although
predominantly written by a single scribe with a dialect traceable to London, also contains texts
written by scribes with dialects from the West Midlands.131
A scribe with a Sussex dialect copied
a manuscript of the Prick of Conscience (Dublin, Trinity College, MS 69) which was possibly
owned by a London merchant and also a prose psalter (Princeton, NJ, Scheide Library, MS
M.143); Hanna suggests, “his Sussex language may simply represent the early training of a
person then immigrant to London, c. 1400.”132
To these examples we might add the unbeneficed
clerics like William Langland and his imitators who made their livings as scribes, scriveners or
civil servants in the City of London, some of whom no doubt were born and were trained in other
areas.133
M. T. Clanchy has drawn attention to another important group of copiers who emerged
throughout this period: the legal scriveners familiar with common and canon law as well as the
manorial and king’s courts and bureaucratic clerks associated with the royal and seigniorial
130 One hundred nineteen of these could be found in seven parishes whose churches were in close proximity to the
Cathedral: St. Faith the Virgin, St. Augustine, St. Michael le Querne, St. Botolph without Aldersgate, St. Nicholas at
the Shambles, St. Sepulchre without Newgate, and St. Bride. See Christianson, A Directory of London Stationers
and Book Artisans, 32-33.
131 Wiggins suggests that Scribe 6 of Auchinleck “originated in the south west Midlands but had spent time in
London and was familiar with south-eastern/east Midland spelling forms. As a result, his written repertoire was
dominated by West Midlands forms but included notable adaptations to accommodate and represent features current
in the written metropolitan language” in “Are Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6 the Same Scribe?,”17.
132 Hanna, London Literature, 18.
133 See Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles.”
39
administration.134
Although written documents were initially made principally by monasteries, in
the twelfth century the king’s government had begun to use documents in its daily business to
form an archive of potential written precedents. T. A. M. Bishop estimates that in 1130 Henry
II’s chancery employed about four scribes, requiring of them approximately three charters a
day.135
However, the output of royal charters per year increased dramatically throughout the
twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, giving rise to a large and complex bureaucracy as the
population of England rose, the number of religious houses increased, and the government came
to rely increasingly on written records. Hanna argues that during the first half of the fourteenth
century, from approximately 1327 to 1340, statute collections such as the Statute Anglie must
have been the most ubiquitous books in England except for the bible and liturgical volumes, and
that they would have been “fundamental in acquainting people with the procedures of making
and consulting books.”136
Compilers such as Andrew Horn, who served as Chamberlain of the
City of London from 1320 until his death in 1328, collected and recopied charters, statutes and
similar materials into large manuscripts such as the Liber Horn (1311) and other Guildhall or
civic volumes. Hanna associates the Auchinleck scribes with this legal milieu.137
Mooney and
Stubbs have shown the importance of London Guildhall clerks such as Adam Pinkhurst,
Scrivener and Clerk of the Guildhall (c. 1358-1410) and John Marchaunt, Chamber Clerk from
1380-99 and Common Clerk from 1399-1417 in the dissemination of Middle English texts at the
end of the fourteenth century.138
Outside of London, legal scriveners and bureaucratic clerks
were also involved in the production of literary texts alongside legal documents.
Other book producers may have been associated with households. Here, particular note should be
made of the Harley scribe who copied in three manuscripts—BL, MS Harley 2253; BL, MS
Harley 273, a largely devotional manuscript; and BL, MS Royal 12.C.xii, a commonplace
book—as well as forty-one charters and legal documents from the Ludlow area in the first half of
134 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Records, esp. 46-80.
135 Bishop, Scriptores regis, 32
136 Hanna, London Literature, 48.
137 In “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” Hanna argues that Scribe 3 might have worked in some
government office as Hoccleve did (95). Bliss argued that this scribe showed signs of “chancery training” in “Notes
on the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 653.
138 Cf. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City.
40
the fourteenth century. This scribe may well have been trained in the legal profession.139
He was
evidently trilingual, as evinced by the contents of the manuscripts he copied. Carter Revard
hypothesizes that this scribe may have served as a household or parish chaplain in Virgin’s
Chapel in the parish Church of St. Bartholomew.140
His patrons could have been a Shropshire
Knight, Sir Lawrence de Ludlow, holder of Stokesay Castle in the same country or the
Mortimers, the dominant local baronial family. Coss notes that throughout the thirteenth and
early fourteenth century there was a steady increase in the number of resident clerics, chaplains
and chantry priests in gentry households, and that, undoubtedly, they played a strong role in the
production of Middle English texts.141
Other households assembled permanent “scriptorial facilities” to aid the production of
manuscripts. Here I want to turn to a close-knit group of scribes and artists that have been
identified as working in the Bohun family residence at Pleshey Castle, Essex over a period of
more than twenty-five years.142
These scribes and artists are discussed in some detail by Lucy
Freeman Sandler in her study of the Lichtenthal Psalter, an exquisite product of the Bohun
scribes, only one of the ten richly illuminated manuscripts or fragments that survive from the
second half of the fourteenth century. Three of the scribes were identified by name—Piers,
Martin, and Robin—in BL, MS Egerton 3277, a Psalter begun in the 1360s for Humphrey the
seventh earl. A fourth scribe, as yet unnamed, appears frequently, occurring in four of the
manuscripts of the 1380s. The same illuminators also appear consistently in the Bohun
manuscripts. The first of the group was the Augustinian Friar John de Teye named “my
illuminator” in the will of Humphrey the sixth earl; he likely began working on Psalters during
the 1360s for Humphrey the sixth earl and continued in the household, producing manuscripts as
late as the 1380s for Henry of Bolingbroke and Mary de Bohun.143
Another unnamed artist—
possibly an apprentice at first—appears first in a minor role in the books of the 1360s and
reappears in a leading or support role for the books of the 1380s. Interestingly, in 1384 John de
139 For a description of this scribe’s activities in three manuscripts, see Revard, “Scribe and Provenance.”
140 Revard, “Scribe and Provenance,” 22.
141 Cf. Coss, “Aspects of Cultural Diffusion.”
142 Sandler, Lichtenthal Psalter, 11-15.
143 Cf. Sandler, “Illuminators of the Bohun Manuscripts.”
41
Teye requested permission from the head of his order to bring Henry Hood, another friar, to
teach him the art of illuminating books and it may be that Henry Hood is this unnamed artist.144
Sandler argues that these scribes and artists were not merely craftsmen employed by the family;
rather, they were “were part of an inner circle of the Bohun household” as evidenced by the fact
that John de Teye appears as an executor in the will and was entrusted with praying for the soul
of his master, along with Humphrey’s confessor, William of Monklane.145
As groups of book and document producers grew in the cities, they began to organize into guilds.
The guilds of the Textwriters and Limners first appear in London in the 1350s. The Scriveners
and Stationers similarly organized in 1373 and 1403, respectively in London.146
The City of
York shows a similar, if delayed, pattern of development: the York Freemen’s Register records
fourteen scribes and one colour maker who became freemen between 1386 and 1387.147
In the
late fourteenth century the York scriveners formed a guild of their own, and notaries appear as
members of the Company from 1392 onwards.148
Other urban centres such as Lincoln and
Norwich also became centres of the book trade to a lesser extent. Professional scribes in these
places may have assembled manuscript through a process of subcontracting and dispersed
production rather than by means of organized production within a single space. Between 1393
and 1402 in York, for instance, two men were employed by the Chapter to produce service
books. In 1393, one “frater William de Ellerker” received 41s. 8d. to write two graduals for the
choir and Richard de Sterton received 40s. to illuminate them. A year later, de Ellerker received
another large sum of money—£11 13s. 3d. —for writing and obtaining parchment for three more
books for the choir. Another year later, a man named Robert Bookbynder received 10s. for
sewing the gatherings of a large gradual and another 20 d. for three sheets of parchment. William
144 Sandler, Lichtenthal Psalter, 19.
145 Ibid., 26.
146 See Steer’s work on the Scriveners’ guild in A History of the Worshipful Company of Scriveners of London and
Scriveners’ Company Common Paper 1357-1628. For the Stationers’ Guild, see Graham Pollard’s early work in
“The Company of Stationers before 1557” and “The Early Constitution of the Stationers’ Company.” See also
Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History 1403-1959 and Blayney, The Stationers’ Company before the
Charter, 1403-1557.
147 Friedman, Northern English Books, 2.
148 See Gee, “The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of York before 1557,” 48. See E. Gordon Duff, English
Provincial Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders to 1557.
42
de Ellerker received 4s. for parchment and Richard de Sterton received 40s. more for
illuminating three more graduals.149
It was not uncommon for certain craftsmen to work together
over time, and the same sets of names tend to recur in lists of witnesses to transactions in these
areas. In Catte Street in the early thirteenth century, for example, Thomas Scriptor, Roger
Pergameneus, Ralph Illuminator, Roger Illuminator and his son Robert, and William Illuminator
witnessed the sale of a property from one Peter Illuminator and his wife to an Adam Bradfot.150
These sets of relationships anticipate the close networks of craftsmen that would have been
consolidated through the formation of guilds in the second half of the fourteenth century.
It is unclear how the subcontracting of labour may have been handled when multiple craftsmen
collaborated. In Paris at the end of the fourteenth century, a bookman by the name of Pierre le
Portier was a commercial libraire (a combination bookseller and book-contractor),
commissioned by the confraternity of Saint-Jacques to begin carrying out work on four
antiphonals. He coordinated the activities of a number of craftsmen while also updating and
refurbishing the Saint-Jacques choir books. In 1407 he died, and the confraternity hired a second
libraire, Pierre’s widow, to finish the job. She was paid, not for copying, but “pour avoir fait
escrire, noter, etc.” [for causing to have written, decorated, etc.]) and in April 1409 the four
volumes were completed.151
The work on the antiphonals of Saint-Jacques is surprisingly well
documented, but we have far less evidence for the manner in which collaboration may have
taken place on projects in England although, undoubtedly, it did. The role of stationers in the
production of books in England in the Middle Ages before the formation of the Stationers’ Guild
in 1403 is still contested. The term is used loosely to describe a seller of writing supplies, a
specialized artisan, a book-contractor, and/or a member of the London Stationers’ company.152
It
is this third category of “stationer” that has proven to be of the most interest for Middle English
scholars, who have argued that both the Auchinleck manuscript in the 1330s and the Hengwrt
manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth
392D) in the 1380s resulted from the coordination of multiple scribes orchestrated by a
149 Friedman, Northern English Books, 35.
150 Michael, “Urban Production,” 176.
151 For a discussion of the collaboration on this project, see Rouse, “Pierre le Portier and the Makers of the
Antiphonals of Saint-Jacques,” 47-68.
152 Kwakkel, “Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation,” 176.
43
stationer.153
Nevertheless, as few records survive which lay out payments for the subcontracting
of labour, it is difficult to tell whether this would have been managed by a separate figure or
whether, in many cases, it may have been an ad hoc process of collaboration organized by the
primary scribe. As Kwakkel concludes, just as we cannot find conclusive evidence for the work
handled by these intermediaries, neither can we exclude the possibility that stationers in England
functioned as supervisors for large textual projects.
I want to offer one final example of how professional scribes and religious institutions worked in
conjunction with one another to produce manuscripts. The fifteenth-century “Edmund-Fremund”
scribe, a professional scribe likely working in Bury St Edmunds, offers a particularly interesting
example of one of the ways that this form of collaboration may have taken place toward the end
of the Middle Ages. In total, his hand has been identified in ten manuscripts containing the works
of Lydgate and two containing the works of Chaucer. Scholars have suggested that this scribe
collaborated with the monk John Lydgate—possibly as a Lydgate specialist or possibly as his
“personal publisher”—and was probably based in the poet’s hometown of Bury St Edmunds in a
commercial workshop rather than at the abbey itself. 154
Building on the work of A. I. Doyle,
Horobin argues that there are no grounds for supposing this “Lydgate workshop” was organized
by the monks themselves; although they may have assisted in its operation by providing
exemplars, it was more likely to have been organized by professional scribes.155
The “Edmund-
Fremund” scribe’s participation on Chaucer manuscripts, Horobin suggests, shows that his
“choice of texts was more likely to have been governed by the market than by personal literary
preferences.”156
The “Edmund-Fremund” scribe reveals how a professional scribe—or possibly a
lay workshop of some sort—may have grown up in the vicinity of a religious institution and that
153 Wiggins suggests that exemplars may have been obtained for the Auchinleck by a “stationer or dealer in texts
who had inter-regional connections and worked closely with editors, compilers, and other copyists” in “Are
Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6 the Same Scribe?” 21. See also Shonk, “A Study of the Auchinleck
Manuscript” for the argument that Scribe 1 acted as the editor for this volume and may have organized its
production. Doyle and Parkes similarly suggest that the Hengwrt manuscript could have made use of “a stationer as
agent...either merely arranging the copying and decoration, or also procuring the exemplars” in introduction to The
Canterbury Tales, xxi.
154 Horobin, “The Edmund-Fremund Scribe Copying Chaucer,” 195. For Scott’s original identification and
discussion of this scribe, see “Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund.”
155 For this perspective, see Doyle, “Book Production by the Monastic Orders,” 21.
156 Horobin, “The Edmund-Fremund Scribe,” 199.
44
the two may have had a mutually beneficial relationship: the “Edmund-Fremund” scribe could
obtain exemplars for texts that were in demand by wealthy patrons while the Abbey, in turn,
presumably gained renown through the “publication” of the works of one of its monks. The
activities of the “Edmund-Fremund” scribe are by no means unprecedented; rather, they are a
logical extension of the kind of collaboration between religious and professional scribes that had
been going on for centuries. Similarly, we can see that after the advent of the printing press in
England, these working relationships continued, as shown by the work of the printer Wynkyn de
Worde for Syon Abbey in the sixteenth century.157
Likewise, three English monasteries—
Abingdon, Tavistock and St Albans—made use of printing presses. The press at Tavistock was
run by a monk named Thomas Richard while the Abingdon printer, on the other hand, “was a
professional, connected only accidentally with the abbey.”158
The first St Albans printer may
have been a commercial printer who worked with only the patronage of the monks, but, forty
years later, c. 1526, a second printer by the name of John Herford set up a second press with the
patronage of Abbots Catton and Stevenage. In 1539, Abbot Stevenage disavowed Herford when
challenged about some of his materials by Cromwell, and Herford was forced to move his
business to the City of London.159
These activities demonstrate that professional scribes and
religious scribes frequently collaborated together and worked in conjunction with one another.
The impression this brief survey of materials creates is of plenitude rather than dearth: a
landscape in which the vernacular texts of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century
emerge, not as an isolated outcropping, but out of a rich culture of manuscript production that
provided liturgical books for the churches, documents for the courts and for the civil
administration, scholastic and teaching texts for the monasteries and cathedrals, praedicabilia for
the mendicant orders, and instructional treatises for parish priests. This literary culture was not
“organized”—that is, with all levels working in concert to produce and disseminate a specific,
“protected” or canonical set of texts although, at times, pockets of concerted production may
have emerged; but it was deeply interconnected and interpenetrating as texts crossed the
157 Cf. Grisé, “Syon Abbey and English Books.”
158 Knowles, Religious Orders 3:26.
159 Ibid.
45
boundaries between religious and lay production centres, and as they were translated—both
linguistically and culturally—into new domains where they might reach new audiences.
3 Fragmentation and Miscellaneity? Booklet Culture in Late Medieval England
One point that I want to return to, leading into my discussion of the production and circulation of
small-format manuscripts, is the claim that Middle English literature constitutes a “fragmented
terrain”160
as Hanna puts it, or, in the words of Shepherd, “the débris of an old literature…mixed
in with the imperfectly processed materials of a new.”161
The association between Middle
English texts and some notion of “fragmentariness” is a persistent one, made all the more
persuasive by the sometimes literally fragmented state in which manuscripts containing Middle
English survive. Take, for instance, BodL, MS Rawl. Misc. D.913, a collection of thirty-four
separate fragments bound together by the Bodleian after 1756, comprising in some cases a single
folio such as the leaf of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chronicle (Part 1) and in others a whole
quire such as the copy of Chaucer’s Astrolabe numbered ff. 23-42 (Part 9).162
This manuscript, a
modern rather than medieval assemblage, consists entirely of what we might think of as the
“débris” of medieval English literature. Another example of the “fragmentariness” of Middle
English manuscripts is BL, MS Harley 2253, the famous trilingual “Harley” manuscript
containing various romances, saints’ lives, lyrics and other ephemera.163
Unlike BodL, MS Rawl.
Misc. D.913, the “Harley” manuscript was a medieval composite manuscript, which consists of
five booklets: three of single quires, one of three quires and one of five quires. Its maker, a
professional scrivener working in the Ludlow area, used the manuscript as a way to record what
Julia Boffey calls “social ephemera.”164
These books appear to exemplify Hanna’s sense of the
“fragmented terrain” of Middle English literature. BodL, MS Rawl. Misc. D.913 suggests a
process of physical breakdown as larger codicological structures were damaged or broken up to
160 Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 47.
161 Shepherd, “Early Middle English Literature,” 81.
162 Described in William D. Macray, Catal. Codd. Mss. Bibl. Bodl. Part V, 136-143.
163 Cf. Ker, Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253.
164 Boffey, Manuscripts of English Court Love Lyrics, 123. For a full discussion of the provenance of the manuscript
and the copying habits of its scribe, see Fein, Studies in the Harley Manuscript.
46
form smaller units. On the other hand, the “Harley” manuscript represents the opposite process,
the building up of medieval manuscripts from ephemeral “pieces” that, individually, might not
have survived the passage of time. But whereas both Hanna and Shepherd embed Middle English
literature in a narrative of fragmentation and débris, I want to suggest that we understand these
“fragments” as traces of a dynamic process of textual exchange and production indicative of an
actively productive Middle English literary culture dependent upon the circulation of ephemeral
texts—in pamphlets, unbound quires, booklets bound in wrappers, to name a few formats—
alongside complete codices.
The study and identification of “booklets” in medieval codices offers one way of understanding
how small-format manuscripts may have circulated and, in some cases, been compiled to form
larger units. Pamela Robinson describes a “booklet” as “a small but structurally independent
production containing a single work or a number of short works.”165
Booklets, she argues, were
capable of circulating on their own but are frequently found in composite volumes. They can be
identified by differences in the dimensions of leaves, handwriting, decoration, systems of
catchwords, systems of quire signatures, the number of leaves to a quire, and also by soiling or
rubbing on the outer leaves or by the presence of blank pages.166
To these, Hanna adds further
means of identification including variations in materials, variations in sources, and variations in
subject matter.167
For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term “small-format”
manuscript to denote generally codicological forms which circulated independently (rolls,
pamphlets, “pagyantes”, unbound quires, libelli and bills to name a few), and “booklet” primarily
as a codicological term to reference a structure within an existing codex according to Robinson
and Hanna’s definition. I will at times note exceptions to this definition when a part of a
manuscript may have, at one stage, been a structurally independent production, but subsequently
it has been modified in such a way that it is not presently structurally independent.168
165 Robinson, “The ‘Booklet’,” 46.
166 Ibid., 47-48.
167 Hanna, “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts,” 30-31.
168 I recognize that my usage of the term might, at times, be slippery. But as Gillespie points out, it is sometimes
difficult to maintain a distinction based on how structurally independent a unit may have been, particularly in cases
where information regarding early structure, provenance or binding has been lost (“Medieval Books, Their Booklets,
Booklet Theory,” 5). Joseph Dane and Erik Kwakkel have both noted the slipperiness of this term. Dane notes, “And
as the critical notion of booklet becomes abstract, the codicological and textual-critical foundations for the booklet
47
Small-format manuscripts and booklets speak to the various ways in which medieval texts may
have circulated in formats other than the codex.169
For example, in the case of the manuscripts
produced by the Harley scribe in the Ludlow area, Susanna Fein suggests that the evidence of
scribal miscopying in one instance indicates that he was most likely often copying from single
sheets or rolls.170
Many medieval catalogues record the presence of a large number of books in
limp bindings (with covers made of parchment, tanned or tawed skin, or cloth) with the term in
pergameno. Others are recorded as being in quaterno or in quaternis (in quires). The catalogue
for the Praemonstratensian house at Tichfield, drawn up in 1400, records 224 volumes of which
approximately 33 percent are described in this fashion.171
Robinson associates these forms of
bindings implicitly with small-format manuscripts that were independently circulated, but
Gillespie usefully points out the difficulty in associating booklets or libelli too closely with limp
bindings, particularly where composite manuscripts are concerned.172
She notes that limp
bindings were also used with larger books such as missals because of their durability.
A set of two manuscripts—BodL Douce 132 and 127, dated to the 1260s and likely produced in
Oxford—further show that we do not always know how individual booklets or composite
manuscripts made from booklets were bound.173
These two manuscripts together comprise six
theory seem to crumble. What Hanna calls a ‘hidden booklet’ is no longer a material entity, but an imagined one, or
perhaps the act of imagination itself” (Chaucer’s Tomb, 144). Kwakkel has proposed alternative terms including
“production unit” and “usage unit” in “Towards a Terminology.” In a second article—“Late Medieval Text
Collections: A Codicological Typology Based on Single-Author Manuscripts”—he pointed out several types of
manuscripts which denote the potential uses of booklets. These include Type 1(The Manuscript Copied in One Go);
Type 2 (The Booklet Copied in One Go); Type 3 (Copied in Sessions - A Bundle of Production Units) and Type
4(Copied in Sessions - Extending an Existing Production Unit). However, as Gillespie points out it is frequently
difficult to divvy up booklets in particular manuscripts and assign them status one way or another lost (“Medieval
Books, Their Booklets, Booklet Theory,” 22). As a result, I have decided to make use of the term “booklet” while
recognizing its inherent slipperiness.
169 Joel Fredell usefully draws attention to how Lydgate might have explicitly designed his poetry to be circulated in
quires or phamplets. He is one of the few scholars to draw attention to a literary culture invigorated by these small
format manuscripts in “Go Litel Quaier.”
170 Fein, “Compilation and Purpose,” 72.
171 Gullick and Hadgraft, “Bookbindings,” 107.
172 Cf. Gillespie, “Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory.”
173 For a discussion and full description, see Robinson, “The ‘Booklet,’” 64-67. See also Taylor, “Manual to
Miscellany.”
48
booklets with a number of Latin texts on law and accountancy, the Anglo-Norman Horn
romance, Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’amour, and the Fables of Marie de France. Robinson argues
that the Berkshire lawyer who owned the manuscript “collected texts essential to his professional
activities as a layman who practised law or administered an estate according to the customary
law merchant and English Common Law, but he also collected texts which he wished to read in
his spare time.”174
That the lawyer was able to purchase both kinds of texts from Oxford
scriveners further suggests Oxford booksellers were comfortable supplying legal reference
works, literary items and university text books and that their stock comprised all three
classifications of material. The sixth booklet of the collection is particularly interesting because
its end leaf (BodL Douce 132, f. 82v) includes a list of the titles of works which an owner had
lent to various friends in the second half of the fourteenth century. On the basis of this, Robinson
suggests that although these six booklets had been assembled together, the collection was not
bound up but kept loose in a wrapper.175
Regarding this set of manuscripts, then, we cannot tell
whether or not the booklets were ever intended to circulate separately, and if they were, how they
might have been individually bound to facilitate this.
Small-format manuscripts may have been particularly useful for the rapid dissemination of
certain texts along institutional lines. In the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council, for example,
nearly every English diocese contributed to the reform by issuing statutes modelled upon
Innocent III’s decrees: examples include the Council of Oxford in 1222, the Council and
Constitutions of the Legate Otto at London in 1237 and of the Legate Ottobono at London in
1268, and John Pecham’s Ignorantia Sacerdotum in 1281, an outline of Christian doctrine and
morals which the priests of the province of Canterbury were ordered to expound in the
vernacular four times each year. But far from imparting the necessary doctrinal points itself, as
Leonard Boyle argues, texts such as the Ignorantia Sacerdotum sometimes demanded companion
volumes of practical theology that would be more easily used by parish priests and secular
clergy.176
In order to educate the clergy, English bishops required that they should possess copies
174 Robinson, “The ‘Booklet,’” 57.
175 Ibid.
176 Boyle, “The ‘Oculus Sacerdotis’,” 82. See also Boyle, “Manuals of Popular Theology,” 30. For Pecham’s canon
Ignorancia sacerdotum, see Cheney and Powicke, ed., Councils and Synods, ii. 900-05. For other details of
Pecham’s and Thoresby’s material in the context of medieval pastoral instruction, see Gibbs and Lang, Bishops and
49
of their synodal statutes in libri or libelli synodales (synodal books or booklets).177
Sometimes
these statutes were transcribed in missals or other liturgical books for ease of reference. Most
often, however, they were issued to clergy as easy-to-carry unbound quires, which could be
brought to annual synods for correction. The vast majority of these small-format manuscripts
were designed for regular consultation, and enumerated for priests exactly what they needed to
teach their parishioners, how to administer the sacraments, and how to preach and perform the
divine office.
John Thoresby, appointed Archbishop of York on 16 August 1352, used a similar system to
educate the newly promoted priests following the devastating outbreak of the Black Death in
1348. Thoresby authorized and encouraged the distribution of the Latin Lay Folk’s Catechism, a
text which summarized the six articles that were the subject of Pecham’s decree Ignorantia
Sacerdotum. He also commissioned an English translation from John Gaytryge, a monk at the
Benedictine abbey of St Mary’s, York. The Latin catechism, along with Gaytryge’s translation,
was issued from Cawood and enrolled in the Archbishop’s Register in 1357 (York, Borthwick
Institute of Historical Research, Register 13, f. 18r). Thoresby apparently issued the text in a
small format, like the synodalia of the thirteenth century. One fifteenth century writer states that
Thoresby sent copies of the work “in small pagyantes to the common people to learne it and to
knowe it, of which yet manye a copye be in England.”178
As in the case of the libelli synodales,
priests copied from exemplars which the archdeacons would make available, and these copies
would be brought to convocations where they would be corrected and updated and where the
priest would be tested on the material contained therein.179
Susan Powell notes that as they
appear in the Archbishop’s Register, the Catechism and Injunctions fit neatly onto a single
separate quire. She suggests that the separateness of the quire may signal that it represents one of
Reform 1215-1272; Haines, “Education in English Ecclesiastical Legislation”; and Shaw, “The Influence of
Canonical and Episcopal Reform,” 44-60.
177 Pontal, Les Statuts Synodaux Français, 1:lxvi-lxvii.
178 Simmons and Nolloth, ed., The Lay Folk’s Catechism, xviii.
179 Gillespie, “Vernacular Books of Religion,” 317.
50
the circulating “pagyantes” which was sewn into the Archbishop’s Register.180
It is unlikely that
any of these “pagyantes” would have survived independently, but, as Doyle notes, the English
Layfolk’s Catechism was frequently incorporated in booklets into miscellaneous or composite
volumes containing “other texts of English and Latin catechetic, homiletic, ascetical and
meditative literature, compiled as much for private reading as public use.”181
Small-format manuscripts were also used as a way to circulate vernacular material. William
Robins argues that the collection of saints’ lives known as the South English Legendary—an
example which I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2—benefited from the circulation of
individual legends or groups of legends “in a variety of small-format copies, such as parchment
rolls, unbound loose leaves, stitched pamphlets or custom-made booklets.”182
Similarly, Anne
Hudson notes that contemporary edicts against Lollard written material at the end of the
fourteenth century and in the early fifteenth century describe the circulation of a range of formats
of differing size and permanence including libri (books), schedulae and rotuli (rolls), quaterni
(quires), and bullaeor (bills).183
Small-format manuscripts and booklets, as Hanna notes, were also a useful means of
intermediary production. They could be produced as units intended to be independently
circulated (as the example of the Lollard materials shows) but they could also act as intermediary
units in the process of production whereby they “involved a minimal commitment of resources
while still allowing ongoing book production” and at the same time “forestalled or indefinitely
delayed any absolute decisions about the form of the final product.”184
The Latin author Walter
Map may have made use of booklets to compose De nugis curialium, extant now in only one
manuscript, BodL, MS Bodley 851. Jan Ziolkowski suggests that he may have drafted the text in
the early 1180s and then let it sit in unbound quires to which he added strips of vellum. At the
stage at which he decided to reorganize the text, he cut the quires and rearranged the groups of
180 Powell, “The Transmission and Circulation of The Lay Folk’s Catechism,” 76.
181 Doyle, “Manuscripts,” 91.
182 Robins, “Modular Dynamics in the SEL,” 201.
183 Hudson, “Lollard Literature,” 331.
184 Hanna, “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts,” 24.
51
folios.185
Matthew Paris used booklets in a similar way to assemble an anthology of the works of
the Latin poet Henry of Avranches (CUL, MS Dd.11.78) which I discuss in more detail in
Chapter 3 as a comparator for the Auchinleck manuscript.
Chaucer too may have allowed the circulation of small-format manuscripts containing parts of
the Canterbury Tales.186
His scribes would have then been left with the texts, as Derek Pearsall
has suggested, “partly as a bound book (with the first and last fragments fixed) and partly as a set
of fragments in folders, with the incomplete information as to their nature and placement fully
displayed.”187
In their description of the production of Canterbury Tales manuscripts, Edwards
and Pearsall argued for a form of “booklet” based production:
The exemplar was split up and circulated in quires for simultaneous copying. The
practice was well known in monastic scriptoria, and has some resemblance to the
university pecia system, but it was evidently a ticklish operation in the hand-to-mouth
world of the London book-trade, which is perhaps why it was so rare.188
Mooney and Stubbs have expanded and modified this assertion in light of their research into the
London Guildhall as a potential “clearing house” for small-format manuscripts containing
exemplars of Middle English texts in the fifteenth century. Richard Osbarn, a Chamber Clerk of
the Guildhall, apparently assembled at least two manuscripts—San Marino, Huntington Library,
MS HM 114, a mid-fifteenth century collection of Piers Plowman, Troilus and Criseyde and
Mandeville among others, and London, Lambeth Palace, MS Lambeth 491, a contemporary
manuscript of the Brut, The Siege of Jerusalem, The Three Kings of Cologne and The Awntyrs off
Arthure—out of booklets that were possibly intended to circulate as exemplars. Hanna
characterized San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 114 as one such manuscript, noting that
the mixed materials (parchment and paper) of its booklets
look cheap and as if produced in the expectation that they might remain unbound for a
protracted period....These small packets of quires, minimally decorated (the scribe did
185 Ziolkowski, “Latin Learning and Latin Literature,” 239. See also Walter Map, De nugis curialium, xxix–xxx.
186 For this position, see Manly and Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales; Pratt, “The Order of the Canterbury
Tales”; also Owen, Jr., The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.
187 Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, 23.
188 Edwards and Pearsall, 262.
52
nearly all his own rubrication, including running titles), look as if they might form a
small in-house bookseller’s stock—cheap copies of popular items in heavy demand.189
Mooney and Stubbs argue that if such an operation was in place during this time, then it is likely
the first producers of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, scribes such as Adam Pinkhurst and
John Marchaunt,
would presumably have accessed the tales in fragments even during Chaucer’s lifetime.
Their accessing portions of Chaucer’s unfinished text in pieces after the author’s death
would not preclude their copying the first portions of the Tales while Chaucer was still
alive and composing them. After his death, they and others each assembled the
incomplete Tales in separate attempts to create an appearance of completeness and
order.190
Rather than emphasizing booklet production as a way to speed up the process of copying,
Mooney and Stubbs suggest that Chaucer may have “published” elements of the Tales in small-
format manuscripts prior to the compilation’s ultimate completion. Consequently, scribes used
these small-format manuscripts as exemplars from which they could create a whole Canterbury
Tales. In this way, we can see that small-format manuscripts and booklets were not only useful
for the publication and rapid dissemination of institutional texts, but also for the publication and
dissemination of English literary texts.
The presence of booklets shows medieval codices were involved in a continual process of
compilation and dismantling, in which their forms were not necessarily fixed. Robinson and
Hanna both agree that booklets were frequently used as a way to compile larger manuscripts
from pre-existing units. The Auchinleck manuscript, which I will discuss in considerable detail
in Chapter 3, was compiled by six scribes from twelve booklets in London in the 1330-40s. A
second manuscript, CCCC, MS 450, shows the same “collecting” principles that Hanna
associates with vernacular miscellanies also applied to Latin texts.191
The contents of the
manuscript are primarily legal, and likely belonged to a Durham lawyer who had studied at
Bologna. The fourth quire of the work likely began as a Goliardic anthology, containing texts
189 Hanna, “Scribe of HM 114,” 123.
190 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 73.
191 For a full account, see Cheney, “Law and Letters” and James, Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi
College Cambridge, 364-372. See also Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 307.
53
such as the Apocalypsis Goliae, De coniuge non ducenda, and Confessio Goliae. The collation of
the manuscript in general shows a mixture of quires of 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 folios, suggesting that
the book is probably the cumulative result of a process of gathering material that was desirable as
it became available. Nevertheless, the similarity in material in the “literary” section of the
manuscript might also indicate that these shorter Latin works tended to circulate in small-format
manuscripts such as pamphlets or unbound quires. Lastly, Alan Fletcher describes how the
breaking up and compilation of sermons was a “characteristic mode of mendicant book
production.”192
He draws attention to BodL, MS Bodley 26, a compilation of sermons with stints
by at least sixteen different scribes ranging from the first half of the thirteenth century to the
beginning of the fourteenth century. The first seven quires (ff. 1-103) were copied by three
scribes and were likely conceived of as an independent unit. The ninth quire, and the earliest
dated quire, may have been part of an independent compilation that was broken into pieces.
Fletcher argues, ultimately, that Bodley 26 was “pieced together by some unknown compiler
who had at his disposal at least three originally discrete books, booklets or quaterni.”193
He
suggests that the compiler, a Franciscan friar, likely drew upon the resources of a scriptorium or
centre to obtain the range of Franciscan exemplars he compiled.194
Here, I want to reiterate the point that Gillespie makes in her assessment of booklet theory: that
the term is, in some ways, “so capacious and so abstract as to produce multiple and contradictory
ideas about medieval manuscripts.”195
She notes,
A booklet may be a book, bound in limp parchment. It may be part of a collection of such
booklets, assembled in a new binding by a medieval collector or a modern one, or both. A
booklet in a composite volume may have been part of another book—a composite
manuscript or some continuously copied whole—disassembled and then recombined
again, by modern or medieval hands. If it was, by contrast, separately bound at the
moment of its production, then this may have been because it was a short work that an
author chose to circulate in booklet format. Or it may have been prepared in this way so it
could form part of the stock of a bookshop…. It may have been prepared in this way so
that an owner could alter, augment, or rearrange its component parts.196
192 Fletcher, “Compilations for Preaching,” 319-20.
193 Ibid., 319.
194 Ibid.
195 Gillespie, “Medieval Books,” 21.
196 Ibid.
54
This recognition that booklets cannot fit easily into any rigid scholarly scheme, but rather that
they denote a flexible mode of production is important. It echoes Joseph Dane’s criticism of
Hanna’s notion of “booklet theory” for the slipperiness of its terminology and its potential to find
booklets that are only “imagined.”197
However, like Gillespie, I believe that “booklet theory” is
useful precisely because it allows us to imagine the extant codices as a series of moving and
movable parts, an organic composite where material divisions are often superseded or
overwritten as a regular part of the process of production. At the same time, “booklet theory”
offers us an avenue to revisit the “débris” of England’s literary landscape as evidence of
production, as evidence of scribes and readers interacting with books in a variety of ways,
creating shifting and slippery codicological units.
I have deliberately chosen examples from a range of time periods—from Walter Map in the
twelfth century to Chaucer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a range of linguistic
contexts—from the Latin and Anglo-Norman booklets collected by a Berkshire lawyer to the
monolingual Auchinleck manuscript—and a range of productive contexts—from a mendicant
scriptorium to Oxford bookshops to personal miscellanies. I have offered up this range of
examples, in part, to reinforce Gillespie’s point that small-format manuscripts and booklets
cannot be easily fit into a rigid scheme. I also want to qualify the association that Hanna makes
between miscellaneity and vernacularity, an association that these examples begin to implicitly
undo. Vernacularity, he suggests, necessarily begets miscellaneity because for Middle English in
the fourteenth century, “[t]here exists no single literary canon and, consequently, no single set of
institutions to stimulate literary activity and to mandate various forms of more or less
standardized book production.”198
In turn he contrasts the procedures of vernacular manuscript
production with those of
any variety of Latinate modes of book production, all of them supported by clearly
demarcatable transmission networks generally supported by one or another sort of
professional affiliation (schools, orders, legal institutions, etc.). These, almost
automatically, prescribe more fixed notions of appropriate literary production, of
canonical texts and presentations.199
197 Dane, Chaucer’s Tomb, 144,
198 Hanna, “Vernacularity and Miscellaneity,” 47.
199 Ibid., 48.
55
This argument implies that Middle English manuscript production was seemingly of a different
kind than Latinate modes of production, and, as I will argue in more detail in Chapter 2, this
oversimplification ignores the substantial body of miscellaneous Latin anthologies in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There is evidence that monastic manuscript production in the
twelfth century favoured “a relatively limited schedule of patristic writers, generally in their most
extensive works,”200
but to a certain extent this is an unfair comparison because it takes as
representative only one mode of Latinate manuscript production.
In some ways, what I am trying to do here is similar to what Gillespie proposes in her article
“Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory” in which she used Hanna’s arguments
concerning the production of vernacular booklets in manuscript production—that is, that they
teach us something about deferral and indeterminacy in manuscript production—in order to set
up an apparent contrast with the shape of printed books which, Hanna imagines, are always
known in advance.201
But Gillespie, rather than accepting the manuscript-print binary as
absolute, points out that printers were not always able to predict the shape of all the books they
printed. They produced a range of half-sheet quarto editions of minor works by Chaucer and
Lydgate that survive in print “miscellanies” or Sammelbände.202
Gillespie argues that production
of these “pamphlets” shows an awareness of the fact that those who bought books might want to
use them in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Thus, although the printing press allowed for the
creation of “stock” or “standardized” volumes, it also allowed for the creation of flexible, smaller
units of materials that could be used in ways the printer need not have anticipated.203
In the same
way, I argue that we ought to collapse the Latin-vernacular binary that Hanna imagines to exist,
which stresses the fixity of Latinate modes of production against the fluidity of Middle English
production. Booklets were useful to those assembling Middle English manuscripts, but they were
200 Ibid.
201 See Gillespie, “Medieval Books,” 24. For example, Hanna, in his introduction to Pursuing History, states that
medieval “construction by the fragment (or “booklet”) most severely challenged modern print notions of book
production” (7). In “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts,” he further develops this, suggesting “in the era preceding a
national canon, scribes and stationers were never aware of the totality of literary production” (31)—implying that in
the Age of Print, stationers could be aware of the totality of literary production.
202 Cf. Gillespie, “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände.”
203 For Gillespie’s discussion of these processes, see “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände,” Huntington
Library Quarterly 67 (2004), 189-214. In particular, note her argument that “[e]arly English Sammelbände suggest a
remarkable openness on the part of printers and owners to the malleable, multiple forms of books” (205).
56
also useful to those assembling Anglo-Norman manuscripts, or Latin manuscripts, or
manuscripts of mixed language and content—that is, the small-format manuscripts and booklets
were a useful tool for circulating small or otherwise ephemeral units of text, and they were also a
useful tool in the production of larger manuscripts—whether they were written in the vernacular
or not.
When we loosen the association between vernacularity and miscellaneity, it becomes
increasingly evident that the methods of making Middle English books and circulating Middle
English texts may not have been intrinsically different from the methods of making other sorts of
books and circulating other sorts of texts. Rather than seeing Middle English culture as
necessarily “fragmentary,” we might productively view medieval literary culture in general as
sustained, in part, by flexible and informal book-making activities that depended upon the
circulation of short or “ephemeral” texts in small-format manuscripts that do not survive in high
numbers. Booklet theory, then, offers a way to discover traces of this lost culture of small-format
textual circulation in surviving manuscripts. The circulation of these small-format manuscripts—
whether they are rolls, pamphlets, “pagyantes,” unbound quires, or booklets in limp binding—
must have operated as a kind of connective tissue linking reading communities typically assumed
to be discrete, a point that Boffey and Edwards make in their discussion of Middle English
literature:
Given the informal routes of transmission characteristically followed by songs and short
texts of similar kinds, the boundaries between different sorts of community (collegiate,
monastic, etc.) must have been quite flexible.204
Both the flexibility and the sense of interconnectedness enabled by the production of small-
format manuscripts are key to my assessment of Middle English literary culture in this chapter.
4 Major Texts, Major Authors
I conclude this chapter by using several case studies to demonstrate the central premises I laid
out for my understanding of English vernacular literary culture from 1280-1415. Here, I return to
Cannon’s assertion that the twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries offered works
204 Boffey and Edwards, 384.
57
produced in “splendid isolation” which are to be valued by scholars “for [their] rarity.”205
From
the mid-fourteenth century onward, he suggests that English writing came to assume “some
aggregated shape,” what he calls, borrowing the language of Marx, “that ‘primitive
accumulation’ sufficient to produce a ‘revolution’.”206
This section addresses how the
production and circulation of manuscripts and texts contributed to the “primitive accumulation”
of Middle English literature and, in turn, its “aggregated shape.”
As I have emphasized throughout this chapter, Middle English textual production persisted
throughout the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries alongside the more robust
forms of Latin and Anglo-Norman production. Many of the Middle English texts of the
neglected post-Conquest period from 1066-1200 were homilies and hagiographic texts. The most
famous of these, and the most linguistically and orthographically anomalous, is the Ormulum
written by the Augustinian monk Orm, which appears in a single manuscript, BodL, MS Junius
1. Cannon and others have called this manuscript a “workshop draft” in which
Orm and an assistant working under his close direction first copied out a portion of a text,
and then made repeated passes through it, trying to iron out exceptions, irregularities, and
mistakes—but always discovering and making more errors in the process.207
For Cannon, the Ormulum typifies the singularity and the “splendid isolation” of early Middle
English texts.208
However, it seems clear to me that this is, in many ways, an oversimplification
in that the Ormulum had numerous Latin sources—including possibly an onomastic compilation
which contained copies of the Glossa, the pseudo-Anselm Enarrationes and Bede’s In Lucae
Expositio Evangelium to name a few—and was part of a broad pattern of manuscript production
in the twelfth century.209
As Treharne shows, although the Ormulum is eccentric in its
205 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 11, 9, respectively.
206 Ibid., 13.
207 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 83. On the state of the manuscript and its anomalous text, see
Turville-Petre, “Studies on the Ormulum MS” and Bruchfield, “The Language and Orthography of the Ormulum
MS.” A comparative example of a working draft of a Middle English text in the fourteenth century is BodL
Ashmole 33 (mid fourteenth century), which includes a parchment wrapper with a draft of part of Sir Firumbras,
which has been edited and revised in the manuscript.
208 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 11, 9, respectively.
209 Morrison, “New Sources for the Ormulum,” 444. See also Matthes, Die Einheitlichkeit des Orrmulum and
Morrison’s earlier article,”Sources for the Ormulum.”
58
orthography and language—that is, in the form of writing, which concerns Cannon most in his
chapter—nevertheless, it is not anomalous in either its genre or its vernacularity. Rather, the
Ormulum ought to be considered part of a program of vernacular manuscript production that was
given new impetus by the mandate toward pastoral care issued by the Third Lateran Council in
1179 (an impetus that would be renewed in the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 with similar
results). In her handlist, Treharne identifies approximately fifty manuscripts containing English
from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.210
Each of these manuscripts, she writes, “is a
fascinating portal into the religious and cultural resource of its centre of manufacture; each is
indicative of a community response to the pastoral and pedagogic needs of a multitude of
users.”211
Nevertheless, these manuscripts display remarkable uniformity; they were
conceived of as relatively light and portable, small by the standards of many Latin books
in this period, and, by comparison, economical to produce. Each, with the exception of
Bodley 343 (and Harley 55, folios 5-13), has the standard single column of writing unlike
many Latin manuscripts in the period, which were written in double-column format.212
For Treharne, the homogeneous form, mise-en-page, and attention to detail of contemporized
spelling, lexis, morphology, phonology and syntax suggests “an overarching production agenda”
which she associates with the Benedictine monks.213
Her study of these manuscripts indicates
that while the Ormulum may yield interesting results when studied as an individual item,
nevertheless, there exists a much broader context for the production of this manuscript, and other
manuscripts which contain texts of its genre, which Cannon seemingly ignores.
A second set of texts which Cannon discusses is the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse and the
Katherine-group. Two of the earliest manuscripts of the Ancrene Wisse, CCCC, MS 402 and BL,
MS Cotton Nero A.xiv, dated to the early thirteenth century, were written in a common Middle
English dialect known as the “AB” language, which points to a West Midlands origin. A
beginner’s guide for female recluses, the original Ancrene Wisse was likely written by an
210 Treharne, Living Through Conquest , 125-7.
211 Ibid., 129.
212 Ibid., 137-8.
213 Ibid., 139.
59
Augustinian canon (or a Dominican friar) for three young sisters of a wealthy family.214
Rather
than imagining itself as a singular product, the text addresses itself to a larger audience:
Ye beoth the ancren of Englond, swa feole togederes, twenti nuthe other ma. Godd i god
ow multi, thet meast grith is among, meast an-nesse ant an-rednesse ant sometread-nesse
of an-red lif efter a riwle, swa thet alle teoth an, alle i-turnt anes-weis, ant nan frommard
other, efter thet word is.
[You are the anchoresses of England, so many together, twenty now or more. May God
multiply you in good, among whom there is the greatest peace, the greatest unity and
single-mindedness and concord in your common life according to one rule, so that all pull
as one, all are turned one way, and none away from the other, according to what I have
heard.]215
The editor of the recent TEAMS edition, Robert Hasenfratz imagines clusters of anchoresses
reading and responding to the text, possibly making revisions themselves if they acted as scribes,
which appeared “as marginal glosses which were incorporated into the main text at the next
copying.”216
The manuscripts of the Ancrene Wisse point toward the existence of an initial
community consisting of the author’s learned colleagues and the anchoresses themselves and an
extended audience—a “new cadre of ‘semi-educated’ contemplatives.”217
Of the surviving
manuscripts, A. S. G. Edwards associates two—CCCC, MS 402 and BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra
C.vi—with the anchoritic and female religious audiences for which the Ancrene Wisse was first
intended. The latter manuscript can be further associated with a house of Augustinian canons at
Wigmore in Herefordshire.218
As I will discuss further in Chapter 2, both the Ancrene Wisse and
the Katherine-group show a consistent association with Augustinian lines of production and
dissemination. This association may have led to the text’s survival in numerous extant
manuscripts, with several later translations appearing in Anglo-Norman and Latin. Both Camb.,
Gonville and Caius College, MS 234/120 (mid or late thirteenth century) and BL, MS Cotton
Vitellius F.vii (early fourteenth-century) are indicative of a broad linguistic context. The former
214 E. J. Dobson has made the strongest case for the Augustinian origins of the Ancrene Wisse in The Origins of the
Ancrene Wisse. For Bella Millett’s arguments in favour of a friar, see “The Origins of the Ancrene Wisse: New
Answers, New Questions.”
215 Hasenfratz, Ancrene Wisse, 4.916-20.
216 Hasenfratz, introduction to Ancrene Wisse, 15.
217 Watson, “Ancrene Wisse,” 198.
218 See Edwards, “Middle English Manuscripts and Early Readers of Ancrene Wisse,” 103-112.
60
contains an English version of the text alongside extracts from the Vitae patrum in Latin,
suggesting the compiler had eremitic interests and was probably male.219
The second of these
two manuscripts contains a copy of an earlier Anglo-Norman translation.220
When viewed in this
context, a context that Cannon largely neglects, the Ancrene Wisse and its related texts appear to
be intrinsically connected to the same intellectual context as thirteenth-century Latin works of
religious instruction, as Barratt argues, and also to institutional lines of production and
dissemination.221
Although the Ancrene Wisse circulated to a limited extent amongst the
educated laity interested in religious practice at the end of the fourteenth century, it seems not to
have done so in substantial numbers as evinced by a pattern of production and distribution which
might be contrasted to that of Richard Rolle’s texts, intended for a similar audience.
Despite the contexts I envisage for the study of these two examples, neither the Ormulum nor the
Ancrene Wisse had a substantial impact upon England’s literary culture, although the closest
might be the Ancrene Wisse, with its survival in over seventeen manuscripts and its persistent, if
limited, influence into the late fourteenth century. To move on from examples Cannon discusses
specifically, I present two case studies which show how the “accumulation” of certain Middle
English texts, facilitated or hindered by their circumstances of production, changed the
“aggregated” shape of England’s vernacular literary culture. At the beginning of the fourteenth
century, at around the same time that several other major Middle English compendia, the Cursor
Mundi and the Northern Homily Cycle, were produced in the northern part of England, the
Lincolnshire canon Robert Mannyng of Bourne translated and compiled two major textual
projects. The first of these was a twelve-thousand line Middle English devotional poem,
Handlyng Synne completed in 1303, based upon William Waddington’s Anglo-Norman Manuel
des pechez. Although twenty-eight manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman source survive, only nine
survive of Handlyng Synne and none of these are from the early fourteenth century.222
Furthermore, only two manuscripts and one fragment, all three from the end of the fourteenth
219 Barratt, “Spiritual Writing,” 347.
220 Ibid.
221 Barratt, “The Five Witts,” 15. See also her detailed analysis of the manuscripts of this text in “Spiritual
Writings,” 345-7.
222 For a discussion of the manuscripts of Manuel des pechez, see Barratt, “Spiritual Writings,” 353-355. For the
manuscripts of Handlyng Synne and the Story of England, see the respective editions by Idelle Sullens.
61
and early fifteenth century, survive of Mannyng’s second work, his Story of England, completed
in 1338.
One of the substantial differences between the number of surviving manuscripts of Mannyng’s
work in comparison with that of his source may have been Mannyng’s presumably limited access
to a community interested in producing and disseminating—that is, publishing—his texts. It is
frequently argued that Mannyng wrote his books to be read by either the priory’s novices or lay
workers.223
In the prologue to Handlyng Synne, Mannyng cites the order and priors at
Sempringham to leave little doubt that the work was “duly authorized, as the rule required”—
possibly because, as Coleman notes, the Gilbertine order of which Mannyng was a member set
harsh penalties for canons who composed anything except service books without official
permission.224
Supporting this, Ker notes that the majority of books recorded or surviving from
Gilbertine priories are service books.225
In contrast, William Waddington was connected with a
network ready to promote and disseminate his work. He was likely a member of the household of
Walter Gray, the Archbishop of York (1215-1255), who held a series of councils in his diocese
from 1241 to 1255 in order to address concerns regarding clerical celibacy, the inheritance of
benefice as well as the education of the clergy in keeping with the mandates for the Fourth
Lateran Council in 1215.226
Archbishop Gray was one of the most zealous reformers of the
period, and Jonathan Hughes argues,
Waddington’s decision to compose a vernacular handbook on confession…for the use of
the less educated clergy of the diocese clearly had official backing and approval at York.
The Manuel des Peches was rapidly disseminated throughout the diocese (almost all the
extant manuscripts were copied between 1275 and 1325, and most originated in the
diocese of York).227
In this case, although Mannyng’s English translations would have appealed to a similar audience
to that of Waddington, and Handlyng Synne was of a similar genre, the principal difference
223 Cf. Turville-Petre, “Politics and Poetry.” See also Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 108.
Coleman argues that these texts might also have been used to entertain pilgrims in “Handling Pilgrims.”
224 Coleman, “Strange Prosody,” 1226.
225 Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 304. Cf. Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham.
226 Sullivan, “A Brief Textual History of the Manuel des Péchés,” 343.
227 Hughes, “The Administration of Confession,” 92.
62
appears to have been the community of potential producers to which Mannyng had access. While
Gray’s work was sanctioned and possibly promoted by the Archbishop of York, Mannyng would
have had to rely upon the resources of the Gilbertines who, although they authorized his literary
endeavors, likely would not have been able to facilitate the production of manuscripts in any
great numbers. Both Handlyng Synne and the Story of England, whether intended for novices,
conversi or even pilgrims traveling to the priory, must have been intended primarily for local
use, and, due to the limited textual resources of the Gilbertine community, must have remained
predominantly local texts, consequently limited from shaping or contributing to a national
vernacular literary culture in any substantial way.
By way of contrast, I want to offer an extended example of an early Middle English author who
achieved canonical or national status because he wrote from a position of overlap between a
number of communities—linguistic, geographic, and bureaucratic—that allowed him access to
an audience that increasingly widened through the circulation of manuscripts: the hermit Richard
Rolle of Hampole (1305-1349). Rolle’s presence as a charismatic intellectual writing in Latin
and English, an author patronized by and conversant with the nobility, was vital to the
development of Yorkshire’s rich culture of devotional and meditational works. The bulk of
Rolle’s early works were written in Latin, including Contra amatores mundi, Incendium amoris,
and Melos amoris. His most popular Latin treatise, Emendatio vitae, survives in ninety-five
manuscripts and sixteen English versions, representing seven separate translations.228
Despite
their apparent popularity, few of these Latin texts survive from the fourteenth century. The
earliest is BL, MS Add. 34763, a small commonplace book containing the pseudo-Bernardine
Speculum peccatoris and the Scala claustralium. Its contents suggest ownership by “a male
cleric with contemplative interests.”229
Early copies of his Latin works circulated both in
England and internationally: we have evidence that manuscripts belonged to the Carthusians in
the Enghien Charterhouse in Hainaut, Belgium,230
the Bridgettine mother house in Vadstena,
Sweden,231
and Christopher Braystones, a Benedictine monk of St Mary’s, York.232
Toward the
228 For Contra amatores mundi, see Theiner, The Contra amatores mundi. For Melos amoris, see Arnould, The
Melos amoris. For Emendatio vitae, see Nicholas Watson’s edition, Emendatio vitae.
229 Barratt, “Spiritual Writings and Religious Instruction,” 361.
230 Cf. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale MSS 2103 and 1485.
231 Cf. Uppsala, University Library, MS C. I.
63
end of his life, Rolle turned to the vernacular in order to engage with a readership of parish
priests, anchoresses, nuns, and noblewomen. According to the compilers of his office, Rolle
composed many “sweet writings” for the edification of his neighbours in the form of “treatises
and little books.”233
These neighbours, likely his main source of patronage, would have included
such leading Richmondshire families as the Scropes of Masham, the FitzHughs of Tanfield, and
the Stapletons of Bedale, who all lived within a twelve mile radius of Layton where Rolle lived
and wandered.234
None of these autograph copies have been identified, although Lord Scrope
owned a copy of the Incendium amoris and “unum Quaternum parvum” [a small quire] which
contained Judica me “quod Ricardus Heremita compsuit et scripsit, pro Remembrancia” [which
Richard the Hermit composed and wrote in remembrance]. Lord Scrope bequeathed both of these
in 1415 to his brother-in-law, Henry Lord FitzHugh.235
John Newton, a contemporary of Thomas
Arundel and Richard Scrope at Cambridge and the treasurer of York Cathedral, also apparently
owned Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 35, a manuscript containing various texts of Rolle
and Bonaventure, as well as Honorius of Autun’s Cognitio vitae, which he may have corrected
with one of Rolle’s original manuscripts.236
I argue that one element of Rolle’s success had to do with the way his texts were produced and
circulated in order to engage interpenetrating readerships. Here, I would draw attention to the last
of the manuscripts discussed above, BodL, MS Rawl. C. 285.237
This is a vellum manuscript
from the north of England dated to the end of the fourteenth century, comprised of four booklets
written by four scribes. The contents of each of these booklets tend toward religious poetry and
prose. The first booklet (ff. 1-39) written by Scribe 1 contains Walter Hilton’s Scale of
Perfection and an extract from the Prick of Conscience. The second booklet (ff. 40-63) written
by Scribe 2 contains The Form of Living and a series of nine prose extracts from Hilton, Rolle
232 Susan Cavanaugh mentions this copy in “A Study of Books Privately Owned in England,” 774.
233 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 90.
234 Ibid., 87.
235 Ibid., 91.
236 Hughes, “The Administration of Confession,” 105.
237 For a description of this manuscript, see Hanna, English Manuscripts, 174-176.
64
and others. The third booklet consisting of a single quire (ff. 64-73) with the first text completed
by Scribe 2 and the remaining completed by Scribe 3 contains anonymous religious texts
including “Meditation on the Passion,” “The Epistle of St John the Hermit,” and excerpts from
the “Verba seniorum.” The final booklet (ff. 74-118) written by Scribe 4 contains a second
version of Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection. Each of the opening pages of the booklets has been
decorated by lombards in gold leaf and the figures of birds, insects, animals and flowers,
completed in the seventeenth century. Each of these booklets ends with a final blank folio which
has since also been filled in with later material. This manuscript exemplifies my point that the
circulation of small-format manuscripts and the production of larger compiled codices out of
booklets contributed to Rolle’s success, a point Vincent Gillespie has also made.238
As I have
noted, Rolle himself may have been responsible for the first “publication” of his work in small
“treatises and little books” which he gave to his neighbours, copies such as the “unum
Quaternum parvum” [a small quire] which contained Judica me owned by Lord Scrope.
A cursory glance at Hanna’s catalogue describing English manuscripts of Rolle’s works brings
up several similar examples: BodL, MS Rawl. A.389, which consists of six booklets of Rollean
material from the end of the fourteenth century;239
Camb., Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125
from the beginning of the fifteenth century, comprising two originally separate manuscripts, the
second of which is divided into four booklets containing religious texts in English and Latin
including Rolle’s Commandment and Form of Living;240
Camb. Trinity College, MS B.15.17
(353), a contemporary manuscript divided into two booklets, the first of which contains Piers
Plowman and the second of which consists of two quires containing only the Form of Living;241
and CUL, MS Ff.5.30 from the beginning of the fifteenth century which consists of two booklets,
the second of which is made up solely of Emendatio vitae written over four quires.242
This list of
“booklets” and small-format manuscripts containing the works of Richard Rolle is by no means
exhaustive. It provides evidence that Rolle’s work circulated in single-author anthologies such as
238 Gillespie, “Vernacular Books of Religion,” 327.
239 Described in Hanna, English Manuscripts, 171-174.
240 Described in Hanna, English Manuscripts, 8-12.
241 Described in Hanna, English Manuscripts, 17-18.
242 Described in Hanna, English Manuscripts, 27-28.
65
BodL, MS Rawl. A.389, in general collections of Middle English religious material such as
Camb., Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125, and as “booklets” containing a single Rollean text
joined to form a composite manuscript such as Camb., Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (353) and
CUL, MS Ff.5.30. Furthermore, these booklets may have been produced as a result primarily of
personal copying as may have been the case for Camb., Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125;
they may have been commissioned from a professional scribe as may have been the case for
BodL, MS Rawl. A.389;243
and lastly, they may have been produced by means of the “scriptorial
facilities” of a religious institution such as the nunnery at Hampole where his biographical office
was compiled in preparation for his canonization. No single avenue of production or
dissemination ensured Rolle’s success as an author; rather, it came about as a result of
dissemination through multiple channels, in multiple languages, and through multiple formats,
each of which expressed different attitudes regarding his canonical or authoritative status and
each of which may have appealed to different reading communities.
Jeremy Catto notes that during Rolle’s lifetime and shortly after his death, his work gestated
quietly, “known only to a small circle of Yorkshire admirers: Margaret Kirkeby, for whom more
than one was written, the nuns of Hampole, and other recluses of the vicinity…together with
their lay patrons of the Scrope and FitzHugh families.”244
At the end of the fourteenth century,
they became known to Thomas Arundel, archbishop of York (1388-96) and his clerical circle
(possibly by means of Richard Scrope, his eventual successor as archbishop of York), after
which point they
enjoyed wide popularity in the fifteenth century, being copied and translated
systematically…into a larger literary world in which texts were scrutinized, licensed, and
proliferated systematically for the edification of a sophisticated and independent-minded
laity.245
243 The scribe of this manuscript also copied Camb., Trinity College, MSR.3.8 containing the Cursor Mundi as well
as BL, MS Harley 1205, a manuscript of the Prick of Conscience, and Manchester, John Rylands University Library,
MS Eng. 50, a second manuscript of the Prick of Conscience and the Speculum Gy de Warewyke. He is discussed
further in Chapter 4.
244 Catto, “1349-1412: Culture and History,” 113.
245 Ibid., 114-5.
66
It may well be the support of influential and energetic supporters such as Arundel and Scrope
that encouraged this copying, in contrast to the fate of the Ancrene Wisse which never enjoyed
the same level of success.
Rolle remains a fascinating character in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literary history
precisely because of his ubiquity. Many works of his disciples were later attributed to him, and
his name became attached to a range of works including the Prick of Conscience and the
Speculum Vitae as a way to “authorize” these otherwise anonymous texts—that is, he appears to
be one of the first vernacular authors whose manuscripts (alongside other related manuscripts)
were conditioned to be read as canonical on the basis of their association with a recognized
authorial figure.246
One of the first Middle English literary best-sellers, his success was due in
part to his skillful exploitation of multiple writing communities and in part, at a material level,
because of the ease in which his texts could be produced, circulated, and integrated into new
physical (and cultural) contexts. Although the production of his works occurred necessarily in
individual “sites”—that is, mass production of his works was never fostered or directed at an
institutional level in the way we see, for example, the Layfolk’s Catechism produced and
disseminated in Yorkshire—nevertheless, these local moments of production, when taken in
aggregate, resulted in a shift in England’s cultural landscape. In subsequent chapters, I will build
upon the groundwork laid here to show the similar interrelationship between literary and textual
activities in the production of three major textual projects.
246 For an example of the attribution of the Speculum Vitae to Rolle, see CUL, MS LI.i.8 (s. xiv
ex). For examples of
the attribution of the Prick of Conscience to Rolle, see BodL, MS Ashmole 60 (s. xivex
), BL, MS Egerton 3245 (s.
xivex
), London, Lambeth Palace, MS 260 (s. xvin
), Camb., Gonville and Caius College, MS 386 (s. xv1), and Oxford,
Merton College, MS 68 (s. xvmed
). See also Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority for his discussion
of how Rolle was presented as an authoritative figure and potential author for this text and others.
67
Chapter 2 “Of Holi Dawes Maked”: Making Early South English Legendaries
1 Introduction
The West Midlands collection of saints’ lives known as the South English Legendary (SEL) was
one of the most widely circulating Middle English texts of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
century.247
Extant in over sixty manuscripts and fragments dispersed throughout the south of
England and parts of the Midlands, nine of which survive pre-1350, the SEL was in its first
incarnation “a rudimentary collection of short saints’ lives, probably dependent on a liturgical
model.”248
The collection was expanded and altered throughout the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries to comprise movable feasts, Old Testament temporale items (a history from
the Creation and Adam, through the major patriarchs, to the prophet), Christ and Mary temporale
items, a prologue sometimes known as the Banna Sanctorum, and further sanctorale items.249
That a collection written in Middle English should survive in six manuscript witnesses and a
further three fragments dated before 1350 is remarkable. In contrast, only five manuscripts and
247 The line of thinking in this chapter is greatly indebted to William Robins’s observations on the circulation of the
SEL. For his excellent discussion of how the “modular dynamics” of the SEL facilitated participation in the
development of a “widespread, vernacular, Middle English, literary culture,” see William Robins, “Modular
Dynamics in the SEL.” An early draft of some of this material was presented in “The Modular Book: Textual
Production and the South English Legendary” at the 43rd
International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo,
MI, 2008).
248 Pickering, “Teaching or Preaching?” 2. Görlach lists twenty-five major manuscripts, nineteen fragments, and
eighteen miscellaneous manuscripts containing at least one SEL text in Textual Tradition and he and Pickering
identified a further manuscript in 1982, described in “A Newly Discovered Manuscript.”
249 The piece which I have called the Banna Sanctorum is referred to by various titles among the manuscripts,
including “Banna,” “de natiuitate,” “De baptismo qui dicitur nouus fructus, “Here it speith of the fruyt called
Christendom.” For a discussion of these titles and their relationship to the framework the prologue establishes, see
Thomas Liszka, “The First ‘A’ Redaction ,” 408.
68
fragments of the Ancrene Wisse (c. 1225-1240) survive from this period;250
three manuscripts of
the Cursor Mundi (c. 1300);251
one manuscript of the Northern Homily Cycle (1295-1306);252
and no manuscripts of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (c. 1303). As such, the SEL
contradicts the characterization that early Middle English texts are “singular and precarious.”253
The collection is deeply entrenched in England’s vernacular literary culture—one of the most
widely distributed Middle English texts before the Pricke of Conscience (c. 1350) and
Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1360-1387).254
Furthermore, it is distinctly connected to an
upsurge in the production of texts spurred on by the Fourth Lateran Council and fostered by a
broad base of readers and scribes that might have included the Benedictines of Worcester
Cathedral Priory or St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester, Augustinian canons, friars, nuns, and, among
others, a host of parish priests, lay clerks, and household scribes.
This chapter argues that one aspect which encouraged the proliferation of SEL manuscripts was
the text’s formal adaptability. The text was well suited for dissemination in England’s
compilatory culture where scribes could adapt materials to reflect the needs of local audiences.
Scholars such as Beverly Boyd and William Robins have drawn attention to the fact that no two
manuscripts of the SEL survive with all the same texts in exactly the same order. These scholars
suggest that the “openness” or miscellaneity of the collection—what Ralph Hanna III describes
as the “oscillation between the planned and the random”255
—shaped the codicology of SEL
manuscripts such as BodL, MS, Laud Misc. 108 and BL, MS Egerton 1993.256
Less attention,
however, has been paid to Manfred Görlach’s suspicion that two SEL manuscripts and another
two fragments were produced in an institutional scriptorium of some sort, which, if this is the
250 Cf. BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.vi; c. 1225-30; BL, MS Cotton Nero A.xiv, c. 1225-50; BL, MS Cotton Titus
D.xviii, c. 1225-50; CCCC, MS 402, c. 1225-40; and the fragment BodL, MS Eng. th.c.70, c. 1300-50.
251 Cf. Edinburgh, MS Royal College of Physicians, c. 1300; BL, MS Cotton Vespasian A.iii, c. 1300; and
Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, MS Cod. theol. 107r, c. 1300.
252 Cf. Edinburgh, MS Royal College of Physicians, c. 1300.
253 Hahn, “Early Middle English,” 91.
254 For a comparison of numbers, see Sargent, “What Do the Numbers Mean?” 206.
255 Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 37.
256 See Boyd, “New Light on the South English Legendary” and Robins, “Modular Dynamics.”
69
case, would make the SEL one of the earliest Middle English texts disseminated along
institutional lines by means of a concerted program of copying.257
This chapter then will
examine how the circulation of the SEL in the West Midlands models two ways of conceiving of
Middle English manuscripts: as open compilations subject to intervention, emendation, revision
and addition at various stages of production and as consolidated, fixed, or canonical entities to be
reproduced and circulated in a single, stable form.
2 Contexts and Backgrounds
2.1 The Authorship of the SEL
Before I turn to an analysis of several individual manuscripts of the SEL, I want to lay the
groundwork by exploring the contexts of production for this collection. Scholars have typically
linked the production and circulation of the SEL to what Mary Elizabeth O’Carroll describes as a
veritable “industry” of pastoralia that emerged in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council in
1215 and its urge to pastoral care.258
In 1215, Pope Innocent III assembled the Fourth Council of
the Lateran in order to address issues including the Crusade, heresy, church reform and pastoral
care. Crucially, he moved for a thorough reform of the clergy and the creation of a pastoral
system to instruct and guide the laity. This was a pivotal moment, not only for the development
of the pan-European Church where the effects of the reform movement have been well-
documented, but also for the development of England’s vernacular literary culture. The precepts
of the Fourth Lateran Council—implemented along official channels in England in the thirteenth
century through local ecclesiastical councils and synods such as Archbishop John Pecham’s
257 For the theory of the scriptorium, see Görlach’s description of CCCC, MS 145 (Textual Tradition, 77-79), BL,
MS Egerton 2891 (Textual Tradition, 92-93), Leicester, Leicester Museum, MS 18 D 59 (Textual Tradition, 113-
114), and Nottingham, University of Nottingham , MS WLC/LM/38 (Textual Tradition, 117). The only earlier
example of semi-organized scribal collaboration across multiple manuscripts is the case of the Ancrene Wisse,
surviving in fourteen manuscripts and fragments, four of which listed above are dated from 1225-1240. Robert
Hasenfratz argues that this text allows us to “imagine clusters of anchoresses copying and reading AW intensively,
interpreting and responding to the text, sometimes prompting the author (their spiritual advisor or advisors) to
clarify, expand, or revise the text” in the introduction to Ancrene Wisse, 15. But at this stage the manuscript
evidence is sufficiently unclear for us to determine with certitude how exactly this might have occurred; it is more
likely to have involved local copying rather than in a scriptorium.
258 See, for example, Thompson, Everyday Saints, 157. Her comments are representative of the general scholarly
consensus.
70
Council of Lambeth in 1281—encouraged a wave of literary production in England’s lingua
materna.259
Of the many texts produced during this first wave—texts such as the Northern
Homily Cycle produced by canons resident in the vicinity of York (1295-1306), the massive
compendium known as the Cursor Mundi (1300), and Robert of Gloucester’s Handlyng Synne
(1303), to name a few—the SEL was arguably the most successful.
Despite the collection’s general association with the rising interest in pastoral care, it is difficult
to be sure about where and when the SEL was first produced since no manuscripts of the SEL
survive from before the end of the thirteenth century, and the earliest surviving manuscript—
BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 (c. 1280-1300)—likely represents a “conflated” and “corrupted”
amalgam of several earlier versions of the text, such that it poses the “greatest problem for the
reconstruction of the genesis of the collection.”260
Scholars studying the SEL have argued for the
involvement of different groups of religious—Benedictine monks, Dominican or Franciscan
friars, Augustinian canons and parish priests—in the early production and dissemination of the
collection. Early scholars such as Wright, Wells and Görlach in particular argued that the first
copy of the SEL was likely written in a monastic house, either in Worcester or at St. Peter’s
Abbey, Gloucester.261
These institutions, runs the argument, would have had the textual and
material resources to produce a major religious compilation: a library, a scriptorium (or
“scriptorial facilities”) of some sort, or at the very least money for materials and a group of
trained scribes in their vicinity.
Beatrice D. Brown, however, in her edition of the Southern Passion, claimed “the South English
Legendary appears to have been written for a purpose which is not historically consistent with
any of the known activities of a thirteenth-century monastic house.”262
Instead, she suggested
259 For an initial overview of the effect of the impetus to pastoral care on literature during the period, see Gillespie,
“Doctrina and Praedicacio;” Boyle, “The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology,” 30-43 and
Shaw, “Popular Books of Instruction,” 44-60.
260 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 80.
261 Cf. Wright, The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, xxxix. Wells argues “the enterprise probably
originated among the monks at Gloucester, or at least became defined and developed at Gloucester” in Manual of
the Writings in Middle English, 293.
262 Brown, The Southern Passion, xcv.
71
mendicant authorship on the basis that a work of pastoral instruction and entertainment such as
the SEL may have easily been adapted for use in sermons and fits well with the general aims and
interests of preachers. She argued that on the continent there existed a strong hagiographical vein
in the writings of Dominican friars, in particular, works such as Jean de Mailly’s Abbreviatio in
gestis et miraculis sanctorum (late 1220s), Bartholomew of Trent’s Epilogus in gesta sanctorum
(mid-1240s), and the famous Legenda aurea (c. 1260). D’Evelyn and Mill, in their 1959 edition,
tentatively suggested that the author was a Dominican because Peter the Dominican was
included.263
Similarly, W. A. Hinnebusch argued that St. Dominic receives greater praise than
St. Francis and so, on that basis, the text was more likely to have had a Dominican author.264
Wolpers noted that the structure of the SEL and the emphasis on humilitas might point toward
Franciscan authorship, but he argued that both orders may have been responsible for the
transmission of the collection in its various forms.265
The debate between Franciscan and
Dominican authorship has re-occurred in a number of more recent articles including Karen
Bjelland’s “Franciscan versus Dominican Responses to the Knight as a Societal Model” and
Sebastian Sobecki’s “Two English Dominican Hagiographers in the Thirteenth Century.”
There are several problems with the methodology of these arguments, which I will lay out,
because, on the one hand, these methodological problems expose the issues of addressing a
collection with such a complex textual history, and, on the other, they show the persistent and
problematic influence of the assumption that the literary production of different religious
institutions occurred in isolation. Towards the first point, the SEL is, as far as we know, a loose
collection of texts taken from numerous sources including Latin hagiographies, breviaries and
even chronicles, possibly versified by more than one author over time, with texts substituted or
edited as the collection was transmitted. Because we can only hypothesize the contents of the
original SEL, and as the subsequent versions show different stages of editorial intervention, it is
in many ways impossible to tell on the basis of the study of a single text, or even a group of
texts, the literary intentions of the original author. Toward the second point, I would recall Neil
263 D’Evelyn and Mill, 16–7.
264 Hinnebusch, Early English Friars Preachers, 311.
265 Wolpers, Die Englische Heiligengeschichte, 239.
72
Cartlidge’s concerns about determining the social context of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29(II)
and BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix on the basis of the texts alone:
…just as the reception implied by any given text is by no means automatically
identifiable with its actual reception, so the purpose of the manuscripts implied by the
accumulation of different texts is not necessarily an indication of the function that they
actually served. Such an analysis may tell us something about the purposes and
expectations of their compilers, but it cannot provide any direct evidence for the early
history of the manuscripts themselves. Moreover, if their composition is taken to be in
any way representative of their original milieux, then we must make sure that due weight
is given to all the texts that they contain. In fact, hypotheses about the circumstances of
their production have often been supported by disproportionate emphases upon relatively
narrow samples of their contents.266
The study of a limited range of texts—in this case, most often, the lives of St. Francis and St.
Dominic—tend to skew the conversation in SEL studies. This is particularly problematic because
it is doubtful that a single life ought to be taken as representative of the aims or agenda—or even
source material—of the whole collection.
If we relied upon this methodology, we might, for example, take an interest in the fact that the
SEL life of St. Dunstan shows the founding of monasteries in England as an indication of
Benedictine authorship. When Dunstan becomes abbot of Glastonbury, the author of BodL, MS
Laud Misc. 108 breaks into an aside that highlights the origins of the “blake Monekes” under
Dunstan’s tenure:
Of blake Monekes, þat was a-rerd : þe furste of Enguelonde—
For ech Abeye of Enguelonde : þat of blake Monekes is
Of þe hous of Glastingburi : furst sprong and cam, iwis.267
A revised and expanded version of this passage appears in CCCC, MS 450 and BL, MS Harley
2277, which provides a more historically-attuned description of the foundation of monasticism in
England, drawn from William of Malmesbury:
At þat hous þat was ferst bigonne four hondred ȝer biuore
And eke þreo & uifti ȝer ar sein Donston were ibore
266 Cartlidge, “The Composition and Social Context,” 252.
267 “Dunstan,” in Horstmann, The Early South-English Legendary, ll. 42-4.
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For þer was ordres of monkes ar sein Patrik come
And ar seint Austin to Engelond broȝte Cristendom
And seint Patrik deide four hondred & to & fifti ȝer
After þat oure swete Leuedi oure Louerd an eorþe ber
Ac none monekes þere nere ferst bote as in hudynge echon
And as men þat drowe to wildernesse for drede of Godes fon
Sein Donston & seint Aþelwold as oure Louerd it bisay
Iordeined to prestes were boþe in o day268
Both CCCC, MS 450 and BL, MS Harley 2277 draw upon and reinforce this history of
monasticism in England in clustered references in the lives of St. Oswald and St. Æthelwold. The
following passage praises the “[e]iȝte and forti abbeis · of monkes & of nonne” founded by St.
Oswald and St. Æthelwold under the auspices of King Edgar:
Seint Aþelwold was þulke time bissop of Wynchestre
And seint Oswold þe godeman bissop [of] Wircestre
Þis tweie bissops & sein Donston were al at one rede
And Edgar þe gode king to do þis gode dede
Þis þre[o] bissops wende aboute þoru al Engelonde
And eche luþer person caste out hom ne miȝte non atstonde
For chirchen and hore oþer god clanlich hom bynome
And bisette it on godemen þoru þe popes grant of Rome
Eiȝte and forti abbeis of monkes & of nonne
Of þe tresor hy made in Engelond of persons so iwonne
And so it was wel bet biset þann it was er on ssrewe
For [wanne] gode maistres beoþ some godnesse [hi] wolleþ ssewe
Gode were þis þre[o] bissops þat at one tyme were þo
Þe betere is Engelond for hom and worþ euere mo.269
This episode was important enough that it is repeated, with lines verbatim, in the life of St.
Oswald:
Seint Donston and seint Oswold wardeins were þerto
And þe bissop of Winchestre seint Aþelwold þat was þo
Þis þre[o] bissops wende aboute þoru al Engelonde
Ech luþer person hi caste out hom ne miȝte non atstonde
Hore churchen and hore oþer god clanliche hy bynome
And bysette it in gode men þoru þe popes wille of Rome
Eiȝte and forty grete abbeies of monekes & of nonne
268 D’Evelyn and Mill, St. Dunstan, ll. 47-56.
269 Ibid., ll. 141-154.
74
Of tresor hy made in Engelond þat of persons was so iwonne
In þe churche of Wircest[r]e ner þerȝute monekes none270
These passages point toward a particular interest in monastic history that re-occurs throughout
multiple texts of the SEL—what Renee Hamelinck sees as a political structure underlying the
inclusion of figures such as Dunstan, Oswald, and Æthelwold.271
Although these linked passages show an interest in monastic history, nevertheless, they do not
prove monastic authorship of the SEL. These passages may have been translated from a monastic
source. Görlach argues that the text for the SEL life of St. Dunstan in BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108,
was adapted, either directly or through several stages of revision, from several Latin
hagiographical texts written by Benedictine monks. The SEL poet appears to have drawn most
heavily upon the Epistola Adelardi (c. 1006-1012) written as a series of short lections for the
Benedictine monks of Christ Church, Canterbury in contrast to the earlier and later lives which
show more narrative freedom.272
The SEL retains the simple tone and many of the episodic
divisions of this text. This text was also used for the breviary lessons for St. Dunstan’s feast day
after the uses of Salisbury, York and Hereford.273
The revised text in CCCC, MS 450 and BL,
MS Harley 2277, although dependent on Adelard’s vita, makes use of other sources, namely
those written by William of Malmesbury and the monk Osbern who wrote another version of the
vita in 1070. The vitae by William of Malmesbury and Osbern carry their own complicated
history and were embroiled in the specific political and cultural milieu of their moment of
writing, responding in the case of the former to the intense rivalry over Dunstan between
Canterbury and Glastonbury and in the case of the latter to the arrival of Norman monks in the
wake of the Conquest.274
In addition to its relationship to possible Latin sources, the Middle
270 D’Evelyn and Mill, St. Oswald, ll. 123-131.
271 Cf. Hamelinck, “St. Kenelm and the Legends of the English Saints.”
272 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 169.
273 The breviary services on St. Dunstan’s feast day after the use of Salisbury, for example, contains six lections
closely corresponding to those of Adelard albeit they have omitted some episodes. The breviaries after the uses of
York and Hereford both contain only three lections, corresponding to his birth, his ecclesiastical career, and his
death. See Stubbs, “Horae Sancti Dunstani Episcopi et Confessoris,” in The Memorials of St. Dunstan, 445-450.
274 Michael Winterbottom and Rodney Thomson deal extensively with the relationship between Canterbury and
Glastonbury in Saints’ Lives: Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus and Indract. David Townsend
75
English St. Dunstan was likely interrelated with the development of Robert of Gloucester’s
Chronicle, which borrows from St. Dunstan as well as from St. Æthelwold.275
In the case of a
collection with such difficult textual relationships between sources and between individual items
in relationsip to the compilation as a whole, it is often difficiult to accurately locate and assess
the presumed user of a text based on the rhetorical position adopted in a single item.
As Cartlidge points out, in cases where the provenance of a manuscript or text is unknown, the
temptation to read deeply into textual interpolations is strong. However, with a collection as
diverse and changeable between extant manuscripts as the SEL, it is problematic to depend too
heavily on any one legend, or set of legends, as indicative of the general tone or make-up of the
collection as a whole. In the case of the SEL, it is often difficult to tell whether the poet used a
single source directly (for instance, Adelard’s Latin vita), or an intermediary source (an account
in a breviary based upon Adelard’s Latin vita), or multiple sources (Adelard’s Latin vita, a
breviary, as well as the vitae of William of Malmesbury and Osbern—or, indeed, a lost Middle
English source which combines elements of these as Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle does).
Even when one can determine the sources, it is still difficult to know the extent to which the poet
translated his material into Middle English in order to maintain institutional or political
affiliations in the original text or whether passages that suggest those affiliations may have been
“relicts” unintentionally preserved.
This problem of determining the readership of a text from its contents is compounded by the fact
that one group may have first produced the SEL and another group may have used it
subsequently. Görlach, for example, argues:
Two of the possible explanations of the origin of the SEL would, however, be that the
“Z” collection [the presumed original collection] was translated from an unknown
legenda (with additions) for the nuns of a Worcestershire house, possibly by a chaplain
shows that Osbern’s treatment of Dunstan reflects the tensions of the Norman transition of power in “Anglo-Latin
Hagiography and the Norman Transition.”
275 See Görlach, Textual Tradition, 42-45 for a discussion of the relationship between passages of the SEL life of St.
Dunstan and Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle.
76
who used the resources of the library at Worcester, or was composed by a Benedictine for
the dependent parishes of Worcester, or possibly Evesham or Pershore. This collection
soon became popular with the friars and with the Benedictine brethren in the surrounding
Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and the Wiltshire houses, and possibly
with the Augustinians at Gloucester.276
A second theory of interrelated production is also plausible: the SEL may have initially been
produced by either one of these institutions and disseminated into either dependent parishes or
vicarages, as Laurel Braswell suggests, or the numerous nunneries where such reading materials
may have been welcome.277
In the Worcestershire and Warwickshire area of the West Midlands,
there were three Benedictine nunneries (Westwood, Wroxale, Henwood) and three Cistercian
nunneries (Whiston, Cookhill, Pinley) where the SEL might have found a home; there were no
nunneries in Gloucestershire. She also suggests the possibility of Augustinian involvement in the
production of SEL texts since one of the duties of the canons was to preach in the neighbouring
parishes. Görlach is generally dismissive of this, but admits that the Augustinians might have
been involved with a secondary stage of production after the SEL had travelled south from
Worcester. Of these two theories of interrelated production, I find it likely, as Braswell argues,
that the Augustinians were involved in at least one strand of production, as I will discuss in more
detail in the second half of this chapter. Rather than restricting the potential authors, producers
and readers of the SEL, however, I argue that we ought to continue to think about the potential
diversity of its audience, an audience that may have included monks, friars, canons and parish
priests, possibly working in concert, possibly copying independently material they plausibly
could have used for public reading, for private reading, or as a possible source of exempla for
sermons or preaching.
The later history of several SEL manuscripts, where it can be traced, shows exactly this sort of
versatility. At the end of the fourteenth century, the catalogue of the library of Titchfield Abbey
lists a “Legenda sanctorum dicitur aurea in anglicise” among its holdings. Although this volume
276 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 50.
277 Braswell suggests that since Gloucester Abbey was the most important appropriator of vicarages in the West, the
legendary may have been compiled by its monks who then relied upon secular parish priests for its transmission. See
The South English Legendary Collection, 254.
77
does not survive, the early date suggests that it may have been a copy of the SEL.278
The so-
called “Vernon” manuscript (BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a.1, discussed in more detail in Chapter 4),
which bears the name “Salus anime” or “Sowlehele,” offers further potential evidence of the
text’s circulation in monastic houses: Sajavaara suggests the Cistercian community at Bordesley
Abbey as one possible home, although, as Ian Doyle points out, a single community would have
been hard pressed to muster the available funds for such a lavish book, and so it may well
represent a project undertaken with broad support.279
Whereas these volumes seem to have found a religious audience, the colophon of London,
Lambeth Palace, MS 223 (c. 1400) suggests that it was a work commissioned for a private
customer: “her endeþ legenda aurea writen by R. P. of þis toun / To a gode mon of þe same is
cleped Thomas of Wottoun.”280
Similarly, a London professional scribe of the mid-fourteenth
century copied two manuscripts containing selections from the SEL.281
The first, BL, MS Harley
874, also has a Middle English prose translation of an Apocalypse.282
The second, BodL, MS
Laud Misc. 622, contains the romances Titus and Vespasian and Alisaunder.283
This scribe also
copied Oxford, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2498, which contains the Middle English Mirror,
the prose Apocalypse, the Early English Prose Psalter, and Ancrene Riwle, possibly for a
member of the upper laity.284
Finally, also in London, in 1376 an inventory of the goods of a
London vintner by the name of Richard Lyons was prepared; this lists “j. livre appelle legende
sanctorum en engleis, pris 10s” which might possibly refer to an unidentified copy of the SEL.285
This brief overview of materials suggests that by the end of the fourteenth century the SEL could
278 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 130.
279 Sajavaara, “The Relationship of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts,” 439. Doyle, introduction to The Vernon
Manuscript, 15.
280 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 83.
281 See Hanna, “Pre-Fifteenth Century Scribes,” 183.
282 Cf. Fridner, An English Fourteenth Century Apocalypse Version.
283 Cf. Smithers, Kyng Alisaunder.
284 Gunn, Ancrene Wisse, 185. Hanna discusses this volume at length in Chapter 4 of London Literature.
285 Hanna, London Literature, 13-14.
78
have possibly been found in a variety of contexts: religious and secular, read or heard by men
and women alike.
3 Producing the South English Legendaries
3.1 The “Redactionist” Approach and the “Fluid Corpus” Approach
The complexity of the SEL’s textual tradition has problematized our ability to make statements
about the authorship and audience of the original collection. But the numbers of surviving
manuscripts have provided a wealth of codicological material which shed light upon the
practices for producing manuscripts. In this section, I will discuss two useful models these
manuscripts provide for imagining how scribes obtained sources and produced new manuscripts
of the SEL: the “redactionist” (or “recensionst”) approach employed by Görlach to map out the
relationship between surviving manuscripts, and the “fluid corpus” approach championed by
Boyd, which emphasizes the openness of the collection to limited scribal revision and editorial
intervention. These two approaches exist at either end of a spectrum, and other scholars such as
Pickering, and, most recently, Robins, have plotted a middle ground between them. I will discuss
the redactionist approach first as it lays out a useful conjectural history of the transmission of the
SEL, and then I will return to the “fluid corpus” approach to discuss some of the complications
these scholars have raised.
3.1.1 The Redactionist Approach
Görlach first employed the redactionist approach to “determine the contents of the original
collection (“Z”) and to describe the alterations that after successive stages of revision and
adaptation eventually led to the texts in the extant manuscripts.”286
To summarize briefly, he
suggested that the initial version of the SEL (“Z1”) was probably compiled in the West Midlands
in the 1260-70s, possibly in Worcester, as a concentration of early manuscripts seem to share a
West Midlands dialect.287
The earliest surviving manuscript, BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108, he
286 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 8.
287 Görlach, “The Legenda aurea and the Early History of the South English Legendary,” 304. In The Textual
Tradition he elaborates this position to suggest that “the selection of the presumptive original SEL is most easily
79
theorized, contains a mixture of “Z” texts and texts from the later “A” redaction. This manuscript
begins with a shortened Prologue attached to St. Fabian, which Görlach argued might give some
indication as to the original plan of the collection:
AL þis bok is i-maked of holi dawes : and of holie mannes liues
Þat soffreden for ore louerdes loue : pinene manie and riue,
Þat ne spareden for none eiȝe : godes weorkes to wurche;
Of ȝwas liues ȝwane heore feste fallez : men redez in holi churche.
Þei ich of alle ne mouwe nouȝt telle : ichulle telle of some,
Ase euerech feste after oþur : In þe ȝere doth come.288
The collection, as this shortened Prologue indicates, was intended to include texts for individual
feast days as well as temporale items but not a full paraphrase of Biblical history. The passage
also indicates that the author (or authors) based the style and format of the legends on those that
“men redez in holi churche,” possibly a Sarum liturgical legendary.289
Soon after its initial
composition, Görlach argued, the scope of the “Z1” collection was expanded from a simple
collection of saints’ lives to include movable feasts, Old Testament material, and Christ and
Mary temporale to create a “Z2” version.
After it was initially composed in Worcestershire in the 1260s, some version of the SEL
(possibly of the “Z2” recension) travelled to Gloucestershire in the 1270s where it underwent a
subsequent stage of revision by a redactor (or redactors) influenced by the Legenda aurea.290
At
accounted for by Worcester provenance, and most of the later alterations can be ascribed to the surrounding houses
or dioceses” (Textual Tradition, 37). For a more detailed account of his reasons, including the presence of certain
saints like Mary of Egypt and Brendan well-represented in Worcester liturgical documents and the potential
Worcester/Gloucester antagonism in certain lives, see pp. 32-38.
288 Horstmann, “Prologue” in The Early South-England Legendary, ll. 1-6. Despite its early age, BodL, MS Laud
Misc. 108 is likely a conflation of a “Z” recension and a later, revised “A” recension. The Prologue occurs over
halfway through the manuscript itself, but preceding a number of texts of the January to March portion in the
expected sequence. Görlach argues that the “disorder must clearly be due to later scribes and compilers, including
the scribe of MS L himself” (Textual Tradition, 7).
289 Görlach, “The Legenda aurea,” 304. For an updated perspective on this, see Sherry Reames, “The SEL and its
Major Latin Models” (discussed below).
290 For a discussion of this early history, see Pickering, “The Expository Temporale Poems” and “The Outspoken
South English Legendary Poet.” For Liszka’s contributions, see “The Dragon in the South English Legendary”; “The
80
this stage Oliver Pickering, building upon Görlach’s conjectural history, argued that the resulting
“A” redaction emerged from the independent work of two distinct redactors. The first “A”
redactor (A1) was an “innovator” whom Pickering labelled the “outspoken poet” and whose
alterations are characterized by a
vivid ability with colloquial dialogue; a gift for humorous anecdote, and for evoking in a
few words the physical details of contemporary medieval life; sympathy for the plight of
individuals in distress; and a sense of wonder (or pretended wonder)…. His work is
additionally distinguished by the frequency with which his verse flows in long and
sometimes complex sentences over the usual couplet boundaries.291
Important among the changes introduced by the “A1” redactor were a new prologue or framing
piece frequently called the Banna Sanctorum which replaced the shortened Prologue attached to
the life of St. Fabian found in BodL, MS Laud Misc 108.292
The Banna Sanctorum opens with a
central metaphor, likely drawn from or suggested by lines that had previously been in the
movable feasts, which posits Christendom as a “niwe frut” which shall bring mankind to his
“kunde eritage”; the narrative then shifts to an extended martial allegory which imagines Christ,
the patriarchs, prophets and martyrs as “oure Louerdes knyȝtes…Þat schadde hare blod for
Cristendom þat it yperissed nere.”293
Ultimately, the Banna Sanctorum imposed a more cohesive
literary frame upon the collection, which must have previously existed simply as a sequence of
items arranged “ȝwane heore feste fallez.” This first redactor, it seems, imagined that the revised
collection should narrate in chronological order the course of salvation history from the Old
Testament, through the events of Christ and Mary’s lives, and finally through the many lives of
the saints.294
The second of these redactors (A2) was an “amalgamator” who transferred the
South English Legendaries”; “Manuscript G (Lambeth Palace 223) and the Early South English Legendary”; “The
Laud. Misc. 108 Manuscript”; and “The First ‘A’ Redaction.”
291 Pickering, “South English Legendary Style,” 1.
292 In CCCC, MS 145 (and, it is conjectured, in BL, MSS Harley 2277 and Egerton 2891, which both begin
fragmentarily), the Banna Sanctorum is the first text of the collection. In BL, MS Egerton 1993, it appears after the
Advent texts.
293 D’Evelyn and Mill, “Banna Sanctorum,” ll. 1, 2, 19-20.
294 This general arrangement is attested to in BL, MS Egerton 1993.
81
movable feasts (Septuagesima, Lent, Easter and Rogationtide) from their position beginning the
work, preceding both the temporale narratives, to a place within the sanctorale cycle,
approximating their changing calendrical positions.295
3.1.2 The “Fluid Corpus” Approach
While the redactionist approach offers a useful conjectural history, Beverly Boyd and other
scholars have criticized it. Boyd argued against the idea that scribes assembling manuscripts of
the SEL were aware, with any great certainty, of what the SEL ought to look like:
When we examine other manuscripts and discover again and again material in the same
style appearing in one and not in another, according to no evident principle of selection,
we are led to suspect that the scribes had no more idea than we have what the contents of
The South English Legendary were supposed to be.296
She resisted the notion that scribes were aware of coherent original collection, replacing the
redactionist approach with an approach that figured the SEL as a large and changeable corpus of
items, dependent upon the needs and interests of the local audience:
It is obvious, then, that a liber festivalis made according to the calendar of one diocese or
religious community would not necessarily match the calendar of a different place. This,
of course, invited revision to include new lections, and perhaps to exclude lections for
saints whose feasts were not kept.297
Boyd concluded that we ought to imagine the corpus of the SEL texts more fluidly than Görlach
suggests. Robins draws attention to this feature of Boyd’s approach where he characterizes the
corpus, as she imagines it, as “chaotic, protean and shifting.”298
295 BL, MS Harley 2277, CCCC, MS 145, BL, MS Egerton 2891, BodL, MS Ashmole 43 and BL, MS Egerton 1993
attest to this arrangement with the movable feasts inserted into the sanctorale cycle. BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 does
not include these, but they may have preceded the existing collection which, in its current state, begins
fragmentarily.
296 Boyd, “New Light,” 191.
297 Ibid., 193.
298 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 191.
82
Robins draws attention to this divide between Görlach’s approach and Boyd’s approach in a
recent article, “Modular Dynamics in the SEL.” He criticizes the redactionist approach because it
tends to consider
(whenever possible) notable modifications to individual SEL poems to be parts of a
revision of an entire compilation. It assumes that transmission occurred through a series
of major manuscript compilations (‘the assumption that the legendary was usually copied
as a collection’), with new ‘redactions’ generated out of earlier redactions, either through
a process of revision and rearrangement or through a process of conflation.299
Here, Görlach imagined scribes treating the SEL along similar lines to the Legenda aurea, a
collection of texts which tended “to cohere centripetally.”300
Alan Fletcher argues this feature of
the Legenda aurea ensures its transmission “en bloc.”301
He further suggests that when
preaching compilations circulated in this fashion, they tended to be “institutionally sanctioned”
or else “a product of professional scribes who had a practical eye to the clerical book market.”302
Like Boyd, Robins suggests we ought to approach the above conjectured history with a certain
amount of caution, particularly the extent to which single manuscripts might represent fully
realized or “protected” redactions. At the level of textual affiliation, we can see the
complications of employing the redactionist approach to the SEL in Görlach’s description of
BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108:
MS L is the earliest example of the “L” redaction, itself the result of a conflation of the
original “Z” collection and the revised “A” texts. MS L is especially valuable because it
contains the greatest number of “Z” texts, some of them unique in L, and in some of
these, the most ‘primitive’ text. Judgment on L is complicated by the mixture of calendar
vs. hierarchical order and random arrangement and by the fragmentation of the
beginning. While many features of the L text can be shown to be characteristic of the “Z”
layer which were later improved by the “A” redactor, other irregularities show that the L
text is much corrupted by all kinds of separative errors, which must be ascribed to the L
scribe or his immediate exemplars.”303
299 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 188.
300 Fletcher, “Compilations for Preaching,” 325.
301 Ibid.
302 Ibid., 326.
303 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 89.
83
In a case such as BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108, the “redactionist” model falls short of clarifying the
origins of the manuscript. As Robins argues, “the demonstration of distinct redactions requires so
much cross-conflation as to make for philological vertigo.”304
Robins’s work responds to Boyd’s characterization of the collection, not as a series of complete
manuscript witnesses to multiple textual recensions, but as a series of free-floating fragments.305
This approach has found general support from a number of important scholars: Liszka, for
example, posited a series of South English Legendaries rather than a singular Legendary.306
Pickering made use of the redactionist approach, but recognized that Görlach’s conjectural
history represented “only broad truths”; he suggested that the “A” redaction did not result from a
distinct re-imagining of the SEL but rather “a succession of piecemeal revisions.”307
Building
upon this work, Robins accords “less authority to the idea of the compilation.”308
Key to this is
an understanding of different ways of construing the nature of the collection:
In the SEL, there are at least three levels of textual coherence in play: that of the item,
that of the compilation and that of the ensemble (the cultural text of the SEL taken as a
whole). There are accordingly several different relationships at stake: between item and
compilation, item and ensemble, compilation and ensemble.309
Here, Robins charts a middle ground between the “redactionist approach” and the “fluid corpus”
approach to describe the compilatory processes which underlay the transmission of the SEL. He
emphasizes that individual items or smaller groups of items played a role in the diffusion of the
SEL. The dispersal and circulation of legends in a variety of small formats such as parchment
rolls, loose leaves, pamphlets or booklets—ephemeral formats that typically do not survive—he
argues, resulted in a “modular” dynamic of manuscript production in which materials could be
substituted or added in such a way to facilitate the addition of saints of local interest or to help
304 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 190.
305 Boyd, “New Light on the South English Legendary,” 193.
306 Liszka, “The South English Legendaries,” 41.
307 Pickering, “Expository Temporale Poems,” 2.
308 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 193.
309 Ibid., 192.
84
cope with defective exemplars.310
He notes, for example, that a shorter life of St. Frideswide
appears in three manuscripts and a separate longer life, independently translated from another
Latin source, appears in four manuscripts.311
Similarly, the lives of Judas and Pilate may have
been another free-floating group of texts. They appear in fourteen manuscripts, but often in
different places within the cycle. Two manuscripts incorporate these narratives into the
temporale section; other manuscripts, such as CCCC, MS 145, and the now fragmented
manuscript which has been divided into BL, MSS Add. 10301 and 10621 and BodL, MS Add.
C.220, place the text in an appendix of assorted materials.312
In further support of this argument,
Görlach identifies eighteen miscellanies which contain single SEL items. The item which
circulated independently most commonly is the third part of St. Michael, which appears in
several miscellanies containing medical and astronomical treatises such as NLS, MS Advocates
23.7.11; San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS HM 64; BodL, MS Laud Misc. 685;
BL, MS Add. 24542; and BL, MS Add. 36983. This text is also contained in BodL, MS Digby
75, a manuscript of miscellaneous religious texts. Görlach states these texts were “probably
issued as booklets and bound together.”313
3.1.3 The SEL as an Open Compilation
The debate between the redactionist approach and the “fluid corpus” approach is, in many ways,
an argument about the extent to which the SEL might be considered an open or closed
compilation—that is, the extent to which scribes may have felt compelled to preserve or
consolidate a canonical or authoritative source—and I use the term broadly here—or, on the
other hand, the extent to which they felt free to intervene in the arrangement of materials. As
Robins argues:
The proliferation of texts seems to have occurred at all phases in the tradition’s history. It
served as a counter-tendency to an opposing principle of consolidation, whereby the
ensemble could come to seem closed, or whereby particular configurations could be
310 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 201.
311 Ibid., 194.
312 See Liszka, “The Dragon in the South English Legendary.”
313 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 119.
85
taken as normative. Such consolidation is what Görlach, in a quotation above, speaks of
as the relative “stability” of basic forms of the collection over time, underpinned by the
copyists’ “reverence” for the text. Textual proliferation and textual consolidation stand in
an uneasy balance throughout the history of the SEL. Just as the pressure of consolidation
might often have put a brake on the generation of new texts, the possibilities for
proliferation unsettled any tendency for the collection to achieve stability.314
Here we might usefully compare the SEL to the Latin liturgical models that Görlach theorized
the original was based upon. Latin liturgical legendaries, as Sherry Reames’s extensive research
shows, provide an interesting comparator for the SEL because they too were subject to the
pressures of adaptation for local use and the homogenizing “ideal of liturgical uniformity” held
by the Dominicans.315
Despite the movement to standardize liturgical legendaries undertaken by
the Dominicans by the 1260s, the concern for uniform texts had not reached the secular clergy
and other religious orders at the point when scholars presume the SEL was first composed. Local
adaptation was still the rule rather than the exception. As Reames points out, consolidation was a
slow and uneven process throughout the fourteenth century, and remnants of competing local
traditions survive to the end of the Middle Ages:
And so many unexpected texts for saints survive in the fourteenth-century manuscripts as
to suggest that many dioceses and individual churches adopted the Sarum liturgy
piecemeal, accepting its calendar and ceremonial while retaining non-Sarum feasts that
had local importance and continuing to use whatever legendary or lectionary of saints
they already had.316
The producers of these liturgical manuscripts recognized the need to leave space for the
possibility of adaptation or the use of local texts. Although early Sarum ordinals have much to
say about the processions, ritual gestures and blessings, psalms, prayers, and songs, many leave
“loopholes” in respect to the lessons. For example, BL, MS Harley 1001, a fourteenth-century
Sarum ordinal from the parish church of Risby, Suffolk, says that there are to be nine lessons for
314 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 196.
315 Reames, “The SEL and its Major Latin Models,” 86. She notes that the authorized Dominican lectionary was
accompanied by explicit warnings that copyists were not to alter or omit anything. On this lectionary, see Leonard
Boyle, “Dominican lectionaries.” See also Reames’s work in The Legenda aurea: a Reexamination of its
Paradoxical History and “Mouvance and Interpretation in Late-Medieval Latin: the Legend of St. Cecilia in British
Breviaries.”
316 Reames, “The SEL and its Major Latin Models,” 86.
86
St. Sylvester’s feast day; the last six are specified but the first three of these are left “to the user’s
discretion” (f. 17v).317
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University, MS 27 (c. 1350) also encourages its
users to follow their own customs. When this manuscript introduces the lessons for St. Egidius, it
states on f. 523r that the reader may choose which lesson to use (“Eligat qui voluerit unum
modum vel alium”).318
I now want to show how the “fluid corpus” approach might explain the shape of two early SEL
manuscripts in codicological terms. These manuscripts each exemplify the compilatory processes
that Robins argues are a major defining characteristic of this model.
3.1.3.1 BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108
BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 offers one of the clearest examples of how copying may have meant
an ongoing process of assembling and organization.319
The manuscript is divided into five
booklets which segregate different sets of materials: the first encompasses the original temporale
material and the surviving Life and Passion of Christ (fragmentary at the beginning, currently ff.
1r-10v); the second encompasses a single quire containing the Infancy of Christ (ff. 11r-22v); the
third encompasses sanctorale texts from Holy Cross to St. Ursula (ff. 23r-55v); the fourth
encompasses the remaining SEL material as well as several associated non-SEL texts, ending
with the Debate of Body and Soul (ff. 56r-203v); and the fifth encompasses the romance texts
Havelok and King Horn and an SEL appendix consisting of the lives of St. Blaise, St. Cecilia,
and a tail-rhymed version of St. Alexius, followed by several folios of miscellaneous verse (ff.
204r-237v). BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 can be further divided into two parts, suggesting that the
current manuscript is in fact a composite manuscript, the result of a scribe combining and
binding two independent or partially independent manuscripts together: the SEL material in
Booklets 1-4 copied by Scribe 1 constitute Part 1 while Booklet 5, a collection of romances and
317 Ibid., 87.
318 Ibid., see also n. 15.
319 For the most recent discussion of the codicology of this manuscript, see Edwards, “Laud Misc. 108: Contents,
Construction, and Circulation,” 21-30.
87
assorted religious text copied later but always intended, most likely, as an addition to the SEL
material, constitutes Part 2.320
Fig. 2.1: BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 (Contents by Booklet) (See Plate 2.1)321
Collation: iii + 114
(1, 3-4 lost, 5 mutilated), 212
, 310
(9 mutilated), 412
-912
, 1012
(2, 3
lost), 1112
(2 lost), 1212
-1412
, 1512
(8 mutilated), 1612
(12 lost), 1712
, 1812
(8, 12
cancelled), 1912
(8 lost), 2012
, 216
(6 cancelled), 226 (sewn on to the preceding quire),
231 + i
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-200v; a careful textualis semi-quadrata
Scribe 2: ff. 201r-203v; a roughly contemporary textualis semi-quadrata
Scribe 3: ff. 204r-228r; a roughly contemporary textualis semi-quadrata
Scribe 4: ff. 228v-237v; a later currens Anglicana
Scribe 5: ff. 238r-238v; a later currens Anglicana
Scribe 6: ff. 238v; a later currens Anglicana
Contents:
Part 1, Booklet 1 [Quire 1] [written by Scribe 1]
Life and Passion of Christ (ff. 1r-10v)
Part 1, Booklet 2 [Quire 2] [written by Scribe 1]
Infancy of Christ (ff. 11r-21v)
Part 1, Booklet 3 [Quires 3-5] [written by Scribe 1]
Holy Cross. (ff. 23r-29v)
St. Dunstan (ff. 29v-30r)
St. Austin (ff. 31r-31v)
St. Barnabas (ff. 31v-32v)
St. John the Baptist (ff. 32v-34r)
St. James the Great (ff. 34r-38r)
St. Oswold King (f. 38v)
St. Edward Martyr (ff. 39r-41v)
St. Francis (ff. 41v-46v)
St. Alban (ff. 46v-47v)
St. Wulfstan (ff. 48r-50v)
St. Matthew (ff. 50v-52r)
320 See Fein, “Somer Soneday: Kingship, Sainthood, and Fortune” for a description of the two part compilation
process, esp. 277-82.
321 This description is based on Edwards’ recent description in “Laud Misc. 108: Contents, Construction, and
Circulation,” 21-30.
88
St. Leger (ff. 52r-52v)
St. Fides (ff. 52v-54r)
St. Ursula (ff. 55r-55v)
Part 1, Booklet 4 [Quires 6-18] [written by Scribe 1 and Scribe 2]
St. Katherine (ff. 56r-59r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Lucy (f. 59r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Thomas a Becket (ff. 61r-87v) [written by Scribe 1]
Short Prologue (ff. 88r-88v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Fabian and St. Sebastian (ff. 88v-89v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Agnes (ff. 89v-91r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Vincent (ff. 91r-93r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Paul (ff. 93r-93v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Bridget (ff. 93v-94v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Agatha (ff. 94v-96r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Scholastica (ff. 96r-96v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Patrick (ff. 96v-104r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Brendan (ff. 104r-110r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Nicholas (ff. 111r-115v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Julian Conf. (ff. 115v-116r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Julian Hosp. (ff. 116r-117v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Mary of Egypt (ff. 117v-121v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Christopher (ff. 121v-124r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Dominic (ff. 124r-127v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Theophilus (ff. 128r-130r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. George (ff. 130r-131r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Edmund King (ff. 131r-132r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Michael (ff. 132r-136v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Clement (ff. 136v-147r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Lawrence (ff. 147r-149r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Kenelm (ff. 149r-153r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Gregory (ff. 153r-154v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Cuthbert (ff. 154v-155v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Mark (f. 155v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Philip (ff. 155v-156v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Jacob (ff. 156v-157r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Bartholomew (ff. 157v-160v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Thomas (ff. 160v-165v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Mathias (ff. 165v-166r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Silvester (ff. 166r-167r) [written by Scribe 1]
89
St. Eustace (ff. 167r-169v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. John (ff. 169v-174r) [written by Scribe 1]
Allhallows (ff. 174r-175r) [written by Scribe 1]
All Souls (ff. 175r-179v) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Edmund Bishop (ff. 179v-185r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Martin (ff. 185r-188r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Leonard (ff. 188r-190r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Mary Magdalene (ff. 190r-197r) [written by Scribe 1]
St. Hippolyt (ff. 197r-198r0 [written by Scribe 1]
Sayings of St. Bernard (ff. 198r-199r) [written by Scribe 1]
Vision of St. Paul (f. 199r) [written by Scribe 1]
Debate of Body and Soul (ff. 200r-203v) [written by Scribe 2]
Part 2, Booklet 5 [Quires 19-23] [written by Scribe 3, Scribe 4, Scribe 5, and
Scribe 6]
Havelock (ff. 204r-219v) [written by Scribe 3]
King Horn (ff. 219v-228r) [written by Scribe 3]
St. Blaise (ff. 228v-230v) [written by Scribe 4]
St. Caecilia (ff. 230v-233v) [written by Scribe 4]
St. Alexius in diff. metre (ff. 233v-237r) [written by Scribe 4]
Somer Soneday (ff. 237r-237v) [written by Scribe 4]
Biblical sentences (f. 238r) [written by Scribe 5]
On Deceit (f. 238v) [written by Scribe 6]
Moral Precepts (f. 238v) [written by Scribe 6]
The Golden Mean (f. 238v) [written by Scribe 6]
Booklets such as those found within BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 offer valuable insight into the
circumstances and methods of production in the early fourteenth century: in some cases a booklet
might represent a coherent set of materials of a specific genre; in others it might have been a tool
for handling multiple exemplars; finally, it might have been a way of delaying decisions about
the order and contents of the final manuscript.322
In this case, the use of booklets likely indicates
multiple compilatory processes. In Part I, the scribe’s use of booklets suggests that the
circumstances of production of the earliest copied SEL materials in this manuscript were
haphazard and ongoing. Carl Horstmann, who edited an edition based on this manuscript, argued
that this manuscript represents a stage in the circulation of the SEL in which there was, as of yet,
322 See, particularly, Robinson, “The ‘Booklet’”; Hanna, “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts;” and Gillespie,
“Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory.”
90
no fixed conception of what the SEL might include; rather, the scribe was still in the process of
gathering and ordering his materials in order to create a complete manuscript.323
Wells, however,
concluded that previous versions of the SEL likely circulated prior to BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108,
and, consequently, this manuscript does not represent the first version of the SEL, but rather its
lack of coherent organization suggests the conflation of two systems of ordering represented in
earlier manuscripts which no longer survive.324
Attempting to re-assess the apparently inchoate
organization of materials, Boyd argued that we ought to see the collection less as an example of a
fully shaped SEL manuscript and more properly as “a collection, an anthology, or as its
cataloguers called it, a miscellany consisting of a range of religious texts including a legendary in
miniature.”325
Finally, Liszka posited the collection as a work in progress over time in which the
organization (or lack thereof) can be explained as a result of a scribe working from multiple
exemplars and experimenting with multiple systems of ordering.326
The presence of the temporale material in two sections—each of which constituted an
independent booklet—and the inclusion of the prologue attached to St. Fabian over halfway into
the manuscript support the idea that the compiler assembled a range of materials as they became
available during the course of the project. The material attached to the Prologue may not have
been among the first sources available to the compiler. As Liszka suggests, rather than copying
verbatim and in order a complete set of texts, the scribe may have adapted and transcribed texts
that fit into the calendrical sequence he was working on and appended the remaining texts at the
end of the sequence.327
In this case, subsequent scribes responded to gaps in copying (ie. blank
folios) by filling them in with materials they imagined to fit thematically with the collection. For
example, Fein argues that Scribe 4 began copying in a quire left unfinished by Scribe 3. When
more parchment was needed, this scribe added another quire of six leaves (Quire 22) to finish St.
323 Horstmann, x.
324 Wells, “The South English Legendary and its Relation to the Legenda Aurea,” 340-42. For later modifications to
her theory from Görlach, Pickering, and Liszka, see Görlach, Textual Tradition, 6-7, 77-80, 304; Pickering, “The
Expository Temporale Poems”; Liszka, “First ‘A’ Redaction,” 408.
325 Boyd, “The Enigma of Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108,” 133.
326 Liszka, “Laud. Misc. 108 Manuscript,” 75-91.
327 Ibid., 83.
91
Cecilia, after which he added St. Alexius and then Somer Soneday.328
One of these later scribes
also added the second part of the manuscript, consisting of the final booklet of romance texts as
well as materials the scribes thought ought to have been included in the original collection (ie.
the SEL appendix).329
This process of ongoing compilation resulted in a unique miscellany rather
than a cohesive and organized set of texts modelled upon a single, complete exemplar.
In the case of BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108, then, we can see how scribes approached the SEL as an
open collection—that is, it was susceptible to the addition and re-organization of texts,
depending on the state of the exemplar (or multiple exemplars) as well as the needs of the
audience. In this case, the original scribe produced his manuscript by means of booklets in order
to facilitate the haphazard and ongoing production of the manuscript, allowing him to add new
sections of texts that may, as in the case of the temporale, have circulated independently or may
not have had a fixed place within the sequence of texts. Later scribes also used booklet
production to add additional materials to the compilation such as the romances of Havelok the
Dane and King Horn, as well as a selection of saints’ lives which were omitted, either by
accident or design, from the original collection.
3.1.3.2 BL, MS Egerton 1993
BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 has features in common with BL, MS Egerton 1993, a well-organized
and decorated manuscript written c. 1320-40 by one scribe using a dialect localized to
Gloucester.330
Because this manuscript has been the subject of far less codicological attention, I
will devote a greater share of my attention to it. Where this manuscript has received scholarly
attention, it is generally because the manuscript is characterized by shorter lines and the
328 Fein, “Somer Soneday,” 278-9.
329 Fein describes a multi-stage series of compilations in her article “Somer Soneday.” She notes that the
manuscript apparently “ends twice” (279): once after the SEL collection, and again after the romance section. She
also argues, following Patterson and Voights, that the flourishing of the manuscript signals “an intervening point of
compilation during which the romance-bearing Booklet 5 was added to the SEL Booklets 1-4” (278).
330 For a description of this manuscript, see Horstmann, xviii; Laurel Braswell, “Saint Edburga of Winchester,” 319;
and Görlach, Textual Tradition, 80–81. LALME locates the dialect of the BL, MS Egerton 1993 scribe to northern
Gloucestershire near the Gloucester/Hereford border (LP7130). For a discussion of the possible connection between
BL, MS Egerton 1993 and the Auchinleck manuscript, see my article “What’s in a Paraph?”
92
inclusion of a number of additional legends, many of which portray native English saints such as
Etheldreda, Botulf, Eadborw, Egwine, and Mildred whose feasts and relics were prominently
honoured in Worcester.331
The inclusion of these “native” saints garnered critical attention from
Paul Acker who asserted that the Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives “may well have been part of the
original SEL from its inception,”332
and from Virgina Blanton who, in contrast, argued that these
saints may have been added to fill out the summer months of the calendar when BL, MS Egerton
1993 was compiled.333
Fig. 2.2: BL, MS Egerton 1993 (Contents by Booklet) (See Plate 2.2)
Collation: iii + 112
-312
, 412
(5 cancelled as a blank leaf), 512
-1912
, 2012
(6 lost) + iii
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-200v; a compressed textualis semi-quadrata
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quire 1-3]
Old Testament History (ff. 1r-21r)
Short Life of Christ (ff. 21r-26v)
Booklet 2 [Quire 3-4]:
St. Anne (ff. 27r-27v)
Conception of Mary (ff. 27v-30r)
Birth of John the Baptist (ff. 30r-30v)
Annunciation and Nativity (ff. 30v-36v)
Advent (ff. 36v-40r)
331 See Görlach, The Textual Tradition, 17. Several editions of the marginal “E” legends have been published
separately from the main text. See Braswell, “St. Edburga of Winchester”; Nagy, “Saint Aeþelberht of East Anglia”;
Major, “Saint Etheldreda”; and Yeager, “St. Egwine.”
332 Acker, “Saint Mildred and the South English Legendary,” 140.
333 Blanton notes that the summer calendar is not as full in the Legenda aurea which may have provided the basis for
many revisions to the winter calendar and this might be one reason for this concentration of native legends.
Furthermore, she posits a possible East Anglia connection as several of these saints received special attention in that
area as well: “To be sure, the cults of eastern England were less likely to have been included in the original
compilation or in the multiple recensions of the SEL, since it originated in the Gloucester/Worcester region. As
noted above, Görlach suggests that a now-lost breviarium from Worcester, which included lections for many of
these saints, may be the source for these lives. Given the geographical locations of these cults, we might also look
for an East Anglian source text, one that included these lives and, by extension, a monastery that was associated
with them. We might also search for an East Anglian monk relocated to the western Midlands whose allegiances to
his regional saints were manifested in his compilation of an SEL manuscript that already featured saints in some type
of ‘nationalist agenda’” in Blanton, “Counting Noses and Assessing the Numbers,” 245.
93
Booklet 3 [Quire 4-20]:
Banna Sanctorum (ff. 41r-41v)
St. Andrew (ff. 42r-44v)
St. Nicholas (ff. 44v-50r)
St. Lucy (ff. 50r-52r)
St. Thomas (ff. 52r-57r)
St. Stephen (ff. 57v-58r)
St. John (ff. 58r-64r)
St. Thomas a Becket (ff. 64r-91v)
Circumcision (ff. 91v-92r)
Epiphany f. 92r)
St. Hillary (ff. 92r-93v)
St. Wulfstan (ff. 93v-96r)
St. Fabian and Sebastian (ff. 96r-97r)
St. Agnes (ff. 97r-99r)
St. Vincent (ff. 99r-101r)
St. Julian Confessor (ff. 101r-101v)
St. Julian Hosteler (ff. 101v-103v)
St. Bridget (ff. 103v-106r)
St. Blaise (ff. 106r-108v)
St. Agatha (ff. 108v-110r)
St. Scholastica (ff. 110r-111r)
St. Valentine (ff. 111r-111v)
St. Juliana (ff. 111v-114r)
St. Matthias (ff. 114r-114v)
St. Oswald Bishop (ff. 114v-117v)
St. Chad (ff. 117v-118r)
St. Gregory (ff. 118r-119r)
St. Longinus (ff. 119r-119v)
St. Patrick (ff. 119v-128r)
St. Cuthbert (ff. 128r-129r)
St. Benedict (ff. 129r-131r)
Annunciation (ff. 131r-131v)
Septuagesima (f. 131v)
Lent (ff. 131v-133v)
Easter (ff. 133v-134r)
St. Mary of Egypt (ff. 134r-138v)
St. Alphege (ff. 138v-141r)
St. George (ff. 141r-142r)
94
St. Mark (ff. 142r-142v)
Rogationtide (ff. 142v-143r)
St. Peter the Dominican (ff. 143r-143v)
St. Philip and St. James (ff. 143v-144v)
Holy Cross (ff. 144v-151v)
St. Dunstan (ff. 151v-154r)
St. Albriht (ff. 154r-155v)
St. Aldhelm (ff. 155v-156v)
St. Austin (ff. 156v-157v)
St. Petronella (ff. 157v-158v)
St. Barnabas (ff. 158v-160r)
St. Eadborw (ff. 160r-161r)
St. Botulf (ff. 161r-162r)
St. Alban (ff. 162r-163r)
St. Etheldreda (ff. 163r-163v)
St. John the Baptist (ff. 163v-156r)
St. Peter (ff. 156r-171r)
St. Paul (ff. 171r-174r)
St. Swithun (ff. 174r-176r)
St. Mildred (ff. 176r-178r)
St. Kenelm (ff. 178r-182r)
St. Margaret (ff. 182r-185v)
Mary Magdalene (ff. 185v-190r)
St. Christina (ff. 190r-194r)
St. James the Great (ff. 194r-196r)
St. Christopher (ff. 196r-198v)
Seven Sleepers (ff. 198v-201v)
St. Martha (ff. 201v-203v)
St. Justine (ff. 203v-206r)
St. Dominic (ff. 206r-210r)
St. Oswald (ff. 210r-210v)
St. Lawrence (ff. 210v-213r)
St. Hippolyt (ff. 213r-214r)
Assumption (ff. 214r-216v)
St. Bartholomew (ff. 216v-219v)
St. Giles (ff. 219v-221v)
St. Egwine (ff. 221v-222v)
St. Matthew (ff. 222v-224v)
St. Michael (ff. 224v-232v)
95
St. Jerome (ff. 232v-234v)
St. Leger (ff. 234v-235r)
St. Francis (ff. 235r-238v)
The scribe of BL, MS Egerton 1993 divided the collection into “booklets” (the term Görlach
uses), which correspond to the Old Testament History and Short Life of Christ (ff. 1r-26v); St.
Anne, Conception of Mary, Birth of John the Baptist, Annunciation and Nativity and Advent (the
Christmas gospels) ending with a blank verso (ff. 27r-40v); and the Banna Sanctorum and
sanctorale beginning with Saint Andrew and ending, fragmentarily, with Saint Francis (ff. 41r-
238v).334
As in BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108, the scribe of BL, MS Egerton 1993 placed the
narrative temporale material in separate booklets from the sanctorale.335
Of particular interest is the fact that Görlach’s “booklet” divisions in BL, MS Egerton 1993
bisect quires rather than falling at the end of quires as is typical for manuscripts constructed by
booklets. Booklet 1 ends on f. 26v which corresponds to the second leaf of Quire 3. Booklet 2,
then, begins on the third leaf of Quire 3 and ends on f. 40r, the fourth leaf of Quire 4. Because
the term “booklet” is often used loosely and because the use of the term “booklets” to describe
the structure of BL, MS Egerton 1993 is counterintuitive, I want firstly to lay out the evidence
that BL, MS Egerton 1993 was assembled through a procedure that is in keeping with booklet
theory. I argue we ought to recognize the divisions of BL, MS Egerton 1993 as booklets on the
basis of four of Robinson and Hanna’s criteria: variations in style of decoration; soiled or rubbed
leaves; blank leaves at the end of a text, sometimes removed; and finally variation amongst
sources or subject matter.336
The beginnings of each of this manuscript’s booklets are indicated
by large red and blue initials on floriated background and floriated borders on two sides (see
Plate 2 for an example). The texts within Booklet 1 (The Old Testament History and Short Life of
Christ) represent an independent unit of the temporale from those in Booklet 2 (St. Anne,
334 Here, I draw the term “booklet” from Görlach’s usage in his description, but, as I will draw attention to below,
this is a problematic term because the booklets bisect quires rather than corresponding to codicological divisions. I
use the term here because, as I will argue, “booklet” theory is helpful for shedding light on these divisions as
indicative of a process of construction typically enabled by the use of more traditional “booklets.”
335 Here, I am following Liszka’s table in “Laud Misc. 108 and the Early SEL,” 89-91, especially regarding Booklet
1 and Booklet 2
336 For the full list of criteria, see Hanna, “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts,” 30-31.
96
Conception of Mary, Birth of John the Baptist, Annunciation and Nativity and Advent). Booklet 1
and Booklet 2 both end with blank space on the verso of their final folios, indicating that the
scribe did not copy the subsequent text immediately afterward. Finally, the texts within Booklet
3 constitute another independent unit, the sanctorale, and the first folio of this booklet (f. 41) has
been partially rubbed or degraded.
The fact that in BL, MS Egerton 1993 all the major unit divisions occur in the temporale whereas
the sanctorale spans a single textual unit suggests that the shape of the temporale may have been
less predictable. Both BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 and BL, MS Egerton 1993 separate the
temporale material into units, possibly suggesting these texts may have circulated independently
from the sanctorale material.337
Camb., St. John’s College, MS 28 offers some evidence for this:
this is an early fifteenth century manuscript of 88 folios explicitly called “temporale” in the
signatures.338
BodL, MS Laud Misc. 622, in addition to its other miscellaneous, religious
contents, contains only temporale texts and no sanctorale texts.339
It makes sense that the
temporale would have been less predictable when we consider Pickering and Liszka’s assertion
that the temporale constituted one of the least stable elements of the SEL, frequently omitted in
many manuscripts.340
Perhaps exemplars for the temporale section were harder to come by, and
consequently the scribe of this manuscript needed to employ a more flexible structure in order to
accommodate the necessarily piecemeal assemblage of the final manuscript. In this respect, BL,
MS Egerton 1993 mimics conceptually the process by which many Latin religious manuscripts
were produced:
Books of Hours were commonly produced in a number of separate groups of quires
containing the Calendar and each of the different offices. Missals too were put together in
this way, with sanctorale and temporale in different fascicles.341
337 For Pickering’s case to include temporale manuscripts in SEL (which Görlach neglects), see Pickering, “The
Temporale Narratives”: 425–55, 429–30, 436–7, 454.
338 See Görlach, Textual Tradition, 85-86. See also James, Manuscripts in the Library of St. John’s College, 37-38.
339 See Görlach, Textual Tradition, 128.
340 See Liszka, “The First ‘A’ Redaction,” 407–13, and Pickering, “Temporale Narratives.”
341 Robinson, “The Format of Books,” 52.
97
Quire 4, an anomaly unto itself, may provide further hints as to the possible issues of production
that led to the current form of the manuscript. The quire contains the final four folios of the
temporale material of Booklet 2 (Advent), a cancelled leaf, a folio containing the Banna
Sanctorum beginning halfway down the page and ending on a new folio with the beginning of
the sanctorale (St. Andrew).
Fig. 2.3: Quire 4 of BL, MS Egerton 1993 (Contents)
Quire 4 Booklet 2 f. 37 Advent
f. 38 Advent
f. 39 Advent
f. 40 Advent / blank verso
Cancelled
Booklet 3 f. 41 half-blank recto / Banna Sanctorum
f. 42 St. Andrew
f. 43 St. Andrew
f. 44 St. Andrew / St. Nicholas
f. 45 St. Nicholas
f. 46 St. Nicholas
f. 47 St. Nicholas
There are several peculiarities within Quire 4 that I want to address, revolving particularly
around the placement and layout of the Banna Sanctorum. As the scribe has laid out the text, the
Banna Sanctorum takes up a single full folio (see Plate 2 for the recto). Unlike any of the other
texts in this manuscript, the Banna Sanctorum begins halfway down the recto and continues to
the last line of the verso, and the folio is worn on both sides. This folio is anomalous in part
because the more common approach to copying would have the scribe begin the Banna
Sanctorum at the top of the recto and leave any remaining space on the verso blank. This is the
approach that the scribe employed at the end of Booklet 1 where half of the final verso (f. 26v)
has been left blank following the completion of the Short Life of Christ. Why then has the scribe
deliberately left space at the beginning of the text rather than at the end? And why has the
previous folio been cancelled in order to form a new unit, if this is indeed what is going on?
Görlach argues that this anomalous construction of the “booklets” takes place because the scribe
of BL, MS Egerton 1993 initiated each section of the text independently. He calculated the space
98
required for the temporale material so that it could be joined neatly with the following
sanctorale. The Banna Sanctorum, he argues, was added as an afterthought, and, when it was
found that Advent extended to f. 40r only, the leaf left blank previous to the Banna Sanctorum
was discarded. Görlach’s explanation, however, requires the scribe to have attempted to calculate
the space required, but, ultimately, to have misjudged. It also posits the Banna Sanctorum as an
afterthought, which to me seems unlikely for three reasons: the text’s general importance as the
structural centrepiece to the collection; the elevated decoration of the recto; and, lastly, because
the scribe includes (or invents) alterations to the text of the Banna Sanctorum as I have outlined
in the figure below.
Fig. 2.4: Alterations to the Banna Sanctorum in BL, MS Egerton 1993
Banna Sanctorum in D’Evelyn and Mill Banna Sanctorum in BL, MS Egerton 1993 Men wilneþ muche to hure telle of bataille of
kynge
Men wilne muche to here telle . of batailes of
kings .
And of kniȝtes þat hardy were þat muchedel is
lesynge
& of kniȝtis þat hardi were . þat muchedel is
lesinge .
Of roulond & of oliuer . of gy of warewike
Þat hardi were bi here riȝt . & ne founde
now are here slike . Wo so wilneþ muche to hure tales of suche
þinge
Whose wilneþ muche to here . talen of suche
þinge .
Hardi batailles he may hure here þat nis no
lesinge
Hardi batailes he may here her . þat nis no
lisinge .
Of apostles & martirs þat hardy kniȝtes were
Of apostles & marteris . þat hardi kniȝtes
were .
Þat studeuast were in bataille ne fleide noȝt for
fere
Þat soffreden þer luþere men. alle quic here
limes to tere .
Þat soffrede þat luþer men al quik hare lymes
totere
Þat studfast were in bataile . ne flicchede
nouȝt for fere .
Telle ichelle bi reuwe of ham as hare dai valþ
in þe ȝere
Tellen ichulle bi rewe of hem . as here day
falleþ in þe ȝere
Verst bygynneþ at ȝeres day for þat is þe uerste
feste
Vurst bigyn at sein andreu . þat is þe furste
feste
And fram on to oþer so areng þe wile þe ȝer
wol leste
And vrom on to oþer arewe . þe whil þe bok
wol leste .
The first emendation—the inclusion of a list of heroes, unique to the BL, MS Egerton 1993—is
important thematically. It causes the Banna Sanctorum to resemble the prologues to Middle
English texts such as the Cursor Mundi, which frequently include a list of romance heroes to
99
which their religious narratives might be compared.342
The second emendation correctly signals
that, unlike the general order used for most early SEL manuscripts which begin at “ȝeres day,”
the collection will begin with the feast of St. Andrew, following the order of many breviaries and
the Legenda aurea, and continue “whil þe bok wol leste.”343
That the scribe has adjusted the text
(or copied a previously adjusted version) of the Banna Sanctorum to correctly reflect the order of
the sanctorale indicates to me that it was not merely an afterthought but an important part of the
collection.
I suggest one possible scenario is that the scribe copied to the end of Advent but did not know
how much space would be required for the Banna Sanctorum. He may not have known either
because he did not, at that time, have the text in his possession or because he knew he wanted to
make alterations to the end of the Banna Sanctorum in order to reflect the final arrangement of
his text. It seems to me, then, that the scribe intended the Banna Sanctorum to directly adjoin St.
Andrew without any blank space separating the two texts. In order to leave room for the Banna
Sanctorum, then, without knowing how long it would be, the scribe left the verso of f. 40 as well
as two additional folios blank, and began copying St. Andrew at the top of the recto of f. 42r.
When he obtained and adjusted the Banna Sanctorum, he calculated the number of lines of the
now complete text and copied it in such a way that it would finish at the bottom of f. 41r. The
blank half-page preceding the beginning of the text may have been intended for a miniature or
large rubricated title that was never filled, although this seems less likely to me since the
manuscript has been decorated with red and blue enlarged initials, suggesting that the intended
decoration scheme was implemented. Also, few surviving manuscripts of the SEL include any
sort of elaborate miniature or large rubricated title. Additionally, as I have noted, both sides of f.
342 See also the Auchinleck King Richard, ll. 7-28 for a comparable passage: “Of Rouland & of Loier....Of Alisander
& Charlmeyn / & Ector þe gret werrer / & of Danys le fiz Oger, / Of Arthour & of Gaweyn” (13-18), or the
Speculum Vitae (c. 1350) which lists “Octouyane and Isambrase” (l. 40), “Beuis of Hamptoun” (43) and “Sir Gye of
Warwyke” (45); or the Laud Troy Book (c. 1400) which includes “Bevis,” “Gy,” “Gauwayn,” “Kyng Richard,”
“Owayn,” “Tristram,” “Percyuale,” “Rouland Ris,” “Aglavuale,” “Archeroun,” Octauian,” “Charles,”
“Cassibaldan,” “Hauelok,” “Horne,” and “Wade” (ll. 15-21). Respectively, King Richard, in The Auchinleck
Manuscript: National Library of Scotland, ed. Alison Wiggins and David Burnley, 25 Apr 2012
<http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/>; Hanna’s edition of the Speculum Vitae and J. Ernst Wülfing’s edition of The Laud
Troy Book.
343 Among SEL manuscripts only Camb., King’s College, MS 13II and Camb., Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2344
begin with St. Andrew.
100
41 are rubbed and worn. This is itself striking because folios bound within a manuscript are
typically protected except in cases of exceptional use or random disaster. Typically, the outer
folios of a manuscript may become rubbed or damaged, particularly if the manuscript was left
unbound for a prolonged period at some stage of its circulation. That f. 41 is rubbed on both
sides suggests that the leaf may have been independent from the rest of the quire at some stage.
In any case, the initiation of booklets within quires and the peculiar copying of the Banna
Sanctorum suggest that this element of the text represented the greatest difficulty for the scribe.
It seems to me that the booklets of BL, MS Egerton 1993 were never intended to circulate
separately (that is, it is not a composite manuscript as BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 may have
been); rather, these booklets offered the scribe flexibility in his copying procedures so that he
could, presumably, copy sections of texts which he was certain about while he delayed decisions
about other sections, possibly because he lacked a suitable exemplar, possibly because he wanted
to adjust the order of the text. Nevertheless, the result of the booklet division is that the
manuscript has a unique structure that, by means of the large red and blue initials, draws
attention to the boundaries as literary divisions that mark texts with a certain degree of aesthetic
autonomy.344
In this way, we can begin to push further at the potential implications of booklet
structure for miscellaneous manuscripts more generally. That is to say, the scribe of BL, MS
Egerton 1993 may have perceived, at some level, the potential for booklets to act as both
codicological devices and as aesthetic devices; that, even if these units were not materially
booklets because they bisect quires, then they were constructed in such a way as to resemble
booklets. This resemblance might be deliberate as the frequent division of miscellaneous
manuscripts into booklets created a conceptual expectation about the way anthologies or
miscellanies were put together. Although this way of understanding booklets comes perilously
close to Dane’s criticism of the potential for “imagined” booklets, nevertheless, I argue this is
344 For examples of other manuscripts of the SEL that make use of a booklet structure, see Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Laud Misc. 108. Pamela Robinson has described the manuscript as a compilation of five booklets which could have
circulated independently before being sewn together to form a codex in her B. Litt thesis. Rosamund Allen in her
edition of King Horn has described an additional booklet boundary between ff. 55 and 56. See King Horn: an
Edition Based on Cambridge University Library MS Gg 4.27. Thomas Liszka provides an updated description of the
booklet structure in the appendix to “MS Laud Misc. 108.” Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS B.6 also makes use
of a booklet of temporale texts. This manuscript of four quires was composed, likely, of two booklets: one of a
single quire that contained the Old Testament History, and one of three quires, which included the Ministry and
Passion, St. Longinus, Pilate, the Harrowing of Hell and the Movable Feasts.
101
one case where we might productively see overlap between the material function of a booklet
and its potential aesthetic function.345
Both BodL, MS Laud Misc. 108 and BL, MS Egerton 1993 show that the success of the SEL
may have resulted, in part, from the fact that its texts were easy to replicate, susceptible to
intervention, and its literary force and value did not rely on the presence of the same texts in the
same order. Instead, as Robins argues, a principle of dispersal facilitated by the circulation of
legends in small-format manuscripts animated the SEL.346
Correspondingly, one might better
relabel Middle English literary culture not as “fragmentary,” but as “compilatory,” suggesting
not that Middle English texts were flawed examples of a previous whole but that the so-called
“fragments” enabled a flexible and continually productive form of book-making.
3.1.4 The SEL as a Fixed or Consolidated Compilation
Although I agree that the “fluid corpus” model offers a useful way of examining the SEL as an
open text, subject to small-scale emendations and revisions, its production facilitated by the
circulation and use of booklets, nevertheless, I argue that the sense of vernacular manuscript
production that this model suggests—that is, as a series of essentially compilatory processes
invigorated by the circulation of independent texts—was not the only way in which Middle
English books were made and transmitted.
Görlach argued that a cluster of two manuscripts and two fragments—CCCC, MS 145 (hereafter
MS C)347
, BL, MS Egerton 2891 (MS N)348
, Leicester, Leicester Museum 18 D 59 (MS Lm)349
and Nottingham, Nottingham University WLC/LM/38 (MS Wh)350
—all can be dated to 1310-
345 For Dane’s concerns, see Chaucer’s Tomb, and my discussion of booklet theory in Chapter 1.
346 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 196.
347 Described in Görlach, Textual Tradition, 87-9. For the contents, see also Horstmann, Early South-English
Legendary, xiv-xvii.
348 Described in Görlach, Textual Tradition, 92-3 Cf. Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British
Museum in the Years 1911-1915, 403-5. See also Manuscripts of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry
for BL, MS Egerton 2891.
349 Described in Görlach, Textual Tradition, 113-114. This manuscript has not been described elsewhere.
350 Described in Görlach, Textual Tradition, 117-118. This manuscript was mentioned in the Stevenson, “Report on
the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton,” 622-3, and in The Register of Middle English Verse, 496.
102
1320 and originated in “a large scriptorium.”351
At least one further set of manuscripts—BL, MS
Add. 10301 (MS Q), MS Add. 10626 (MS Qa) and BodL, MS Add. C.220 (MS Ba), the three of
which originally constituted a single manuscript which has been disbound—dated approximately
fifty years later, may have been based on an exemplar from this scriptorium.352
In this section, I
will analyze the layout, script, and dialect of these two manuscripts and two fragments to
propose an alternate way of thinking about the SEL: not as an open compilation but as a
consolidated text.
Görlach first drew attention to these two manuscripts and two fragments in his descriptions of
them in Textual Tradition:
The group is characterized by persistent genetic relationships. The closeness of the texts
is such that even minor variants were carefully reproduced, and since the scribes, who
except for the later Q copyist (and T) probably came from one scriptorium, refrained
from conjectural emendation or contamination from control manuscripts, they are ideal
copyists for the textual critic. The high standard of copying suggests a large scriptorium;
if the tenuous connection with the Augustinians is indicative of the historical facts, a
large Augustinian house like Cirencester or Osney would be the most likely home of the
“Q” [Görlach’s term for this recension] MSS.353
What interests me about these two manuscripts and two fragments is that they exemplify a model
of manuscript production which is typically not associated with early Middle English texts
before the coming of print: duplicative copying. “Duplicative copying,” Matthew Fisher writes,
“can be most readily conceptualized (and identified) in multiple manuscripts of a single text that
share mise-en-page and other paratextual features.”354
Fisher suggests that early examples of
duplicative copying are typically associated with the Bible or with scholastics texts accompanied
by a sophisticated or complex page layout:
In its earliest incarnations duplicative copying enabled the transmission of complex page
layouts, whether text and gloss or text and image. These books, some coming from a
centralized locus of production, others shaped in a common milieu and connected by a
common imagined reception, are a salutary reminder that the layout and execution of all
351 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 78.
352 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 57, 96.
353 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 57.
354 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 40.
103
books, both in the vernaculars and in Latin, in deluxe codices and private commonplace
books, was anything but unconsidered.355
He notes several examples of duplicative copying, the majority of which seem to have come
from the eleventh and twelfth century religious environments. For example, Lincoln, Lincoln
Cathedral Library 98, Fisher notes, has been “clearly visually designed to recall the images, color
scheme, and iconography of the Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Bible, 1.”356
It can also be associated
with some highly annotated secular Latin texts such as the glossed manuscripts of the
Alexandreis.357
Following upon Vincent Gillespie’s observations on the similar layouts of Pore
Caitif and Prick of Conscience manuscripts, Fisher suggests that duplicative copying may have
been used in the fifteenth century to develop a “particular visual rhetoric” usefully to “cue
audience expectations about genre, and to participate in recognizable textual traditions.”358
3.1.4.1 Comparison of the Manuscripts
In the following section, I will lay out the similarities between these manuscripts in order to
demonstrate that these manuscripts were likely written by multiple scribes related by a single
scriptorium, potentially in collaboration with one another.
3.1.4.1.1 Text
Both MS C and MS N share the majority of the same texts in the same order. After f. 168 of MS
C, four quires of twelve have been lost, and Görlach suggests these likely contained Sts. Simon
and Jude, ll. 197 – St. Thomas, ll. 286. MS N has suffered numerous losses, including eight
leaves from the beginning and at least four quires from the end of the manuscript. The lost texts
can be hypothesized by means of comparison with MS C. MS N also includes a number of
additional legends not present in MS C (Seven Sleepers, St. Leger, St. Francis, St. Frideswide, St.
Brice, and the Southern Passion). Based on the high quality of these texts, Görlach suggests that
355 Fisher, Scribal Copying, 39-40.
356 Ibid., 40. Cf. Kauffman, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066-1190.
357 See, for example, Townsend’s discussion of the commentary on the ekphrastic description of the tomb in Book 4,
in the introduction to Glosses on Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis, 6-14.
358 Fisher, 40. For Gillespie’s comments on the manuscript tradition of these two texts, see “Vernacular Books of
Religion,” 332.
104
these may have been preserved in the original exemplar or else drawn from a supplementary
exemplar. The Southern Passion, however, is “from an inferior source, possibly added in the
desire for completeness.”359
MS Lm follows MS N for the position of Pilate, which has been
omitted from the main text in MS C and has been added in an appendix by a later hand.
Fig. 2.5: CCCC, MS 145 (MS C) (Contents by Booklet) (See Plate 2.3)
Collation: ii + 112
-1412
, 1512
, 1612
(lost), 1712
-2112
, 2212+3
+ ii
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-210v; closely spaced Anglicana360
Scribe 2: ff. 211r-213v; an angular Anglicana
Scribe 3: ff. 214r-218v; a round Anglicana
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quires 1-21] [copied by Scribe 1]
Banna Sanctorum (ff. 1r-1vr)
Circumcision (ff. 1v-2r)
Epiphany f. 2r)
St. Hilary (ff. 2r-3vr)
St. Wulfstan (ff. 3v-6r)
St. Fabian and Sebastian (ff. 6r-7v)
St. Agnes (ff. 7v-9vr)
St. Vincent (ff. 9v-12r)
St. Julian Confessor (ff. 12r-12vr)
St. Julian Hosteler (ff. 12v-14vr)
St. Bridget (ff. 14v-17vr)
St. Blaise (ff. 17v-20vr)
St. Agatha (ff. 20v-22r)
St. Scolastica (ff. 22r-22vr)
St. Valentine (ff. 23r-23vr)
St. Juliane (ff. 23v-26r)
St. Mathias (ff. 26r-26vr)
359 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 93.
360 The Parker of the Web digital database, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for CCCC, MS 145, suggests two main
hands wrote the texts I have ascribed only to Scribe 1. This database does not list the possible folios where these
transitions occur and I have not been able to identify them. I follow Görlach’s description where he notes a single
scribe copied these texts.
105
St. Oswald Bishop (ff. 26v-29vr)
St. Chad (ff. 29v-30vr)
St. Gregory (ff. 30v-32r)
St. Longinus (ff. 32r-32vr)
St. Patrick (ff. 32v-41vr)
St. Edward Martyr (ff. 41v-44vr)
St. Cuthbert (ff. 44v-46r)
St. Benedict (ff. 46r-48r)
Annunciation (ff. 48r-48vr)
Septuagesima (f. 48vr)
Lent (ff. 48v-51r)
Easter (ff. 51r-51vr)
St. Mary of Egypt (ff. 51v-56r)
St. Alphege (ff. 56r-59r)
St. George (ff. 59r-60r)
St. Mark (ff. 60r-60vr)
Rogationtide (ff. 60v-61vr)
St. Peter Dominican f. 61vr)
Sts. Philip and James (ff. 62r-63r)
Holy Cross (ff. 63r-67r)
St. Quiriac (f. 67vr)
St. Brendan (ff. 67v-77r)
St. Dunstan (ff. 77r-79vr)
St. Aldhelm (ff. 79v-80vr)
St. Austin (ff. 80v-82r)
St. Barnabas (ff. 82r-83r)
St. Theophilus (ff. 83r-89r)
St. Alban (ff. 89v-90vr)
St. John the Baptist (ff. 90v-92vr)
St. Peter (ff. 92v-99r)
St. Paul (ff. 99r-102vr)
St. Swithun (ff. 102v-104vr)
St. Kenelm (ff. 104v-109r)
St. Margaret (ff. 109r-113r)
Mary Magdalene (ff. 113r-117vr)
St. Christina (ff. 117v-122r)
106
St. James the Great (ff. 122r-127r)
St. Christopher (ff. 127r-130r)
St. Martha (ff. 130r-132vr)
St. Oswald King (ff. 132v-133r)
St. Lawrence (ff. 133r-135r)
Assumption (ff. 135v-138vr)
St. Bartholomew (ff. 138v-142r)
St. Giles (ff. 142r-144r)
Holy Cross (ex) (ff. 144r-145vr)
St. Matthew (ff. 147r-149r)
St. Michael (ff. 149r-150r)
St. Jerome (ff. 159r-161r)
St. Denis (ff. 161r-163r)
St. Luke (ff. 163r-164r)
St. Ursula (ff. 164r-166v)
Sts. Simon and Jude (ff. 166v-168v)
One quire lost.361
St. Thomas (ff. 169r-170v)
St. Anastasia (ff. 170v-172r)
St. Stephen (ff. 172r-173v)
St. John (ff. 173v-180r)
St. Thomas (ff. 180r-210v)
Booklet 2a [Quire 22] [copied by Scribe 2]
St. Guthlac (ff. 210v-213r)
Booklet 2b [Quire 22] [copied by Scribe 3]
Judas (ff. 214r-215r)
Pilate (ff. 215r-217v)
St. Thomas a Becket (ff. 217v-218r)
Fig. 2.6: BL, MS Egerton 2891 (MS N) (Contents) (See Plate 2.4)
361 I have included textual losses when comparative texts present in one manuscript or the other are thought to be
missing. The missing texts are conjectured to be St. Quentin, Allhallows, All Souls, St. Leonard, St. Martin, St.
Edmund Bishop, St. Edmund King, St. Clement, St. Katherine, St. Andrew, St. Nicholas and St. Lucy.
107
Collation: ii + 112
(1-8 lost), 212
-312
, 412
(11-12 lost), 512
(1 lost), 612
, 712
(7 lost), 812
(12 lost), 912
, 1012
(2 lost), 1112
(lost), 1212
(2-3 lost), 1312
, 1412
(5-12 lost), 1512
(4,
12 lost), 1612
, 1712
(11 lost), 1812
, 1912
(5-9 lost), 2012
(9, 12 lost) + ii. Probably
more than four quires at the end.
Scribe 1: a closely spaced Anglicana
Contents:
Eight folios lost.362
St. Agnes (ff. 1r-1v)
St. Vincent (ff. 1v-4r)
St. Julian Confessor (ff. 4r-4v)
St. Julian Hosteler (ff. 4v-6v)
St. Bridget (ff. 6v-9v)
St. Blaise (ff. 9v-12v)
St. Agatha (ff. 13r-14r)
St. Scolastica (ff. 14r-15r)
St. Valentine (ff. 15r-15v)
St. Juliane (ff. 15v-18r)
St. Mathias (ff. 18r-18v)
St. Oswald Bishop (ff. 18v-21v)
St. Chad (ff. 21v-22v)
St. Gregory (ff. 22v-24r)
St. Longinus (ff. 24r-24v)
St. Patrick (ff. 24v-33v)
St. Edward Martyr (ff. 33v-36v)
St. Cuthbert (ff. 36v-38r)
St. Benedict (ff. 38r-39r)
Two folios lost.363
Lent (ff. 39r-40r)
Southern Passion (ff. 40r-50r)
362 I have included textual losses when comparative texts present in one manuscript or the other are thought to be
missing. In this section, the conjectured texts are Banna Sanctorum, Circumcision, Epiphany, St. Hilary, St.
Wulfstan, and St. Fabian and Sebastian.
363 The missing texts are conjectured to be Annunciation and Septuagesima.
108
Easter (ff. 50r-55r)
St. Thomas (ff. 55r-57v)
Judas (ff. 57v-59v)
Pilate (ff. 59v-62v)
St. Mary of Egypt (ff. 62v-67r)
St. Alphege (ff. 67r-68v)
St. George (ff. 68v-70r)
St. Mark (ff. 70r-70v)
Rogationtide (ff. 70v-71r)
St. Peter Dominican (ff. 71r-71v)
Sts. Philip and James (ff. 71v-73r)
Holy Cross (ff. 73r-75v)
Holy Cross: Inv. (ff. 75v-77r)
St. Quiriac (ff. 77r-77v)
St. Brendan (ff. 77v-86r
St. Dunstan (ff. 86r-88v)
St. Aldhelm (ff. 88v-89v)
St. Austin (ff. 89v-91r)
St. Barnabas (ff. 91r-92r)
St. Theophilus (ff. 92r-97v)
St. Alban (ff. 97v-98v)
St. John the Baptist (ff. 98v-100v)
St. Peter (ff. 100v-106v
Eight folios lost.364
St. Margaret (ff. 107r?-107v )
Mary Magdalene (ff. 108r 111v)
St. Christina (ff. 111v-116r)
St. James the Great (ff. 116r-121r)
St. Christopher (ff. 121r-124r)
Seven Sleepers (ff. 124r-126r)
St. Martha (ff. 126r-128r)
St. Oswald King (ff. 128r-129r)
364 The missing texts are conjectured to be St. Paul, St. Swithun and St. Kenelm.
109
St. Lawrence (ff. 129r-131r)
Assumption (ff. 131r-132v)
Five folios lost.365
Holy Cross: Ex. (ff. 133r-135r)
St. Matthew (ff. 135r-137r)
St. Michael (ff. 137r-144v)
St. Jerome (ff. 144v-146v)
St. Francis (ff. 146v-152r)
St. Leger (ff. 152r-153r)
St. Fides (ff. 153r-154r)
St. Denis (ff. 154r-156v)
St. Luke (ff. 156v-157v)
St. Ursula (ff. 157v-159v)
Sts. Simon and Jude (ff. 160r-162v)
St. Quentin (ff. 162v-164r)
Allhallows (ff. 164r-165r)
All Souls (ff. 165r-166v)
St. Katherine (ff. 166v-169r)
St. Leonard (ff. 169r-171v)
St. Martin (ff. 171v-174v)
St. Brice (ff. 174v-175v)
St. Edmund Bishop (ff. 175v-182r)
St. Clement (ff. 182r-190r)
St. Andrew (ff. 190r-192v)
St. Nicholas (f. 193r-94v)
Probably four quires lost at end.366
Fig. 2.7: Leicester, Leicester Museum, MS 18 D 59 (MS Lm) (Contents)
(See Plate 2.5)
A parchment bifolium, likely leaves 4 and 9 of Quire 5.
365 The missing texts are conjectured to be St. Bartholomew and St. Giles.
366 The missing texts are conjectured to be St. Lucy, St. Thomas, St. Anastasia, St. Stephen and St. John.
110
Scribe 1: a closely spaced Anglicana
Contents:
Pilate (ll. 247-end)
St. Mary of Egypt (ll. 1-64)
St. Alphege (ll. 39-116)
Fig. 2.8: Nottingham, University of Nottingham, MS WLC/LM/38 (MS Wh)
(Contents) (See Plate 2.6)
Two conjugate strips of parchment.
Scribe 1: a closely spaced Anglicana
Contents:
St. Bridget (ll. 5-25, 39-59)
3.1.4.1.2 Layout
All four manuscripts share similar, though not identical, layout and decoration. They were
written in a single column. MSS C, N, and Lm are ruled such that the text of each line is flush
against the capital letter initiating that line while MS Wh makes use of a gap of approximately 4
mm. between the initial of each first line and the remaining text of that line. MSS C, N, and Lm
each make use of small red and blue flourished initials to introduce new lives. It is likely that MS
Wh also included these, but the fragment does not contain an appropriate transition between lives
from which to judge. Each of the manuscripts also employs distinctive, c-shaped, red and blue
paraphs with a curved bowl, parallel top lines and bottom lines with the top line extending past
the bottom line.
Fig. 2.9: Comparison of Paraphs
MS C MS N MS Lm MS Wh
111
The paraphs of MSS C, Lm and Wh have no descender whereas MS N makes use of a curved
descender for marginal paraphs. In all four manuscripts, the scribal cue for the inclusion of a
paraph is two angled hatch strokes. Paraph placement is generally consistent across the
manuscripts (see the transcriptions of these manuscripts in the Appendix). MSS C, N, and Lm
also use a similar set of red running titles and marginal notes in the comparable sections. These
are lacking in MS Wh.
Of the manuscripts, MS C is the most decorated, including on f. 1r a large red and blue puzzle
initial (omitted in MSS N, Lm and Wh because the equivalent folio is lost). MS C also includes
touches of red for the beginnings of each of the half lines throughout where MSS N, Lm and Wh
do not.
3.1.4.1.3 Script
Fig. 2.10: Comparison of Scripts
112
MS C, f.
57r,
St. Alphege
MS N, f.
7r,
St. Bridget
MS Lm,
St. Alphege
MS Wh,
St. Bridget
All four manuscripts also make use of a similar early Anglicana script with difference in stroke
width. Characteristic letter forms common to all four hands include a “g” formed with a small
bowl and an additional looped compartment underneath; a circular “d” with a low ascender; a
circular, two-compartment “w”; an initial “i” with prominent forking and forking of the
ascenders of “l”, “b” and “h” present in both the main hand and the running titles.
Fig. 2.11: Comparison of Similar Letterforms
MS C MS N MS Lm MS Wh
113
Some noticeable letterforms discrepancies occur in the case of MS Wh. MSS C adnLm make use
of a distinctive “y” with a long, straight, angled descender whereas MS Wh and MS N use a “y”
with a right-hooked descender. MSS C, N and Lm use a typical Anglicana v-shaped “r” that
descends below the line whereas MS Wh uses a “r” with a straight, unbranching descender.
Lastly, MSS C, N, and Lm use most frequently a “v” with a rounded bowl whereas MS Wh uses
this form as well as a “v” with an angular, pointed bowl.
Fig. 2.12: Comparison of Different Letterforms
MS C MS N MS Lm MS Wh
114
3.1.4.1.4 Dialect
In the appendix to this chapter, I have included a full transcription of the fragmentary material
from MS Wh and MS Lm and the comparable sections of text in MS C and MS N where
available. All four manuscripts, in general, show similar dialects for those sections of text, with
only MS Wh offering several anomalous forms.
Fig. 2.13: Comparison of Dialect Profiles
Linguistic
Profile MS C MS N MS Lm MS Wh
For for (vor) for for, vor vor
Would wolde wolde
wolde, (wold,
walde) wolde
Past participle y-, i- i-, y- i- y-
They hi, hy hi, hy hi, hy hi
Should ssolde (sselde)
ssolde (selde,
ssulde)
ssolde (selde,
ssulde) ssolde
Be beo (beoþ) beo, beoþ beoþ beo, beþ
ss- ss ss, sch ss (sh) ss
World worles, worlde worles warle
-ly liche (lich) liche liche
liche
(lich)
Up/Upon upe ope (up) upe, op, ope upe
Slayed slou, slowe slowe, slawe
Their hore hare, hore hore
Held huld huld helde
-eo eo eo eo eo, o
You ȝou (þou) (ȝe) ȝou þou, ȝou (ȝe)
Foul foul, voul, voule voule
home hom ham ham
She heo heo heo heo (ȝo)
Her hure hure hure (hire) hure
Self sulf (sulue) sulue sulf (sulue)
Among
among (amang,
amange) among among among
Gave ȝaf ȝaf ȝaf ȝef
When wanne wenne
The chart shows the majority of uses are relatively consistent for these texts and indicate a West
Midlands dialect. MSS N, Lm and Wh are all closely grouped to the Gloucester/Berkshire
115
border.367
Scribal tendencies are as follows: MSS C and N tend to favour the use of “i” over “y”
whereas MS Wh and Lm favour “y” over “i.” Similarly, MS N favours the use of the initial “f”
over “v”; MS Wh favours “v” over “f”; and MSS C and Lm use both forms. Lastly, several
anomalous forms appear in MS Wh which are not attested in MSS C, N or Lm, most noticeably,
the rare form “ȝo” for Mod. E she whereas MSS C, N and Lm consistently use “heo”, and “ȝef”
for the Mod. E gave where the other three manuscripts consistently use “ȝaf.”
3.1.4.1.5 Errors and Corrections
In MSS C and Lm the scribes have duplicated ll. 53-54 of St. Alphege. In MS C the error has not
been noted. In MS Lm, the scribe has noted the error and struck through the duplicated lines. MS
N omits the duplication, but the couplet following these lines has been scraped and rewritten by a
later hand, suggesting that some error in the same general area may have occurred that needed to
be emended. MS C was corrected throughout, probably by two hands, one of which was likely
the scribe (c. 1400) who added several lives to the appendix at the end of the manuscript. MS N
was corrected by the principal scribe who added lines in the margin, and by two later hands. MS
Lm shows only the above sign of correction, and MS Wh shows no correction to the remaining
text.
3.1.4.2 A Possible Model?
The similarity in texts, layout, decoration, and dialect suggests that these four manuscripts were
likely produced in the same environment. The fact that each of these manuscripts contains an
error or correction at ll. 53-54 of St. Alphege might indicate that at least one primary exemplar
lies behind all four manuscripts, but as MS Wh and MS Lm are exceptionally fragmentary, it is
difficult to say this with any certainty. Of the manuscripts MS C appears to be the most
decorated and includes the most complete system of running titles.368
MS Wh, on the other hand,
is the most anomalous in that the layout shows more discrepancies (the gap between capital
367 The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English places MS C slightly to the east of the border in Berkshire (Profile
6810, Grid 429 195) and MS N slightly to the west in Gloucestershire (Profile 6970, Grid 408 205). There is
insufficient text in MSS Lm and Wh to place independently, but their general similarity with MSS C and N suggests
that they likely originate in the same area.
368 Note, for example, in l. 100 of St. Alphege the inclusion of the additional marginal note “=diabolus” where no
equivalent marginal note exists in MS N and Lm.
116
letters and the rest of the line); the hand uses several different letterforms (“r” and “y”); and the
dialect shows usages unattested in the other manuscripts (“ȝo” and “ȝef”).
Hanna argues that on the basis of the similarities between these manuscripts, they were likely
written by the same scribe.369
However, I argue that the anomalies in MS Wh at the level of
layout, script, and dialect, while hardly substantial on their own, suggest that the four
manuscripts were not written by a single scribe, but instead by a group of at least two scribes
(possibly more) operating in the same milieu. Shared training or a shared general location might
explain the similarities in script. Describing the development of similar hands in a shared milieu,
Parkes writes: “Organized copying by members of a community usually lasted only for short
periods: once a community had built up its collection of texts, organized copying was
abandoned, and with it some of the distinctive features in local handwriting.”370
Similarly,
Rodney Thomson notes that monastic scriptoria tended to generate “‘house’ styles of script and
decoration” when books were made locally, often over two or three generations.371
Borderline
cases where two scribes wrote in a similar hand are not uncommon in other environments where
scribes might share training or the same working environment. We might look to the example
offered by the Auchinleck manuscript, discussed further in Chapter 3, where palaeographers
have had a difficult time distinguishing between the hands of Scribe 1 and Scribe 6.372
Other
cases include Scribe D and Scribe Delta of the Trinity Gower, where Doyle and Parkes explain
the similarity in script by positing a master-apprentice relationship.373
It is not surprising that
scribes engaged in the “mechanical” copying of a shared exemplar would also share other
features.374
If it is the case that these scribes were operating in a shared milieu—what we might call a
scriptorium or shared “scriptorial facilities”—then I suggest, following Görlach, that the
369 Hanna, “Some Pre-Fifteenth-Century Scribes,” 182-183.
370 Parkes, “Handwriting in English Books,” 111.
371 Thomson, “Monastic and Cathedral Book Production,” 141.
372 See Wiggins, “Are Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6 the Same Scribe?”
373 See Doyle and Parkes, “The Production of Copies,” Appendix B.
374 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 93.
117
financial resources, the general plan of the manuscript and the exemplar (likely a version close to
MS C, but with some texts like the missing Pilate either present or copied from a separate
exemplar) may have been provided by a religious institution. Where then might this scriptorium
have been located? St. Peter’s Abbey in Gloucestershire has been put forward as a possible site
of production for SEL manuscripts. Carl Horstmann in his early edition of the SEL noted the
tendency toward Gloucestershire dialects in the earliest manuscripts and, on the basis of this,
claimed that it “was the work of many decades of years, of many collaborators, most likely the
joint work of a whole abbey, that of Gloucester, where the plan seems to have been fixed and
brought into definite shape.”375
Oliver Pickering places the “A” reviser in Gloucester, and
suggests that he may have been the same Robert of Gloucester responsible for an early
fourteenth century Middle English Chronicle, or someone writing in his style.376
Although the
major period of book acquisition and production took place in the twelfth century, some copying
still took place in the Abbey. Original charters written by the abbey’s scribes survive from
around the mid-twelfth century to 1263, and at the end of the fourteenth century stone partitions
for scribal carrels were built in the south aisle of the cloister.377
Other possible Benedictine sites
include Abingdon in Berkshire or Malmesbury in Wiltshire, though these seem possibly further
afield than the dialect localization might suggest.
The possibility of mendicant involvement in the production of MSS CN, Lm and Wh must be
admitted, although it seems less likely since these four manuscripts do not resemble books
produced by friars, which tend to be miscellaneous or composite manuscripts. Collections such
as the Legenda aurea were the exception rather than the rule. The two major mendicant houses
in the region were located in Gloucester and Oxford, but, in general, the kind of copying shown
in this group of SEL manuscripts does not fit the modus operandi of the friars. The Dominican
Order, in particular, seldom encouraged its friars to copy books because the time involved would
375 Horstmann, Early South-English Legendary, ix. The most detailed investigation of the SEL dialect that is
available, the chapter in L. Braswell, Thesis, 94-142, does not distinguish enough between the language of the
existing texts and that of hypothetical ancestors and so it is difficult to support this purely on dialectal grounds.
376 See Pickering, “South English Legendary Style.”
377 Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes, 24.
118
have drawn them away from studying, preaching and the salvation of souls.378
Generally, we do
not see the kind of organized production associated with the monastic scriptorium.
The Augustinian priories at Llanthony Secunda or Cirencester in Gloucestershire or Osney in
Oxfordshire are somewhat more plausible sites. Laurel Braswell suggested the possibility of
Augustinian involvement in the production of SEL texts since one of the duties of the canons was
to preach in the neighbouring parishes. Görlach is generally dismissive of this, but admits that
the Augustinians might have been involved with a secondary stage of production after the SEL
had travelled south from Worcester; he notes Cirencester or Llanthony as possible, if tenuous,
sites for MSS CNLmWh.379
The fact that in the early fifteenth century MS C was donated to the
Augustinian church of St. Mary of Southwick lends credence to Augustinian affiliation. That the
fragment MS Lm was bound into Wyggeston Hospital Charity, Leicester, might also be an
indication that it resided in Leicester Abbey for some time.
Many of the Augustinian houses had both extensive libraries and were the site of on-going book-
making or book acquisition programs. A catalogue of the Llanthony library c. 1355-60 lists over
five hundred books, rivalling that of some of the largest Benedictine houses. Several of these
texts show comparable themes to the SEL including a “Legenda sanctorum. de dono Willelmi de
Pendebury prioris Lant” and several copies of sermons intended to be read on feast days, in
addition to several books of hagiography and miracles.380
A large number of the surviving books
date to the fourteenth century, suggesting that the production or acquisition of books continued
well into this period. The wealthy abbey of Cirencester, too, boasted a well-stocked library. The
major phase of manuscript production and acquisition for the library took place during the third
quarter of the twelfth century where we have evidence of “seven canons assisted by a lay scribe,
writing under the direction of a series of precentors, produced thirteen surviving manuscripts.”381
378 Parkes, Hands Before Our Eyes, 26.
379 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 50.
380 For this list, see The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, 36-94, esp. items 55, 97, 101, 222 (“Liber de miraculis
sancti Thome”), 282 (“Vita sancti Thome”), 283 (“Vita sancti Edmundi archiespiscopi”), 284 (“Miracula Beate
Marie”), and 390 (“Vita Sancti Brendani”).
381 Doyle, Their Hands Before Our Eyes, 15.
119
The lay scribe was one Radulfus de Pulleham, “scriptor,” who came from Pulham on the border
of Somerset and Dorset, which was part of the abbey’s original endowment.382
The scribes of the
twelfth century produced an excellent collection of patristic and theological texts, including
works by Gregory, Robert Cricklade, Cassianus, Augustine, Aldhelm, Bede, and Isidore, among
others.383
It is unclear to what extent manuscript production continued to take place in
Cirencester, but at least one fragment of the SEL—BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra D.ix—can be
traced to its holdings in the sixteenth century when Sir John Prise obtained it for Robert Cotton
in his capacity as commissioner.384
Osney too offers a possible site of production. Though its
records are far more fragmentary, the library possessed a number of chronicle and hagiographical
texts including a “Vita S. Frediswidae,” a “Vita Odonis,” and a “Vita S. Wenefridae.”385
Recent scholarship by Thomas Heffernan and Teresa Webber has emphasized the involvement of
Augustinian canons in the production and dissemination of texts of a similar kind to the SEL.
Here, we might look to the anonymous Yorkshire text known as the Northern Homily Cycle, a
text modelled upon Robert of Gretham’s Anglo-Norman cycle of metrical homilies known as the
Mirour and surviving in twenty extant manuscripts. By comparing the rubrics of the Sunday
gospels to the corresponding text in the four major secular uses, the four mendicant orders, and
the monastic orders, Thomas Heffernan has suggested that the text was likely produced by
canons resident in the vicinity of York, likely Augustinian.386
He further adds that by the end of
the fourteenth century there was “a concerted effort under the guidance of a religious order
which supervised the production of a considerable number of versions between the late 1380s
and 1440.”387
Similarly, in the early fifteenth century, John Mirk, an Augustinian canon of
Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, produced another vernacular sermon cycle known as the Festial.
382 Ibid., 98-99.
383 See Ker, The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, 26-28; also Medieval Libraries, 51-52.
384 Summit, Memory’s Library, 169. For a description of this manuscript, see Görlach, Textual Tradition, 11-12. The
scripts of the two scribes evident in this fragment show a much stronger influence from textura than MSS
CNLmWh, and the dialect is similar to that of BodL, MS Ashmole 43, located in the Gloucestershire/Oxfordshire
area.
385 Webber, Augustinian Canons, 403-405.
386 Cf. Heffernan, “The Authorship of the ‘Northern Homily Cycle’.”
387 Heffernan, “Orthodoxies’ Redux,” 75.
120
About forty manuscripts and fragments containing the Festial, or material adapted from it,
survive.388
Expanding the lens beyond homiletic texts, it is clear the Augustinians were involved in a range
of other literary endeavours. The Ancrene Riwle, “Katherine Group,” and “Wohunge Group” can
also be associated with Augustinian lines of production and dissemination. CCCC, MS 402 was
donated to Wigmore at the beginning of the fourteenth century;389
BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra
C.vi was donated to the Augustinian nuns of Canonsleigh; London, Lambeth Palace MS 487,
containing a “Wohunge Group,” may have belonged to Llanthony;390
and, further to this, Jean-
Pascal Pouzet argues that Yorkshire Augustinian houses may have been instrumental in the
dissemination of the work of a fellow canon, Peter Langtoft, whose first redaction of his
Chronicle appears in two manuscripts (BL, MS Cotton Julius A.v and BL, MS Harley 114)
which were possibly issued from the same scriptorium.391
The latter of these is probably an
Augustinian manuscript as it bears an ex libris from the priory of North Ferriby. Susanna Fein
has produced an edition of the works of John the Blind Audelay, a chaplain to Lord Lestrange of
Knockin who was appointed the priest of a family chantry at Augustian abbey in Haughmond
where he worked with two monks to produce a volume (BodL, MS Douce 302) entitled The
Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven and the Life of Eternal Salvation.392
This was a
fifteenth-century anthology of collected works likely copied with the author present, perhaps
supplying previously composed exemplars, reading aloud and correcting by dictation.
Furthermore, the trilingual poet John Gower had a long-standing association with the
Augustinian canons at the priory of St. Mary Overy in Southwark, leading G. C. Macaulay and
John Fisher to posit that Gower may have relied upon the library and possible scriptorium to
assist with the production and circulation of his works. While Parkes and Doyle have argued
388 For a discussion of the manuscripts of the Festial, see Wakelin, “The Manuscripts of John Mirk’s Festial” and
Fletcher, “Unnoticed Sermons from John Mirk’s Festial.” For the Festial’s use in a broad program of pastoral care,
see Susan Powell, “John Mirk’s Festial.” See also Powell’s 2009 edition, John Mirk’s Festial.
389 For theories regarding the authorship of the Ancrene Wisse by an Augustinian canon, see particularly, Dobson,
“The Date and Composition” and The Origins of the ‘Ancrene Wisse’.
390 See Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, xi.
391 Pouzet, “Augustinian Canons and their Insular French Books,” 273.
392 See Fein’s introduction to the edition of John the Blind Audelay.
121
against a “Gower scriptorium,” in a recent article Pouzet re-addresses the issue and suggests that
Augustinian canons from St. Mary Overy and elsewhere “may have been instrumental in the
dissemination of the poet’s works.”393
He argues that the canons had in place by the late
thirteenth century a “network of Augustinian dissemination” exemplified in the circulation of
texts such as the Speculum Ecclesie, which may have been “circulated in bespoke booklets, not
necessarily or simply on a commercial basis, and possibly—in part at least—through
Augustinian industry.”394
He compares the circulation of these texts to small-format manuscripts
of Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve copied by John Shirley (d. 1456) who was associated with St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, an institution under Augustinian rule, as well as to the
circulation of the Vox Clamantis and the Cronica Tripertita, the latter of which is recorded as
having been in quaternis which, Hanna argues, reflects “a case of transmission by ordinal
channels.”395
The production and circulation of these manuscripts from the thirteenth century to
the fifteenth century—often by means of small-format manuscripts—points toward an
institutional interest in texts similar to the SEL.
In positing Augustinian involvement in the production of these manuscripts of the SEL, I join
what Hanna recently called “a developing, but still nascent, group of voices urging a
reassessment of the religious orders and vernacular composition by assembling evidence for the
large vernacular literary involvement of…the Augustinian or black canons.”396
The production
of these manuscripts of the SEL fits well with both the agenda and the interests of the
Augustinian canons. Further to that, the Augustinians seem to have been involved in several
examples of what we might consider to be “publication”—by that I mean, the concerted
production of a single text or group of related texts—as the manuscript history of Peter
Langtoft’s Chronicle, the Northern Homily Cycle, Mirk’s Festial and the works of John Gower
bears out. That these texts seem to survive in relatively high numbers for the period in question
indicates the general success of these projects. The copying of MSS CNLmWh might suggest,
393 Pouzet, “Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts,” 11.
394 Ibid., 18-19.
395 Hanna, “Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature,” 34-5.
396 Hanna, “Augustinian Canons,” 27.
122
then, a similar program of production designed both to stabilize or consolidate the corpus of the
SEL—that is, to create a “canonical” version of the collection—and to “publish” it by means of
the production of multiple copies.397
4 Conclusions
In conclusion, this chapter has argued that the SEL sometimes followed general patterns of
organization but was also open to emendation, addition, subtraction, substitution and limited re-
ordering. Certain elements of the collection tended to be more fixed whereas other elements such
as the placement of the Prologue or Banna Sanctorum, the inclusion of the temporale, and the
inclusion of the lives of Judas and Pilate tended to be more susceptible to editorial intervention.
The openness of the SEL was likely facilitated by the potential transmission of small-format
manuscript containing grouped lives or individual legends, which circulated alongside more
extensive, “complete” collections. In the early fourteenth century a scriptorium in the West
Midlands, most likely associated with an Augustinian house, made a concerted effort to stabilize
the collection and transmit it as a consolidated collection by means of duplicative copying.
I want to return to the claims of others that I raised at the beginning of this chapter that early
Middle English texts are “singular and precarious”398
and “[isolated] from immediate vernacular
models and examples”399
; that the literary culture which produced them was only “hiccupping its
way towards continuous production.”400
It seems to me that in making these claims, scholars do
not attend sufficiently to England’s culture of book-making and literary production from which
the SEL, and other similar vernacular texts, emerged. Despite the unique appearance of many
SEL manuscripts, there were models for the texts themselves. There were also models for the
arrangement of the texts and models for producing and disseminating the collection as a whole.
397 For other examples of medieval publication in the early Middle Ages in England, see Sharpe on Anselm’s
involvement in the production of his own works in “Anselm as Author.” For examples in the late Middle Ages in
England, see Horobin’s work on the Edmund-Fremund scribe who may have been a Lydgate specialist or possibly
his “personal publisher” in “The Edmund-Fremund Scribe Copying Chaucer,” 195. For Gower, as discussed above,
see Pouzet in “Southwark Gower: Augustinian Agencies in Gower’s Manuscripts and Texts.”
398 Hahn, 91.
399 Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, 2.
400 Cannon, “Monastic Production,” 320.
123
Although the examples of vernacular production within religious scriptoria were rare in this
period, the form of production employed by the SEL scribes was, in many ways, a natural
extension of the book-making procedures of the Augustinian canons more generally. I would
expect that as we continue to research the scribal hands and the production sites of early Middle
English texts, similar cases will appear and the case for a thriving network of Augustinian
vernacular production will emerge.
Rather than viewing the SEL as “singular and precarious” then, I want to end with a discussion of
how the models I have investigated point toward the emergence of a national literary culture.
Literary scholars have traditionally focused on a nascent sense of national pride or history
evident in the inclusion of so many English saints within the SEL. Thorlac Turville-Petre, for
example, in England the Nation, claimed the SEL depicted the presence of a unified political
England taking its place among other nation-states on the Continent while Klaus Jankofsky
concluded that the compiler and later redactors manipulated their material in order to make it
engaging to an English audience.401
Developing this further, Jill Frederick argued we can see
“this pattern of a developing sense of Englishness” identifiable across many regional SEL
manuscripts, corresponding to an interest in the emergence of English as a literary language and
the consolidation of political boundaries.402
But my interest is in the way the production and
circulation of manuscripts facilitated the development of a national literary culture. Here,
Robins’s model has again proved particularly useful. He argues that the poetic features of the
SEL—its “septenary couplets, rhythmic divisions, uncomplicated and flexible lexis and
syntax”—may have encouraged scribes to interact with the collection and thereby contribute to
the “diffuse project of establishing a widespread, vernacular, Middle English, literary culture.”403
In this analysis, diffusion—or proliferation, as he elsewhere labels it—remains a key feature.
Although the SEL encouraged adaptation for local audiences, it still remained a “larger cultural
text,” fostered by isolated pockets of production that were connected by the circulation of books
and small-format manuscript, the movement of scribes, and institutional networks. This point is
401 See, respectively, Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 61 and Jankofsky, “National Characteristics.”
402 Frederick, “Anglo-Saxon Saints and National Identity,” 73.
403 Robins, “Modular Dynamics,” 207.
124
emphasized when we turn to the treatment of the SEL as a consolidated or canonical text,
protected against extensive revision and the subject of an institutional program to rapidly copy
and disseminate the collection. In this chapter I have shown the paradigm associated with
vernacular manuscript production, which emphasizes the isolation, openness and fragmentation
of its texts, and the paradigm associated with Latin manuscript production, which sees its texts as
institutionally connected, consolidated and whole, interpenetrate one another. In the following
chapter I will turn to the Auchinleck manuscript, a manuscript which exemplifies the importance
of England’s compilatory culture for the commercial book-trade in London as well as for
regional religious houses.
125
Chapter 3 “Of Freynsch No Latin Nil Y Tel More”: Assembling the Auchinleck Manuscript, 1330-1340
1 Introduction
In the first half of the fourteenth century, a group of six scribes operating in London collaborated
to create NLS, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (c. 1330-1340), known as the Auchinleck manuscript, a
compendium of Middle English verse unusual in both its size (now consisting of 331 folios and
fourteen stubs, with an additional ten folios located detached from the manuscript) and the range
of its subject matter (forty-four items, including romances, hagiographical texts, chronicles and
religious verse written almost exclusively in Middle English).404
Auchinleck has been a
touchstone for scholars interested in early English manuscript production, for it is one of the first
manuscripts produced exclusively in Middle English, a precursor to those monumental
compendia such as the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts (BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a. 1 and BL, MS
Add. 22283, respectively) that dot the literary landscape of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, positioned at an intersection between developments in the English language and
developments in the methods and models for producing Middle English texts.405
As Ralph Hanna
404 All references to texts from the Auchinleck are from Alison Wiggins and David Burnley, The Auchinleck
Manuscript. This chapter has developed from a paper entitled “‘I N’am But a Lewd Compilator’: Booklets,
Bookmen and the Production of Vernacular Manuscripts,” (delivered at the LOMERS Annual Conference: Studies
in the Auchinleck Manuscript, University of London, 2008) as well as from a paper entitled “What’s In a Paraph?
Auchinleck Scribe 2 and the West Midlands,” (delivered at the Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Early Book
Society, Exeter, 2009) published as “What’s in a Paraph? A New Methodology and its Implications for the
Auchinleck Manuscript.” I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of Arthur Bahr and Timothy Shonk who
both commented on and contributed to early versions of this research.
405 For a discussion of the Type II and Type III London dialects, see Samuels, “Some Applications of Middle
English Dialectology.” Note Hanna’s resistance to this model and discussion of the problem of type II London
English in London Literature, 25-30.
126
III notes, one cannot hope to avoid Auchinleck when contemplating the emergence of Middle
English literature precisely because the manuscript appears in London “at a moment in which a
literature apparently local in its nature was transformed into a model for a developing national
culture.”406
Auchinleck represents for many scholars an originary or anticipatory moment in the history of
English literature where it seemingly points toward the rise of middle class consumers, the
emergence of a bold and confident vernacular voice, and the triumph of secular literature over
the “dead hand of monastic morality.”407
In this history, the manuscript functions as a prototype
for the Canterbury Tales with its diverse, effusive literary forms jostling alongside one another
in an expensive and monolithic display of English pride, and scholars emphasized this
connection with the Canterbury Tales when they imagined that Chaucer had used Auchinleck as
a source for “Sir Thopas” (a claim which has lost support in recent years).408
But this history of
English literature depends on codicology as much as it depends upon the production of Middle
English texts, and in this way Auchinleck shows how book history sometimes shapes or
buttresses arguments about the development of England’s literary culture.
406 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 92. Turville-Petre labelled Auchinleck a “handbook of the
nation” in England the Nation, 112. Purdie articulates the Englishness of the Auchinleck, too, as demonstrated in the
tales of explicitly English heroes such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Southampton, Horn and Richard II. She notes
that Auchinleck even goes so far as to ignore “the awareness of some killjoy historians that [Arthur] could not, in
fact, have been English in any sense other than that of inhabiting a land which would eventually be named after one
of the invading peoples against whom Arthur was supposed to have fought” in Purdie, Anglicising Romance, 97.
407 Here I borrow Andrew Taylor’s phraseology, admittedly somewhat out of context, from a similar debate over the
meaning of the inclusion of “Sumer is Icumen In” in the miscellaneous manuscript BL, MS Harley 978 in his
monograph Textual Situations, 81. Taylor argues that the reception of BL, MS Harley 978 manuscript has been
framed by debates which pit native inspiration against religious composition, in effect driving “a wedge between
monastic and popular culture” (ibid.). A similar debate has shaped the reception of Auchinleck. See, for example,
Field, “From Gui to Guy: The Fashioning of a Popular Romance” for an assessment of the slipperiness of “popular”
as a concept in relationship to high and low forms of art. Coss resists the distinction between religious and lay
audiences for romances in his study of Auchinleck and early romances. He argues for the interpenetration between
gentry households and resident clerics, chaplains and chantry priests, stressing as I believe is true that the clerical
role in the production of romance was “undoubtedly a strong one” in “Aspects of Cultural Diffusion,” 57.
408 See Loomis, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript: Thopas and Guy of Warwick.” Although the connection
has long since been dismissed, it continues to exert a surprisingly persistent influence on scholarship today. For an
example of this, see Eckert, “Chaucer’s Reading List.” Cannon returns to the theme in a recent article but still
largely concludes that we cannot know if Chaucer ever saw Auchinleck or was simply well-versed in material of the
sort contained within it. See “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript Revisited.”
127
This chapter re-examines the codicological structure of Auchinleck as well as the models of
scribal collaboration which shaped it to put pressure on many of the assumptions about the
development of England’s vernacular literary culture that the manuscript has traditionally
appeared to support. Of particular interest is Hanna’s assessment that Auchinleck exemplifies his
two conditions of literary production in fourteenth-century England: vernacularity and
miscellaneity. Flying in the face of the exuberance of medieval Latin anthologization extensively
documented by George Rigg and others, Hanna argues vernacularity can be strongly associated
with miscellaneity because for Middle English in the fourteenth century, “[t]here exists no single
literary canon and, consequently, no single set of institutions to stimulate literary activity and to
mandate various forms of more or less standardized manuscript production.”409
In turn he
contrasts the procedures of vernacular manuscript production with those of
any variety of Latinate modes of manuscript production, all of them supported by clearly
demarcatable transmission networks generally supported by one or another sort of
professional affiliation (schools, orders, legal institutions, etc.). These, almost
automatically, prescribe more fixed notions of appropriate literary production, of
canonical texts and presentations.410
Hanna suggests that booklets were a particularly useful way of producing manuscripts such as
Auchinleck because they allowed scribes to copy exemplars as they became available, share
production when necessary, and they could be compiled into larger units to make full
manuscript-books should the patron so desire. In turn, this model is explicitly connected to
Middle English texts for which, Hanna argues, there would have been an irregular or limited
demand in the mid-fourteenth century because there existed no pre-set “canon” of desirable texts.
One major goal of this chapter, then, will be to assess the extent to which the production of
Auchinleck differed from the production of Latinate or Anglo-Norman books, with particular
reference to the use of booklets as a major constitutive element of the production of the
manuscript. By placing the manuscript in a context that sees its production as an extension of
book-making activities in both Latin and Anglo-Norman, in conversation with and not
409 Hanna, “Vernacularity and Miscellaneity,” 47. For detailed descriptions of numerous Latin poetic anthologies,
see the work of Binkley, Dinkova-Bruun, Townsend, and most importantly Rigg, in the multipart article series
published in Mediaeval Studies entitled “Medieval Latin Poetic Anthologies.”
410 Ibid., 48.
128
opposition to clerical literary culture, I hope to come to a more nuanced understanding of the
interpenetration between areas of book-making traditionally considered to be discrete.
2 Backgrounds and Contexts
2.1 A Major Middle English Miscellany
Fig. 3.1: NLS, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (“Auchinleck”) (Contents by Booklet)
Collation: 18(1, 4 lost), 2
8(3 stub), 3
8(3, 6 lost), 4
8, 5
8(2 stub), 6
8(5, 7 stub), 7
8, 8
8(2
stub), 98(8 stub), 10
8, 11
8(4 stub), 12
8, 13
8(1 stub), 14
8, 15(lost),16
8, 17
8(1 stub),
188(5, 8 stub), 19
8-23
8, 24
8(8 lost), 25
8, 26
8(6 lost), 27-34
8, 35
8(1, 4 stub), 36
8 (3
stub), 3710
, 38(lost), 398(1, 2, 7, 8 lost), 40
8(3-7 lost), 41
8-42
8, 43
8(4 lost), 44
8-45
8,
468(3, 6 lost), 47
8(3, 6 lost), 48-51(lost), 52
8(8 lost); Quire 5, f. 4, 5 from Edinburgh,
Edinburgh University Library, MS 218 (MS E), f. 1; Quire 39, f. 3, 6 from London,
London University Library, MS 593 (MS L), f. 2; Quire 39, f. 4, 5 from St. Andrews,
St. Andrews University Library, MS PR.2065 R.4 (MS A), f. 15; Quire 48, f. 2, 7
from Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS 218 f. 4; Quire 48, f. 4, 6 from
St. Andrews, St. Andrews University Library, MS PR.2065 R.4 (MS R).
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-38v, 48v-69v, 108r-167r, 201r-267v, L f. 1rv – f. 337; a clear and
compressed Anglicana Formata
Scribe 2: ff. 39r-48r, 105r, 328r-334v; a tall textualis semi-quadrata
Scribe 3: ff. 70r-104v; a straight Anglicana with pointed descenders
Scribe 4: ff. 105v-107r; a square, set textualis quadrata
Scribe 5: ff. 167r-201r, a currens textualis semiquadrata
Scribe 6: ff. 268r-277v; a set Anglicana Formata similar to Scribe 1
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quires 1-6] [written by Scribe 1]
The Legend of Pope Gregory (fragmentary) (ff. 1r-7 stub)
The King of Tars (ff. 7r-13v)
The Life of Adam and Eve (E ff. 1r-2v; ff. 14r-16r)
Seynt Mergrete (ff. 16r-21r)
Seynt Katerine (ff. 21r-24v)
St Patrick’s Purgatory (ff. 25r-31v)
Þe Desputisoun Bitven þe Bodi and þe Soule (ff. 31v-35r)
The Harrowing of Hell (fragmentary) (ff. 35r-37r or 37v)
The Clerk who would see the Virgin (fragmentary) (ff. 37r or 37v-38v)
Booklet 2 [Quires 7-10] [written by Scribe 1 and Scribe 2]
Speculum Gy de Warewyke (fragmentary) (ff. 39r-48r stub) [written by Scribe 2]
129
Amis and Amiloun (fragmentary) (ff. 48r stub-61v stub) [written by Scribe 1]
The Life of St Mary Magdalene (fragmentary) (ff. 61v stub-65v) [written by Scribe 1]
The Nativity and Early Life of Mary (ff. 65v-69v) [written by Scribe 1].
Booklet 3 [Quires 11-16, 15 lost] [written by Scribe 2, Scribe 3, and Scribe 4]
On the Seven Deadly Sins (ff. 70r-72r) [written by Scribe 3]
The Paternoster (fragmentary) (ff. 72r-72r or 72v stub) [written by Scribe 3]
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (fragmentary) (72r or 72v stub-78r) [written by
Scribe 3]
Sir Degare (fragmentary) (ff. 78r-84r stub) [written by Scribe 3]
The Seven Sages of Rome (fragmentary) (ff. 84r stub-99v) [written by Scribe 3]
Floris and Blancheflour (ff. 100r-104v) [written by Scribe 3]
The Sayings of the Four Philosophers (ff. 105r-105r) [written by Scribe 2]
The Battle Abbey Roll (ff. 105v-107v) [written by Scribe 4]
Booklet 4 [Quires 17-24] [written by Scribe 1 and Scribe 5]
Guy of Warwick (couplets) (ff. 108r-146v) [written by Scribe 1]
Guy of Warwick (stanzas) (ff. 145v-167r) [written by Scribe 1]
Reinbroun (ff. 167r-175v) [written by Scribe 5]
Booklet 5 [Quires 26-35] [written by Scribe 1 and Scribe 5]
Sir Beues of Hamtoun (ff. 176r-201r) [written by Scribe 5]
Of Arthour and of Merlin (ff. 201r-256v) [written by Scribe 1]
Þe Wenche Þat Loved Þe King (fragmentary) (ff. 256v-256 stub) [written by Scribe
1]
A Peniworþ of Witt (fragmentary) (ff. 256 stub-259r) [written by Scribe 1]
How Our Lady’s Sauter was First Found (ff. 259r-260v) [written by Scribe 1]
Booklet 6 [Quire 36] [written by Scribe 1]
Lay le Freine (fragmentary) (ff. 261r-262 stub)
Roland and Vernagu (fragmentary) (ff. 262v stub-267v)
Booklet 7 [Quire 37; may have contained Quire 38 presently lost] [written by
Scribe 6]
Otuel a Knight (ff. 268r-277v)
Booklet 8 [Quires 39-40] [written by Scribe 1]
Kyng Alisaunder (MS L, f. 1r-v; MS A, f. 1r-2v; MS L, f. 2r-v; ff. 278-9)
The Thrush and the Nightingale (f. 279v)
The Sayings of St Bernard (f. 280r)
Dauid Þe King (ff. 280r-280v)
Booklet 9 [Quires 41-43] [written by Scribe 1]
Sir Tristrem (fragmentary) (ff. 281r-299 stub)
Sir Orfeo (fragmentary) (ff. 299 stub-303r)
The Four Foes of Mankind (ff. 303r-303v)
Book 10 [Quires 44-46] [written by Scribe 1]
130
The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle (ff. 304r-317r)
Horn Childe & Maiden Rimnild (ff. 317v-323v)
Alphabetical Praise of Women (ff. 324r-325v)
Booklet 11 [Quire 47; may have contained Quires 48-51 presently lost] [written
by Scribe 1]
King Richard (f. 326; MS E, f. 3r-3v; MS A, f. 1r-2v; MS E, f. 4r-4v; f. 327)
Booklet 12 [Quire 52] [written by Scribe 2]
Þe Simonie (ff. 328r-334v)
With its unusually large and varied selection of Middle English texts, Auchinleck apparently
exemplifies Hanna’s idea of the miscellany with its “defiantly individual impulses” and its
“oscillation between the planned and the random.”411
The codicology of the manuscript has been
described extensively, but rewards repeated study with an intriguing model for collaborative
manuscript production in London in the early fourteenth century.412
The manuscript is divided
into twelve booklets or fascicles, that is, groups of continuously copied quires where the end of a
text coincides both with a gap in the copying of the manuscript and the end of a quire. Four of
these booklets show signs of collaboration or successive copying by at least two scribes while
the remaining eight appear to be the sole work of only one scribe. Most of these booklets begin
with a substantial romance or historical poem, for example, Guy of Warwick (Booklet 4, ff. 108r-
146v), Beues of Hamtoun (Booklet 5, ff. 176r-201r), Sir Tristrem (Booklet 9, ff. 281r-299v), and
The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle (Booklet 10, ff. 304r-317r) to name several
prominent poems. Scholars traditionally have understood these texts to be the “big ticket” items
around which the manuscript was structured while the shorter texts such as Þe Desputisoun
Bitven þe Bodi and þe Soule (Booklet 1, ff. 31v-35r), On the Seven Deadly Sins (Booklet 3, ff.
411 Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 37-38.
412 The earliest description of Auchinleck appears in Kölbing’s “Vier romanzen-handschriften.” Supplements to this
were provided in Bliss’s “Notes on the Auchinleck Manuscript” and Cunningham’s similarly titled “Notes on the
Auchinleck Manuscript” when the manuscript was re-bound. This work was largely adopted and extended
Cunningham and Pearsall’s facsimile The Auchinleck Manuscript and Mordkoff in her unpublished 1981
dissertation, “The Making of the Auchinleck Manuscript: The Scribes at Work.” The only major objection to the
views of Kölbing, Bliss and Cunningham concerns the number of scribes that copied this manuscript. Alison
Wiggins has, persuasively I think, shown that six scribes worked on the manuscript in “Are Auchinleck Manuscript
Scribes 1 and 6 the Same Scribe?” but the issue remains contentious. See all the discussion of the manuscript in
Kerby-Fulton et al, Opening Up Middle English Manuscript Studies, esp. “Englishing Romance: The Auchinleck
Manuscript.”
131
70r-72r), and The Paternoster (Booklet 3, ff. 72r-72r or 72v) have been labelled as “filler” texts,
ancillary to the general plan of the manuscript.413
Some plan for the manuscript—in both a codicological and a literary sense—must have existed:
despite the ad hoc collaboration of the scribes involved, scholars have convincingly argued that
Auchinleck follows a consistent layout that implies a design for the general look of the
manuscript in place at an early stage of production. The major copier of the manuscript, Scribe 1,
who completed over 70% of the copying and added the majority of item titles and catchwords
likely implemented or managed this design plan. Most of the larger items were once preceded by
a miniature although many of these have been removed by cutting. For surviving examples, see
The King of Tars (f. 7r); The Paternoster (f. 72r); Reinbrun (f. 167r); Þe Wench þat Loved a
King (f. 256v); and King Richard (f. 326r). Generally, the first letter of every line is picked out in
red and all scribes isolate the initial letter of the line with a ruled column. Noticeable departures
from this design plan or decoration anomalies occur in Booklets 2, 3, 7 and 12, all of which have
been initiated by a scribe other than Scribe 1. I will return to these booklets later in this chapter
in order to suggest that these design anomalies may indicate these were made at a separate stage
of production.
It is generally accepted that Auchinleck was produced in London at some point in the 1330s. The
dialect of Scribes 1 and 3 has been localized to London, and contemporary historical references
in texts such as Sir Beues of Hamtoun and The Short Metrical Chronicle confirm an interest in
the city.414
Simply by virtue of its size, moreover, London is by far the most likely place in
England for six scribes to have been working in tandem. London would have also offered a
number of possible patrons for the book including lower gentry and prosperous merchants like
the fishmonger and London Chamberlain Andrew Horn who compiled the analogous Liber
413 For the concept of “big ticket” items in Auchinleck, see, for example, Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck
Manuscript,” 94.
414 See Loomis, “A Possible London Bookshop.” Wiggins and Hanna both emphasize London as a likely place for
this quanitity of textual information to be shared between scribes. See, respectively, Alison Wiggins, “Guy of
Warwick: Study and Transcription”; and Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript.” Alison Wiggins, in
her recent study of the London contexts of the manuscript, supports this claim: “The cumulative result of these
additions is partially to reroute the nation’s history through London in order to feed an interest in marvellous stories
pertaining to the urban environment” in “The City and the Text: London Literature,” 546-7. On medieval London’s
literary networks, see Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice.”
132
Custumarum in the first half of the fourteenth century.415
Romance exemplars were frequently
exchanged between London and the West Midlands pre-1400.416
Studies of Auchinleck have posited several models for manuscript production in the early
fourteenth century. The scholarship discussing the Auchinleck manuscript’s production has been
contentious, beginning with Laura Hibbard Loomis’s groundbreaking article in the 1940s.
Adapting the model of the monastic scriptorium to a commercial venture, Hibbard Loomis
proposed that the manuscript was created in what she called a “lay scriptorium” or
“bookshop.”417
This need not have been an actual shop; rather she proposes the idea of a lay
center “where went on, whether under one roof or not, the necessarily unified and directed work
of compiling, copying, illuminating, and binding any book.”418
The idea of the lay scriptorium or
bookshop was influential, but codicologists in the in 1970s and onward complicated and resisted
this model in important ways. Doyle and Parkes dismissed the notion that scribes produced the
texts of Chaucer and Gower in lay scriptoria, arguing instead for dispersed, ad hoc production
facilitated by the piecemeal sharing of individual quires.419
Pamela Robinson laid out important
modifications to the bookshop theory in her Oxford dissertation where she argued that the
manuscript was assembled from twelve booklets.420
Her analysis implies that booklets were part
415 Hanna argues that Horn’s work, which itself follows the models of the previous century, “can be integrally
connected with the greatest contemporary London English literary book, the Auchinleck MS” in London Literature,
54. He adds that legal texts such as Horn’s share related craftsmen with Auchinleck: “Some of the same hands
provided decoration both in Auchinleck and in...the extensive legal volume (s) ‘Liber custumarum’, only part of
which is still at the Guildhall, the remainder dispersed in British Library, MS Cotton Claudius D.ii and Oxford, Oriel
College, MS 46” in “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 96. See also Dennison, “‘Other Manuscripts of the
Queen Mary Psalter Workshops” and “An Illuminator of the Queen Mary Psalter Group.” Analogues for Auchinleck
in terms of both production methods and possible audience, Hanna suggests, include CCCC, MS 70 (also produced
for Andrew Horn) called de veteribus legibus Anglie and containing codes from Ine to Henry III.
416 Wiggins, in her study of the corpus of West Midlands romances, concludes a number of West Midlands romances
appear to have been copied from London exemplars, and vice versa, enforcing “the impression that exchange of
exemplars between these two regions was especially significant for romance transmission” in “Middle English
Romance,” 249.
417 Loomis, “A Possible London Bookshop,” 597, 599.
418 Ibid., 597.
419 Cf. Doyle and Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis.”
420 See Robinson, “A Study of Some Aspects of the Transmission of English Verse Texts.”
133
of a process of speculative production in which a buyer could select from a number of premade
booklets.
Timothy Shonk, however, proposed an alternate model in which a buyer commissioned the
codex from a stacionarius, a term he uses following Graham Pollard to refer to “a dealer…an
intermediary between the producer and the public rather than an actual maker of the goods he
sells.”421
In the case of Auchinleck, however, Shonk argued that Scribe 1 was more than simply
an intermediary; he was an editor of sorts, copying the bulk of the material, overseeing the
various stages of construction, and coordinating between the buyer and the other scribes.422
Shonk argued that Scribe 1 wrote all of the extant catchwords and likely determined the order in
which the booklets were arranged. He was also likely responsible for numbering items and
adding titles after the manuscript had been decorated. The assumption of these duties suggests
that Scribe 1 was employed for more than just copying; rather, he was an editor who determined
the general layout of the page and the final order of the items within the book. Within this model,
copying need not have been localized to a physical “shop” where all scribes were present.
Rather, material could be parceled out to scribes within the city to enable copying, either
simultaneously or sequentially, to occur.
Lastly, Matthew Fisher has returned to the argument that Scribe 1 may have been more than just
an editor; he may have had access to multiple exemplars from which he partially composed,
translated or edited texts like the Short Metrical Chronicle, likely by means of Anglo-Norman
exemplars like Des Grantz Geanz and Matthew Paris’ Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, and also
multiple copies of Middle English texts like King Richard. Fisher writes,
421 See Shonk, “Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 87. See also Graham Pollard’s work on the term stacionarius
in “The Company of Stationers before 1557,” 14-15. I discuss the use of the term “stationer” in more detail in
Chapter 1 of this dissertation. It is unlikely that a “stationer” as the term is used in the fifteenth century would have
been in operation in the mid-1340s.
422 Shonk states, “He copied most of the material himself, farmed out other pieces to independent scribes, and then
completed the work needed to put the book into its final form….He served as ‘editor’ of the manuscript and did
much of the writing, but some of the work he subcontracted to other scribes and rubricators.” Shonk, “Study of the
Auchinleck Manuscript,” 73. See also his article, “The Scribe as Editor,” 19-20.
134
The writer of the Auchinleck Short Chronicle had in his hands copies of some extremely
au courant texts. This suggests not what is called “exemplar poverty,” but rather
privileged access to a remarkably diverse and substantive selection of texts.423
Although Fisher does not argue for a return to Loomis’ bookshop model where a group of scribal
hacks jointly composed a series of romances, he adapts elements of this theory to demonstate the
fluidity of composition and scribal authorship in the period.
2.2 Chaucer, the Auchinleck Bookshop and Literary History
The best starting point for a discussion of Auchinleck’s more general impact on literary history is
Laura Hibbard Loomis’s influential article “The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London
Bookshop of 1330-1340.” In this article Loomis made two claims which have continued to shape
Auchinleck scholarship despite substantial resistance from codicologists. Firstly, she suggested
that Chaucer may have “had this manuscript, so famous and so venerable, in his hands.”424
The
assertion that Chaucer must have possessed the Auchinleck in order to write “Sir Thopas” has
largely been dismissed as a product of “wishful thinking”425
—impossible to prove and dependent
upon a “drastically over-simplified model of fourteenth-century manuscript production.”426
Most
recently, Christopher Cannon has revisited Loomis’s use of a heuristic methodology that
analyzes intertextual phrases with a “sympathetic spirit” in order to determine how we might use
a similar approach to analyze elements of Chaucer’s style in relationship to possible “native”
romances and saints’ lives.427
Nevertheless, Cannon ends up in the somewhat awkward position
of acknowledging the rigorous attention Loomis devoted to Auchinleck, suggesting “there was
never a good reason to try to characterize the ‘particular English style’ that Chaucer
‘inherited’…since he clearly ‘inherited’ more than one such style,” and then chastising scholars
423 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 150.
424 Loomis, “A Possible London Bookshop of 1330-1340,” 597.
425 Cannon, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 132.
426 Wiggins, http://auchinleck.nls.uk.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/editorial/importance.html. Wiggins recognizes
that, nevertheless, the association does offer interesting clues as to the milieu in which Chaucer worked and the
forms of texts which he may have come across.
427 Cannon, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript Revisited,” 146. It is unclear how precisely Cannon uses the
term “native” in regard to both saint’s lives and romances: he may, in this case, mean texts of those genres written in
English in England.
135
for not “recognizing what a valuable tool such careful reading might itself be for uncovering the
other books Chaucer might have held in his hands.”428
Cannon’s response to the materials—which suggests both that Loomis’s methodology is useful
for discovering what books Chaucer might have possessed and at the same time arguing there is
no good reason to try to use those books to ascertain Chaucer’s style—is symptomatic of the
perceived link between Chaucer and Auchinleck. Although no conclusive evidence has been
found to support the assertion that Chaucer had access to Auchinleck, nevertheless, scholars have
argued that Auchinleck is representative of a type of book—namely, a miscellaneous manuscript
filled with assorted styles of English verse—which Chaucer may have used as a model or source
of material for his own writing. Here, we might consider Míċeál Vaughan’s claim that the
unfinished nature of the Canterbury Tales, its division into fragments, and its multiple “voices”
cause Chaucer’s compilation to resemble structurally miscellaneous manuscripts such as
Auchinleck.429
We might extend this argument even further, as Arthur Bahr does, to argue that
the Canterbury Tales elevates the form of the compilation aesthetically by using the haphazard
and sometimes contradictory constellation of tales to reveal “ideological perspectives more
complex than would be possible for any single one of their constituent parts.”430
The line of
argumentation taken up by both Vaughan and Bahr is useful in that it attempts to draw Chaucer’s
work closer to earlier Middle English manuscripts, but it also serves to implicitly support the
assumption that there is something inherently English about the appearance of Auchinleck—that
is, as Hanna has suggested, that miscellaneity and vernacularity go hand in hand. This is an
argument I intend to complicate throughout this chapter, but for the moment, it is simply useful
to bear in mind that the Auchinleck-Chaucer connection continues to reinforce the perception of
the production of Auchinleck as an originary moment for the development of English literary
culture when figured as a precursor to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or inspiration for “Sir
Thopas.”
428 Ibid.
429 Cf. Vaughan, “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Auchinleck MS: Analogous Collections.”
430 Bahr, “Convocational and Compilational Play,” 1. For an expansion of this perspective, see his recently released
book, Fragments and Assemblages.
136
In a similar vein, the second argument Loomis proposed—that of the existence of a “bookshop”
which may have been the cradle of this new form of English literature—has also continued to be
persuasive despite resistance by codicologists and book historians. The idea of the lay or secular
“bookshop” has become a recurring motif that finds its way into the footnotes of a number of
articles and monographs, often with only a few lines to support or dismiss it. Here, I turn to
Kevin Sean Whetter’s brief discussion of the production of Auchinleck in Understanding Genre
and Medieval Romance to show some of the problematic ways in which the “bookshop” model
persists. Whetter states:
It has long been a critical commonplace that Auchinleck was produced in a London
bookshop for a non-aristocratic patron and that this production included in-house copying
and translation of texts such as Guy [of Warwick].431
He goes on to acknowledge that the work of Shonk and Wiggins troubles this idea, but he
modifies the “bookshop” model only insofar as to say that “while [Auchinleck] may have been
produced in some sort of bookshop, it was not (as Hibbard Loomis’s theory had it) translated and
copied simultaneously.”432
Whetter adds that “even in the fourteenth century, manuscripts had
ceased to be the product of clerical scriptoria alone and were instead increasingly produced in
bookshops; indeed, most extant romance manuscripts seem to be the product of bookshops.”433
As the first chapter of this dissertation lays out, we have little if any evidence for the presence of
bookshops in England during the Middle Ages, let alone enough to support the claim that most
romance manuscripts were produced there. It would be more correct to say that many romance
manuscripts seem to be the product of professional scribes, sometimes working in ad hoc
collaboration with one another and sometimes working with shared “scriptorial facilities.”
I have offered an extended summary of this scholarship pertaining to the “bookshop” theory, and
Whetter’s use of it in his monograph Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance, to draw
attention to how literary scholars generalize the arguments of manuscript scholars in ways that
431 Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance, 46.
432 Ibid., 47.
433 Ibid. Taylor takes a similar position in his discussion of the context of booklet production in his article “From
Manual to Miscellany,” which I discuss further below. He in turn seems to take his lead from D. J. A. Ross’s article
“A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman Workshop.” Ross, however, suggests something closer to an atelier than he
does a scribal workshop.
137
distort or simplify them. The underlying implication of Whetter’s discussion of the Auchinleck is
that by the fourteenth century, manuscript production had moved from the monastery to the
marketplace where vernacular romances were readily available. From this, he concludes that
romances enjoyed “widespread popularity” in the fourteenth century and that there was “in some
corners, at least awareness of romance as a genre.”434
Whetter’s conclusion that medieval readers
understood romance as a genre may not be wrong in and of itself, but it places too much weight
upon his understanding of what a medieval bookshop was and what that might reveal about the
size of the potential audience and availability of vernacular romances in fourteenth-century
London. Whetter assumes that the existence of a bookshop—whether copying took place
simultaneously or in sequence—shows that there must have been widespread demand for
romance texts ipso facto. This line of reasoning only makes sense if we also assume that this
bookshop (or other bookshops) produced romances in large numbers and that Auchinleck was
not a singular or anomalous production in the mid-fourteenth century. It also assumes a certain
model for the production and sale of these romances.
To tease this out further, I would point to Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin’s discussion
of an image of Lady Hagiography, a Pilgrim and Lady Lesson in BL, MS Cotton Tiberius A.vii
(Plate 2). In this image, Lady Hagiography appears to be gesturing toward a number of books
laid open on shelves. Gillespie and Wakelin note how Loomis interpreted this image as a
bookshop in which commodities were placed on display to be sold to potential customers when
in fact it ought to be interpreted in another way: “the shelves, set up in what has been called the
‘lectern-system’, resemble those of a library.”435
Loomis’s misidentification of what was
happening in this image speaks directly to the argument I am attempting to make: Loomis saw
books sitting open on lecterns and placed them in the context of a modern shop in which a
customer would be able to make a choice amongst a series of pre-made units, produced because
the demand was known to be great enough to ensure their eventual sale. I emphasize the phrase
“pre-made” because the debate between the speculative and bespoke production of booklets of
fascicles is one particularly important to this chapter, which I will return to later for further
434 Ibid.
435 Gillespie and Wakelin, introduction to The Production of Books, 2.
138
discussion. Loomis’s understanding of a bookshop is the same understanding of a bookshop that
Whetter relies upon when he contrasts the bookshop to a monastic scriptorium and uses
Auchinleck as evidence for the “widespread popularity” of Middle English romances. The
problem is that the modern concept of a bookshop—a commercial endeavour dependent upon the
speculative production of units in advance of a commission—is a highly specific concept
dependent upon consistent (or at least anticipatable) demand, and it may not have had an easy
analogue in the vernacular book trade. As Hanna writes:
Unlike the centralized world of modern print-book culture (or even that of institutionally
supported Latin handmade book culture), no consistent demand for vernacular books
existed in the Middle Ages. As a result, there was neither anything like a publisher’s
stock nor any of the other more or less formal bibliographical conveniences that facilitate
the dissemination of texts in our literary world.436
Shonk—whom Whetter cites specifically—proposes a different model when he argues Scribe 1
acted as a stacionarius or compiler who accepted a commission from his patron to produce a new
manuscript containing certain, requested texts. Shonk’s model depends upon Auchinleck as a
bespoke manuscript produced by professional scribes in response to a specific commission rather
than as a speculative venture.
All of this is to say that the idea of the bookshop appears to be so persuasive in both its
simplicity and its familiarity that it oversimplifies the complexities of the models that scholars of
Auchinleck have put forward. At the same time, literary scholars still use the idea of the
Auchinleck bookshop to support a number of assumptions: that copying completed by the laity
followed a different model than copying completed by scribes working in or with religious
houses; that lay audiences were substantially different than religious audiences; that in the mid-
fourteenth century there existed a widespread demand for Middle English texts as distinct from
the demand for Latin and Anglo-Norman texts of a similar type; and that there was a widespread
demand for romance texts (with romance here standing in for a more general rise in the demand
for secular literature). These assumptions, in turn, are typically used to support a traditional view
of literary history that sees the fourteenth century as a time in which Middle English became a
new, influential language of literature supported by the rising middle class. Supporting this
436 Hanna, introduction to Pursuing History, 8.
139
assessment, Peter Coss draws attention to the way that the “bookshop” theory when it was first
proposed had a considerable impact on those who wished to show “how ‘literary’ the extant
romances [were]” by giving them a canonical status within a major Middle English codex; at the
same time, the “bookshop” theory encouraged “scholars, beginning with Loomis herself, to look
to London and the ‘middle class’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ for the audience of romance.”437
In this way,
we can see how book history comes to shape literary history.
This in turn leads me back to Christopher Cannon’s article reconsidering Loomis’s theory of
Auchinleck: I want to draw attention to one final element of his engagement with current
Auchinleck scholarship. In this article, Cannon attempts to put into perspective Loomis’s
hypotheses concerning how the Auchinleck scribes collaborated within the bookshop
environment to translate and produce the romances that make up the volume. He contrasts her
“heuristic” methodology with the “much harder proof” offered by codicological studies of “the
touchable substance of pen marks on pages, mise en page, and the binding of folia into
quires.”438
Cannon proceeds (rightly) to point out that the codicological material which is the
subject of manuscript study “does not always admit to ironclad proof.”439
To show his point, he
turns to the “chimera…once identified by many scholars as ‘scribe 6 of Auchinleck.”440
This
move is problematic, however, because the debate regarding the existence of a six scribe—
specifically, whether or not the scribe who copied Booklet 7, containing Otuel, was actually a
sixth scribe or simply Scribe 1 copying with a different dialect and a slightly different script—
has not been settled. Robinson, Hanna and Parkes come down in favour of five scribes, but
nevertheless Wiggins’s convincing computer analysis of scribal habits confirms the early work
of Timothy Shonk and A. J. Bliss, determining that we can distinguish the scribe of Booklet 7 as
separate from Scribe 1.441
I draw attention to this problematic example in Cannon’s article
because he uses the “chimera” of Scribe 6 as evidence that “improvements in the resources for
437 Coss, 38, 48.
438 Cannon, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 133.
439 Ibid.
440 Ibid.
441 Wiggins, “Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6.” A. J. Bliss first identified six scribes in an early article,
“Notes on the Auchinleck Manuscript.” This work was later supported in a palaeographical and codicological study
of the manuscript by Shonk in “A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript.”
140
studying medieval manuscript production—not least the vast amount of scholarship on this
subject in recent decades—has made such [codicological] study increasingly precise.”442
It ought
to be pointed out, then, that those improvements in resources—in this case, Wiggins’s
application of what she calls “whole-data analysis” to distinguish a single scribe from his fellow
copyists—have failed to settle the debate. Despite the convincing nature of Wiggins’s analysis,
Hanna, depending on the oculus palaeographicus rather than Big Data, still continues to contest
the existence of Scribe 6.443
My point, then, is two-fold: on the one hand, there is a distinct problem with how scholars
integrate preliminary or changing models of scribal collaboration into broader debates; on the
other hand, despite increasingly sophisticated techniques for analysis, many of our current
models should not be regarded as “iron-clad” since many of the underlying assumptions of those
models are still being actively contested—that is, book history with all its details and “touchable
substances,” appears to offer concrete proof or evidence for literary claims, yet it is clear those
same “touchable substances” are still open to investigation and subject to competing
interpretations.
But the questions those models attempt to answer still remain intensely important. To what
extent can we judge the demand for Middle English literature in the fourteenth century? Who
consumed and invested in this form of literature? Were the mechanisms by which that demand
was satisfied an extension of or intrinsically different from those for other literary languages?
Just as in Chapter 1 I troubled the concept of the monastic scriptorium by demonstrating that
monks, friars and clerics could make or cause to have made books in a number of different ways
through in-house, collaborative production but also through what we might call “commercial
production”—that is, by commissioning a book to be copied by a professional scribe—likewise,
in this chapter, firstly, I want to point out that there was no stable concept of the bookshop (or
indeed scriptorium) in fourteenth-century England. Secondly, I want to hone and revise the
442 Cannon, “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 134.
443 Hanna disputes the existence of the sixth scribe in “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 92 and confirms
this opinion in London Literature, 40, n. 7. He argues that the differences in duct in Booklet 7 result from a different
ruling system, indicating that the quire may have been intended originally for some other purpose.
141
current, generally accepted model of the production of Auchinleck and thereby point out some of
the ramifications for our understanding of the conditions of vernacular manuscript production in
fourteenth-century England.
2.3 From Monastery to Marketplace
In the previous section I showed that Loomis’s bookshop theory has contributed to lingering
misconceptions about the circulation of Middle English literature in the mid-fourteenth century. I
also showed how scholars have simplified modifications to the bookshop theory to make broad
arguments concerning literary history. In this section, I want to break down in more detail what
exactly we might mean when we say “bookshop” and thereby approach a number of models for
the production of books during the period. First of all, it is useful to come to some sort of
tentative understanding of the distinction between “commercial” and “non-commercial”
production of books during the fourteenth century. These categories are separate from and
complicated by the distinction between monastic production and lay production. To show the
difficulties, I quote a passage from Diane E. Booton’s Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to
Print in Late Medieval Brittany:
At a crossroad of trade routes and geo-political struggles, Brittany’s production of books
and manuscripts reflected a combination of regional and outside influences. As elsewhere
in Western Europe, Brittany experienced a gradual shift of manuscript production from
monasteries to lay scriptoria and from rural settings to urban centers, as the motivation
for copying the work in ink on parchment evolved from an aspect of religious meditation
to personal profit.444
This monograph sketches out a history of manuscript production not dissimilar to that which
occurred in England; at the same time, it conflates the shift from monastic production to lay
production with a transition from copying as a form of “religious meditation” to “personal
profit”(or what we might think of as commercial production). In many ways, it is clear that the
reception of Loomis’s “bookshop” theory has followed a similar trajectory, presenting the
transition from a monastic to lay scriptorium as a sign that vernacular books were now part of a
commercial market targeting a predominantly secular audience.
444 Booton, Manuscripts, Market and the Transition to Print, 2.
142
The commercialization of book production clearly did occur to some extent during this period.
The pecia system of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century is already a vivid attestation
of commercialization of manuscript production, as is the work of an Oxford scribe like William
de Brailles.445
But rather than seeing this as a full transformation, I would turn to the more
nuanced perspective offered in Ian Doyle’s “The English Provincial Book Trade before Printing”
in which he argues that England’s book trade as late as the fifteenth century still continued to
have “significant non-commercial segments” and that none of the individual activities associated
with selling books—the practice of handicrafts such as making ink or parchment, the
organization and copying of texts, and the selling of complete books—could offer full-time
occupation.446
Linne Mooney makes a similar point that the copying of Chaucer’s texts in the
fifteenth century, when the market for vernacular English literature was significantly more
developed than in the mid-fourteenth century, still constituted only a sideline trade performed
predominantly by scribes who supported themselves with other sorts of copying:
This is not to say that [the scribes of Chaucer’s manuscripts] were all commercial
producers of books: in fact there is only very limited evidence for commercial literary
manuscript production before the third quarter of the fifteenth century, near the end of the
period under question. One must be careful to draw distinctions between scribes copying
vernacular literary texts (who seem to have done so in addition to other jobs involving
writing), those copying other kinds of texts, principally in Latin, for high demand, such as
school books, works studied at universities, bibles and liturgical manuscripts (who might
make up the members of the Mistery or Guild of Textwriters) and those importing books
from the continent or re-selling books produced in England. Those producing copies of
literary texts in London in the late fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries were
professional writers, in the Middle English sense of “scribes”, but they do not appear to
have made their living principally by copying vernacular literary texts.447
The first step to clarifying our understanding of how Auchinleck was produced requires us to
acknowledge, as Jean Pascal Pouzet suggests, the “general pattern of interlocking book-
445 For de Brailles and the creation of an impressive Book of Hours in Oxford in the thirteenth century, see Donovan,
The De Brailes Hours, esp. 9-24. For Graham Pollard’s important article on the pecia system, see “The Pecia
System in the Medieval Universities.” It ought to be noted that little if any hard evidence has been found for the use
of the pecia system in Oxford or Cambridge in the Middle Ages. For a further description of the pecia system in the
1250s and 1260s in Paris, see Croenen’s introduction to Patrons, Authors and Workshops, esp. 1-3.
446 Doyle, “The English Provincial Book Trade,” 13.
447 Mooney, “Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and their Scribes,” 192.
143
producing activities,” each of which implied a “medieval ‘market economy.’”448
These patterns
of activities indicate how “precarious and versatile” the procedures involved in making books
were and, correspondingly, how as scholars we ought to view commercial and non-commercial
paradigms as porous and interpenetrating rather than separate and discrete.449
Erik Kwakkel has clarified some of the features of the late medieval economy: he argues the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw an increase in commercialization and organization.450
The
channels by which a patron could obtain a copied text were still remarkably diverse. Customers
could directly approach scriveners, schoolmasters, students and notaries to copy a text, receive it
in loose quires, and commission other artisans such as limners or binders to finish the book. It is
possible that a craftsman might have worked as an intermediary—in the loose sense in which
Graham Pollard uses the term stacionarius—in order to organize the division of labour, although
we have little evidence of how such middle men, if they did exist, would have operated. It is
likely, however, that in some cases, a book might be assembled by multiple craftsmen without
such a stacionarius (or similar figure) organizing the labour.
Furthermore, it is necessary to add that we ought not to restrict participation in the commercial
book trade to the laity. C. Paul Christianson, for example, identifies at least 254 citizens who
were professional manuscript craftsmen and stationers in London between 1300 and 1520, but he
notes that this number does not include both the Writers of the Court Letter, who wrote legal
documents and would become the Scriveners’ Company, and other clerical scriveners who
would have worked as occasional text-writers (the numbers of both groups together totalling
over 295 writers).451
Kerby-Fulton and Justice have drawn attention to the role of unbeneficed
clerics in the production of Middle English literature, with particular reference to William
Langland.452
I have also discussed in Chapter 2 the role of Augustinians in the production of
manuscripts of pastoral care such as the South English Legendary. Further to this, clerical scribes
448 Pouzet, “Book Production Outside Commercial Contexts,” 214.
449 Ibid., 238.
450 Kwakkel, “Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation,” 173-191.
451 Christianson, “London’s Late Medieval Manuscript-Book Trade,” 88-89.
452 Cf. Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles.”
144
frequently competed with non-clerical scribes for the same sorts of jobs. In the fifteenth century,
Richard Flynt, a self-described “capellanus and tyxtwriter” was admitted to the freedom of the
city of York as one who “desireth to be maid free of the tyxtwrutters crafft and occupaccion so
that he may from now furth at his libertie writte, make, bynd, note and florysche bokez and
theym sell and put to sale.”453
By 1476, the York ordinance of the guild of textwriters, luminers,
noters, turners, and flourishers stipulated that only priests with benefices worth less than seven
marks a year could practice any of the crafts controlled by that guild, indicating that competition
from chaplains and clerics must have been a problem throughout the proceeding years as they
copied texts and participated in a variety of crafts associated with the book trade in order to earn
money.454
Members of religious orders also participated in the book trade by commissioning books from
professional scribes (as opposed to having them produced “in-house”). We can see this in the
case of Walter Meriet, chancellor of Exeter Cathedral in 1333 who commissioned from book
makers in Oxford a lavishly illuminated copy of Bartholomeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus
rerum. In 1339, Bishop John Grandisson of Exeter was forced to admonish Meriet for his
expensive purchase in a mandate claiming, “Walter...had books made, both ready made and with
ornaments added for him, to the ruin of his poor and infirm parishioners.”455
Two other Oxford
men, William Reed, Bishop of Chichester (d. 1385) and Richard Calne, an Augustinian canon
from Lanthony Secunda at Gloucester, compiled a series of manuscripts by means of the
purchase of smaller booklets (or small-format manuscripts). In an inscription to Walter Robert,
his scribe and notary, Reed describes how he assembled the volume from booklets from other
people’s libraries and from booklets he wrote himself or caused to be made.456
Richard Calne
also noted in his volumes, acquired between 1412 and 1421, that they were partly written by him
and partly commissioned by scribes.457
When this evidence for clerical engagement with the
book trade is taken into account, it becomes clear that an understanding of the development of
453 Friedman, Northern English Books, 36.
454 Ibid.
455 Michael, “Urban Production of Manuscript Books,” 182.
456 Robinson, “The ‘Booklet,’” 59.
457 Robinson, “The Format of Books,” 51.
145
manuscript production in the fourteenth century as a transition from “an aspect of religious
meditation to personal profit” oversimplifies the matter.
Having established that in the fourteenth century books containing literary texts were produced
in a variety of contexts, both commercially and non-commercially, both by and for religious
members and the laity, I will turn to several examples of manuscripts comparable to Auchinleck
which further reinforce this point. Firstly, I turn to CCCC, MS 50, a late-thirteenth-century
manuscript startlingly similar to Auchinleck in both contents and design that belonged to the
Benedictine monks of St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury.458
Fig. 3.2: CCCC, MS 50 (Contents by Booklet)
Collation: iv + 112
-712
, 86, 9
12-15
12, 18
8 (wants 8) + iv.
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-7v; a clear textualis semi-quadrata
Scribe 2: ff. 7v-90r, 91r-181r; 105r, 328r-334v; a spiky textualis semi-quadrata
Scribe 3: ff. 90r-90v; a nearly contemporary Anglicana
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quires 1-8] [written by Scribe 1, Scribe 2, and Scribe 3]
Genealogy of the Kings of Britain (ff. 1r-6r) [written by Scribe 1] [Latin]
Roman de Brut (ff. 6v-90r) [written by Scribe 1 and Scribe 2] [Anglo-Norman]
Le Livere des Reis de Britannie (ff. 90r-90v) [written by Scribe 3] [Anglo-Norman]
Booklet 2 [Quire 9] [written by Scribe 2]
Romanz di un Chivaler et sa Dame e un Clerk (ff. 91r-94v) [Anglo-Norman]
Amis et Amiloun (ff. 94v-102r) [Anglo-Norman]
The Four Daughters of God (ff. 102r-102v) [Latin]
Booklet 3 [Quires 10-16] [written by Scribe 2]
Roman de Guy de Warewic (ff. 103r-181r) [Anglo-Norman]
This manuscript measures 335 x 230 mm, larger than Auchinleck’s current 250 x 190 mm, and
dates to the second half of the thirteenth century (see Plate 3). The text of the manuscript was
written by two scribes in double columns of 42 lines each with the initial letter of each line offset
458 For a description of the manuscript, see James, Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge,
101-103. See also Ailes, “Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context” and Blacker, “‘Will the Real Brut Please
Stand Up?”
146
and ornamented in red, and with an addition at the end of Booklet 1 by a third, nearly
contemporary scribe. CCCC, MS 50 also employs red and blue initials with pen flourishing
which act as section dividers, with larger red and blue puzzle initials for major textual divisions.
The contents recall what scholars have considered to be the “core” texts or major items of
Auchinleck: a range of romances including Amis and Amiloun, the Short Metrical Chronicle, a
text which Turville-Petre argues acts as the backbone of Auchinleck to which the semi-historical
romance texts are attached, and the two-part tale of Guy of Warwick as well as the tale of his son
Reinbrun.459
Like Auchinleck, the manuscript has been produced by means of booklets, of which there are
three. The first booklet ends on f. 90v. Although the quires typically consist of twelve leaves, this
quire has been cut down to six leaves. When Scribe 2 finished copying the Roman de Brut, he
left the remainder of the recto and the entire verso blank. A third nearly contemporary scribe,
Scribe 3, filled in those leaves with Le Livere des Reis de Britannie in a small Anglicana hand.
The second booklet begins with a three-line red and blue “puzzle” initial and ends with The Four
Daughters of God on f. 102v near the bottom of the verso. After the explicit for this text, an
eight-line rubricated verse introduction to Guy de Warewic has been added, thus creating an
apparent content link between Booklet 2 and Booklet 3. The third booklet, containing only Guy
de Warewic, begins with a 14-line red and blue “puzzle” initial with an adjoining red and blue
border that spans the top of the page (perhaps indicating that this was the main attraction?). This
booklet ends with a reduced quire of eight leaves, with the final leaf removed. I stress the
similarities between these two manuscripts in terms of both content and design in order to begin
to sketch out a context for Auchinleck. Auchinleck is much of a kind with CCCC, MS 50. It is of
a similar size, it is of a similar level of decoration, it contains strikingly similar material, and it is
divided into booklets. Although we have less information regarding the methods of production
for CCCC, MS 50 than we do for Auchinleck, we nevertheless can associate it with St.
Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury on the basis of a notation on f. 1r (“de librario S. Aug. cum. A”)
459 Turville-Petre, England the Nation, 112.
147
and a second notation on f. 6r (“Liber de librario S. Aug. Cantuarie Dist. Gra”). The manuscript
is no. 1516 in the old catalogue.460
A second manuscript also bears comparison: BL, MS Add. 45103 (Penrose).461
Like CCCC, MS
50, this is a large manuscript, measuring 360-5 x 255 mm. It dates to the fourth quarter of the
thirteenth century. Written predominantly by a single scribe in an ornamental semi-quadrata
textualis, the Penrose manuscript consists of a range of Latin and Anglo-Norman texts including
an abridgement of Dares Phrygius’s De Excidio Troiae Historia, Wace’s Roman de Brut, The
Four Daughters of God, and The Prophecies of Merlin, written by a second scribe on a single
quire (Quire 10) and inserted into the Roman de Brut, bisecting Quire 9.
Fig. 3.3: BL, MS Add. 45103 (Penrose Manuscript) (Contents by Booklet)
Collation: i + 112
-812
, 912
[this quire is interrupted at f. 85 by the addition of 1012
],
1112
, 1212
(one leaf lost), 1312
-1412
, 1512
(final leaf removed), 1612
-1812
+ i
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-85b, 98r-220v; a square textualis quadrata
Scribe 2: ff. 86r-97v; textualis semi-quadrata
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quire 1] [written by Scribe 1]
History of the Trojans and Greeks (ff. 1r-10v) [Latin]
ff. 11-12, blank, unruled
Booklet 2 [Quires 2-14, excluding Quire 10] [written by Scribe 1]
Roman de Brut (ff. 13r-166v) [Anglo-Norman]
Booklet 2a [Quire 10] [written by Scribe 2]
Prophecies of Merlin, on a quire inserted into Booklet 2 (Quire 10, Booklet 2a?) (ff.
86r-97v) [Latin]
Booklet 3 [Quires 15] [written by Scribe 1]
First Statute of Westminster (ff. 167r-184v) [Latin]
Booklet 4 [Quires 16-18] [written by Scribe 1]
La Petite Philosophie (ff. 185r-212r) [Anglo-Norman]
The Four Daughters of God (ff. 212r-214r) [Latin]
Apocalypse (ff. 214v-215r) [Anglo-Norman]
460 See Barker-Benfield, St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury.
461 For a full description of this manuscript, see Skeat, The British Museum Catalogue of Additions to the
Manuscripts 1936-1945, I, 85-89. See also Bolton and Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature, 2, 20, 325, 685, 717.
148
La Sainte Resurrectioun (ff. 215r-220v) [written by Scribe 1] [Anglo-Norman]
The Penrose manuscript was also assembled by the production of booklets, some of which
consist of no more than a single quire containing a single text (Booklet 1, Booklet 2a, Booklet 3)
and others which consist of multiple quires to accommodate a long text (Booklet 2) or multiple
texts compiled together (Booklet 4). Each of the main booklets (1, 2, 3 and 4) has a thin piece of
parchment sewn in that has been twisted to form a marker. Also like CCCC, MS 50, this book
can be traced to a religious house, the Benedictine cathedral priory of Christ Church, Canterbury,
where it appears in a list of books repaired in 1508 and compiled by William Ingram.462
The
ornamental nature of the script suggests religious training, particularly the ink work of the
decorative ascenders which integrates human faces and animal shapes.463
These two manuscripts, similar to Auchinleck in grade, contents and construction, were owned
by and possibly produced in religious houses. Lest one think that literature of this sort—namely,
“national” histories and romances—was an anomalous inclusion in a library such as that of St.
Augustine’s, Canterbury or Christ Church, Canterbury, it is worth noting that the Benedictine
monks of St. Augustine’s Canterbury possessed no fewer than four copies of Guy of Warwick
along with a “gesta cuiusdam militis qui vocatur ypomedon” (Hypomedon) a “liber qui vocatur
Graal in gallico” (a collection of Arthurian legends) and a “romaunz de per le Galois”
(Percival).464
Nor was it only this religious house which owned works of this sort: Peterborough
possessed a number of miscellaneous French works including a number of epics and romances
left in a bequest by a prior who died in 1392. A copy of the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic
dated to 1300 was bound into BL, MS Harley 3775, a composite manuscript consisting primarily
of chronicles and documents relating specifically to St. Albans Abbey.465
Another copy of the
Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic was bound with a selection of Latin sermons and glosses on
Hebrew names that at one point belonged to St Werburg’s Abbey in Chester.466
462 This booklist can be found in Canterbury, Canterbury Cathedral, MS C. 11. See James, Ancient Libraries, 158, n.
161.
463 Symes suggests that this book was copied by the Canterbury monks in “The Boy and the Blind Man,” 124, n. 30.
464 Sánchez-Martí, “Reconstructing the Audiences,” 176. Cf. Taylor, Textual Situations, 190, 264, n. 175.
465 See Ailes, “Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context,” 16-17.
466 Ibid., 18.
149
Another example warrants attention: CUL, MS Dd.11.78, a miscellaneous manuscript featuring
longer hagiographical works and many short poems written by the Latin professional poet, Henry
of Avranches. The manuscript was compiled, owned and partly written by the chronicler
Matthew Paris, a monk of St Albans in the thirteenth century. A self-identified “scriptor” or
“confector” of books, Matthew worked on a number of manuscripts which have been identified
as holographs.467
This manuscript is a good comparator for Auchinleck because it shows how the
compiler of a miscellaneous manuscript might settle on the “shape” of the manuscript while
compiling it. Like Auchinleck, at least five scribes produced CUL, MS Dd.11.78 including
Matthew Paris himself, and they divided the manuscript into a number of booklets, which
Townsend and Rigg identify as follows:
… separate series of quire numbers, gaps in catchwords, blank leaves, differing page
sizes, stages of decoration, changes of hand, and similar indications show that the
‘volume’ (as it is called in the Contents List) originally consisted of five booklets or
libelli (as Matthew calls Part IV on fol. 153r).468
Townsend and Rigg suggest that these five booklets were written, compiled and decorated
separately. It was only through the process of writing and compiling that Matthew Paris came to
envision a plan for the entire manuscript. Townsend and Rigg claim:
If, then, Matthew came to see [CUL, MS Dd.11.78] as a Henry anthology post factum,
the addition of Part V was the most likely catalyst for the shift in his principal conception
of the manuscript’s contents. By far the longest piece in the codex and the poet’s magnum
opus, its authorship duly noted by the scribe, Matthew would have noticed its common
authorship with No. 35; he may gradually have realized that a number of other items were
also Henry’s works.…The whole codex seems to have become a Henry anthology in
Matthew’s mind only after he became conscious of originally inadvertent coincidences in
the compilation process. Only in the late stages of the book’s genesis did these suggest a
consciously pursued strategy.469
467 Matthew Paris describes himself as a “scriptor huius libris” in the Chronica maiora, but the scribe of the fair
copy BL, MS Cotton Nero D.v has substituted “confector.” See Vaughan, 35.
468 Townsend and Rigg, “Medieval Latin Poetic Anthologies (V),” 355. Because of the complicated and highly
irregular nature of the assembly of this manuscript, even a partial description would take many pages. As such I
refer the reader to the detailed description in this article.
469 Ibid., 389.
150
This manuscript suggests the inherent flexibility of Latinate bookmaking in the thirteenth
century, even in respect to a “canonical” poet such as Henry of Avranches. Here, we might see
the development of the poet’s canon, not as an initial governing force for the systematic creation
of new manuscripts, as Hanna would suggest, but rather as a product of the process of
compilation itself. That is to say, even in an institutional setting like St Albans, literary
canonization was just as likely to follow from the creation of a manuscript as it was to determine
shape and contents of a manuscript from the outset.
One final example warrants study: the so-called Edwardes manuscript, a composite manuscript
which contained at least seven items before it was unbound and its pieces were sent to auction in
the nineteenth century.470
Early scholars of Auchinleck claimed that this manuscript in its
presumed original state may have been in the Auchinleck bookshop and may have provided the
source material for a number of texts in Auchinleck; however, in 1969, Judith Weiss argued
against this on the grounds that the manuscript was a composite of several booklets dating from
the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century.471
My interest is primarily in three of the items
which may have made up the original Edwardes manuscript: Gui de Warewic (now BL, MS Add.
38662, ff. 1-80), Chanson de Guillaume (now BL, MS Add. 38663, ff. 1-20) and the Anglo-
Norman Pseudo-Turpin (now BL, MS Add. 40142, ff. 1-14). These three small-format
manuscripts may have been copied and/or decorated by a group of scribes collaborating
(possibly in a scriptorium or workshop) in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Tony Hunt
suggests the Augustinian priories of Oseney or St. Frideswide, Oxford as potential locations for
these “scriptorial activities.”472
The presence of some form of persistent collaboration is
indicated by the similarity of script, design and decoration of all three of the Edwardes fragments
(see Plate 4, BL, MS Add. 38662). They are of a similar size (approximately 220-5 x 160 mm),
with the page divided into two columns of forty lines and with the first letter of each line
separated. They each begin, or include, a large puzzle initial in red and blue with penwork
470 For a summary of the current theory of compilation of this manuscript, see Ailes, “Gui de Warewic in its
Manuscript Context.”
471 Cf. Weiss, “The Auchinleck Manuscript and the Edwardes Manuscripts.”
472 Hunt, “The Anglo-Norman Book,” 378-9. Legge argues that Guy of Warwick, written for one of the Earls of
Warwick, may well have been composed by a canon of Oseney between 1232 and 1242. See Anglo-Norman in the
Cloisters, 63.
151
decoration in brown and green. They have also each been decorated with smaller red or blue
initials with distinctive hooked flourishes. The copy of Gui de Warewic and the copy of the
Pseudo-Turpin both appear to be in the same hand while the copy of the Chanson de Guillaume
is in a similar script by a different scribe but with an identical system of decoration. Of the
manuscripts I have discussed so far, only these three seem to indicate some form of continuous
collaboration, even if only at the level of decoration, between multiple craftsmen producing
similar sorts of work. Here, too, the use of booklets (or small-format manuscripts) containing a
single text and consisting of one or multiple quires seems to have facilitated production.
I draw attention to these manuscripts as comparators to Auchinleck to begin to undo some of the
binaries which have governed our understanding of the production of Auchinleck and the role it
plays in the traditional history of manuscript production which posits a transition from the
monastery to the marketplace. A number of potential audiences have been suggested for
Auchinleck: provincial gentry visiting London similar to the Pastons, as Coss argues;473
an old
crusading family such as the Beauchamps or Percies, as Turville-Petre claims;474
Shonk agrees
with Doyle that it may have been intended for wealthy Londoners with court connections,475
while Arthur Bahr suggests a mercantile audience.476
It is not my purpose to argue that
Auchinleck was in fact intended for use within a religious house, but rather I want to stress the
possibility that books like Auchinleck were used within that milieu. In many cases, they looked
similar. In many cases, they contained texts of the same genre or sources for those texts. For
example, Fisher has recently argued that two of the major sources for the Auchinleck Short
Metrical Chronicle survive in religious books. One of these, the portion of BL, MS Cotton
Cleopatra D.xi containing Des Grantz Geanz, from which the episode of Albina is drawn, was
copied by Alan of Ashbourne, vicar choral of Lichfield Cathedral in 1325. Fisher suggests:
473 Coss, “Aspects of Cultural Diffusion,” 56-7.
474 Turville-Petre, “England the Nation,” 134-8.
475 Shonk, “A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 90.
476 See Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, particularly Chapter 2.
152
Before it was chained in Lichfield, Alan of Ashbourne may have travelled from Lichfield
with his book containing Des Grantz Geanz, or a scribe connected to the Auchinleck
manuscript may have had access to it there.477
Similarly, he suggests that the story of the consecration of Westminster Abbey is drawn from
Matthew Paris’s Anglo-Norman Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei which survives only in CUL,
MS Ee.3.59, a beautifully illustrated manuscript. The text’s recent translator notes that this
manuscript was likely “neither an original nor an autograph, but is believed to be a copy made at
Westminster or in London of an earlier manuscript by Paris that has not survived.”478
Paris, as I
have discussed, was a Benedictine monk at St Albans Abbey in the thirteenth century, and his
process of producing books parallels that of Auchinleck Scribe 1. While it might be argued that
the languages of the texts in these manuscripts constitutes a key difference—that the use of
Middle English denotes a non-clerical audience—nevertheless, as I have shown in my previous
two chapters, many producers of Middle English texts were members of religious houses. A
large vernacular compendium of historical, religious and romance texts such as Auchinleck was
not unprecedented. In fact, it had numerous precedents both within clerical circles and within
mercantile circles. The insistence upon a gentry or mercantile audience for Auchinleck depends,
in part, upon the assumption that the reading interests of these individuals differed substantially
from the reading interests of those in religious houses. Just as commercial and non-commercial
paradigms ought to be viewed as interpenetrative, so ought we to place Auchinleck in the context
of multilingual copying.
3 Producing the Auchinleck Manuscript
3.1 The Auchinleck Manuscript and Booklet Production
Thus far, this chapter has engaged peripherally with the notion that Auchinleck was constructed
by means of a number of compiled booklets. The implications of this method of production offer
useful insights into the size of the market for Middle English texts in the mid-fourteenth century.
477 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 150.
478 Paris, The History of Saint Edward, 28. This manuscript may have been made for Queen Eleanor’s daughter-in-
law Eleanor of Castile on her arrival in England in 1255. It can be compared with several related Apocalypse
manuscripts from the same workshop: New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.524; BL, MS Add. 35166; Los
Angeles, John Paul Getty Museum, Ludwig MS III; and BodL, MS Tanner 184.
153
In Chapter 1, I argued that Middle English literary culture relied upon the production and
circulation of small-format manuscripts: they enabled short texts to circulate independently in
rolls, pamphlets, “pagyantes,” unbound quires, libelli (little books or booklets), and bills. Not
only did texts in these small-format manuscripts circulate independently, they were also
frequently compiled to form larger, composite codices. Auchinleck offers an excellent example
of how scribes used booklets to produce Middle English volumes of unprecedented size within a
primarily commercial paradigm. Pamela Robinson, Andrew Taylor, Ralph Hanna III, Alexandra
Gillespie and Alison Wiggins have argued that the booklet structure of Auchinleck tells us a
great deal about both the status of vernacular texts in mid-fourteenth century and the means by
which scribes collaborated to produce books for sale. In this section, I will outline three
predominant theories which describe the role of booklets in the production of Auchinleck. The
first posits that the twelve booklets of Auchinleck are a sign of speculative production, that is,
that the booklets were made in advance of a commission so that they could be selected and
compiled into larger books. The second posits that Auchinleck was a bespoke book whereby the
twelve booklets enabled multiple scribes to copy texts quickly according to a general, pre-
determined plan. The third, an intermediary model which I support, was put forward by Alison
Wiggins and posits that the majority of the copying of Auchinleck occurred on a bespoke basis in
response to the desires of a patron, but some booklets may represent textual units initiated
outside of Scribe 1’s plan that were incorporated into the codex before it was decorated.
3.1.1 Speculative Production
The first theory, advanced by implication in Pamela Robinson’s 1972 Oxford dissertation and
echoed by Derek Pearsall in the introduction to the facsimile of Auchinleck, contends that the
Auchinleck booklets were likely produced speculatively: that is, the twelve booklets indicate a
method of production in which a scribe might copy out texts for which he imagined there to be a
demand into a booklet in advance of receiving a commission. The customer, then, would select
from a number of pre-made booklets and a stationer, scribe or other craftsmen such as a binder
would assemble these to create a complete manuscript. Robinson sought to connect Auchinleck
154
more closely with a form of production common in the fifteenth century in which the scribal
collaboration enabled a kind of “production economy.”479
Pearsall agreed that
…the motive for the method of production seems clear: the bookshop produced a series
of booklets or fascicles, consisting of groups of gatherings with some integrity of
contents (note the pious nature of the romances in the first two groupings), which were
then bound up to the taste of a particular customer, at which point catchwords would be
supplied.… Fascicular production of this kind is evidently advantageous in a small-scale
custom trade, and there is good evidence of the practice in the fifteenth century.480
In so arguing, Pearsall supported the gist of Loomis’s original bookshop model. He too posited a
group of scribes working closely together to translate and versify new texts.481
It is easy to see
how the argument for speculative production works in tandem with the apparent
misidentification of the “bookshop” in Fig. 3.3, the image of Lady Hagiography in a book-filled
room. The speculative production of booklets indicates an arrangement not entirely dissimilar
from a modern bookshop. Here, a customer could approach the seller, and select from a series of
pre-made booklets which he could then have compiled, decorated and bound at his leisure in the
same way a modern shopper might choose from a number of available books on display in a
store.
The argument for the speculative production of Auchinleck by means of pre-produced booklets
has been advanced most forcefully by Andrew Taylor, whose interest lies not in where the
original Auchinleck romances came from but “the likely scale of the market for Middle English
writing in the 1330s.”482
Rather than turning to the fifteenth century for a viable production
model, Taylor connects Auchinleck with the production of Anglo-Norman books in the
thirteenth century. Building upon the work of David Ross, he suggests that the presence of a
“‘lay establishment specialising in the copying and illustration of secular Anglo-Norman
479 Robinson, “A Study of Some Aspects,” 120-138.
480 Pearsall, introduction to The Auchinleck Manuscript, ix.
481 Pearsall advocates explicitly for “the general collaborative nature of the translating and versifying works of these
professional hacks in the bookshop” in the introduction to The Auchinleck Manuscript, x. He reiterated this position
in his keynote address at the 2008 LOMERS conference Studies in the Auchinleck Manuscript held at the University
of London. Like Loomis, Pearsall argued for the collaborative “bookshop” model on the basis of textual sharing in
certain romances, but Rhiannon Purdie has convincingly argued evidence that disproves the necessity of
collaboration in Anglicizing Romance, 107-123.
482 Taylor, “Manual to Miscellany,” 3.
155
literature in the second quarter of the thirteenth century’…was not that uncommon.”483
At such
an establishment, “a reader might also have been able to assemble an elegant collection of
fashionable and varied material by making a personal selection of pre-copied fascicles.”484
Taylor imagines the Auchinleck bookshop as an extension of that same practice, suggesting the
development of a sizable market for Middle English romances as early as the 1330s that would
have allowed a scribe to produce booklets speculatively with some assurance that the investment
in materials and time would not go to waste. While I agree that scribes may have collaborated to
produce books or booklets of vernacular texts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—
disbound booklets of the Edwardes manuscript support this—Taylor offers no conclusive
evidence that these units were produced speculatively in advance of a commission.
3.1.2 Bespoke Production
The second line of argumentation, developed predominantly by Hanna and Gillespie, is that
Auchinleck was a “bespoke” manuscript produced primarily after the patron commissioned it.
For Hanna, Auchinleck remains predominantly Scribe 1’s book, and the use of a production
model dependent upon booklets points toward a sequential form of production:
It is, in fact, a single practitioner volume with ad lib piecework—like Ringo, scribe 1
called in his friends when the going got tough. The booklets then are not, as in fifteenth-
century work, simultaneous in origin, a production economy, but largely the sequential
efforts of an individual…. At this date, the book must have been “bespoke”, a client’s
special order. The separable production may suggest that this was an order that, in some
sense, got out of hand, that scribe 1 was provided with a succession of requested items
(‘Give me a Beves’, ‘ This week I was thinking about Richard Coeur de Leon’) from
someone perhaps imperious but certainly wealthy and enthusiastic.485
Hanna’s view of the production methods of Auchinleck ties in more broadly with his arguments
about the use of booklets in miscellaneous, vernacular manuscripts. He argues that codicologists
must distinguish between “booklets as purchased objects” and “booklets as produced objects”—
that is, between a completed booklet that was intended to be a self-sufficient object that could
later be incorporated into a composite manuscript, and a booklet intended as an intermediary unit
483 Ibid., 4.
484 Ibid., 11.
485 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 94.
156
in the production of a single, unified book.486
For Hanna, the commercial market for a book such
as Auchinleck would have been small, and the shape of any such commission would have been
impossible to predict in advance. In turn, then, he emphasizes the “booklet” as an intermediary
production tool, a “way to have some ready stock, especially of popular texts, without the major
investment inherent in producing a full codex ‘on spec’.”487
In this line of reasoning, Hanna still
leaves open the possibility of some degree of speculative production—that is, a bookseller could
create a stock of popular texts—but at the same time, the major benefit of the booklet at this
stage was that it allowed other scribes to quickly copy new texts in order to fulfil a commission
that got out of hand. Gillespie supports Hanna’s position, and further elaborates that Scribe 1
must have “parcelled out exemplars and commissioned half-finished booklets from clerks and
literate artisans in his vicinity in order to get the work done.”488
3.1.3 Semi-Bespoke Production
The third line of argumentation, put forward by Alison Wiggins, offers an intermediary model.
In her study of whether Scribe 1 and Scribe 6 were the same, Wiggins suggests that the
Worcestershire/Gloucestershire dialects of Scribe 2 and his fellow West Midlander, Scribe 6,
could be a clue to uncovering the textual communities that gave rise to this important
manuscript. She describes a model of production for the manuscript that would depend upon “the
existence of sustained, long-standing professional relationships between scribes who moved
between different regions and exchanged texts, exemplars, and readymade booklets as and when
required.”489
Wiggins agrees, for the most part with Hanna and Gillespie, but modifies their
production model to suggest that Booklet 7, a single quire of ten folios containing only the
Charlemagne romance Otuel and completed single-handedly by Scribe 6, may have been started
as an independent booklet.490
She writes:
486 Hanna, “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts,” 22.
487 Ibid., 23.
488 Gillespie, “Medieval Books,” 7.
489 Wiggins, “Are Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6 the Same Scribe?” 18.
490 Hanna similarly notes that Booklet 7’s ruling indicates it might have been initiated for another purpose than
Auchinleck, but he draws different conclusions. See Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 92 and
London Literature, 40, n. 7.
157
Otuel is notable for its disunity and independence from the rest of the manuscript. It is
unusual because it is headed by an enlarged capital. It is written on a quire constructed of
ten folios whereas the other forty-six quires in the manuscript are of eight folios. There is
also no catchword on the final folio of this quire whereas throughout most of the rest of
the manuscript the editor Scribe 1 supplied catchwords consistently. That he did not add a
catchword implies that Scribe 1 received the Otuel booklet pre-assembled and this, along
with the visual differences and disunities, indicates that Otuel was copied independently.
That is, it was copied without the direct supervision of the editor Scribe 1 and at an
earlier stage, before Auchinleck and its design plan were conceived of.491
The difference between Hanna and Gillespie’s position and Wiggins’s position is that Hanna
implies the half-finished booklets were commissioned after Auchinleck was conceived of
whereas Wiggins argues that Booklet 7 was not initially conceived of to be part of the book, but
was later incorporated into the book. I find Wiggins’s model the most compelling because it
acknowledges the limited and unpredictable demand for vernacular texts during the mid-
fourteenth century and emphasizes how a scribe participating in the production of Middle
English texts would have needed to be a “professional shape changer”492
capable of adapting to
the fluid and changing culture of literary production in the period.
3.2 Booklets 2, 3 and 12 as Independent Units
In this section, I wish to expand upon Wiggins’s assertion that Booklet 7 was copied without
direct supervision, possibly as an independent booklet. I argue that Booklets 2 and 12, initiated
by Scribe 2, and Booklet 3, initiated by Scribe 3, may also have been independent units at some
stage of production because of the noticeable decoration anomalies which occur in these
booklets, each of which is initiated by a scribe other than Scribe 1.493
We might, for example,
contrast the design anomalies that appear in Booklets 2, 3, and 12 as I lay them out below with
the general uniformity of Scribe 5’s stints in Booklet 4 and Booklet 5. In Booklet 4, Scribe 5
copies Reinbrun following upon the couplet and stanzaic Guy of Warwick texts copied by Scribe
1. Here, Scribe 5 follows Scribe 1’s design plan, leaving space for a miniature at the beginning of
491 Wiggins, “Are Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6 the Same Scribe?” 19-20.
492 Ibid., 18.
493 In her description of the Auchinleck manuscript accompanying the online facsimile, Wiggins anticipates that
other booklets may have been conceived of separately. She states, “The work of Scribes 2 and 4 is notable for its
inconsistency with this general format and is therefore likely to have been produced at a different stage from the
work of the other scribes.” (http://auchinleck.nls.uk/editorial/physical.html#scribes)
158
the text, separating out the first initial of each line, and copying forty-four lines to a page in
double columns. He maintains this design plan when he copies Bevis of Hamtoun, which initiates
Booklet 5.
Fig. 3.4: Other Independent Booklets (Contents)
Booklet 2 [Quires 7-10]:
Speculum Gy de Warewyke (fragmentary) (ff. 39r-48r stub) [written by Scribe 2]
Amis and Amiloun (fragmentary) (ff. 48r stub-61v stub) [written by Scribe 1]
The Life of St Mary Magdalene (fragmentary) (ff. 61v stub-65v) [written by Scribe
1]
The Nativity and Early Life of Mary (ff. 65v-69v) [written by Scribe 1]
Booklet 3 [Quires 11-16, 15 lost]:
On the Seven Deadly Sins (ff. 70r-2ra) [written by Scribe 3]
The Paternoster (fragmentary) (ff. 72ra-72r or 72v stub) [written by Scribe 3]
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (fragmentary) (ff. 72r or 72v stub-78r)
[written by Scribe 3]
Sir Degare (fragmentary) (ff. 78r-84r stub) [written by Scribe 3]
The Seven Sages of Rome (fragmentary) (ff. 84r stub-99v) [written by Scribe 3]
Floris and Blancheflour (ff. 100r-104v) [written by Scribe 3]
The Sayings of the Four Philosophers (ff. 105r-105r) [written by Scribe 2]
The Battle Abbey Roll (ff. 105v-107v) [written by Scribe 4]
Booklet 12 [Quire 52]:
Þe Simonie (ff. 328r-334v) [written by Scribe 2]
3.2.1 Booklets 2 and 12
Scribe 2 writes in a distinctive Gloucestershire dialect, similar to that of Scribe 6, and appears in
Auchinleck at three points.494
Firstly, he writes the Speculum Gy de Warewyke (ff. 39r–48r),
which appears at the beginning of Booklet 2. The rest of this booklet is completed by Scribe 1
(ff. 48r–59v). Secondly, Scribe 2 writes the Sayings of the Four Philosophers (ff. 105r), which
appears near the end of Booklet 3. Third, he writes the Þe Simonie (ff. 328r–334v), which makes
up the twelfth and final booklet of the collection. In this section, I will focus on Booklets 2 and
Booklets 12—the booklets in which Scribe 2 copies the first text—and then I will return to
Booklet 3 where Scribe 2 copies following upon Scribe 3’s stint. My analysis begins firstly by
identifying a number of anomalies in the decoration of these two booklets, which may indicate
494 See LALME, LP 6940 in the north east corner of Gloucestershire on the border with Worcestershire and
Warwickshire.
159
that Scribe 2 initiated the booklets independently from Scribe 1’s design plan and that they were
later incorporated into that design plan with the addition of further texts and with decoration
completed by the atelier(s) used for the rest of the book.
Scribe 2’s stints in Booklets 2 and 12 are distinguishable from booklets initiated by Scribe 1 in a
number of ways, outlined below.
3.2.1.1 Decoration Anomalies in Booklet 2
1. Scribe 2 has provided his own ruling for Speculum Gy de Warewyke (24-30 lines per
column as compared to the 44 lines per column used for the subsequent texts copied by
Scribe 1 in Booklet 2: Amis and Amiloun, The Life of St Mary Magdalene, and The
Nativity and Early Life of Mary).
2. Like Booklet 7, this booklet begins with an enlarged “puzzle” initial whereas elsewhere
blue initials with red flourishes are used. (See Plate 4.)
3. The second initial in Booklet 2 is an entirely red initial with a red dotted outline (also
anomalous).
4. The remaining initials in Speculum Gy de Warewyke are 3-4 lines high whereas in Scribe
1’s stints they are 2 lines high.
5. The paraphs in Speculum Gy de Warewyke were completed by Scribe 2.495
6. Speculum Gy de Warewyke does not begin with a miniature.
7. There is no “incipit” or in-text title.
8. There is no catchword in Speculum Gy de Warewyke, a text which spans multiple quires.
Timothy Shonk has suggested that many of the features of decoration in Auchinleck such as
paraphs, historiated initials, and miniatures were added by several craftsmen working in a single
atelier during a separate stage of production: “Thus, it appears that the volume was decorated as
a unit after the completion of the writing, and no segment of it appears to have been designed for
495 For a thorough examination of Scribe 2’s paraphs as compared to the three other styles of paraphs that appear in
Auchinleck, see my article “What’s in a Paraph?” This work modifies Timothy Shonk’s identification of the paraphs
in Auchinleck in “Paraphs, Piecework, and Presentation: The Production Methods of the Auchinleck Revisited,” a
paper presented at the London Old and Middle English Research Seminar: Studies in the Auchinleck Manuscript,
London, UK, June 20, 2008.
160
independent circulation.”496
Such an atelier is also proposed by Kathleen Scott, who identifies
the style of the miniatures as the same as that used in the Queen Mary Psalter.497
I argue that these decoration anomalies suggest Scribe 2 began the booklet according to his own
design plan, completed the paraphs and began to complete his own decoration scheme consisting
of the “puzzle” initial on f. 39r and the red block initial f. 40r. Before he completed the
decoration of this booklet, he passed it to Scribe 1 who added Quires 8, 9, and 10 and wrote the
remaining texts (Amis and Amiloun, Life of St Mary, Nativity and Early Life of Mary) according
to his standard mise-en-page. I propose that the entire booklet was decorated as a complete unit
by the atelier along with the other eleven booklets at the final stage of production, thus giving the
manuscript a generally unified appearance.
3.2.1.2 Decoration Anomalies in Booklet 12
1. Scribe 2 provides his own ruling for Booklet 12 (24-30 lines per column).
2. Scribe 2 leaves 3-4 lines for historiated initials rather than 2 lines as Scribe 1 does.
3. The paraphs in Booklet 12 were completed by Scribe 2.
4. There is no catchword in Booklet 12.
5. Booklet 12 does not begin with a miniature.
6. Scribe 2 has written a text title in red in the top margin of Booklet 12 whereas,
commonly, Scribe 1 copies the text title even if the text is completed by another scribe
(i.e. On the Seven Deadly Sins (copied by Scribe 3), and Sir Beues of Hamtoun (copied
by Scribe 5)).
7. Booklet 12 begins with and consists of a short complaint poem rather than a large “big
ticket” romance or historical item (i.e. Booklets 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).
Again, I argue that Scribe 2 began the booklet according to his own design plan and he
completed the paraphs himself. He passed the booklet to Scribe 1 who had it decorated along
with the remaining booklets by an atelier. Scribe 2’s stints in Booklets 2 and 12 are important
because they follow a layout different from the other booklets in the manuscript, a manuscript
496 Shonk, “A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 78.
497 See Scott, “A Mid-Fifteenth Century English Illuminating Shop,” 195.
161
noted for its layout coherence despite the collaboration of so many scribes.498
These stints also
begin their respective booklets, lending evidence to Wiggins’s assertion that Scribe 1 may have
incorporated booklets initiated outside of his design plan.
3.2.2 Collaborative Copying in Booklet 3
In addition to initiating Booklets 2 and 12, Scribe 2 collaborated with two other scribes on a third
booklet. Booklet 3 is noteworthy for several reasons: firstly, it is the only booklet in which
multiple scribes collaborated without Scribe 1 completing a stint; secondly, it does not begin
with a “big ticket” romance but instead begins with several short religious pieces; and thirdly, it
contains the unusual, triple-column text, The Battle Abbey Roll copied by Scribe 4. In
“Reconsidering Auchinleck,” Hanna claims, “the closest thing Auchinleck scribe 1 has to a
legitimate collaborator is scribe 3”499
because he is the only scribe to initiate a booklet in which
Scribe 1 does not copy and to copy more than one text in sequence: the remaining scribes,
including Scribe 2, copied single texts in isolated sections of the manuscript.500
Like Scribe 1,
Scribe 3 writes in a dialect localizable to London, and Parkes argues that his hand shows possible
influences of a chancery script.501
But despite copying the only other extended run of texts,
Scribe 3 appears to have been unfamiliar with copying in Middle English. He frequently
substitutes yogh for thorn, leading Karl Brunner to conclude he was “French Norman” and not
fully fluent in English.502
Bahr suggests, “the fact that Scribe 3 seems to have been
uncomfortable or unfamiliar with texts in English makes it unlikely that he orchestrated a booklet
of texts in that language for inclusion in a manuscript whose resolute Englishness is so
498 Shonk, in particular, argues that the appearance of unity across the work of so many scribes raises “the possibility
of a predetermined design”; see ibid., 77.
499 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 95. It is unclear whether or not Scribe 1 was responsible for
catchwords in this booklet or not. Two catchwords appear in the booklet, one on f. 99v and the other on the final
folio of the booklet, f. 107v. Bliss, Pearsall and Cunningham and Mordkoff argue that the first of these was written
by Scribe 3, whereas Shonk argues it was written by Scribe 1. The scholarly consensus is that the second catchword
is in the hand of Scribe 1.
500 Hanna, London Literature, 76.
501 LALME III, LP 6500. For a nuanced examination of the orthographic practice of Scribes 1 and 3, see Emily
Runde, “Reexamining Orthographic Practice.” For Parkes’s analysis of his handwriting, see English Cursive Book
Hands 1250-1500, xvii. Bliss also makes this claim in “Notes on the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 653.
502 Brunner, The Seven Sages of Rome, ix.
162
remarkable.”503
But if we “unstitch” the booklet and view it as a series of component pieces, the
shapes of which gives clues as to the process by which it was constructed, then the evidence
suggests Scribe 3 may have begun Booklet 3 as an independent unit.
Booklet 3 can be divided into several small production units that exhibit slightly different
systems of decoration and I will argue that these indicate potentially separate stages of
production. The ruling of this booklet follows a format close to that of Scribe 1. Wiggins argues
that all six quires of Booklet 3 (Quires 11-16) “seem certainly to have been ruled by Scribe 1”504
but I contend that a change in ruling occurs after the second quire of the booklet, Quire 12, and
that we should regard the decoration anomalies of Quires 11 and 12 as indicative that these two
quires may have begun as a separate production unit. My examination, then, will first begin with
the decoration anomalies in Quires 11 and 12, a unit written entirely by Scribe 3 which contains
On the Seven Deadly Sins, The Paternoster, The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, with Quire 12
ending fragmentarily with Sir Degare.
3.2.2.1 The Design of Quires 11 and 12 of Booklet 3
1. These quires are ruled with 38-40 lines per column each rather than the usual 44 lines per
column typically employed by Scribe 1.
2. The first text of this unit (On the Seven Deadly Sins) does not begin with a miniature.
3. The second text in this unit (The Paternoster) is accompanied by a miniature on f. 72r
which has been awkwardly fitted between the two columns of text rather than in a single
column.
4. The title for The Paternoster is in Scribe 3’s hand.
5. No catchwords are visible for these two quires.
6. Booklet 3 begins with two short religious texts rather than with a large “big ticket”
romance or historical item.
503 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 110.
504 Wiggins, “Are Auchinleck Manuscript Scribes 1 and 6 the Same?” 19.
163
3.2.2.2 The Design of Quires 13, 14, 15 and 16
1. These quires are principally written by Scribe 3, with short texts copied in the final three
folios (ff. 105r-107v) by Scribe 2 and Scribe 4.
2. These quires are ruled with 44 lines per column rather than the 38-40 lines per column of
the previous two quires.
3. The opening pages for two texts by Scribe 3 in these quires (Seven Sages of Rome and
Floris and Blancheflour) are missing so it is impossible to say how miniatures or titles
were integrated.
4. A single catchword appears in these quires on f. 99v. Bliss, Pearsall and Cunningham and
Mordkoff argue that it was written by Scribe 3, whereas Shonk asserts that, like the other
catchwords, it was written by Scribe 1.505
I suggest that Quires 11 and 12, copied by Scribe 3 and containing On the Seven Deadly Sins,
The Paternoster, The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, and Sir Degare, were also initiated
outside of Scribe 1’s design plan. If these quires were initiated independently then it is possible
that Scribe 3 ruled them with 38-40 lines rather than 44 lines as part of his personal copying
habitus. This would also explain why they do not easily accommodate the first miniature. The
subsequent quires (Quires 13-16) were then added to the original quires of this booklet with the
intent that they should follow the general plan implemented in Scribe 1’s stints with 44 lines per
column.
3.2.2.3 Collaboration in Booklet 3
In addition to the divergent system of ruling and the awkward inclusion of miniatures, Booklet 3
is anomalous in that its texts were copied by three separate scribes. Scribe 3 copied the first six
extant items and finished his stint at the end of Floris and Blancheflour on f. 104v seventeen
lines short of the end of the ruling. Such use of space normally occurs at the end of a booklet, but
in this case, in addition to the seventeen lines following Floris and Blancheflour, several unused
pages of the ruled quires would not have been filled. On f. 105r, Scribe 2 began his stint, copying
505 For Bliss, Pearsall and Cunningham and Mordkoff, see, respectively, “Notes on the Auchinleck Manuscript,”
657; “Introduction,” xi; and “The Making of the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 75. For Shonk, see “Study of the
Auchinleck Manuscript,” 84.
164
The Sayings of the Four Philosophers. This is the only example of a single folio stint in the
entire manuscript. Scribe 2 completed this item using Scribe 3’s original ruling, thus forcing his
unusually tall textualis script into a much more cramped space. Unlike Scribe 3, Scribe 2 did not
separate the first letter of his line, and he did not leave enough space for the single flourished
initial that appears in his stint. Consequently, the artist has cramped the initial and extended it
into the upper margin. On f. 105v Scribe 4 copied a list of names commonly known as The Battle
Abbey Roll in four columns. These columns have been ruled over the original ruling completed
by Scribe 3 (or Scribe 1). There is no other form of rubrication or decoration on these pages. The
Battle Abbey Roll continues until f. 107v where it runs for approximately a quarter of a page. The
remaining space of the recto and verso were left blank and have since been filled in by later
scribes. Booklet 3 also points toward a different kind of collaboration than is apparent elsewhere
in the manuscript where Scribe 1 appears to be coordinating copying.
I propose a possible scenario for how the copying stints of Scribe 3, Scribe 2 and Scribe 4 may
have taken place. Scribe 3 ruled Quires 15 and 16 of Booklet 3 according to his personal habitus
and copied the first four texts (On the Seven Deadly Sins, The Paternoster, The Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin, and Sir Degare) outside of the design plan for the manuscript. He then either
received the remaining four quires ruled by Scribe 1, as Wiggins suggests, or else he ruled them
himself according to Scribe 1’s system. Scribe 3 copied The Seven Sages of Rome and Floris and
Blancheflour, ending his stint on f. 104v, at which point he delivered the booklet to Scribe 1. It is
possible that Scribe 3 may have passed the booklet directly to Scribe 2, but since Scribe 1 and
Scribe 2 copied together in Booklet 2 and Scribe 1 likely made the majority of the decisions
regarding content and arrangement, it seems more likely to me that Scribe 1 was involved at this
stage. Scribe 1 determined that the remaining folios of the ruled but unfinished quire should be
filled, and passed the incomplete booklet like a relay baton on to Scribe 2. Scribe 2 copied The
Sayings of the Four Philosophers and then Scribe 4 re-ruled the remaining folios to
accommodate a three-column layout and copied The Battle Abbey Roll. This hypothetical order
of production fits generally with Hanna’s theory that the Auchinleck scribes worked sequentially
rather than simultaneously, and the genuine collaboration between scribes may have been
minimal, facilitated primarily by Scribe 1.
165
3.3 A Model for Producing Auchinleck
If we view Booklets 2, 3, and 12 as initiated outside Scribe 1’s design plan but incorporated into
the plan for the book midway through their production, then we must re-evaluate the production
model established for the book as a whole; a production model that focuses primarily upon
Scribe 1 as an organizer and controlling figure parcelling out portions of the writing when
necessary. Instead, I argue we ought to attend to the improvisational nature of the production of
the manuscript—how Scribe 1 may have taken partially completed booklets and adapted them
for his own work. To me, this is a possibility opened up by Wiggins’s analysis of Booklet 7 and
distinct from the theory that the booklets are being used to enable dispersed production after the
commission. I do not wish to suggest that the manuscript may have been compiled from
preproduced booklets according to the model of speculative manuscript production advanced by
Robinson, Pearsall and Taylor. Instead, following Wiggins, I suggest an intermediary model in
which some booklets were “bespoke” while at least four booklets were created in advance or, at
the least, created outside Scribe 1’s planning and then incorporated into the codex during the
process of compilation.
This conclusion suggests modifications to the current theory of the production of Auchinleck.
First, it forces us to reconsider the role of Scribe 1 in the compilation of the manuscript as not an
editor, per se—that is, making textual interventions in the work of other scribes in order to
achieve a sort of literary unity—but as a compiler who completed his own copying, possibly
composed or altered exemplars, commissioned booklets, but also obtained partially completed
booklets initiated outside of his plan. He then incorporated these booklets and smoothed out
differences in appearance by, at times, adding texts, catchwords and titles in the same way that
Matthew Paris, in his creation of CUL, MS Dd.11.78 only came to a full understanding of his
manuscript partway through the process of assembling it, and then smoothed it out by adding
running titles and the like near the end of the process of assembly. A further level of unification
would have occurred at final stage of production when the manuscript was decorated by an
atelier. If these booklets were initiated independently, we can re-envision collaboration on the
manuscript not as a tightly coordinated process but rather as a fluid process with individual
scribes maintaining a certain degree of autonomy rather than working closely together. It also
addresses a lingering problem that Hanna fails to fully address in his account of the production of
166
Auchinleck. If Scribe 1 parcelled out exemplars and commissioned half-finished booklets
sequentially in order to complete a commission he was having difficulty with, then what exactly
were these difficulties? Hanna points specifically to exemplar poverty or the interference of a
patron as an issue. He writes:
A limited number of these orders [scribe 1] may have had to fulfill simultaneously and as
exemplars for copying came available, and in those situations he may simply have had to
rely upon piecework contributions from colleagues. For (hypothetical) example, he might
have acquired on short-term loan an exemplar for Beves of Hampton (copied by scribe 5
into the first third of what would, with scribe 1’s additions and finishing, eventually
become Booklet 5) at a moment when his client was clamouring for a look at Alisaunder,
now the very fragmentary Booklet 8 but in any event at least a forty-folio stint (? two
weeks’ work) in its own right.506
However, while this argument might make sense in the case of a text such as Beves of Hampton
or Otuel, both of which generally fit Scribe 1’s pattern of initiating a booklet with a substantial
romance item, it seems less likely that a patron would be clamouring to get his hands on
Speculum Gy de Warewyke, On the Seven Deadly Sins or even Þe Simonie because all three are
anomalous texts within the manuscript already in terms of their genre. Another possible
narrative, then, might be that Scribe 1 was given a large commission for a collection of Middle
English verse and, in order to supplement his own store of exemplars, he arranged with other
scribes to obtain partially completed quires or booklets of material, to which he added more
texts. The first two quires of Booklet 3, for example, which contain On the Seven Deadly Sins,
The Paternoster, and The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, may have been started as a short
booklet containing predominantly religious material. When Scribe 1 contacted Scribe 3, Scribe 3
expanded this booklet with the addition of four more quires which follow both Scribe 1’s design
plan (44 lines per column, space left for miniatures at the beginning of texts) and also his plan
for predominantly romance content (Sir Degare, The Seven Sages of Rome, and Floris and
Blancheflour). When Scribe 3 could not fill the final quire of the booklet, Scribe 1 solicited
further help from Scribe 2 and Scribe 4 to provide the final texts. It is not impossible that Scribe
2 and Scribe 3 may have initiated their booklets independently but following a generally similar
layout to Scribe 1 in part because both the size of the page and the double-column format were
506 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 94.
167
typically used for texts of this sort. Hanna notes that a number of surviving vernacular books and
fragments share the same general textual presentation including the thirteenth-century London,
Dulwich College, MS 22 which contains La Estorie del Euangelie, the late-thirteenth-century
CUL, MS Gg.iv.27, part 2, with Floris, King Horn, and The Assumption of Our Lady, the early-
fourteenth-century Middle English Guy of Warwick in BL, MS Add. 14408 and the fragments of
Havelok in the mid-fourteenth-century CUL, MS Add. 4407. As Hanna notes:
all of these books share textual presentations and ones foreign to the general run of
smaller thirteenth-century vernacular manuscripts. They are folio-sized volumes in
double-column format, generally of forty lines or more to the column. They have offset
capitals at the head of each line, often in a separately ruled column, and the capitals,
although provided in text ink, are red-slashed.507
This corpus of manuscripts and fragments speaks to a pattern that might indicate that by the end
of the thirteenth century, professional scribes copied vernacular texts according to a similar
format designed to display two columns of short lines of verse. As a result, the general
similarities in the layout of booklets not initiated by Scribe 1 offer weaker evidence for a design
plan than typically credited; these similarities might be indicative of a general type of book-
making rather than a plan for a specific, unified book.
This model is more in keeping with the kind of fluid process of copying and composition that
Fisher argues for in the production of the Auchinleck Short Chronicle. Fisher notes that this text
may have depended upon a variety of “foul” or “working” papers:
The localized exemplar of the Auchinleck Short Chronicle was likely a variety of what
for a later period are termed “foul” or “working” papers. Reliance upon such an
intermediary step, one predicated upon being ephemeral, bears with it some uncertainty.
508
But he goes on to argue that the use of “working” papers indicates a fluid model of production
where it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a draft piece and a finished piece. A
scribe’s “working” papers might be bound up into a manuscript later. As he notes, “finished
products can also become intermediary steps: a finished manuscript can serve as an exemplar
507 Hanna, “Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript,” 99.
508 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 167-8.
168
before then being the basis of further revisions.509
.But if we broaden the application of this
model, then it seems just as likely that the manuscript as a whole may have comprised some units
which may have been, essentially, “working” papers—ephemeral units—that, when incorporated
into the book, ceased to be ephemeral. Just as finished products can become intermediary steps,
so too can intermediary units become finished products. This is exactly the sort of process that
Hanna, Mooney and Stubbs argue was at work in the production of San Marino, Huntington
Library, MS HM 114, a collection of booklets gathered by Richard Osbarn, the Chamber Clerk
of the London Guildhall in the early fifteenth century. Hanna writes that the contents of this
manuscript suggest “that either the scribe or his director was intensely aware of textual contents
and capable of assembling a number of archetypes with ease.”510
Further to this, he added that
the booklets themselves may have been intended to be exemplars because they
look cheap and as if produced in the expectation that they might remain unbound for a
protracted period.…These small packets of quires, minimally decorated (the scribe did
nearly all his own rubrication, including running titles), look as if they might form a
small in-house bookseller’s stock.511
Mooney and Stubbs have modified this to suggest that the manuscript represents, not a
bookseller’s stock, but rather a collection of exemplars, for his own use, or for use by the
community of clerks at the Guildhall.512
These are booklets that might have included exemplars,
then, or booklets which might not have been originally intended to be included in the manuscript
and could be replaced if a better copy of a text were found. While it is clear that Auchinleck in
toto is not exactly the same sort of book, it is nevertheless possible that elements of the
manuscript were produced as minimally decorated, small packets of quires intended to preserve a
personal copy of a text, that were then later incorporated into the manuscript.
This model still emphasizes the role of booklets in facilitating production, but it collapses
Hanna’s distinction between the “booklet as purchased” and the “booklet as produced.”
509 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 167-8.
510 Hanna, “Scribe of HM 114,” 123.
511 Ibid.
512 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 37.
169
Following Gillespie, I believe Auchinleck shows that a booklet need not have been viewed in
terms of Hanna’s binary: it may have been intended for possible sale or it may have been used to
keep groups of texts in hand without any decision about the final use of the unit ever having been
made in advance.513
The production of Auchinleck from a combination of semi-independent
booklets and bespoke booklets suggests a series of “compilatory” processes that nevertheless
reach toward or point toward a desire for unity.
If we take the design anomalies and the use of booklets as indicators of ad hoc collaboration
rather than closely organized collaboration, then this suggests that Mooney’s assertion that in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the copying of English vernacular texts would have
only constituted a sideline business likely holds true for the mid-fourteenth century. Both Scribes
2 and 6 write with a dialect traceable to the West Midlands, suggesting that they were trained
outside of London, possibly in the same sort of school that produced the scribes of the South
English Legendary discussed in Chapter 1. Scribe 3 shows signs of chancery training and
appears to be less comfortable copying in English. These scribes, although they can be located to
the same general London milieu, do not constitute a “school” with any regular style. They were
more likely to have been freelance copyists taking on vernacular copying in addition to other
forms of copying in the chancery, as legal scriveners or in the making of religious books.
Whereas the “bookshop” theory suggests set production patterns or a “production economy” as
Pamela Robinson argues, my analysis of the use of booklets indicates that production was ad hoc
and scribes were required to be inventive.
4 Conclusions
This chapter puts pressure on the claim that Auchinleck provides evidence for a literary history
characterized by the rise of middle class consumers, the triumph of a secular literary culture over
a religious literary culture, and the emergence of a bold, nationalistic vernacular voice. Rather
than viewing Auchinleck as an originary point, I have attempted to place it in a context of
interlocking book-making activities, which included commercial and non-commercial segments,
admitted religious makers and readers, and existed primarily as a sideline of other forms of
513 Cf. Gillespie, “Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory.”
170
copying. In conclusion, I want to return to Hanna’s argument that Auchinleck exemplifies the
vernacularity and miscellaneity of fourteenth-century English manuscripts. He connects the use
of booklets with vernacular, miscellaneous manuscripts such as Auchinleck in particular by
means of the flexibility they offered scribes during this period of exemplar poverty and
unpredictable demand, a period in which, lacking a national canon,
scribes and stationers were never aware of the totality of literary production and could
always reasonably expect that the most important text they could transmit in any chosen
context might be the one that would only come to hand next week.514
In sum, Hanna suggests that booklets were a format for manuscript production particularly
valuable for manuscripts such as Auchinleck because they allowed scribes to begin to copy
exemplars as they became available, share production when necessary, and they could be
compiled into larger units to make full manuscripts should the patron so desire. In turn, this
model is explicitly connected to Middle English texts for which, Hanna argues, there would have
been an irregular or limited demand in the mid-fourteenth century because there existed no pre-
set “canon” of desirable texts.
I want to complicate this. Hanna argues that the booklet was useful because the Middle English
period was characterized by exemplar poverty in which texts were difficult to get hold of. But as
my discussion of a range of manuscripts containing romance and historical poems shows, the
sorts of texts we see in Auchinleck were available in a wide variety of locales within England,
and, as Matthew Fisher has shown regarding the composition of the Short Metrical Chronicle,
Scribe 1 likely had “privileged access to a remarkably diverse and substantive selection of
texts.”515
This is not to say, as Andrew Taylor implies, that the demand for Middle English
romances was so high that a single scribe or stationer could have made a living selling only those
texts, in which case one might posit Auchinleck represents “but one surviving element from what
was once a full commercial system in which these and similar fascicles circulated in their
hundreds.”516
But it does suggest that, at the very least, scribes may not have been so hard
514 Hanna, introduction to Pursuing History, 3.
515 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 150.
516 Taylor, “Manual to Miscellany,” 3.
171
pressed for materials in English that, as Hanna argues, “the most important text they could
transmit in any chosen context might be the one that would only come to hand next week.”517
Instead, I argue, as Gillespie does, that booklets must have been a regular part of book-making
activities in Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Latin, useful for circulating single texts or small
groups of texts independently as small-format manuscripts, but also useful as a building block
for larger manuscripts.518
Further to this, I want to put more pressure on the intrinsic connection Hanna makes between
“vernacularity” and “miscellaneity” in contrast to Latinate forms of manuscript production. This
argument implies that Middle English manuscript production was of a different kind than Latin
modes of production. There is evidence that monastic manuscript production in the twelfth
century favoured “a relatively limited schedule of patristic writers, generally in their most
extensive works,”519
but by the thirteenth century it is clear from the work of Rigg and others
that miscellaneous Latin poetic anthologies were commonly being produced, often comprising
short texts alongside longer texts, in much the same way we see Auchinleck being produced.
Hanna’s comparison oversimplifies the matter because it takes as representative only one mode
of Latinate manuscript production. CCCC, MS 50 offers a ready-to-hand example of another: its
several Latin texts (the genealogy of the Kings of England and the allegorical Four Daughters of
God) have been combined with Anglo-Norman texts in order to create a miscellaneous
manuscript. The Penrose manuscript offers a similar example, composed of four booklets
containing both Latin and Anglo-Norman materials. The Anglo-Norman booklets compiled to
form the now disbound Edwardes manuscript show how religious houses may have used small-
format manuscripts. It is clear that booklets were useful to those assembling Middle English
manuscripts, but they were also useful to those assembling Anglo-Norman manuscripts, or Latin
manuscripts, or manuscripts of mixed language and content—that is to say, the booklet was a
useful tool for circulating small or otherwise ephemeral units of text, but it was also a useful tool
in the production of larger manuscripts—whether they were written in the vernacular or not.
517 Hanna, “Booklets,” 31.
518 Cf. Gillespie, “Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory.”
519 Hanna, “Vernacularity and Miscellaneity”, 48.
172
My codicological analysis shows that the compiler of Auchinleck engaged with the material
components of his project in a sophisticated manner. While the limitations of fourteenth-century
manuscript culture challenged any attempt to fully control a production, these limitations
inevitably led to a collaborative work in which numerous voices and aesthetic preferences
manifested themselves. Although Auchinleck is the earliest surviving large-scale manuscript of
Middle English texts, it was by no means completely unique. It had precedents amongst Latin
and Anglo-Norman manuscripts in terms of both form and content. Auchinleck is nevertheless
important in that it reveals how the production of manuscripts containing literary texts in any of
England’s three languages tended to be flexible and ad hoc, requiring scribes to take on a
number of different roles, to become “professional shape changers” in order to satisfy the
uncertain but growing demand for new texts.
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Chapter 4 “This Book Oute Blowen”: Disseminating the Prick of Conscience, 1380-1415
1 Introduction
In his assessment of what the numbers of extant manuscripts might mean for Middle English
studies, Michael Sargent lists the following texts with high numbers of surviving manuscripts:
the Wycliffite Bible, the Brut chronicle, the Prick of Conscience, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Piers
Plowman and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. Of these, the most overlooked and, arguably,
one of the most important is the northern penitential text known as the Prick of Conscience
(PoC) whose numbers exceed even Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales.520
Despite the survival
of over 120 manuscripts and fragments of the PoC—forty of which date from the fourteenth
century alone—few monographs have been devoted to the study of this text exclusively, and
little has been done to gauge its effect on England’s national literary culture.521
Over 9,000 lines
long, the poem seeks to “pryck” the soul of its readers “so of that drede may love bygynne.”522
It
is divided into seven parts that cover the wretchedness of mankind, the unstableness of the
world, the fear of death, Purgatory, the tokens of Judgement Day, the pains of Hell and the joys
520 Lewis and McIntosh note that the original date probably corresponded to just before the death of Richard Rolle:
“The traditional attribution to Rolle has helped to provide the traditional date: towards the middle of the fourteenth
century, and, though the reasons for this date are no longer valid, the date itself is probably correct. Manuscripts do
not begin to appear until after 1350, but when they do appear, they do so in large numbers, which is usually a sign
that the work in question was composed not many years before,” in their Descriptive Guide, 4. All my quotations
from the PoC are, unless otherwise noted, from the TEAMS edition of New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn
a.13, a manuscript closely related to BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix upon which Morris’s edition was based.
521 The survival of over 120 manuscripts and fragments offers a rough basis for understanding the text’s production
and dissemination, and Angus McIntosh, who pursued by statistical means the number of missing manuscripts that
might be required to explain the range of variant readings among four surviving manuscripts, suggests that the
proportion of survivals to losses may be upwards of 1:20. Cf. McIntosh, “Two Unnoticed Interpolations.”
522 Morey, “Entre,” Prik of Conscience, ll. 330-331.
174
of Heaven. When placed in contrast with the works of London poets such as William Langland,
John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer—poets typically understood to make up an emerging Middle
English “canon” and, subsequently, the modern literary canon—the PoC has been perceived as a
“peripheral text” which plays only “a small part in ‘the great spectacle of literature’ as defined
and studied by scholars.”523
In addressing this critical neglect, this chapter draws together a
number of strands which run through this dissertation—how compilation invigorated Middle
English manuscript production, the circulation or production of exemplars in “booklets” or
small-format manuscripts and, most importantly, the role of clusters of scribes in the production
of multiple manuscripts—in order to assess the features of the PoC and the networks of
production that contributed to its success as a Middle English bestseller.
Central to this chapter is the premise that the PoC was closely connected with an emerging
“canon” of northern vernacular religious texts that were produced through the concerted effort of
localized groups of scribes.524
Throughout the fourteenth century, the area administered by the
archbishop of York was a region of rich literary activity following two distinct, but interrelated
strands. The first consisted of didactic texts written in English, loosely aligned with the programs
of reform and pastoral care initiated in England following the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215
and Archbishop Pecham’s 1281 council of Lambeth. The four principal vernacular texts from the
north in the fourteenth century written to supplement or aid parish priests were the Northern
Homily Cycle (1295-1306), likely produced by Augustinian canons resident in the vicinity of
York; the anonymous Cursor Mundi (1300); the mid-to-late fourteenth-century Speculum Vitae
(often attributed to William of Nassyngton, an English clerical administrator and translator from
Nassington in Northamptonshire); and the Layfolk’s Catechism (c. 1350s), translated by John
Gaytrynge, a Benedictine monk at St. Mary’s Abbey in York. The second strand consisted
primarily of devotional and meditational works, which had a different focus than the didactic
Lateran IV pastoralia. Yorkshire had witnessed a great settlement of Cistercian monastic
foundations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many of which had fostered new writing on
523 Fitzgibbons, “Enabled and Disabled ‘Myndes’,” 74. For examples of scholars who have sidelined the
contribution of the PoC in England’s literary culture, see Burrow’s discussion in Medieval Writers and their Work,
20 and Pearsall’s discussion in Old English and Middle English Poetry, 139.
524 Here, I take the term as Hanna uses it in his discussion of these northern vernacular religious texts, particularly in
his article “Northern Scribes.” I will discuss and nuance the term in more detail in this chapter.
175
spiritual and conventual life inspired by Bernardine mysticism, and would in turn continue to
produce some of the most influential meditational and didactic Middle English texts of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.525
These works saw their greatest and most influential
expression within the Latin and vernacular writings of Richard Rolle.526
His contemplative
works, addressed first to a narrow audience of priests, anchoresses, and noblewomen whom he
knew personally, became popular by the end of the fourteenth century as an increasingly wide
audience of religious and gentry readers sought to imitate his affective spirituality.527
Rolle’s
popularity and his status as a national author were likely encouraged by the support of influential
patrons including Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of York (1388-96) and Archbishop of
Canterbury (1396–97, 1399–1414), as well as Richard Scrope, Bishop of Lichfield and Chester
from 1386 to 1398 and Arundel’s eventual successor as Archbishop of York from 1398 until his
death in 1405.
The PoC shares links with both the didactic and contemplative strains of northern literature and,
as surviving wills, bequests, libraries lists and the evidence of manuscripts themselves suggests,
it also likely engaged the same pool of readers, patrons and producers: parish priests, vicars and
chantry chaplains, canons and a new stratum of gentry readers and northern prelates with
sufficient capital to indulgence in bibliophilic activities.528
But the PoC was also more than
simply a regional text: by the end of the fourteenth century it had spread throughout England. It
survives in a number of different forms: the Main Version (MV) comprising ninety-six
manuscripts, the Southern Recension (SR) comprising eighteen manuscripts, extracts in another
525 Cf. Blake, “Middle English Prose and its Audience.” See also Pantin, English Church, 252; and Hanna’s
discussion of the impact of Rolle’s writing on the north’s literary community in “Yorkshire Writers.”
526 Substantial attention was first drawn to Rolle in Horstmann’s Yorkshire Writers, in which Horstmann ascribed
many anonymous texts to the hermit due to their (possibly erroneous) ascription in some surviving medieval
manuscripts. Hope Emily Allen subsequently corrected many of these errors of attribution—including that of the
PoC—in Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle. Subsequently, Nicholas Watson has produced a new chronology of
Rolle’s writings in Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority.
527 I discuss some of these individuals in more depth in Chapter 1, but a good summary can be found in Hughes,
Pastors and Visionaries, 80-93. See also Freeman’s study of the role of women in promoting Rolle’s texts in “The
Priory of Hampole and its Literary Culture.”
528 See Barratt’s description of the ownership of PoC manuscripts in “Spiritual Writings,” 358-359. See also her
description of the ownership of Rolle manuscripts in the same article, 361-3. Cf. Woods and Copeland who remark,
“It seems to have had the same patterns of ownership among the middle ranks of clergy and gentry as another
expansive and popular penitential work, the Speculum Vitae,” in “Classroom and Confession,” 398. Cf. Hanna, “The
Yorkshire Circulation of the Speculum Vitae.”
176
eight manuscripts, and an abridged version known as the Speculum Huius Vitae in two
manuscripts.529
Its dialect distribution is wide, covering nearly three-quarters of the counties of
England, and as Beadle notes, the geographical spread of these manuscripts offers insights into
the main loci of production:
There has long been general agreement, on linguistic grounds, that the Prick is very likely
to have been composed in the north of England, probably in Yorkshire, and perhaps
within the area where the “fully northern” manuscripts (whose more precise distribution
remains to be worked out) are shown on the map. The “centre” from which it emanated
must have lain in that region, and the distribution gradually thins as it moves southwards,
though by no means evenly. East Anglia, an area with which a conspicuously large
number of surviving Middle English manuscripts can be associated on dialectal and other
grounds, shows a particular concentration, and the perhaps adventitious survival of a
variant version in a group comprising five manuscripts associated with Lichfield…lends
strength to a comparable but less dense concentration in the north-west midland
counties.530
From Beadle’s examination of the work of Lewis and McIntosh, published in two maps in the
appendix of their Descriptive Guide, we can see that major clusters of extant manuscripts appear
in the north near Yorkshire, in the east near Cambridge and Ely, and in the West Midlands,
concentrated in the area around Lichfield and, to a lesser extent, in Worcestershire and the
surrounding counties.531
The Southern Recension manuscripts appear in the Southwest Midlands
around the intersection of Hereford, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.532
An investigation of several of these “clusters” of production forms the basis of this chapter. In so
doing, my work will investigate—and modify—the basis for thecontrast that Elizabeth Eisenstein
makes between the “economy of abundance” in the century after the invention of printing and
the preceding period where the “production, collection, and circulation of books were subject to
529 These forms are described in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 5-15.
530 Beadle, “Middle English Texts and their Transmission,” 79. Although the presence of texts of mixed dialect (or
Mischsprachen) and the habit of scribes translating, or failing to translate, the dialect of their exemplars into their
own dialect make firm assertions of provenance difficult, as I will show in this chapter, these dialectal clusters do
seem to conform, at least broadly, to patterns of production supported by other forms of analysis. For a discussion of
the problems of Mischsprachen manuscripts, see Benskin and Laing, “Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle
English Manuscripts.”
531 Cf. Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, Map i, 171.
532 Cf. Ibid., Map ii, 173.
177
an economy of scarcity.”533
In particular, I will demonstrate that certain texts such as the PoC
may not have been produced in an “economy of scarcity” despite having been first circulated in
manuscript form rather than in print. Following upon this, I take particular interest in moments in
which multiple copies of a text appear to have been rapidly produced and disseminated. Kate
Harris, in her article “The Role of Owners in Manuscript production and the Book Trade,” picks
up on Eisenstein’s point, noting that we have limited examples of “experiments in the rapid
multiplication of copies” prior to adaptation of the printing press to the book trade.534
Although
more examples have emerged in recent years with the advent of large projects devoted to the
study of scribal identification such as Mooney, Stubbs, and Horobin’s “Late Medieval English
Scribes,” discussed already, these examples have largely been the work of “literary” authors of
Middle English texts such as Chaucer and Langland for whom the London Guildhall appears to
have been a “clearing house” for exemplars, and Lydgate, whose works appear in at least ten
manuscripts produced by a commercial workshop or scriptorium in Bury St Edmunds.535
These
projects have been tremendously useful in identifying the methods by which scribes collaborated
to produce “canonical” texts (by our standards, at least); nevertheless, substantially less work has
been done to investigate the production and dissemination of texts outside the traditional canon.
In Chapter 2 of this dissertation I examined one such experiment in the early fourteenth century:
the production of several manuscripts of the South English Legendary, possibly facilitated
through the support of Augustinian canons. This chapter extends that line of inquiry, arguing that
many of the conditions which supported the copying of the poetry of London authors in the
Guildhall also supported the production of the PoC and an emerging canon of northern
vernacular religious texts. In many respects, the PoC anticipates the “economy of abundance”
that occurs after the invention of printing.
I argue that the spread of this text occurred as a result of the collaboration of clusters of scribes
in areas where exemplars were readily available and where the production of texts may have
been supported by an influential circle of ecclesiasts interested in spreading texts they deemed to
533 Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 334.
534 Harris, “The Role of Owners in Book Production and the Book Trade,” 172.
535 Cf. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City for the cluster of scribes operating in the London Guildhall and
Horobin, “The Edmund-Fremund Scribe Copying Chaucer,” for the work of Lydgate.
178
be orthodox. In this respect, this chapter revisits the excellent work done by Ralph Hanna III in
revealing communities of literary production and lines of dissemination from the north to the
south, but in so doing, I intend to bring his work into productive conversation with a broader set
of intellectual ambitions and to extend his work with a more concerted focus on scribal copying
habits (particularly, duplicative copying) in regions he has identified as important areas of
production.536
A substantial part of this chapter will be devoted to the production of northern
vernacular religious texts at the end of the fourteenth century and the early fifteenth century in
Lichfield, a town whose scribes appear to have been engaged in a project of “cultural
dissemination” whereby they translated northern religious texts into a more accessible dialect
and disseminated them into the West Midlands.537
By investigating several of these scribes, their
methods of production and the resulting codicological features of their manuscripts, I will
elucidate the contexts of production for several important manuscripts including the famous
Vernon and Simeon compendia (BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a. 1 and BL, MS Add. 22283,
respectively).
2 Contexts and Backgrounds
2.1 Manuscripts and the Development of the Medieval Canon
One line of argumentation which has run through this dissertation—an argument I have hinted at
in previous chapters but will explore in more detail here—concerns the relationship between
manuscript production as an act of canon formation and the development of a national literary
culture. In the Introduction to my dissertation, I identified three ways of looking at the
relationship between the production and circulation of texts and the emergence of a national
literary culture: the work of Sargent, who connects the numbers of surviving manuscripts to
536 Here, I draw most heavily upon his research as outlined in “Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260,” Pursuing History,
“Yorkshire Scribes” and “Yorkshire Writers.”
537 Hanna, “Yorkshire Writers,” 105. Hanna has framed Lichfield as a centre for the translation and dissemination of
northern texts into the West Midlands in two articles in particular: “Some North Yorkshire Scribes and Their Texts,”
and “Yorkshire Writers.” He has further posited this connection in his contribution to David Wallace’s digital
project entitled “Europe: a Literary History, 1348-1418,” published at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/. Hanna’s section on Lichfield appears at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/nodes/lichfield.html. His work coincides with Sarah Horrall’s work
in The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, which, as I will demonstrate, can be connected with the production of the
PoC in this area.
179
patterns of production; the work of Mooney and Stubbs, who posited Chaucer as the “Father of
English Literature” in part because manuscripts of his texts were widely produced, and also, in
part, because his work was popular among the clerks of the Guildhall who were in an ideal
position to produce multiple copies through shared “scriptorial facilities”;538
and lastly the work
of Gillespie, who suggested that aspects of a manuscript (or printed book) itself conditioned its
text(s) to be received as spurious or canonical “cultural objects.”539
Within these three
approaches, Chaucer emerges as an obvious and recurring example of the relationship between
the production of manuscripts and the emergence of a national poet laureate. In this respect, it
seems no large leap to consider how the production of manuscripts of Chaucer’s text—in the
Guildhall, for example—might have been an intentional (or unintentional) act of canon
formation.
The term “canon” carries with it a great deal of modern baggage, and sits uneasily within the
academic discourse of scholars of medieval vernacular literature. In the medieval period, the
term might be most easily fitted to the processes by which the Bible was consolidated, edited and
disseminated.540
The concept of “canonicity” has since developed in modern literary scholarship,
addressing questions of aesthetic, literary and cultural value, on the one hand, and the
constitution, preservation and reproduction of authority, on the other hand. Two important books
which frame the development of modern canons (as opposed to medieval canons) are Pierre
Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production and John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem
of Literary Canon Formation.541
Hanna and other medievalists (such as Seth Lerer in Chaucer
and his Readers) have found the term useful for thinking about medieval textual practice
538 Cf. Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, publisher’s blurb.
539 Cf. Sargent, “What do the Numbers Mean?”; Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City; and Gillespie, Print
Culture and the Medieval Author.
540 The term canon criticism was coined by James A. Sander in his major works, Torah and Canon, Canon and
Community, and From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Recented edited collections which
highlight and trace recent debates in canon cricticism include Craig G. Bartholomew’s Canon and Biblical
Interpretation and Einar Thomassen’s Canon and Canonicity.
541 Bourdieu’s model incorporated three levels: (1) the position of the literary field within the field of power; (2) the
structure of the literary field as datermined by agents competing for legitimacy; and (3) the genesis of the producers’
habitus. Cf. Johnson, introduction to The Field of Cultural Production, 14. John Guillory revisited the notion of
“canon formation” as an aspect of the politics of representation in reviewing, for example, distribution of cultural
capital in the literary syllabus. Importantly, he argues, “canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its
transmission” (7).
180
although their usage rightly suggests that medieval canon formation might be considered
different from modern canon formation in part because the institutions which constituted,
preserved and reproduced cultural authority were organized differently than in the modern
period.542
I believe that the framework of “canonicity” offers a useful starting point for thinking
about medieval literary cultures, particularly regarding its possible effect on reproduction,
transmission and preservation, and so I will continue to use the term.
In his book, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late
Eighteenth Century, Trevor Ross writes:
At present, canons are made and preserved within critical and academic institutions as
well as cultural establishments such as public libraries, publishing houses, repertory
theatres, and so on. Modern canon-formation, in this way, is an act of reception, of
introducing readers to the literature of the near or distant past, and preserving that
literature in the hope of maintaining the culture that helped to produce it.543
In his approach, Ross identifies the medieval period as one in which the formation of a literary
canon was associated with the mechanisms of “cultural reproduction”; at the same time, during
this period (and beginning with Chaucer, he argues), the canon was “something to be produced,
not reproduced.”544
In his analysis, he draws attention both to Chaucer’s strategies of “self-
canonisation” as well as to the strategies of fifteenth-century poets such as Lydgate who
“acclaimed Chaucer at the head of an indigenous canon…in order at once to legitimize their own
efforts in the language and to maintain an idea of public poetry.”545
Ross’s line of argumentation
is by no means a new one, and a range of scholars (including Mooney, Stubbs, Lerer and
Gillespie) have posited Chaucer at the heart of a complex process of canonization in which he, as
542 Lerer, for example, situated fifteenth-century poetry within “the field of discourse Chaucer had initiated”
(Chaucer and His Readers, 11), but, in doing so, he traced the way in which the Chaucerian canon was transmitted
after the author’s death and the way in which his successors invented Chaucer as the Father of English Literature.
543 Ross, English Literary Canon, 5.
544 Ibid., 10.
545 Ibid., 44. See also the work of Alastair Minnis who presented a framework for understanding scholastic literary
theory which subsequent scholars have used to understand Chaucer’s adaptation of Latin authorial practices. Cf.,
Lerer (Chaucer and His Readers) who drew on Foucault to describe Chaucer’s influence on his followers, and Pask
(The Emergence of the English Author) who argues that Chaucer’s posthumous “authorization” bridged the gulf
between the medieval Latin auctor and the modern English author (9).
181
the “Father of English Literature,” was made by others as much as he himself was a “maker” of
the English canon.
But if the modern act of canon formation depends at least in part on the reproduction of texts in
critical and academic institutions, in public libraries and publishing houses, then it is a natural
extension of this to include medieval manuscripts as well as libraries and scriptoria. Medieval
manuscripts are described as libraries in parvo (or in magno), and it has long been recognized
that they functioned as repositories for and preservers of valued texts.546
George Shuffelton, for
example, draws attention to the notions of miscellaneity and monumentality as a dialectical pair:
he argues that the act of collecting, a fundamental characteristic of medieval book-making, was
simultaneously both a monumentalizing act and a miscellanizing gesture.547
Turning to examples
I have discussed previously, we can see both monumentalizing and miscellanizing tendencies at
work in Matthew Paris’s anthology of the works of the Latin poet Henry of Avranches in CUL,
MS Dd.11.78 or in the compiling of the Auchinleck manuscript from a series of twelve booklets,
some produced specifically for the volume and some produced autonomously. Both of these
manuscripts have been characterized in terms of presenting some form of medieval literary
canon.548
Susanna Fein, too, explicitly associates the selection and arrangement of materials in
miscellaneous manuscripts such as Camb., Trinity College, MS B.14.39, BL, MS Cotton
Caligula A.ix and Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29(II) as a type of canon formation:
This double instance of a distinctively eclectic collection being replicated in different
western locales—resulting in Cotton, Jesus and likely others—suggests that compilers
and scribes were feeding an appetite for literary fare, which, as it was nourished, would in
turn have built up a level of generic expectation among readers. Such expectation for the
delivery of certain themes might tentatively be called ‘canonical’. What seems to us a
miscellany might, then, have been received more as an anthology by contemporary
546 Cf. Philippa Hardman’s article on NLS, MS Advocates 19.3.1 titled, “A Mediaeval ‘Library in parvo.’”
547 Shuffelton, “The Miscellany and the Monument,” 4-6.
548 For CUL, MS Dd.11.78, see Townsend and Rigg, “Medieval Latin Poetic Anthologies (V),” for a discussion of
CUL, MS Dd.11.78, wherein they argue that the manuscript may have begun, originally, as a simple collection, but
may have been re-imagined as an anthology post factum. It is worth noting that this manuscript has subsequently
been used by scholars as one of the key manuscripts to principally define the canon of Henry of Avranches’s poetic
works. This canon was first established by J. C. Russell and J. P. Heironimus in The Shorter Latin Poems of Henry
of Avranches. For the Auchinleck manuscript, see Hanna, London Literature. Note Hanna’s comments that in
creating “Sir Thopas” Chaucer appears to have made an effort “to laugh out of the canon” romances such as those
contained in Auchinleck. See Hanna, London Literature, 305.
182
readers, by virtue of its dissemination of a recognizable cluster of texts to an expanding
audience. Unlike a printed anthology, however, manuscripts like Cotton and Jesus have a
variable, aggregate, individual nature, and a compiler could wield a degree of freedom in
selection and arrangement, although he might still plan to address canonical expectations
of ‘wholeness’.549
Canonization through manuscript production, I argue, involves three related processes: selection,
replication and upgrading. Here, I understand selection to be the process by which scribes chose
texts to be included in a booklet or manuscript; replication to be the process by which scribes
reproduced texts (either accurately or with modifications); and upgrading to be the process by
which scribes inscribed texts with new markers of cultural value, including authorial inscriptions,
rubrics and the like, or new systems of decoration.
These notions of selection, replication, and upgrading have traditionally been associated with
print culture, but I believe there is reason to extend this into the production of manuscripts.
Parkes recognized that manuscripts of the thirteenth century were better ordered and arranged
than texts of the twelfth century, and later scholars have subsequently identified this tendency as
an “impulse leading to the printed page of the Gutenberg era.”550
Bryan Davis, for example, in
his analysis of two duplicate copies of Piers Plowman (BL, MS Add. 10574 and BL, MS Cotton
Caligula A.xi), suggests that the production of vernacular texts in London reflects a growing
codification of book design:
As ever more similar copies of popular texts came into circulation, standard concepts of
layout and content arose that guided a producer in the selection of alternatives with which
to repair damaged exemplars. Just as Piers Plowman the poem memorializes the
metamorphosis of social relations in later fourteenth-century England, the varying forms
of Piers Plowman as an economic commodity illustrate the shift of the English book
trade towards mass production.551
The process of selection, replication and upgrading, in turn, potentially encouraged further
attempts at replication as exemplars became increasingly available and as certain texts became
549 Fein, “Literary Culture of the West Midlands” (forthcoming). Professor Fein was kind enough to show me an
advanced version of this chapter. A version of it will be presented as “Harley 2253, Digby 86, and Auchinleck: The
Evidence for an Early Middle English Canon from the West Midlands” at the 40th
Saint Louis Conference on
Manuscript Studies (October 11-12, 2013).
550 Gomille, “Anthologies of the Seventeenth Century,” 79.
551 Davis, The Rationale for a Copy of a Text, 154.
183
recognizably imbued with a higher status. In this way, scribes produced (and reproduced)
medieval texts as canonical.
In viewing scribes and manuscript producers as engaged in a complex process of selection,
replication, and upgrading, I follow Matthew Fisher who argues that we must open up our way of
thinking about the nature of scribal copying and, importantly, the issue of scribal textual
corruption (alternately figured as scribal invention or scribal authorship). Fisher views scribes as
engaged in a range of different ways of interacting with texts, at times attempting to replicate
exemplars and at times attempting to create, modify, or improve their materials. By rejecting an
axiomatic division of scribes and authors, he suggests, we can come to a better understanding of
the role scribes played in making intelligent and powerful decisions about the selection and
replication—that is, the canonizing—of medieval texts.
Although Middle English scholars traditionally place Chaucer’s works at the centre of these
complicated canonizing processes in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, this chapter
posits that the production of the PoC was also directed by the impulse to canonize. For example,
although the modern consensus is that no author is known, nevertheless, within the Middle Ages
it began to be associated both with Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175-1253), Bishop of Lincoln, and
with the Oxford-educated hermit, Richard Rolle, whom in Chapter 1 I argued ought to be
considered one of the first national Middle English authors. The association between Rolle and
the PoC was particularly influential. Five manuscripts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
century attribute the PoC to Rolle, and even Lydgate attributes the text to Rolle, in a canonizing
gesture of his own, in the Fall of Princes:
I nevir was aqueynted with Virgyle,
Nor with [the] sugryd dytees of Omer,
Nor Dares Frygius with his goldene style,
Nor with Ovyde, in poetrye moost entieer,
Nor with the souereyn balladys of Chauceer,
Which among alle that euere wer rad or songe
Excellyd al othir in our Englyssh tounge.
I can nat been a iuge in this mateer,
As I conceyve folwyng my fantasye,
In moral mateer ful notable was Goweer,
And so was Stroode in his philosophye.
In parfyt lyvyng, which passith poysye,
184
Richard Hermyte, contemplatyff of sentence,
Drowh in Ynglyssh the Prykke of Conscience.552
Although Emily Hope Allen persuasively dismissed the theory of Rolle’s authorship of the PoC
on stylistic grounds, nevertheless, I argue that our understanding of the PoC’s circulation and
popularity still ought to take into account the power of the association—that is, how the
attribution of PoC manuscripts to a well-known author conditioned it to be read as canonical, and
therefore appropriate to be produced and reproduced.553
The families who had patronized Rolle
and his writing throughout the first half of the fourteenth century—the Nevilles, Daltons,
Scropes, and Percys, to name a few—and important career ecclesiasts in the second half of the
century such as Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of York and then Canterbury, and Richard Scrope,
who succeeded him as Archbishop of York—would continue to be linked with the production of
manuscripts of northern vernacular texts such as the PoC. The attribution of Rolle’s authorship
to the PoC was a powerful canonizing gesture, one which encouraged the circulation of the text
by Rolle’s followers and one which may have protected the PoC in the turbulent climate of the
late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century when texts of vernacular theology came under
closer scrutiny.554
I want to return, here, to the idea of Chaucer as a canonical figure and the production of his
manuscripts within the Guildhall as a potential act of “canon formation.” The Guildhall acted as
a central repository—or, rather, a place for centralized interest and activity—for the writings of
London authors such as Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, to which, Stubbs and Mooney argue,
“patrons of provincial authors such as John Trevisa or the anonymous author of The Siege of
Jerusalem might bring exemplars of their works for copying and dissemination.”555
Hanna and
552 Lydgate, “An Envoy to Duke Humphrey,” ll. 3401–14 from Book 9 of Fall of Princes. This passage echoes
homage to Gower and Strode in Troilus and Criseyde (V.1856–57). The manuscripts of the PoC which attribute
authorship to Rolle are BodL, MS Ashmole 60 (s. xivex
), BL, MS Egerton 3245 (s. xivex
), London, Lambeth Palace,
MS 260 (s. xvin
), Camb., Gonville and Caius College, MS 386 (s. xv1), and Oxford, Merton College, MS 68 (s.
xvmed
).
553 For a convincing assessment of the evidence, see Allen, “The Authorship of the Prick of Conscience” and
Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole.
554 For the role of Thomas Arundel, for example, in the debates surrounding the orthodoxy of vernacular texts in
England, see Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change” and the essays collected in After Arundel, for a more recent
assessment of Arundel’s impact upon the vernacular literary landscape.
555 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 132. For other scholars who, previous to Mooney and Stubbs,
suggested a similar pattern of production and dissemination, see Owen, Manuscripts of “The Canterbury Tales,” 98;
185
others have argued that the copying which occurred in this locale represents “the development,
in the hands of a few individuals, of a recognizable ‘English canon,’ a set of masterworks that
now stand at the head of modern conceptions of English literature.”556
Mooney and Stubbs,
developing the position further, suggest several possible factors motivating the clerks to engage
in this copying: special commission from powerful patrons, personal acquaintance with the
authors themselves, the clerks’ desire to supplement their income, and the political decision to
promote English as a language of government and commerce.557
These factors contributed to the
linked processes of selection, replication, and upgrading—processes which resulted in the
creation of multiple copies of these texts and the eventual production of high-grade manuscripts
such as the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Canterbury Tales (respectively, Aberystwyth, National
Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D and San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9) and
the ornate copy of Troilus and Criseyde (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.817)
prepared for Henry, Prince of Wales (c. 1410-13). The production of the manuscripts of these
London authors, I suggest, was an act of canon formation that had a parallel in the north of
England.
2.1.1 The Ripon Manuscripts
Building upon Hanna’s research, I argue that during the second half of the fourteenth century,
before the majority of this canonizing copying was taking place in London, a similar process was
ongoing in regional centres such as Ripon and Lichfield in order to promote and disseminate a
northern canon of vernacular religious material. Here, I want to draw attention to Hanna’s work
(building upon an unpublished identification by Doyle in his Lyell Lectures) on four manuscripts
of similar dimensions and contents that he suggests were produced in or near Ripon, produced by
Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 179-83; Hanna, “Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage,” 909; Bowers, “The House
of Chaucer & Son,” 137; and Kerby-Fulton and Justice, “Marketing Ricardian Literature,” 225.
556 Hanna, “Pre-Fifteenth-Century Scribes,” 180.
557 Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City, 133-40.
186
a cluster of at least eleven collaborating scribes and artists who followed “some form of ‘house-
style.’”558
The manuscripts of this cluster are as follows:
1. BodL, MS Rawl. Poet 175 (s. xiv2)559
2. BL, MS Cotton Galba E. ix (s. xivex
)560
3. BL, MS Harley 4196 (s. xivex
)561
4. BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E.VII (s. xivex
)562
These manuscripts contain romances such as Ywain and Gawain and the Seven Sages of Rome
alongside “para-liturgical” texts such as the PoC, the Northern Homily Cycle, the Northern
Passion, the Book of Shrift, the “Book of Penance” (a text on confession that frequently
circulates with the Cursor Mundi).563
Three of the scribes worked on more than one manuscript,
and at least one artist completed cadel capitals and lombard limning in more than one
manuscript. The language of these scribes, two profiled by LALME and the remaining two
profiled by Hanna himself, is similar to manuscripts localized to Burneston in the North Riding
or to Masham, but Hanna suggests that the town of Ripon, located about eight miles away from
Burneston and Masham, seems a more likely location.564
Ripon had, he argues, a number of
institutions that would have supported secular canons including a large minster, a song school for
choristers and a free grammar school as well as “a more than pragmatically literate and interested
religious audience” consisting of local gentry families such as the Miniots, the Markenfields, the
558 Hanna, “The Yorkshire Circulation of the Speculum Vitae,” 290. For Hanna’s short description of these
manuscripts, see Table 91 in “Yorkshire Scribes,” 168.
559 Described as MV 83 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 116-7. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 174.
560 Described as MV 27 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 58-9. See also Friedman and Harrington, Ywain
and Gawain.
561 Described as MV 34 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 66-7. Described in Nevanlinna, The Northern
Homily Cycle, 5-10. Also see the detailed discussion of the language of this text, 31-105.
562 Described in Nevanlinna, The Northern Homily Cycle, 11-7. Also see the detailed discussion of the language of
this text, 31-105.
563 Caie and Renevey, introduction to Medieval Texts in Context, 7. Trudel suggests that the inclusion of the so-
called Book of Penance that accompanies three of the Cursor manuscripts may suggest that the “leued” for whom
the Cursor Mundi was written were not simply laypersons, but also priests who were ignorant of Latin in “The
Middle English Book of Penance and the Readers of the Cursor Mundi,” 1.
564 LALME describes the language of BodL, MS Rawl. Poet. 175 (LP 174) as west of Thirsk. Lewis and McIntosh
suggest “fully northern” for this manuscript as well as for BL, MS Harley 4196 and BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix in
their entries.
187
Pigots, the Plumptons, the Scropes and the Marmions, many of the same families who formed
the readership of the works of Rolle.565
He attributes the production of these four manuscripts to
“associated local clergy” as well as “a substantive lay network in which the clerical role may
only have been facilitative.”566
I draw particular attention to these manuscripts because, as Hanna argues, they constitute a
literary community engaged in a process of canon-formation as scribes came to produce (and
reproduce) the same texts in the same visual formats:
Thus these later fourteenth-century books, [BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix] and its congeners,
testify to an extensive transmissional community sharing both texts and production
procedures. This community extends over three literary generations and nearly a century.
This is what it means to have a literary community, a literary tradition, and a canon or
works, in this case a robustly local/regional one.567
I want to turn to two of these manuscripts—BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix and BL, MS Harley
4196—to discuss, briefly, several aspects of the “production procedures” which this literary
community used.
Fig. 4.1: BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix (Contents by Booklet) (See Plate 4.1)
Collation: iii+112
-612
, 712
(9 lost), 812
-912
, 10 lost, 114
Scribe 1: ff. 4r-48v; Anglicana formata (Scribe 1 of BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E.vii)
Scribe 2: ff. 48v-50r; Anglicana
Scribe 3: ff. 50r-75r; textura semiquadrata (Scribe 3 of BL, MS Harley 4196)
Scribe 4: ff. 76r-113r; textura semiquadrata
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quires 1-4] [copied by Scribe 1, Scribe 2, and Scribe 3]
Ywain and Gawain (ff. 4r-25r) [copied by Scribe 1]
565 Hanna, “Yorkshire Scribes,” 175. For his discussion of the gentry connections, see his section entitled “Local
readers, actual and putative,” 173-181.
566 Hanna, “Yorkshire Scribes,” 181. On the vicars of Ripon, see Werronen, Ripon Minster in its Social Context, c.
1350–1530 where he identifies the wages and roles of many of these vicars whom he says frequently complained
about being underpaid for their services of preaching and hearing confessions. Supporting the assertion that vicars
would have used the PoC as part of their duty of pastoral care, Horobin has identified two Augustinians in
Chichester who copied the text in “The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137.”
567 Hanna, “Yorkshire Writers,” 100.
188
Seven Sages of Rome (ff. 25v-48v) [copied by Scribe 1]
On the Transitoriness of the World (ff. 48v-49r) [copied by Scribe 2]
Prophecies of Merlin (ff. 49r-50v) [copied by Scribe 2]
Sir Peny (ff. 50v-51r) [copied by Scribe 2 and 3]
How Crist spekes tyll synfull man of his gret mercy (f. 51v) [copied by Scribe 3]
Appeal of Christ to Man (f. 51v) [copied by Scribe 3]
Booklet 2 [Quires 5-6] [copied by Scribe 3]
Battle of Halidon Hill (f. 52r)
The Battle of Bannockburn Avenged (ff. 52r-52v)
The Expedition of Edward III to Brabant (ff. 52v-53r)
First Invasion of France (ff. 53r-53v)
The Sea Fight at Sluys (ff. 53v-54r)
The Siege of Tournay (ff. 54r-54v)
The Battle of Crecy (ff. 54v-55v)
The Siege of Calais (ff. 55v-56r)
The Battle of Neville’s Cross (ff. 56r-56v)
The Defeat of the Spaniards (ff. 56v-57r)
The Taking of ‘Þe castell of Gynes’ (ff. 57r-57v)
The Gospel of Nicodemus (ff. 57v-66v)
Book of Penance (ff. 67r-75r)
Booklet 3 [Quires 7-11] [copied by Scribe 4]
Prick of Conscience (ff. 76r-113r)
Fig. 4.2: BL, MS Harley 4196 (Contents by Booklet) (See Plate 4.2)
Collation: ii + 18
(1, 7 lost), 28-3
8, 4
8 (2, 3 lost), 5
8-12
8, 13
8 (2 lost), 14
8 (1, 5 lost),
168-17
8, 18
8+1, 19
8-27
8, 28
8 (2-8 lost), 29
8-30
8, 31
8 (8 lost), 32
8 (1-6 lost), 33
8-35
8,
364
+ ii
Scribe 1: ff. 1r-6v; textura semiquadrata
Scribe 2: ff. 7r-132v; textura semiquadrata
Scribe 3: ff. 133r-164v; textura semiquadrata (Scribe 3 of BL, MS Cotton Galba
E.ix)
Scribe 4: ff. 165r-205v, textura semiquadrata
Scribe 5: ff. 206r-258v; textura semiquadrata (Scribe 2 of BodL, MS Rawl. Poet.
175)
Contents:
Booklet 1 [Quires 1-18] [copied by Scribes 1 and 2]
189
Northern Homily Cycle (temporale) ff. 1r-132r
Booklet 2 [Quires 19-27] [copied by Scribes 3 and 4]
Northern Homily Cycle (sanctorale) ff. 133r-205v
Booklet 3 [Quires 28-35] [copied by Scribe 5]
The Gospel of Nicodemus (ff. 206r-215v)
The Prick of Conscience (ff. 215v-258v)
These two manuscripts—both of which were produced at approximately the same time in the
“second generation” of manuscripts produced in the cluster—bear considerable similarities to
one another:568
they are of similar dimensions and layout, with BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix
measuring 335 x 220 mm with two columns of 48 lines and BL, MS Harley 4196 measuring 380
x 275 mm with two columns of 48 lines; they share a scribe (Scribe 3 in both manuscripts); and
they share two texts, the PoC and the Gospel of Nicodemus. Furthermore, two features of these
manuscripts may indicate that they were produced quickly or, at least, as part of an established
production procedure: production by booklets and production by duplicative copying.
These two manuscripts are both divided into large “booklets” where the end of a text
corresponds with the end of a quire and a scribal stint. Each of the booklets was copied by only
one or two scribes. Here I want to return to a larger argument I have pursued throughout this
dissertation: namely, that much of Middle English literary culture was sustained by means of the
production and circulation of texts in small-format manuscripts—pamphlets, unbound quires,
booklets bound in wrappers—alongside complete codices. As Hanna argues, the use of booklets
in manuscript production speaks to “a fundamental way of forming books in the Middle Ages,
the creation of larger codices from relatively small textual units.”569
Booklets could be used as a
way to speed up the process of manuscript production by allowing for simultaneous copying of
materials by multiple scribes. Booklets could also be used in order to create small, potentially
autonomous units of texts, which could circulate independently or which scribes or owners could
compile to form larger, composite manuscripts.
568 The earliest manuscript produced in this cluster is BodL, MS Rawl. Poet 175, dated to the middle of the
fourteenth century.
569 Hanna, “Booklets,” 24.
190
BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix evokes the second practice. It appears to be a miscellaneous (or
possibly composite) manuscript, comprising both longer texts such as the PoC, the Seven Sages
of Rome and Ywain and Gawain alongside numerous short religious lyrics and historical verses.
The structure of BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix recalls the principles for copying employed in the
Auchinleck manuscript discussed in Chapter 3, in which scribes worked on independent units of
material that could be assembled at a later stage, generally following the same layout. BL, MS
Cotton Galba E.ix is divided into three booklets, whichcorrespond roughly to the stints of each of
the scribes. The first of these is Booklet 1, copied principally by Scribe 1. He copied both Ywain
and Gawain and the Seven Sages of Rome, which ended three folios before the end of Quire 4 on
f. 48. Scribe 2, whom Hanna argues copied slightly later than the rest of the scribes (possibly
early fifteenth century?) though I have found this difficult to support on the basis of
palaeography alone, filled in the remaining folios of Booklet 1 with three short lyrics (On the
Transitoriness of the World, Prophecies of Merlin and Sir Peny).570
Midway through the third of
these lyrics, Scribe 2 broke off copying. Scribe 3 completed Sir Peny and added another two
religious poems (How Crist spekes tyll synfull man of his gret mercy and Appeal of Christ to
Man) to finish off the remaining empty folio. Scribe 3 then wrote all of Booklet 2, and Scribe 4
wrote all of Booklet 3.
The booklets of BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix show more autonomy than the booklets of
Auchinleck where a principle scribe unified the manuscript by adding catchwords, running titles,
and decoration. Although the booklets of BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix have a consistent general
layout (two columns of 48 lines each), the system of decoration is different for each. Booklet 1
(quires 1-4) makes use of alternating blue and red Lombard capitals and includes one pen and
initial in the stint of Scribe 3; Booklet 2 (quires 5-6) contains multiple styles of decoration
including pen and ink initials, red and blue historiated initials, and red and purple historiated
initials (possibly completed by the same artist); Booklet 3 (quires 7-11) has painted champs. The
fact that the manuscript comprises multiple systems of decoration relegated to either the stint of a
570 For the dating of Scribe 2, see Hanna, “Yorkshire Writers,” 93.
191
particular scribe or to a particular booklet suggests to me that these booklets were decorated
before they were compiled to form a single, unified manuscript.571
From the codicological details alone it is difficult to tell exactly how the production of this
manuscript was managed. We do not, as in the case of Auchinleck, have a single scribe who
wrote catchwords and titles throughout, thereby providing a unifying element to the individual
booklets. Hanna dates Scribe 2’s hand to the early fifteenth century (perhaps twenty years later
than the he dates the handwriting of Scribe 1, 3 and 4). This may suggest that Scribe 1 himself
produced and decorated (or had decorated) the majority of Booklet 1 independently of the other
two booklets. However, the dating of hands on palaeographical grounds is often an imprecise
science: although Scribe 2’s hand stands in marked contrasts with those of Scribe 1, 3 and 4 in
that it is more cursive, less evenly spaced, and shows considerably more blotting and variance in
the width of penstrokes, these differences might be explained if we understand Scribe 2 to be a
scribe with less training or skill. At the very least, it is likely that Scribe 2 added additional texts
to the blank folios at the end of the quire but failed to finish his final poem (Sir Peny). Scribe 3,
in the process of copying his own booklet, may have encountered Booklet 1 and completed Sir
Peny and then added two more religious texts. However, although Scribe 3 copies in Booklet 1,
there is nothing which directly connects his stint in Booklet 1 with the stint in Booklet 2.
Consequently, it is possible that all three of these booklets were, more or less, produced and
decorated independently of one another. The comparatively ornate decoration in Booklet 3
would have been more expensive to commission, suggesting that this booklet at the very least
may not have been conceived of as part of a compiled manuscript even if that was the eventual
use to which it was put.
Likewise, BL, MS Harley 4196 is divided into three booklets, the first of which contains the
temporale of the Northern Homily Cycle, the second of which contains the sanctorale of the
Northern Homily Cycle and the third of which contains the Gospel of Nicodemus and the PoC.
Each of these booklets comprises a substantial grouping of quires (eighteen quires in Booklet 1,
nine quires in Booklet 2, and eight quires in Booklet 3) and the involvement of five separate
571 Little information has been deduced regarding the structure of this manuscript from either binding or provenance.
BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix came to the British Library from the collection of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, and suffered
some injury in the fire of 1731 (some shriveling of the inner corners of certain folios). The binding is modern.
192
scribes. Despite the common layout of all three texts, each of the booklets in this manuscript also
appears to have been decorated independently. Booklets 1 and 3 have been decorated with blue
and crimson initials executed with gold leaf and adorned with sprays of three vines, each with a
gold ball. Booklet 2, however, has been decorated with a different palette of colours (pink rather
than red) and features frills rather than sprays with gold balls, indicative of a different decorator.
As in the case of the previous manuscript, this difference in decoration suggests that, although
these booklets have subsequently been compiled to form a single manuscript, at the stage of
decoration they may have been independent from one another. No system of catchwords links
these booklets.
Such a production method may have allowed for dispersed copying and decoration in which
sections of texts could be quickly copied and finished units could be compiled to form larger
books or libraries of devotional texts in parvo. In some respects, we might imagine
circumstances for copying that were not dissimilar from those in the London Guildhall where
scribes copied exemplars into booklets, some of which were compiled to form larger
manuscripts. Supporting this, the group of four manuscripts Hanna has identified as making up
the Ripon cluster, two of which I’ve discussed in detail, share a pool of texts: the PoC, the
Gospel of Nicodemus, the “expanded” Northern Homily Cycle, the Seven Sages of Rome and the
Book of Penance as well as a number of lyrics. This suggests that the scribes had ready access to
shared exemplars.572
The versions of the “expanded” Northern Homily Cycle in BL, MS Harley
4196 and BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E.vii, for example, are genetically linked and appear only in
these two manuscripts, suggesting a shared exemplar.573
The three versions of the PoC in BL,
MS Harley 4196, BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix, and BodL, MS Rawl. Poet. 175 are also genetically
related, and this might suggest that they were derived from a common exemplar.574
The
572 Cf. Trudel, “The Middle English Book of Penance and the Readers of the Cursor Mundi.”
573 These constitute the second “expanded” version of the Northern Homily Cycle. The first “expanded version,”
interestingly enough, appears only in in BodL, MS Eng. Poet a. 1 (“Vernon”) and BL, MS Add. 22283 (“Simeon”)
discussed below in my section on the Lichfield cluster. Cf. Nevanlinna, The Northern Homily Cycle: The Expanded
Version.
574 See Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 59, 67, 116.
193
connections between texts and between manuscripts allow us to imagine that these exemplars
may have been passed from scribe to scribe or were available within the Minster itself.575
A second production procedure allowed for the concerted production of texts in this cluster: what
Matthew Fisher calls “duplicative copying.” Duplicative copying, as I discussed in Chapter 3,
occurs when a scribe copies not only the text but also retains lineation, mise-en-page, marginalia,
annotations, decorations, and other features:
Hanna points out the similarities between the “texts, hands, and production procedures” of BL,
MS Harley 4196 and BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix, but I want to extend his observations to argue
that the two copies of the PoC extant in these two manuscripts were produced by means of
duplicative copying as demonstrated in the two folios presented in Plates 4.1 and 4.2.576
Here, I
would draw attention to the fact that the same lineation has been retained across both
manuscripts and the same system of rubricating Latin quotations and copying them in a set
textualis quadrata has also been retained. Both manuscripts also include angled brackets marking
poetic couplets, although these are used more often in BL, MS Harley 4196 and only appear
sporadically in BL, MS Cotton Galba E.ix. The use of duplicative copying would have worked to
both speed up the production of copies of the text and, at the same time, would have contributed
to the growing sense of uniformity in the mise-en-page. In this way, the production of the PoC in
Ripon might be seen to anticipate the impulse toward mass production of generally identical
copies of texts facilitated by the printing press in the fifteenth century.
In conclusion, although this cluster of manuscripts is small—only four manuscripts—in
comparison to the larger cluster of manuscripts, texts, and scribes associated with the London
Guildhall, it, nevertheless, as Hanna argues, gives us a sense of an active process of canonization
at work through the production of manuscripts. This process parallels the process of canonization
of the works of Chaucer and other London authors in the Guildhall a generation later in several
important respects. These include a shared location (Ripon, possibly the Minster itself), local
patrons and writers (the nearby gentry families), a shared group of scribes and artists (Hanna’s
575 Werronen argues that the Ripon vicars had a more developed communal identity than any other group of clergy
in the parish, based in part upon their shared common residence (Ripon Minster in its Social Context, 53).
576 Hanna, “Yorkshire Scribes,” 180.
194
cluster of at least eleven collaborating scribes and artists), a shared stockpile of exemplars
(evident from multiple copies of the same texts including three copies of the PoC, two of the
expanded Northern Homily Cycle, and two of the Gospel of Nicodemus), and shared production
strategies (production by booklets and production by “duplicative” copying). These features
resulted in the development, in Ripon, of a canon of northern vernacular religious materials.
I have discussed the parallels between the copying of texts by the “canonical” London authors in
the Guildhall and the copying of vernacular religious texts in Ripon to show that similar
conditions were at work in both instances. However, it ought to be noted that the copying in
Ripon still constitutes a limited example of regional production and regional canon formation.
Although Jonathan Hughes attributes the majority of the copying of vernacular religious texts in
Yorkshire and the surrounding area to the injunctions promoted by John Thoresby, Archbishop
of York (d. 1373), to educate the clergy in the wake of the Black Death, Hanna argues, instead,
that the copying in Ripon was not facilitated by institutional support.577
Rather, the scribes in
Ripon responded “to their own indigenous tradition”—perhaps the reason why BL, MS Cotton
Galba E.ix, Booklet 2 includes historical verses traditionally ascribed to Laurence Minot, an
author associated with the area.578
This lack of institutional support may have kept textual
production reasonably localized. In the following section of this chapter, I turn to a larger cluster
of copying in Lichfield, an area which Hanna has argued played a seminal role “in passing on
northern books, especially into the south-west Midlands, where they might contact the other
great early English local culture.”579
577 Cf. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries.
578 Hanna, “Yorkshire Scribes,” 174. See also Edwards’s reassessment of the possible authorship of these poems
based upon the codicology of the Ripon manuscript in “The Authorship of the Poems of Laurence Minot: A
Reconsideration.”
579 Hanna, “Yorkshire Writers,” 101.
195
3 Producing the Prick of Conscience
3.1 Lichfield: A Centre of Vernacular Production?
3.1.1 Group IV of the Main Version Prick of Conscience
In this section, I draw attention to a large group of textually related manuscripts, which have
been labeled Group IV of the Main Version by Lewis and McIntosh in their Descriptive Guide
(and Group Xi in Percy Andreae’s nineteenth-century study of the PoC).580
The Group IV
manuscripts are divided into three further subgroups, as outlined below: the Vernon-Simeon
Subgroup, the Lichfield Subgroup, and the Grosseteste Subgroup. This section, focusing
particularly upon the Lichfield Subgroup and the Vernon-Simeon Subgroup, follows Hanna in
arguing that Lichfield was an “entrepôt specialising in texts” where “virtually the full canonical
range of extensive Yorkshire writing c. 1290-1375 passed through” as it was “revamped for non-
Northern consumption.”581
Further to this, I argue that we can see similar processes of selection,
replication and upgrading at work in the production of multiple copies of the PoC in this region
as in Ripon: an impulse to canonize the PoC. I will begin by outlining, briefly, the textual
relationship between these manuscripts and the corpuses of those scribes involved in the
production of these manuscripts who copy in more than one manuscript.
3.1.1.1 Vernon-Simeon Subgroup
The Vernon-Simeon subgroup is characterized by the displacement of lines 950-1181 from Book
II to a position between lines 585 and 586 in Book I, two titles to Book I at different places, a
similar beginning to Book IV, and a number of other readings.582
1. Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 33 (s. xiv2, south west Lincolnshire)
583
2. BodL, MS Rawl. Poet. 139 (s. xiv2, north east Shropshire)
584
580 See Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 7-9. Cf. Andreae, Die Handschriften des Pricke of Conscience.
581 Cf. Hanna, “Lichfield,” published at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/nodes/lichfield.html.
582 Cf. Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 78.
583 Described as MV 18 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 50.
196
3. BL, MS Harley 1205 (s. xivex
, Lichfield) (also a member of the Lichfield Subgroup)585
4. BodL, MS Ashmole 41 (s. xivex
, central Staffordshire)586
5. BL, MS Add. 22283 (Simeon) (s. xivex
, north Worcestershire)587
6. BodL, MS English Poetry A. 1 (Vernon) (s. xivex
, north Worcestershire)588
7. BodL, MS Rawl. C.319 (s. xv1, northwest Suffolk with strong central Midlands
underlay)589
8. BL, MS Lansdowne 348 (s. xvin
, central Staffordshire)590
3.1.1.2 Lichfield Subgroup
The Lichfield Subgroup is characterized by ten new lines added to the beginning of the Prologue.
These ten lines give a title and an outline which do not exist in other versions of the poem. It also
584 Described as MV 82 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 115-6. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BodL, MS Rawl. Poet. 139. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 192 in
McIntosh et al, 233.
585 Described as MV 31 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 63-4. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BL, MS Harley 1205. LALME has not mapped but McIntosh et al. state
that the “language is from Lichfield or nearby,” 239.
586 Described as MV 59 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 92-3. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BodL, MS Ashmole 41. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 243 in
McIntosh et al, 237.
587 Described as MV 40 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 72-3. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BL, MS Add. 22283. Also see Guddat-Figge, Manuscripts Containing
Middle English Romance, 145-151, and Doyle, The Vernon Manuscript, introduction, plates and foldout. For the
dialect, see the LALME, LP 243 for the scribes of the Vernon manuscript.
588 Described as MV 70 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 103-4. Cf. Doyle, introduction to The Vernon
Manuscript: A Facsimile. The scholarship on this manuscript is substantial, but a good starting point is Derek
Pearsall’s edited volume of essays entitled Studies in the Vernon Manuscript and Scase’s edited volume The Making
of the Vernon Manuscript. See also Manuscripts of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BodL, MS
English Poetry A. 1. For the dialect of Scribe 1 (Vernon Scribe A) in Worcestershire, see LALME, LP 7670
(McIntosh et al., 250). Serjeantson places this dialect in the “South Shropshire-South Staffordshire” area in “The
Index of the Vernon Manuscript,” 227. Against this placement, Smith argues that it ought to be located somewhat
southwest of the main hand in “Mapping the Language” (51). For the dialect of Scribe 2 (Vernon Scribe B), see
LALME, LP 7630 in McIntosh et al., 249.
589 Described as MV 77 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 110-1.
590 Described as MV 36 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 68-9. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BL, MS Lansdowne 348. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 238 in
McIntosh, et al., 237. See also Manuscripts of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for BL, MS
Lansdowne 348. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 238.
197
includes several other readings that “show an independent editor trying to make better sense of
what he had in front of him.”591
Lewis and McIntosh hypothesize that BL, MS Harley 1205, a
member of the Vernon-Simeon subgroup, may be the exemplar underlying the Lichfield
Subgroup.
1. BL, MS Harley 1205 (s. xivex
, Lichfield)
2. London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 57 (s. xivex
, Lichfield)592
3. Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS English 50 (s. xivex
, south east
Staffordshire)593
4. BodL, MS Douce 156 (s. xivex
, central Midlands)594
5. Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B (s. xiv/xv, Lichfield)595
6. Holkham Hall, Wells, Library of the Earl of Leicester, MS 668 (s. xiv/xv,
Lichfield)596
7. New Haven, Yale University Library, MS Osborn a 13 (s. xv1, Lichfield)
597
8. Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16A (s. xv1, south Shropshire)
598
591 Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 8. The IMEV, which omits three of these manuscripts (MV 45, 57, and
88), calls this version “The Pricke of Conscience with ten prefatory line prefixed to the usual beginning” (1193).
592 Described as MV 45 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 78-9. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 57.The dialect is not mapped in
LALME but see McIntosh et al., 239.
593 Described as MV 54 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 87-8. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS English 50. See also
Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, III, 401-402. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 519 in McIntosh, et
al., 238.
594 Described as MV 68 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 101-2. The dialect localization is taken from
this.
595 Described as MV 89 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 102-3. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B. The dialects of the two scribes of this
manuscript are not mapped in LALME but are given in Lewis and McIntosh. Note that Scribe 1 is Vernon Scribe A
whose dialect is mapped as Scribe 1 of the Vernon manuscript (see above).
596 Described as MV 23 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 54-5. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Holkham, Holkham Hall, Library of the Earl of Leicester, MS 668.The
dialects for these scribes are not mapped but are discussed by McIntosh et al., 239.
597 Described as MV 57 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 90-1. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for New Haven, Yale University Library, MS Osborn a 13.The dialect of
this scribe is not mapped but is discussed by McIntosh et al., 239.
598 Described as MV 88 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 120-1. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16A. For the dialect, see LALME, LP 4239
198
3.1.1.3 Grosseteste Subgroup
This third subgroup consists of four closely related manuscripts characterized by the ten lines
added to the Prologue, two additions in Book II, one of twenty lines and another of six lines.599
The ancestor of this subgroup appears to be part of the Vernon-Simeon subgroup. This subgroup
of manuscripts, like the Vernon-Simeon subgroup, appears to have emerged first in the West
Midlands and to have travelled from north-west Worcestershire through south Gloucestershire
and finally to the Somerset/east Devon border. Interestingly, three of these manuscripts
erroneously ascribe the authorship of the PoC to Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1235-
1253), as follows: “Roberti Grostehed episcopi lincolliensis” (Leeds, University Library, MS
Brotherton 500, f. 1r); “Magistri Roberti Grosthed episcopi quondam lincolinensis [sic] doctoris
que egregii in theologia” (BodL, MS Digby 14, f. 1r); and “venerabilis lincoliensis” (BodL, MS
Laud Misc. 486, f. 122r). I will not discuss this subgroup in detail except to echo Beadle in
arguing that it shows the PoC was open to local revision and re-dissemination on a small
scale.600
1. Leeds, University Library, MS Brotherton 500 (c. xiv/xv, north west Worcestershire)601
2. BodL, MS Digby 14 (c. xv1, Devonshire)
602
3. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royal Albert I, MS IV 998 (c. xvin
, Devonshire)603
4. BodL, MS Laud Misc. 486 (s. xvin
, south Gloucestershire)604
in McIntosh et al., 234. For the ownership of this manuscript in the fifteenth century, see Bale, “Late Medieval
Book-Owners Named John Leche.”
599 Cf. Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 8.
600 Beadle, “Middle English Texts and their Transmission,” 80.
601 Described as MV 24 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 55-6. See also Manuscripts of the West
Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Leeds, University Library, MS Brotherton 500. See also Humphrey and
Lightbrown, “Two Manuscripts of the Pricke of Conscience,” 29-30, facsimile of f. 121r facing p. 29. For the
dialect, see LALME, LP 7660 in McIntosh et al., 249.
602 Described as MV 63 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 96.
603 Described as MV 4 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 36-7.
604 Described as MV 72 in Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, 105-6.
199
The Group IV manuscripts, I argue, provide insight into the relationship between a text’s
dissemination and its means of production. The nearly twenty manuscripts that comprise Group
IV are significant in that they represent a concentrated (both geographically and temporally)
group of related manuscripts, with several scribes who copied in multiple manuscripts.
3.1.1.4 Scribes Copying in Multiple Manuscripts
1. The Corpus of the Rylands Scribe605
a. BL, MS Harley 1205 (Prick of Conscience)
b. Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50 (Prick of Conscience)
c. BodL, MS Rawl. A.389 (works of Richard Rolle, and Maidstone’s penitential psalms
and others)606
d. Camb., Trinity College, MS R.3.8 (Cursor Mundi)607
e. Durham, Durham University Library, MS Mickleton and Spearman 27 (Latin
statutes)608
f. Possibly also BodL, MS Eng. poet. e. 17 (s. xivex
or xiv/xv) (fragments of Richard
Maidstone’s penitential psalms)
g. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, ChAnt/L/199 (quitclaim dated 1 August 1396)609
h. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, ChAnt/L/200 (land grant dated 14 January 1398) 610
i. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, ChAnt/L/204 (land grant dated 1 May 1402)611
605 For the corpus of this scribe, see Hanna, “Some Pre-Fifteenth Century Scribes,” 188-9. See also Hanna’s note of
this identification in The English Manuscripts, 173-4. Jeremy Griffiths originally identified this scribe as “the
Lichfield scribe” and assigned him Camb., Trinity College, MS R.3.8; Durham, Durham University Library, MS
Mickleton and Spearman 27; BL, MS Harley 1205; Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50; and
BodL, MS Eng. poet. e. 17.
606 Described in Hanna, The English Manuscripts, 171-4. See also Ogilvie-Thompson, Richard Rolle: Prose and
Verse, xxxvi-xlv; Edden, Richard Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms, 12-14; Ker, “Patrick Young’s Catalogue of the
Manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral,” 281, 288-9; and Horstmann, Yorkshire Writers, II, 36-45.
607 Described in Thompson, The ‘Cursor Mundi’, 38-9. See also Horrall, The Southern Version, 14-15.
608 Described in Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 2:514-517.
609 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This quitclaim is between John Irysshe of
Lichfield and his Margaret to Nicholas Sporiour of Lichfield.
610 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This land grant is between Agnes, wife of
Thomas Cartwright of Lichfield, to John and Margaret Figeon.
611 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This grant is between Bernard Rydware,
vicar of Tutbury, and Richard Hiklyn, chaplain, to Roger and Alice Rydware of Lichfield.
200
j. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, ChAnt/L/205 (land grant and property grant dated 17
August 1408)612
k. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, 3764/76 (quitclaim dated 1408)613
l. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, 3764/767 (demise dated 1408)614
m. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, D(W)1734/J/1609 (land grant dated 11 June
1401)615
n. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, D(W)1734/J/1697 (rent agreement dated 4
June 1403)616
o. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, D(W)1734/J/1781 (land and property grant
dated 12 January 1409)617
p. Shrewbury, Shropeshire Archives, 1057/2/7 [post mortem inquisition of Fulk Mouthe,
dated 5 July 1414]618
q. BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a.1 (“Vernon”) (an inscription on f. 239v)619
r. BL, MS Add. 22283 (“Simeon”) (an inscription on f. 38r)620
2. The Corpus of the Trinity Scribe621
612 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This grant is from John Wyche of Lichfield
to the same Bernard Rydware, William de Rydware, and Robert Rydware of Lichfield.
613 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This quitclaim is from Thomas Arwe of
Lichfield to John Barre of Lichfield, a barber.
614 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This demise is by john Ondeby, canon of
Lichfield, to Thomas ate Well of Little Haywood, mason.
615 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This land grant is between Robert Aston, of
Wilmencote, and William Fordayne, to Master John de Ondeby, Thomas, de Ondeby, and John Cook, chaplain.
616 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33.This quitclaim is from John Smyth of
Wilmencote to John Ondeby, canon of Lichfield, and Thomas de Ondeby and John Cook.
617 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This grant is from Richard Herrys to his
daughter Agnes.
618 Identified by Horobin in “Scribe of the Vernon Manuscript,” 32-33. This is post mortem inquisition that John
Scriveyn was present at Fulk Mouthe, before David Holbache, escheator, in Shropshire.
619 This inscription reads: “De scripcione trium quaternorum vel quatuor primum verbum Oþur dignite & trium
foliorum.” This and the corresponding inscription below are shown in The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile, 13, fig
7a-b and further discussed in Doyle, “Codicology, Palaeography, and Provenance,” 12-13.
620 This inscription reads: “Memorandum quod Johannes Scryveyn scribet domino Thome Heneley tres quaternos
vel quatuor & tria folia Et incipit ad ista verba in isto columbine Oþur dinite. Or benefys.”
201
a. Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B (Prick of Conscience)
b. BodL, MS Douce 156 (Prick of Conscience)
c. Holkham Hall, Wells, Norfolk, Library of the Earl of Leicester, MS 668 (Prick of
Conscience)
3. The Corpus of the Vernon Scribe A622
a. Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B (Prick of Conscience)
b. Holkham Hall, Wells, the earl of Leicester, MS 668 (Prick of Conscience)
c. BodL, MS Douce 156 (Prick of Conscience)
d. BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a.1 (“Vernon”) (a compendium of religious verse)
e. BL, MS Add. 22283 (“Simeon”) (a compendium of religious verse)
f. Stratford-upon-Avon, The Shakespeare Birthplace Library, DR 18/30/20/1 (two
frankpledges dated 1 October 1406 and 10 May 1407)623
g. Stratford-upon-Avon, The Shakespeare Birthplace Library, DR 10/1406 (several
Warwickshire deeds)624
4. Vernon Scribe B625
a. BodL, MS Eng. Poet. A.1 (“Vernon”)
b. BL, MS Add. 22283 (“Simeon”)
621 No other scholar has yet identified this scribe’s hand in both manuscripts. I provide the evidence for this
identification later in the chapter. For a limited look at the scribal profile of this scribe in Oxford, Trinity College,
MS 16B, see Manuscripts of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B.
No entry is provided for BodL, MS Douce 156.
622 Hanna discusses the corpus of this scribe in “Pre-Fifteenth Century Scribes,” 187-8.
623 Discussed in Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 45 and Doyle, The Vernon Manuscript, 13. Cf.
Hilton, The Stoneleigh Leger Book.
624 This is the Gregory Ledger Book in which the Warwickshire deeds have been bound with a thirteenth-century
Stoneleigh Cartulary. Discussed in Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 45.
625 For the corpus of this scribe, see Hanna, “Some Pre-Fifteenth Century Scribes,” 187-8. See also Doyle’s
discussion of this scribe in The Vernon Manuscript. For an updated look at the works of this scribe, see Manuscripts
of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B; BodL, MS Eng. Poet. a.1;
BL, MS Add. 22283; and Holkham Hall, Wells, the earl of Leicester, MS 668.
202
3.2 Copying in the Vicinity of Lichfield Cathedral?
I begin by drawing attention to Lichfield itself as a possible centre for copying northern
vernacular religious texts. Not a rich town by any means, Lichfield developed primarily as
a convenient way-station situated at the juncture of two Roman roads. There one of
medieval England's great arteries, Watling Street (the modern A5, joining London and
Wroxeter), crossed a much less prominent route. This was Ryknild Street, which began
near Cheltenham and connected the Southwest Midlands with south Yorkshire, via
Birmingham, Derby, and Sheffield. Each of these routes was entwined with other
important connecting roads; to the east of Lichfield, a spur of Watling Street ran off to
Chester, and in south Yorkshire, Ryknild Street joins England’s spine, The Great North
Road.626
In many ways, Ripon and Lichfield were not dissimilar environments. Lichfield was a small
provincial town with approximately 3,000 inhabitants in the later fourteenth century, hosting a
number of educated men, trained in copying, possibly employed by local religious houses,
parishes, or in the secular Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Chad, the seat
of the bishop.627
In addition to the cathedral residentiaries, many of whom were royal or
episcopal servants, retired ecclesiastics or university scholars, the cathedral hosted a number of
chantries, initially ministered to by appointed vicars, but by the fourteenth century a separate
group of chantry chaplains had begun to appear.628
Like Ripon, Lichfield boasted a number of potential craftsmen associated with the book trade.
Scase identifies at least one illuminator who appears in the records for Lichfield—a “Robert
Lomynour” (1397, 1398)—and Rebecca Farnham argues that Artist B of the Vernon manuscript
may have worked in the vicinity of the Lichfield/Staffordshire area.629
Doyle identified Richard
Scriveyn and his wife in the lay subsidy for Lichfield in 1379-80, along with one John
Parchemener. John Parchemener was admitted in 1411 to the town guild as John
626 Cf. Hanna, “Lichfield,” published at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/nodes/lichfield.html.
627 See Rosser, “The Town and Guild of Lichfield in the Late Middle Ages,” 39-47. See also Dyer and Slater, “The
Midlands,” 609-638.
628 Greenslade, Victoria County History of Staffordshire, 148-149.
629 Scase, “The Artist of the Vernon Initials,” 221. She follows Michael in “English Illuminators.” Farnham makes
the suggestion that Artist B of the Vernon manuscript worked in Lichfield in “Border Artists of the Vernon
Manuscript,” 131.
203
Parchemynmaker.630
Another scribe, discussed below under the name the Rylands Scribe, was
employed as a legal scrivener in the area and also copied vernacular religious texts. Furthermore,
the clerks attached to the cathedral and diocese may have also been available to copy texts. The
large number and variety of hands found in the bishops’ registers in the fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries suggest that they were copied by secular clerks and not professional scriveners
such as the Rylands Scribe.631
Although he notes that no conclusive identification can be made,
Horobin associates the hand of one of the scribes found in the register of Bishop Stretton (1360-
85) with BodL, MS Ashmole 41, a copy of the PoC listed above; he associates the hand of
another of the scribes with Vernon Scribe B, whom he suggests was “a member of the secular
clergy of Lichfield Cathedral.”632
The canons of Lichfield Cathedral constitute an important
possible readership for vernacular works of religious instruction. Doyle has identified Thomas
Hanley, canon of Lichfield cathedral from 1389 until his death in 1422, as the figure mentioned
in inscriptions in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts. These indicate that a scribe, John
Scriveyn (identified as the Rylands Scribe), was engaged to copy an extract of the Speculum
vitae for Dominus Thomas Heneley.633
Other possible readers of vernacular material associated
with Lichfield Cathedral include Richard Scrope, a member of Arundel’s Ely circle, who served
as Bishop of Lichfield and Chester from 1386 to 1398 and whom I will discuss in greater detail
below. These links suggest that Lichfield hosted multiple scribes and readers interested in
vernacular texts, and in the following sections I will show that scribes contributed to the spread
and potential “canonization” of the PoC.
3.2.1 Producing a Corpus: The Rylands Scribe
In this section, firstly, I will use the Rylands Scribe to show the PoC may have spread alongside
other northern penitential or didactic texts such as the Cursor Mundi and the works of Richard
630 Doyle, “Codicology, Palaeography, and Provenance,” 15.
631 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 37. He suggests that if these were copied by professional scribe
then one would expect “a more restricted repertoire of scribes and greater uniformity and calligraphic expertise
across the various entries” (38).
632 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 39.
633 Cf. Doyle, “Codicology, Palaeography, and Provenance,” 14.
204
Rolle. This scribe has been identified with the name John Scriveyn in two notations in the
Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, mentioned above. Of this scribe, Hanna writes:
One individual, the scribe responsible for Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.8, with the
‘Southern Version’ of the Yorkshire biblical history Cursor Mundi, has always been
perceived as central to these procedures—and has become more so as study intensifies. In
addition to the Trinity manuscript, he shared copying of a seminal version of Rolle's
epistles, the head of a wide West Midlands distribution, including the representations of
these texts in both Vernon and Simeon. And he produced two copies of The Prick. One of
these was taken from an exemplar that stands at the head of an originally local
tradition.634
Allen, Doyle and Horobin have greatly supplemented this work by identifying the hand of this
scribe in a number of legal documents (quitclaims, land grants, property conveyances, etc.) in the
Lichfield area.635
As Horobin notes, “Each of these documents concerns people and places
connected with the city of Lichfield, while the last indicates a connection with the Cathedral and
one of its canons, John Ondeby, a name which recurs in documents copied by John Scriveyn.”636
From this documentary research, it appears as if the Rylands Scribe was a professional scrivener
working in Lichfield and the surrounding area, frequently in conjunction with cathedral canons
and chaplains in the city. I draw attention to the corpus of this scribe, firstly, in order to establish
some understanding of the practices and procedures of copying in Lichfield. As such, I want to
examine his corpus in general, drawing attention predominantly to his copying of other northern
vernacular works including the Cursor Mundi and Rolle’s Form of Living and Ego Dormio
before I move onto his manuscripts containing the PoC.
The corpus of the Rylands Scribe gives an indication of the range of northern vernacular texts
copied in the Lichfield area, a corpus which resembles that of the manuscripts produced at
Ripon. Camb., Trinity College, MS R.3.8 contains a good copy of the Cursor Mundi written in a
634 Cf. Hanna, “Lichfield,” published at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/nodes/lichfield.html. This
scribe is called the “Lichfield Master” in McIntosh, “New Approach to Middle English Dialectology,” 22-31.
635 Hope Emily Allen first identified the Rylands Scribe as a professional scrivener active in the Lichfield area in
“Manuscripts of the Ancren Riwle,” 116. Doyle identified further property records and suggested the hand was the
same as those three manuscripts containing the Prick of Conscience and Cursor Mundi as mentioned above. In
“Codicology, Palaeography, and Provenance,” he found substantial similarities in the script of the notations in the
Vernon and Simeon manuscripts (12-15). Horobin added to these identifications in “Scribes of the Vernon
Manuscript,” 29-35.
636 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 33.
205
parchment manuscript measuring 307 x 220 mm. The text appears in two columns of 40 lines,
except during the Passion narrative, which is presented in single columns. LALME localizes the
dialect of this manuscript to Lichfield.637
This manuscript of the Cursor Mundi is one of the
“Southern Recension” manuscripts studied in detail by Sarah Horrall, a recension which she
argued contains not “a corrupt copy of a northern poem, but a new poem, substantially changed
in language and scope from its original.”638
Horrall believed one of the ancestors of the southern
group to be the south Lincolnshire exemplar, and so in some ways this version of the Cursor
Mundi might be seen to generally follow the pattern of dissemination of the Vernon-Simeon
Subgroup of the PoC which also includes an early Lincolnshire copy of the PoC (Chicago,
Illinois, Newberry Library, MS 33).639
Horrall, like Hanna, believed Lichfield might have been
the place where the “Southern Recension” version of the Cursor Mundi was produced.640
It
appears likely that the PoC was revised in Lichfield in the same way that the Cursor Mundi was,
after which it was disseminated more broadly. For example, a second copy of a “Southern
Recension” Cursor Mundi appears in London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 57, which also
contains a late-fourteenth century version of the PoC identified by Lewis and McIntosh as part of
the Lichfield subgroup.641
In addition to copying a manuscript containing the “Southern Recension” of the Cursor Mundi,
the Rylands Scribe also copied BodL, MS Rawl. A.389, an important manuscript containing the
works of Richard Rolle. This manuscript has a reasonably secure Lichfield provenance: LALME
identifies the dialect of the Rylands Scribe’s stint in this manuscript as the same as that of
Camb., Trinity College, MS R.3.8, and Ker identifies two names (“liber M Thomas Rynold” and
“liber M Iohannis Reedhil” on f. 105v) as two holders of the same prebend in Lichfield
637 Cf. LALME, LP 36; see I:237 and 3:450-51.
638 Horrall, Southern Version, 1, 12.
639 Horrall, Southern Version, 1, 1.
640 Horrall, Southern Version 1, 12. John Thompson has cautioned against this opinion arguing that “the case for
assuming such a high level of editorial intervention in a (non northern) ancestor of [these four manuscripts] should
not be exaggerated and usually seems quite unpromising,” in The ‘Cursor Mundi’, 56. In this respect, he takes a
more conservative approach in prioritizing the importance of manuscripts which he believes are more closely linked
to an authorial version. He argued that the copying of this manuscript did not constitute a fullscale rewriting, but
rather a “policy of modernization” (51).
641 For a description of this manuscript, see Thompson, The ‘Cursor Mundi’, 39-40.
206
Cathedral in the late fifteenth century.642
This manuscript, discussed briefly in Chapter 1 in
relation to the circulation of Rolle’s texts by means of booklets, is divided into six booklets
written by at least four scribes. The Rylands Scribe wrote two of these booklets: Booklet 2 (ff.
13r-20v), consisting of a single quire of eight leaves containing Richard Maidstone’s penitential
psalms, and Booklet 6 (ff. 85r-105v), containing Rolle’s Form of Living, Ego Dormio and
several short religious poems. The Form of Living is, interestingly, the second copy appearing in
this manuscript (the first of which appears in Booklet 5).”643
Hanna remarks that this second
copy of the Form of Living is “a deviant text apparently concocted in the course of preparing
Bodleian, MS Rawl. A.389.”644
This “deviant” version of the Form of Living also appears in
Paris, Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, MS 3390, which was copied by a north Warwickshire scribe
in the early fifteenth century.645
Hanna suggests BodL, MS Rawl. A.389 was the exemplar for
the Form of Living which appears in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, which I will discuss in
more detail later on. This set of connections suggests that certain northern religious vernacular
texts moved from Lincolnshire into Lichfield and out of Lichfield toward Worcester and
Warwickshire.
I turn now to the two manuscripts of this scribe which contain the PoC: BL, MS Harley 1205 and
Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50. Of these two, the most important is
arguably BL, MS Harley 1205, which Lewis and McIntosh suggest may have been the exemplar
underlying the Lichfield Subgroup. BL, MS Harley 1205 is a plain parchment manuscript
measuring 185 x 115 mm containing only the PoC written in a single column of 28-29 lines per
page. It is minimally decorated throughout. Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS
Eng. 50, on the other hand, which contains the second PoC copied by this scribe, is slightly
larger (250 x 150 mm) with 33 lines per page. The manuscript is more highly decorated,
beginning with two 5-line initials done in red and green ink with red flourishes forming a border
along the left margin. The relationship between these manuscripts is interesting: despite being
copied by the same scribe, they do not share the same layout, and although they both belong to
642 See Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 115.
643 Hanna, “The Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3,” 201.
644 Hanna, “Yorkshire Scribes,” 105.
645 Hanna, “The Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3,” 201.
207
the Lichfield Subgroup, there are numerous minor differences which suggest that either both
texts were based upon slightly different, but related exemplars, or that the scribe felt free to make
minor alterations at the level of line. The two comparable pages and their transcriptions shown in
Plates 4.3 and 4.4 demonstrate this phenomenon. In particular, I draw attention to some
differences at the level of decoration: the inclusion of a system of punctuation marks at the end
of each line in Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50; the inclusion of,
typically, small initials with red flourishes at the beginning of Latin quotations in Manchester,
John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50 compared to the simple lombards in BL, MS
Harley 1205; the rubrication of Latin quotations in BL, MS Harley 1205; and finally the system
of paraphs in BL, MS Harley 1205, which have been omitted in Manchester, John Rylands
University Library, MS Eng. 50.
At times the two texts show a high level of similarity. For example, we can compare the
following set of two couplets in which the primary changes occur in the use of abbreviations, the
substitution of “i” for “y” and vice versa, and at the level of substitution of prepositions and verb
tenses:
The þridde for þei to gider shal come
Byfore god at þe day of dome
The ferþe for whenne þei are comen þider
They shal ay aftir dwelle to gider (BL, MS Harley 1205, f. 1v, ll. 3-6)
As compared to:
The þridde for þei to gider shal come ;
Byfore god on the day of dome .
The ferþe whenne þei ben comen þider ;
Thei shul ay aftir dwelle to gider
(Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50, p. 52, ll. 7-10)
But if we compare two further sets of couplets, we can see more substantive differences at the
level of the substitution of words and even the alteration of rhymes:
And oute of monnes herte shule springe
And were lapped aboute wiþ herte strynge
And þe crop myȝt out at his mouþ swote
And to vche ioynt were fastened a rote (BL, MS Harley 1205, f. 2r, ll. 16-19)
As compared to:
208
Out of monnes herte to springe ;
And wrappede were wiþ herte stringe .
The croppe out of his mouþ he bere ;
And to vche ioynte a rote faste were .
(Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS Eng. 50, p. 53, ll. 16-19)
Whereas in BL, MS Harley 1205, the scribe has copied the more difficult reading—“And þe crop
myȝt out at his mouþ swote”—in Rylands, Eng. 50, we can see a simplified reading which may
have necessitated a change to the following line—“The croppe out of his mouþ he bere.”
The differences in word choice and rhymes in these two manuscripts suggest that the scribe may
have made changes to his text in the process of copying. This lends support to Horrall’s theory
that the Rylands Scribe not only engaged in dialect translation, but also may have potentially
compared, corrected, or attempted to improve upon the texts he worked with. If we take this in
conjunction with Hanna’s assertion that the Rylands Scribe appears to have “concocted” a
deviant text which combined Rolle’s Form of Living and Ego Dormio, then we may begin to be
able to characterize the copying habits of the scribe more precisely: that is, he likely had access
to a number of exemplars of northern vernacular religious texts and he may have been one of the
earliest of the Lichfield scribes to engage in the process of translating those texts into a Lichfield
dialect. The scribe was not a strictly duplicative copier; instead, he felt confident enough to
correct or emend, at times combining two texts to create a new text, at other times making
alterations at the level of word substitution or minor rewriting.
3.2.2 Concerted Production: The Trinity Scribe
If, as Matthew Fisher argues, copying can occupy “stylistic registers” then I want to turn to a
second scribe of the Lichfield Subgroup who engaged with his text in a very different way.646
When viewing BodL, MS Douce 156 and Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B I noticed remarkable
similarities between the two manuscripts, and I identified the second scribe of Oxford, Trinity
College MS 16B and the primary scribe of BodL, MS Douce 156 as the same scribe. Simon
Horobin, within the last month, also published an identification of this scribe, noting that this
scribe also acted as the second scribe of Holkham Hall, Wells, Norfolk, Library of the Earl of
646 Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 37.
209
Leicester, MS 668.647
However, as Horobin only provides brief mention of this identification
and no palaeographical analysis, in the section following, I will examine two of these
manuscripts in more detail—BodL, MS Douce 156 and Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B—to
demonstrate the intriguing collaborative copying practices of this scribe.
Fig. 4.3: Description of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B (Contents)
(See Plate 4.5)
Collation: i + 1-2v (remnants of a Latin Missal); 18-6
8, 7
8 (one leaf lost, stubs for
two more lost leafs); 86 (one leaf lost, an extra partial folio, trimmed, has been added
after f. 58); 98-10
8, 11
8 (final three leaves lost), 12
8 (lost), 13
8-15
8, 16
8 (final leaf
cancelled) + ii
Scribe 1: ff. 3-8v, l. 6; 30v, l. 19-31; 53r, l. 28-78v; 84r-84v, l. 24; 111v-114r;
Anglicana formata; Lichfield (Vernon Scribe A)
Scribe 2: ff. 8v, l. 7-30v, l. 18; 31v-53r, l. 27; 79-83v; 84v, l. 25-111; Anglicana
formata with traces of Secretary; Lichfield (Trinity Scribe)
Contents:
Remnants of a Latin Missal (ff. 1r-2v)
Prick of Conscience (ff. 3r-114v) [copied by Scribes 1 and 2]
Copying Breakdown by Quires
Quire 1 (ff. 3-10)
Scribe 1: ff. 3r-8v, l. 6
Scribe 2: ff. 8v l. 7-end
Quires 2-3 (ff. 11-26)
Scribe 2: complete text
Quire 4 (ff. 27-34)
Scribe 2: ff. 27r-30v, l. 18
Scribe 1: ff. 30v, l. 19-31
Scribe 2: ff. 31v-34v
Quires 5-6 (ff. 35-50)
Scribe 2: complete text
Quire 7 (ff. 51-55)
Scribe 2: ff. 51r-53r, l. 27
647 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 46.
210
Scribe 1: f. 53r, l. 28-end
Quires 8-10 (ff. 56-78)
Scribe 1: complete text
Quire 11 (ff. 79-83)
Scribe 2: complete text
Quire 12 (ff. 84-91)
Scribe 1: ff. 83r-84v, l. 24
Scribe 2: ff. 84v, l. 25-
Quires 13-14 (ff. 92-107)
Scribe 2: complete text
Quire 15 (ff. 108-114)
Scribe 2: ff. 108r-end of 111r
Scribe 1: ff. 111v-114v
Fig: 4.4: Description of BodL, MS Douce 156 (Contents)
Collation: i + 18 (-7), 2
8-3
8, 4a
8 (first five leaves present; remaining leaves are out of
order, after Quire 5), 58, 4b (remaining three leaves of Quire 4a), 6
8-10
8, 11
8 (-8) + i;
ends fragmentarily.
Scribe 1: ff. 1-173; set Anglicana formata; Central Midlands [Trinity Scribe]
Contents:
Prick of Conscience (ff. 1-173)
3.2.2.1 Collaborative Copying in Trinity College 16B
The first point I want to make is that, in comparison to the other copies of the PoC which I have
examined thus far, Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B is notable in that the copying of the scribes
is often not separated either by quires or by booklets; instead, the two scribes have shared
copying, taking over from one another within quires. Horobin argues that Vernon Scribe A also
supplied the Latin rubrics in the portions copied by the Trinity Scribe.648
This suggests a closer
form of collaborative copying than we have seen in other cases, with Vernon Scribe A possibly
648 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 45.
211
working in a supervisory capacity.649
A similar form of alternating copying is also used to
produce Holkham, Holkham Hall, Library of the Earl of Leicester, MS 668.650
In Plate 4.5, I
have reproduced f. 7v, the first point of transition between Vernon Scribe A and the Trinity
Scribe in BodL, MS Douce 156. Here, we can easily distinguish between the two hands, the first
of which (Vernon Scribe A) makes use of a thick-stroked Anglicana formata with the ascender of
the first initial extended into the left margin and the second of which is a thinner, somewhat
rushed, pointed Anglicana formata with some Secretary features.
The Manuscripts of the West Midlands project notes the following elements as characteristic of
the hand of the Trinity Scribe in this manuscript: flourished ascenders or tails of first initial on
each line extended into left margin; Sigma s in initial and final position; long s in medial
position; 2-shaped r in medial position; double compartment a; B-shaped w; v-shaped r in medial
position; descender of y has a much shorter flick up than that of Scribe 1; 8-shaped g.651
To these
I would add a pointed single compartment Secretary a, a pointed h with an angled stroke
between the ascender and hump alongside a smoother h, an l with the same angled stroke, and a
distinctly pointed d alongside a rounded d.
Fig. 4.5: Characteristics of the Trinity Scribe in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B
Flourished ascender
or tail
Sigma s
649 Ibid.
650 In this manuscript, Vernon Scribe A writes from the beginning of the text to l. 1047, then ll. 1076-2112,and ll.
8086-9624, alternating with the Trinity Scribe who writes ll. 4482-5480, ll. 5498-5767, and ll. 5818-8085. Cf.
Manuscripts of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Holkham, Holkham Hall, Library of the Earl of
Leicester, MS 668.
651 Manuscripts of the West Midlands: A Catalogue of Vernacular Manuscript Books of the English West Midlands,
c. 1300 - c. 1475 (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 2006), http://www.mwm.bham.ac.uk, accessed June 30,
2013, entry for Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B.
212
medial long s
medial 2-shaped r
double compartment
a
b-shaped w
medial v-shaped r
y with short descender
8-shaped g
Secretary a
pointed h with an
angled stroke
l with an angled
stroke
pointed d
The general angularity and untidier quality to the hand suggests that this was a lower-grade copy.
This assessment is supported by other features of the text, including a marked difference in the
213
quality of decorative initials at various stages of the manuscript (see, for example, Plate 4.6
which compares initials on f. 14v and f. 74v, the first of which occurs in the stint of the Trinity
Scribe and the second of which occurs in a stint of Vernon Scribe A). One also notes the
anomalous shift in the way Latin quotations are marked from rubrication of the same script to an
unrubricated, more set version of the same script which occurs in Vernon Scribe A’s stint on f.
56v (see Plate 4.7).
In comparison, BodL, MS Douce 156, completed by the Trinity Scribe alone, is a far more lavish
and well-executed manuscript (see Plate 4.8). BodL, MS Douce 156, on p. 1, includes a
substantial border decoration incorporating the first initial of the opening prayer and the first
initial of the Prologue, done in red and blue paint with gold leaf. It also includes blue initials with
red flourished penwork for minor divisions in the text as well as several larger initials which
mark the opening of each book, done in gold leaf on blue and crimson grounds decorated with
white vinework with, typically, triplets of barbed coloured balls, also in crimson and blue (see,
for example, p. 25). The majority of these have been excised.
3.2.2.2 Identifying the Hand of BodL, MS Douce 156
As I noted earlier, BodL, MS Douce 156 has been the subject of very little scrutiny, and until
very recently, no scholar had posited that BodL, MS Douce 156 and Oxford, Trinity College, MS
16B were both written in part by the Trinity Scribe. This identification may have been hampered
by the fact that the scribe appears to have switched his dialect between the two manuscripts,
employing a Staffordshire (or Lichfield) dialect in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B as indicated
by the Manuscripts of the West Midlands project and the Descriptive Guide and a central
Midlands dialect in BodL, MS Douce 156 as identified by the Descriptive Guide. Neither of
these manuscripts has been mapped by LALME. While switching dialects is unusual behaviour
for a scribe, it is not unprecedented. Vernon Scribe A, who collaborated with the Trinity Scribe
in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B also switches dialects between manuscripts. In Holkham
Hall, Library of the Earl of Leicester, MS 668 he employs a Staffordshire (or Lichfield) dialect.
In Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B his dialect is mixed, with elements of a Staffordshire (or
Lichfield) dialect and elements of a Worcestershire dialect. In Vernon and Simeon he employs a
214
Worcestershire dialect.652
Horobin suggests that he was capable of copying in both a Worcester
dialect and a Staffordshire dialect depending upon the nature of the commission and the dialect
of his exemplar.653
The identification of this scribe’s hand has also been hampered by the fact that the Trinity Scribe
employs a slightly different script in each of these two manuscripts. In Oxford, Trinity College,
MS 16B he employs a more cursive Anglicana Formata with a Secretary influence while in
BodL, MS Douce 156 he employs a set Anglicana Formata without any trace of a Secretary
influence. Nevertheless, the two scripts share many similarities at the letterform including the
extended initials on the first ascender, the Sigma s, the medial long s, the medial 2-shaped r, the
double compartment a, the B-shaped w, the lineal f, the 8-shaped g, the h and l with an angular
stroke (though this is less pronounced), and the pointed, circular d. In contrast, the single
compartment, Secretary a is only used initially in BodL, MS Douce 156, the y has a slightly
more hooked curve, and the v-shaped r has disappeared entirely. However, the differences might
be explained by the change to a more formal hand.
Fig. 4.6: Characteristics of the Trinity Scribe in BodL, MS Douce 156
ascender on first
initial
Sigma s
medial long s
medial 2-shaped r
652 For his stints in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, see LALME: LP 7670, p. 250. For his stints in Holkham
Hall, Wells, the Earl of Leicester, MS 668, he is identified as writing in a Lichfield dialect; see LALME, 239.
653 Horobin, “Mapping the Words,” 70.
215
double compartment
a
b-shaped w
y with short descender
8-shaped g
Secretary a (only in
capital A)
pointed h with an
angled stroke
l with an angled
stroke
pointed d
3.2.2.3 The Layout of BodL, MS Douce 156
A final piece of evidence provides an intriguing link between Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B
and BodL, MS Douce 156: the substantial similarities between their layouts. In my previous
discussion of the Ripon cluster of manuscripts, I noted that the scribes of the area engaged in
duplicative copying in order to replicate “canonical” texts. Here, I argue that the Trinity Scribe
also had an impulse toward duplicative copying, albeit a less consistent form. In this case, he
appears to have upgraded BodL, MS Douce 156 by adding elements such as running titles,
paraphs and a more elaborate system of decoration. In Plate 4.9, I have included two comparative
216
examples in which the format, lineation, and decoration have been retained in both manuscripts.
Several features of the manuscripts are evident: both Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B and
BodL, MS Douce 156 are of a similar size (242 x 158 mm and 252 x 150 mm, respectively);
both contain 34-35 lines per page in a single column; both retain the same lineation throughout;
both use a similar system of rubrication to mark out Latin quotations; and finally, and most
interestingly, both share a remarkable duplication of ascender flourishes as I show in Plate 4.10.
The copying of these two manuscripts provides important insights into the procedures by which
texts might be replicated. Horobin suggests, “They are page for page the same and clearly derive
from the same exemplar.”654
However, if we consider how these manuscripts were copied, three
possibilities present themselves: firstly, both manuscripts have been copied from a lost exemplar;
secondly, Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B is a less elaborate copy of BodL, MS Douce 156;
thirdly, BodL, MS Douce 156 is an “upgraded” copy of Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B. Of
these possibilities, I believe that the third is most likely. There are several reasons for this. At the
level of the text, several errors occur in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B that do not appear in
BodL, MS Douce 156 (although it is possible that correct readings in BodL, MS Douce 156 have
been corrupted in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B). Furthermore, BodL, MS Douce 156, at the
conclusion of the “Entre” or Prologue includes an additional couplet (likely a scribal
interpolation) which is omitted in Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B:
In vche partie fynde men may
Diuerse materes & goode to say
Þat wreten is bifore to loke
Nis but þe entree of þis booke
Of which is an ende made
Ffil þe cuppe & make vs glade655
Because of the marked similarities in layout and the attention to duplicative copying, it seems to
me more likely that a final couplet would be added to an “upgraded” manuscript than that two
lines would be omitted, particularly because of their general prominence and visibility at the end
of a major section of text.
654 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 46.
655 BodL, MS Douce 156, p. 8 (my emphasis).
217
The second reason I have for believing that BodL, MS Douce 156 is a copy of Oxford, Trinity
College, MS 16B concerns the dialect of the texts and speaks to my broad argument regarding
the mechanisms of spread at work in the production of the PoC. In Oxford, Trinity College, MS
16B, both Vernon Scribe A and the Trinity Scribe copy in a Lichfield or Staffordshire dialect.656
In contrast, in BodL, MS Douce 156, the Trinity Scribe copies in a Worcester dialect. Similarly,
in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, Vernon Scribe A also copies in a North Worcester
dialect. As I mentioned earlier, on the surface, this behaviour seems somewhat anomalous.
Angus McIntosh identifies three possible scribal copying strategies: a scribe could translate a
text entirely into his own linguistic repertoire; a scribe could copy a text exactly as written,
literatim, preserving all spelling features; and, finally, a scribe could partially translate a text,
resulting in a so-called Mischsprache—a “linguistic output containing two or more elements that
are mutually incompatible…from non-contiguous areas within the established dialect
continuum.”657
In the late fourteenth century we would be more likely to expect a scribe’s
linguistic output to be generally consistent across multiple manuscripts—that is, to be either fully
translated into the scribe’s native register or else to be of a mixed dialect. But scribes were
flexible creatures, and, as Horobin reminds us, “[i]tinerant professional copyists would have
come across exemplars in a variety of dialects and would often have had cause to adjust their
repertoires accordingly.”658
In a case such as this in which a scribe substantially shifts his
dialect, one presumes that one of the dialects could represent the dialect of the exemplar (or a
close form) while the other could represent a translation into the native register of the scribe.
Although it is impossible to know from the dialect alone which is the scribe’s original and which
is that of an exemplar, it seems to me more likely that the native dialect of both the Trinity Scribe
and Vernon Scribe A is better represented by the Worcester dialect. And in this regard, it is
important to understand the nature of Vernon Scribe A’s career: as I noted earlier, he copied in a
Worcester dialect the chronicle and cartulary of Stoneleigh Abbey, the daughter house of
Bordesley in north Worcestershire, in 1392 and 1393, and then added documents in 1407 and
656 Cf. Manuscripts of the West Midlands, accessed June 30, 2013, entry for Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B.
657 See Section 1.4, introduction to LAEME. See further, McIntosh, et al., LALME, 13-16.
658 Horobin, “Mapping the Words,” 68.
218
1411.659
Doyle has also identified his hand in two views of a frankpledge dated October, 1406,
and May, 1407, for Radway, a manor further south that belonged to Stoneleigh. The preface to
the cartulary was written by a retired abbot named Thomas Pype who refers to the fact that his
successor at Stoneleigh, Thomas Halton has sent him a writer (possibly the scribe in question?),
and also mentions the handling and dispatch of an exemplar and copied text.660
Pype had
connections to Lichfield. As Horobin has discovered, in 1373 Pype was involved in a set of
property transactions involving his ancestral home. An important figure in these transactions was
John de Stafford, who took control of Thomas Pype’s relative, Margery, only surviving child of
Henry de Pype. John de Stafford was himself a canon of Lichfield Cathedral.661
This
identification suggests that Thomas Pype had connections to Lichfield as well as to Stoneleigh.
This gives us some indication of Vernon Scribe A’s career: he had some form of longstanding
association, possibly over twenty years in length, with the Cistercians of Stoneleigh and he was a
scribe who may have moved from location to location in the process of collecting and passing on
exemplars and copied texts. Horobin suggests that the Vernon Scribe A’s career was similar to
that of the Rylands Scribe: “a legal scrivener who drafted property conveyances and grants for a
range of clients” and “an itinerant professional scrivener with connections with both Stoneleigh
and Lichfield rather than a Cistercian monk resident at Stoneleigh.”662
As Horobin notes, one
such location he visited was very likely the area around Lichfield where he may have copied
texts for the canons of the cathedral and obtained exemplars which he copied, literatim, either in
Lichfield itself, or which he carried back to Worcester and copied there. From this, it might be
inferred tha the Worcester dialect is his native dialect whereas the Lichfield dialect represents his
exemplar’s dialect.
It is possible that the Trinity Scribe may have followed a similar trajectory: that is, he copied in
collaboration with Vernon Scribe A two manuscripts of the PoC (Oxford, Trinity College, MS
16B and Holkhall, Earl of Leicester’s Library, Holkham Hall, MS 668). When he copied these
659 See Doyle, introduction to Vernon Manuscript, 5-6 and 12-13.
660 Doyle, introduction to Vernon Manuscript, 12. See also Hilton, The Stoneleigh Leger Book.
661 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 43-44.
662 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 44.
219
manuscripts, he copied literatim and preserved the dialect of the exemplar, perhaps because he
was unfamiliar with the text. He may then have used Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B as an
exemplar for the production of a second manuscript of higher quality, BodL, MS Douce 156,
translating the text into his native dialect as he became more comfortable with what it contained.
He used the format, layout, and even marginal decorations of this exemplar as a guide to creating
a more elaborate form still generally consistent with the copying habits which shaped the layout
of the text. Horobin echoes this assessment:
…these three manuscripts witness to the collaborative efforts of two scribes supplying
copies of the Prick of Conscience in a standard layout but in varying decorative formats
for customers with different budgets. The relationship among these three manuscripts,
their exemplars, and the two scribes who copied them, are suggestive of a
professionalized production process.663
In this respect, the copying of these two scribes follows a similar pattern to the copying in Ripon,
where scribes had a tendency to reproduce (or replicate) copies of the PoC in an identical format,
although in that case Hanna hypothesizes the manuscripts were created by canons whereas in this
case they were more likely written by itinerant professional scribes.
If this hypothetical scenario is correct, then Oxford, Trinity College, MS 16B and BodL, MS
Douce 156 offer examples of the complex process of canon formation that occurs when texts are
selected and replicated. If Vernon Scribe A and the Trinity Scribe travelled to Lichfield where
they encountered a group of scribes actively engaged in producing multiple copies of the PoC,
then it must have been easy for them to obtain cheap exemplars which they could duplicate,
creating more elaborate copies, possibly for readers in their native region of Worcestershire. In
this way, a text such as the PoC would have spread beyond the region of initial production,
through a variety of channels of transmission and translation, into an ever-widening area of
circulation.
663 Horobin, “Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript,” 46.
220
3.2.3 Canonizing the Prick of Conscience: The Creation of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts
In my discussion of the manuscripts copied by the Trinity Scribe, I speculated that this scribe
may have upgraded his second manuscript with running titles, paraphs, and a more lavish
program of initials. In some respects, then, we might see the production of BodL, MS Douce 156
as part of the canonizing impulse I have suggested may have shaped the production of
manuscripts of the PoC in Lichfield. In this section, I want to turn to two final example—the
Vernon and Simeon manuscripts—copied by the Trinity Scribe’s collaborator, Vernon Scribe A,
in which we can see similar canonizing impulses at work.
Libraries in magno, the ornate Vernon manuscript and its sister compilation the Simeon
manuscript are two of the most important compilations of English religious poetry from the
fourteenth century. Vernon measures 572 x 394 mm and consists of 341 folios, decorated with
illuminated initials, borders, and miniatures completed by two artists. It was copied by two
scribes, the Vernon scribe who copied the bulk of the materials throughout, and Vernon Scribe A
who copied the table of contents and Ailred of Rievaulx’s Informacio ad Sororem Suam. Simeon
is of a similar size, 590 x 390 mm, although it probably never ran to as many folios as Vernon.
Simeon was copied by four scribes, two of which also copied texts in Vernon. I draw attention to
these two manuscripts because they are witnesses to an important, and impressive, canonizing
impulse. These manuscripts would have been exceptionally expensive due to their size and lavish
decoration. One need only turn to the expensive and elaborate miniature which prefaces the PoC
on f. 265r of Vernon to understand the resources put forward in order to create these books.
Doyle estimates that each leaf may have been one or two days’ work for a single hand; it
probably would have taken several years and a cost of between £50 and £100 to complete both
volumes.664
Consequently, the question of who the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts were
produced for remains both interesting and unresolved. In this section, I show that the production
of the PoC in the Lichfield area offers possible answers.
Scholars have suggested a range of possible contexts including an English nunnery, a monastic
house, or even possibly a noble or royal chamber. Of these suggestions, a female religious
664 Doyle, “The Shaping of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts,” 2.
221
audience has gained the most support, in part because several of the texts included in Vernon and
Simeon—the Ancrene Wisse, Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, the Latin De Institutione inclusarum,
and Rolle’s English writings—were initially composed as practical guides for religious
women.665
Kerby-Fulton, in her recent summary of the production contexts of the Vernon
manuscript, writes:
Its library-sized collection of 403 religious, moral, and literary works packed tidily into
the 350 surviving folios would undoubtedly have provided a wide and appropriate range
of reading for monastic women. Its physical size (544 x 393 mm.) renders it much too
large (and much too heavy at over fifty pounds!) to have been used anywhere but on a
lectern, where a small group of nuns (and many English nunneries were small) could
have enjoyed Vernon’s lavish decoration and illustration as well as its finely executed
script. Since the manuscript also features texts punctuated for reading aloud, we might
imagine it situated in a monastic refectory as well, where saints’ lives and other fortifying
words like those found in Vernon would be read at meal times.666
Doyle first suggested an original home at Nuneaton, a house of Fontrevraud in Warwickshire
where at least one other manuscript (the trilingual Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS
McClean 123) was left to the priory by the learned prioress Margaret Sylemon in the 1380s,
approximately the same time at which Vernon and Simeon were written.667
Alternately, Kari
Sajavaara suggested the volume may have been produced in the Cistercian community at
Bordesley Abbey in Worcestershire, in part because of the written dialect of the scribes of the
manuscript (a point I will return to).668
In addition to suggesting Bordesley Abbey, Hanna has
added the possibility of Bordesley’s two daughter establishments (Stoneleigh and Mervale) as
well as another Cistercian house in the area (Combe) or possibly “some consortium of these.”669
The possible Cistercian connection has been noted by other scholars as well. Kerby-Fulton
suggests that the presence of a monk in white robes in the bottom right of the lavish illustration
which opens the PoC in Vernon “might indicate that this manuscript was made for Cistercian
monks, of whom he is one, but it could also relate to such a person being a donor of the
665 Cf. Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, 113.
666 Kerby-Fulton, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts, 298.
667 Kerby-Fulton, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts, 298. See also Bell, What Nuns Read, 158.
668 Sajavaara, “The Relationship of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts,” 439. See also Doyle, introduction to The
Vernon Manuscript, 15.
669 Hanna, English Manuscripts, 158.
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manuscript.”670
She adds that a Cistercian house is suggested by text like the translation of
Aelred’s De institutione, the life of Bernard of Clairvaux which has been attached to the South
English Legendary, and the Miracles of Our Lady. She notes also that Vernon shares fourteen
English items in common with BL, MS Add. 37787, a collection of English and Latin made
shortly after 1388, possibly for a monk of Bordesley by the name of John Northwood.671
Further
to this, as I outlined in the previous section, Vernon Scribe A provides the final, substantial
connection between Vernon, Simeon and a possible Cistercian house because his hand appears in
the chronicle and cartulary of Stoneleigh Abbey, the daughter house of Bordesley, in 1392 and
1393, and again in 1407 and 1411, as well as in two views of a frankpledge for Stoneleigh’s
manor, Radway.672
However, a stumbling block for this line of inquiry, as Doyle points out, is
that these Cistercian communities would have been hard pressed to muster the funds for such a
lavish book: the cost of the two manuscripts would have equalled about half of the entire yearly
income for Stoneleigh Abbey.673
There is, however, another theory. Hughes and Catto make a compelling argument that we ought
to see the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts as repositories of the sorts of northern vernacular
religious texts discussed in this chapter, possibly commissioned for or by Richard Scrope,
Bishop of Lichfield and Chester from 1386 to 1398.674
Hughes and Catto both suggest Lichfield
as a possible place of production, and in the recent edited volume The Making of the Vernon
Manuscript, both Doyle and Horobin support this theory.675
I have already noted the fact that the
Rylands Scribe, known also as the Lichfield master, likely wrote inscriptions in both Vernon and
Simeon indicating that he was present when both volumes were under construction although he
670 Kerby-Fulton, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts, 170. Scott suggests that the columbines hanging from
the bottom border of the page with the Trinity panel might indicate a Benedictine/Norwich connection. Contra the
Cistercian identification, Wendy Scase argues that this might be intended to depict Richard Rolle in “Patronage
Symbolism and Sowlehele,” 235-238.
671 Ibid., 300. For the connection between those texts, see Scudder Baugh, 37-39.
672 See Doyle, introduction to the Vernon Manuscript, 5-6 and 12-13.
673 Doyle, introduction to the Vernon Manuscript, 14, 15.
674 Cf. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 214, and Catto, “1349-1412: Culture and History,” 125.
675 Doyle, “Codicology, Palaeography, and Provenance,” 23. Cf. Horobin, “The Scribes of the Vernon Manuscript.”
Surprisingly, Scase does not address the potential Lichfield origin of the manuscript in her chapters assessing
possible lines of patronage in “Patronage Symbolism and Sowlehele” and “The Patronage of the Vernon
Manuscript.”
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did not write any portion of the main text. These notes indicate that he was requested to copy
three to four quires consisting of the Speculum vitae for Thomas Henelay, a canon of Lichfield.
In further support of the connection between these two manuscripts and the Lichfield copying,
several of the exemplars of the manuscript have been identified as Lichfield texts. Hughes and
Hanna have both recognized that the anomalous copy of Rolle’s Form of Living and Ego Dormio
in Vernon descended, possibly with the intervention of a single exemplar, from BodL, MS Rawl.
A.389, the compilation of Rollean texts copied by the Rylands Scribe.676
The possible exemplar
(or exemplars) for the PoC in these two manuscripts presents a more complicated case. Building
upon the work of Angus McIntosh, Robert Lewis concluded that the PoC in Simeon at least was
copied from multiple exemplars:
First, there were at least two copies of the Pricke of Conscience in the scriptorium, for a
time at least….Second, both manuscripts use the same exemplar for most of their text of
the poem, diverging only for ll. 3784-4620, with Simeon the one to change exemplars.
Third, to judge from the order of contents in this part of each manuscript and from the
error in Simeon that puts the title to the Pricke of Conscience at the end of Speculum Vite,
one can feel pretty certain that Vernon was the model for Simeon, but that Simeon was
not just a copy of Vernon.677
The first of these exemplars, he suggests, was close to BL, MS Harley 1205 (copied by the
Rylands Scribe); the second was a related copy, but possibly further from the original.678
Thus, it
appears to be the case that at least two of the northern texts included in Vernon and Simeon are
closely related to copies first produced by the Rylands Scribe in Lichfield, a scribe whose works
also circulated amongst the canons of Lichfield.
These connections suggest a close relationship between the copying of the PoC and the works of
Rolle in Lichfield and the copying of the massive compendia of the Vernon and Simeon
manuscripts. But rather than contradicting the work of Doyle, Kerby-Fulton and others, this
Lichfield connection allows us to fill in some of the gaps in respect to how these exemplars were
obtained and who might have supplied the financial resources to create such a massive
676 Hanna, “Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3,” 38, and Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 214.
677 Lewis, “The Relationship of the Vernon and Simeon Texts,” 259.
678 Ibid. Note, also, that Lewis and McIntosh in the Descriptive Guide suggest that BL, MS Harley 1205 was the
original exemplar for the subgroup.
224
compendium. Doyle remarks that Vernon and Simeon would have required a large collection of
vernacular manuscripts, the procurement of which would have required “a very wide knowledge
of existing religious literature, old and new.”679
Similarly, as Kerby-Fulton argues, one of the
biggest stumbling blocks to identifying the intended audience of Vernon and Simeon is
economic:
Bordesley was far from a wealthy house, and for a smaller community like Stoneleigh,
Vernon and Simeon together would have cost half its annual income. The [economic]
problem is eliminated, however, if we imagine a wealthy patron from outside the
community, perhaps one whose arms would have filled the outline of a small shield that
dangles from the bottom of the border decoration at the opening of the manuscript’s
second section (see fol. 105rv).680
If we imagine that the production of Vernon and Simeon may have been related to the copying in
Lichfield, then a possible patron presents himself: Richard Scrope, Bishop of Lichfield and
Chester from 1386 to 1398, or one of the Cambridge-educated clerks who were part of his circle.
Although Hughes suggested Scrope as a possible patron in 1988, and Catto further supported this
position in 2011 when he argued “it is tempting to speculate that [Vernon] was made to be
consulted at Lichfield Cathedral, about 1395, at the instigation of bishop Richard Scrope,” few
scholars have investigated the connection in any detail and Wendy Scase does not investigate it
in her chapter on “The Patronage of the Vernon Manuscript.”681
In the following section, I will
briefly summarize Scrope’s career to show his potential interest in a textual project of this sort.
3.2.3.1 Richard Scrope and the Possible Patronage of Vernon and Simeon
Born about 1350, Richard Scrope was the third son of Henry Scrope, first Baron Scrope of
Masham. A careerist by nature, educated first in Oxford and afterwards in Cambridge where he
served as Chancellor in 1378, Scrope rose quickly through the Church hierarchy, proving himself
to be an able administrator and a talented man of letters. During his early years, he and a number
of northern clerks educated at Cambridge, primarily at Peterhouse, were employed in the
679 Doyle, “The Shaping of the Vernon and Simeon Manuscripts,” 6.
680 Kerby-Fulton, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts, 300.
681 Catto, “1349-1412: Culture and History,” 126. Wendy Scase suggests the Beauchamp family as the most likely
patrons in “The Patronage of the Vernon Manuscript.”
225
diocesan administration by Thomas Arundel, then the Bishop of Ely—the same Arundel who
would implement the Constitutions in 1409, which curtailed the creation of some questionable
works of vernacular theology.682
Although Arundel was for some time regarded by scholars as a
draconian censurer of vernacular theology, nevertheless, for the majority of his career, he
attempted to “outface the attraction of the Lollards” by promoting orthodox texts such as the
PoC.683
In 1410, for example, Arundel officially approved Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the
Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, a text which explicitly countered Lollardy. Aston suggests there are
enough links between Arundel, Mount Grace and Nicholas Love for it to “seem plausible that the
archbishop might have sponsored the production of the book.”684
Hughes argues that the
connection between Arundel and Nicholas Love, prior of the Yorkshire charterhouse at Mount
Grace may have formed when Arundel spent time in York between 1408 and 1411.685
Like
Scrope, many members of Arundel’s Ely circle would continue to be supporters of pastoral care
and vernacular theology throughout the following fifty years, and several of them can be
associated with Scrope’s tenure in Lichfield and York. One such member, for example, was John
Newton, who took orders and was ordained a priest by Arundel in 1380. He then followed the
usual path of ecclesiastical careerism under the patronage of Arundel, serving in Staffordshire,
Northamptonshire, and Lincolnshire. He would later go on to amass impressive personal libraries
in the counties of York and Durham, and often entertained his own circle of scholars and
theologians.686
Newton apparently owned Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 35, a manuscript
containing various texts of Rolle and Bonaventure, as well as Honorius of Autun’s Cognitio
vitae, which he may have corrected with one of Rolle’s original manuscripts.687
Another possible
member of Arundel’s circle was the author Walter Hilton, a clerk of Lincoln in 1371, who served
in the Ely consistory court in Cambridge in 1375. Hilton attempted to live as a hermit for some
682 Cf. Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change.”
683 Catto, “1349-1412: Culture and History,” 124.
684 Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350-1600, 82. Opinions differ as to the nature of
Arundel’s connection with the book. See, for example, Doyle, “Reflections on Some Manuscripts of Nicholas
Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ,” 82-93 and Hudson, Premature Reformation, 437-440.
685 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 186.
686 Friedman, Northern English Books, 203.
687 Hughes, “The Administration of Confession,” 105.
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time before he eventually settled for membership as an Augustinian canon.688
In the late 1380s,
Hilton wrote a number of texts including the Epistola de Leccione, Intencione, Oracione,
Meditacione et Aliis, the brief treatise in English Of Angels' Song, as well as his major work, the
Scale of Perfection. It is also possible that Hilton translated the popular Latin text Stimulus
amoris into English under the name The Prickynge of Love (both of which appear in Vernon and
Simeon).689
In 1382 Richard Scrope was instituted Dean of Chichester, and four years later on 18 August,
1386 he became Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. He would serve in Lichfield for thirteen
years before being translated to York in 1398. Scrope, like many in his extended family, must
have had an avid interest in northern devotional and didactic texts. His uncle Geoffrey Scrope, a
canon of Lincoln in 1381, left a book of devotion to John Bautre, a vicar choral of York Minster,
and a copy of a manuscript entitled Hostienses to Richard Scrope himself in 1384.690
His nephew
Henry Lord Scrope of Masham, owned an autographed volume of Rolle’s works as well as a
copy of the PoC. Richard Scrope may well have met Margaret Kirkby when he was rector of
Ainderby in Richmondshire from 1367 to 1376, when Margaret was a recluse there.691
His
family had been her early patrons. Geoffrey Scrope bequeathed twenty shillings to an anchoress
of Hampole in 1382 who may well have been Margaret Kirkby.692
Hughes suggests that Scrope
introduced Rolle’s works to the clerks of Arundel’s circle.693
When Scrope assumed the bishopric of Lichfield and Coventry, he would have surrounded
himself with a household of clerks, many of whom were educated at Cambridge and several of
whom he brought with him to York in 1398, including John Gylby, Thomas Hilton, and his
precentor at Lichfield Cathedral, Robert Wolveden. Clerks such as Gylby, Hilton and Wolveden,
as I have noted earlier, were the sort of men who would have actively read and used northern
688 Ellis and Fanous, “1349-1412: Texts,” 145.
689 Cf. Hanna, The Index of Middle English Prose, xiv.
690 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 203. Cf. Thompson, “The Registers of the Archdeaconry of Richmond, 1361-
1442.”
691 Margaret Kirkby held a cell in the Ainderby churchyard in 1357, and lived there until she relocated to Hampole
in around 1381. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 87.
692 Stokes and Bragg, Market Harborough Records, 50.
693 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 203.
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devotional and didactic books. Upon the death in 1414 of John Newton, a residentiary canon of
the York Chapter, John Gylby would preside as executor with Thomas Haxey, King’s Clerk,
over the transfer of at least seventy books—forty on law and the rest theology, scriptural
commentaries, and the didactic works of northerners like Hoveden, Rolle, and Rymington—in
order to found the York Minster Library.694
It was also likely the members of Scrope and
Arundel’s clerical circles who arranged to have Rolle’s texts copied and translated systematically
“into a larger literary world in which texts were scrutinized, licensed, and proliferated
systematically for the edification of a sophisticated and independent-minded laity.”695
In many ways, then, as both Hughes and Catto have argued, Scrope represents an ideal candidate
to patronize the production of manuscripts of the northern vernacular religious verse.696
His
family had long been involved in the patronage of the works of Richard Rolle, and he himself
had long been a vigorous proponent of pastoral care and a supporter of orthodox vernacular texts,
a point that fits well with Heffernan’s speculation that Vernon and Simeon were produced “as a
concerted response to the religious controversy of the period.”697
David Lawton and Susanna
Fein have echoed this sentiment.698
Scrope’s connection with Thomas Arundel might also
explain Doyle’s note that on f. 1 of the Simeon manuscript the name “Joan Bohun” appears in a
small hand. Joan Bohun was Thomas Arundel’s sister and the wife of Humphrey Bohun, a man
whose family, Staley suggests, patronized much of the manuscript art of the period.699
Further to
this, Joan Bohun has links with a number of religious volumes: her death is noted in the Luttrell
Psalter; she may have owned Oxford, New College, MS 65, an Anglo-Norman apocalypse; and
Thomas Hoccleve even translated for her the verse “Complaint of the Virgin.”700
One possible
694 Friedman, Northern English Books, 205.
695 Ibid., 114-5.
696 Cf. Catto, “1349-1412: Culture and History,” 135. Hughes argues that the attribution of the unified text of the
Form of Living and Ego Dormio in Vernon to “quodam notabile Ricardi Rolle hermite” suggests an “informed
ancestry within the region that Rolle lived”; consequently, he suggests Scrope as a possible patron in Pastors and
Visionaries, 186.
697 Heffernan, “Orthodoxies’ Redux,” 79.
698 Cf. Lawton, “Englishing the Bible,” 448 and Fein, “Example to the Soulehele,” 193-4.
699 Staley, Languages of Power, 257. Doyle, introduction to the Vernon Facsimile, 15-16. Cf. Sandler, The
Lichtenthal Psalter .
700 Cf. Jambeck, “Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England, 1200-ca. 1475,” 236-37.
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explanation of the production of the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts is that Vernon was
produced, either for use in Lichfield as Catto speculates, or simply using the resources of
Lichfield for a monastic house elsewhere, possibly in Worcestershire.At the same time, Simeon,
the smaller sister volume, may have been copied using the same exemplars, materials, scribes
and decorators, for use by Joan Bohun in her widowhood.
Scase pursues a secondary connection with both Joan Bohun and Thomas Arundel. She connects
the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts with the possible patronage of the Beauchamp family.701
The Beauchamp family was well-connected with Thomas Arundel and with the Bohuns. Joan
Fitzalan, wife of William Beauchamp, was the daughter of Richard Fitzalan, third earl of
Arundel and eighth earl of Surrey (Thomas Arundel’s brother) and she was the granddaughter of
William de Bohun, earl of Northampton. As Scase argues, William Beauchamp and his family
also shared the “interests, ideological leanings, background, connections, and associations”
which fulfill “the conditions for the patronage and production necessary for Vernon.”702
This
interconnected network of families interested in vernacular texts, including career ecclesiasts and
members of noble households, suggests that we ought to expand the scope of our inquiry beyond
a Cistercian house to include a broader spectrum of possible patrons.
I want to conclude by suggesting, then, that one way of regarding the production of the Vernon
and Simeon manuscripts was as a deliberate act of canonization, in which materials were
selected and replicated in two lavishly decorated books in order to elevate the status of the texts
contained within in the same way that the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, copied by a single scribe
and decorated with a series of illustrations, appears to canonize Chaucer’s most famous text.
Such a gesture—which Heffernan recognizes in Vernon as “an attempt to give pride of place to
the hallowed traditions of orthodoxy in the vernacular”703
—would have been a powerful signal
that some vernacular religious texts had achieved a high status, enshrined as they were within
this “monument to semi-popular religious literature of the Middle English period.”704
701 See, Scase, “The Patronage of the Vernon Manuscript,” esp. 288-292.
702 Ibid., 293.
703 Heffernan, “Orthodoxies’ Redux,” 79.
704 Blake, “Vernon Manuscript,” 59.
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4 Conclusions
This chapter confirms the argument made by Hanna and others that Lichfield constituted a major
site of the production of northern vernacular religious texts, of which the PoC appears to have
been a particularly popular example. It may be the case that we have a model of production
similar, in some respects, to the production of northern religious vernacular manuscripts in Ripon
in that these manuscripts could have been copied predominantly by canons, vicars or chaplains
associated with Lichfield Cathedral. Nevertheless, there is a substantially greater “porousness” to
the Lichfield cluster of manuscripts. While a number of manuscripts seem to have been copied in
a Lichfield or Staffordshire area dialect within the cluster, others are from various areas in the
central or Southwest Midlands. What I posit, then, is that a certain portion of the copying may
have been centralized in Lichfield itself, and may have attracted scribes from the area or,
alternately, that exemplars may have simply traveled or been transmitted to other areas of the
country. For example, the Grosseteste Subgroup—spread across Worcester, Gloucester and
Somerset—offer an example of a northern text travelling beyond regional boundaries.
Further to this, we can see the production of manuscripts of the PoC as part of a complex process
of canonization in which scribes and their patrons selected texts and then replicated them in a
variety of ways which marked them as important cultural objects. In both Ripon and Lichfield,
the earliest stages of copying show more willingness on the part of scribes to rewrite, edit or
amend their texts, while the later stages of copying tend to be primarily duplicative, in which the
layout, lineation, and mise-en-page were preserved. This tendency toward duplicative copying,
in turn, created a set of expectations about what a text might look like, a process also evident in
the copying of manuscripts of Langland, Gower, and Lydgate. In Lichfield, we can also see at
work a process of upgrading in which some later copies appear to be more ornately decorated
than some earlier copies upon which they may have been based. We might then understand this
process of upgrading as a dynamic interplay between the recognized increased prestige of the
text and attempts to make the text appear more prestigious. The greatest example of this sort of
textual canonization can be seen in the making of the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, two of
the most lavish and important anthologies of Middle English religious verse to survive.
The PoC was one of England’s first truly national texts, a text surviving in substantial numbers
and representing a wide range of English dialects. Although, like many northern vernacular
230
religious texts, it may have been first conceived of and promoted as a regional text, circulating
predominantly in Yorkshire, nevertheless, the text was translated into a less regionally distinct
dialect in Lichfield where it proliferated, copied by secular clerks and professional scriveners for
a range of patrons which likely included the canons of the cathedral. This production of multiple
copies of a text in turn enabled the dissemination of the text to an increasingly broad audience.
Returning to Mooney and Stubbs’s assertion that Chaucer might be considered the “Father of
English Literature” because his works were among those of his generation “produced in
sufficient numbers to reach a wider audience,” we can begin to see how the PoC might offer a
parallel model for creation of a national literary culture. This chapter, then, extends my critique
of Hanna’s claim that vernacular texts, in contrast with Latin texts, had “no single literary canon
and, consequently, no single set of institutions to stimulate literary activity and to mandate
various forms of more or less standardized manuscript production.”705
The vast majority of
medieval literary canons—Latin, French and Middle English—were continually engaged in a
process of selection and adjustment, reproduction and modification as they responded to the
needs of their local audiences. Consequently, we ought not to imagine that the fourteenth and
fifteenth century ever produced a single national literary culture; rather, the production of texts
and books was invigorated by the interpenetration of paradigms, by the collaboration of scribes
and patrons, and by the inherent porousness of communities of readers and writers.
705 Hanna, “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity,” 47.
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Concluding Thoughts
This dissertation has drawn together a number of existing strands of thought in scholarship—
booklet theory, the importance of miscellaneity, and the renewed focus on the identification of
scribal hands and networks of manuscript production—to broaden our understanding of the
contexts from which Middle English manuscripts arose in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
centuries and to shed light upon a number of texts that have been frequently ignored in literary
studies to date. My work has developed in important ways from the research of other scholars,
particularly that of Ralph Hanna III and Christopher Cannon. In undertaking this research, I have
asked how manuscripts might add to a literary history that is often discussed in terms of texts and
not books, and in doing so, I have aimed to begin to address the relationship between Middle
English literature and the work of writers in other insular languages of this period, Latin and
Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French; to see the production of Middle English manuscripts as
intrinsically linked to the production of a host of other kinds of manuscripts; to see manuscript
codicology and literary form in conversation; and to trace the networks of production which gave
rise to England literary culture through the analysis of dialect, handwriting, codicology and
marks of provenance. When undertaking research of this sort one is always struck by the
immensity of the task at hand and the monumental amount of work still to be done. My research
has only confirmed this for me.
My concluding remarks focus on three particular areas that my dissertation has addressed, that I
plan to focus on in my continuing post-doctoral research. First, my dissertation has, I hope,
begun to contextualize the forces which transformed the isolated, singular and irregular
production of Middle English literature in the early fourteenth century to the continuous and
organized production associated with the corpus of well-recognized authors such as John
Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fifteenth century. At the same time, I
have aimed to provide examples of the way in which Middle English texts were produced in the
232
fifteenth century beyond that corpus of well-recognized literary authors. In studying several of
the many surviving manuscripts and fragments of the Prick of Conscience, I was struck by the
wealth of data yet to be processed. The study of scribes producing Middle English manuscripts
has been hampered by the difficulty of accessing archival materials, comparing the data obtained
from medieval manuscripts (for example, the use of certain scripts or layout), and by a
dependence on the “paleographic eye”—that is, the exposure to a sufficient number of sample
manuscripts that allows the palaeographer to recognize patterns instinctually. Work by scholars
such as the late Malcolm Parkes, A.I. Doyle, Linne R. Mooney, Estelle Stubbs and Simon
Horobin has done much in recent decades to formalize the processes by which palaeographers
identify features of certain scribal hands.706
New technology has made those processes more
widely applicable, by more scholars. An increasing number of manuscripts have been made
available in digital form. Recent projects like the AHRC-funded “Late Medieval English
Scribes” project completed in 2011 and the Mellon Foundation-funded collaboration
“Manuscript Studies in an Interoperable Digital Environment”707
for which I have served as a
research assistant have benefited from the increased digitization of manuscripts, and from the
development of electronic tools that make comparison of the features of manuscripts easier—for
example tools for the annotation of images of manuscripts (Drew University’s Digital
MappaeMundi tool) or the transcription of manuscript texts (Saint Louis University’s TPEN).
These projects have employed a similar methodology to that pioneered by Parkes, Doyle, and
706 A selection of the research which has produced this methodology includes M. B. Parkes’s English Cursive Book
Hands 1250-1500, which documents and provides examples of the palaeography of English scribes; also Their
Hands Before Our Eyes and Pages from the Past which provide further details about the context for scribal
production. Doyle’s works include several notable studies of book ownership and production including “'Book
Production by the Monastic Orders in England,” “English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VI”
and “'The English Provincial Book Trade before Printing” as well as numerous articles and books addressing
individual manuscripts or corpuses. Mooney, Stubbs and Horobin have developed more detailed methods of
profiling scribes. For the identification of hands, see Mooney, “Professional Scribes?” in New Directions in
Medieval Manuscript Studies and see Horobin’s elaboration on the techniques associated with identification in “The
Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Reconsidered.” The “Late Medieval English Scribes” projects, directed by Mooney,
Stubbs, and Horobin, provides detailed breakdowns of the individual letterforms of important medieval scribes. This
project has led to several important identification, many of which have been published in Mooney and Stubbs,
Scribes and the City.
707 Two of the stated goals of the “Manuscript Studies in an Interoperable Digital Environment” project are to
utilize and refine new digital technologies and, by doing so, to investigate a collection of digitized images or
document image. As such, the project has allowed a series of research projects to test and shape the development of
tools. This form of research, which emphasizes the collaboration across institutional and disciplinary lines has been
particularly fruitful and speaks to a new model for scholarship within the field.
233
others: that is, the in-depth study of individual manuscripts—these days often by way of digital
images—as well as a broader heuristic study and comparison of a large corpus of related
manuscripts. One of my objectives has been to show that just as such projects as “Late Medieval
English Scribes” have begun to clarify the relationships between the people who produced late
medieval Middle English texts by major authors such as Chaucer and Lydgate, so too can those
methodologies generate insights into the production of Middle English text outside of that
corpus.
I believe that much work remains to be done profiling scribal hands and comparing other
evidence of manuscript producers’ practices in the case of understudied texts such as the South
English Legendary and the Prick of Conscience. But if we understand Middle English
manuscript production as an extension of manuscript production in other languages, then I would
argue we must gather and compare more manuscript evidence for corpuses of texts in those
languages as well. Scholars have been slower to identify the hand of scribes who copied in all
three languages (or mainly in Latin or French): in part because the disciplinarity of many
universities privileges the study of English texts and in part because many of the criteria upon
which we identify scribal hands (dialect, script, etc.) are not consistent when a scribe writes in
more than one language. This is one gap in scholarship I hope to pursue in the future. The study
and comparison of features of manuscripts containing texts in languages other than English will
allow for more analysis of trends—chronological, geographical, palaeographical, art historical—
in medieval book production. This, in turn, will provide scholars with data to better contextualize
evidence of changing orthography, the influence of regional dialects, the practice of multilingual
code-switching and translation and the development of new artistic and scribal schools.
As codicological research of the kind I am advocating above continues to reveal networks
underpinning the production of manuscripts in Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman, it is
also important that we use the data generated to continue to enliven our literary readings of texts.
In this dissertation, I have touched upon the subject of “literariness” through the work of scholars
such as Cannon and Treharne who, though they disagree at points, both argue that we ought to
re-evaluate the process by which we have excluded certain works from literary history. But if we
believe that the study of Middle English literary culture is (or could be) a study both of texts and
of books, then another line of inquiry is opened up: the potential intersection between traditional
“formal-literary” elements of a text and “formal-codicological” elements of a manuscript—or in
234
the words of D. F. McKenzie, study of how “forms effect meaning.”708
The recent turn to “new
formalism” in critical theory—a term I use broadly and with the recognition that there is at this
point in time no single school of new formalism—offers the potential to energize this line of
inquiry.709
In a 2009 article co-written with Peter Buchanan, I identify a number of scholars
whose work addresses how literary form and the manuscript history of medieval English texts
might intersect. This article was written as a summary of new directions in the field introduced at
the 2009 Conference on Editorial Problems organized by Alexandra Gillespie and held at the
University of Toronto. My thinking continues to be indebted to many of the scholars who
presented there, including D. Vance Smith, Martha Rust, Jessica Brantley, Daniel Wakelin,
Simon Horobin and others.710
Their work, taken in aggregate, acknowledges a dynamic
interaction between codicological and literary innovations, whereby book technologies
influenced literary patterns, and, in turn, literary patterns affected the production and alteration of
books.711
The study of this dynamic interaction offers an exciting method for contextualizing the
book within late medieval culture; this will be a second area important to my post-doctoral
research.
Finally, I want to turn to a figure who has both been a touchstone throughout this dissertation
and, simultaneously, oddly absent: Geoffrey Chaucer. In my Introduction I suggested that we
ought to re-examine what we mean by “national” literary culture and, necessarily, one aspect of
this re-examination requires us to consider the role of Chaucer as the titular “Father of English
Literature” and England’s first national poet laureate. My purpose has not been to unseat
Chaucer from his place at the centre of the medieval and modern literary canon: rather my goal
708 McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 13. Here, my approach to the relationship between the form
of texts and the form of books has developed out of a graduate class on the “Medieval Vernacular Book” which I
took under the guidance of Professor Alexandra Gillespie.
709 Marjorie Levinson notes upon reviewing several essays expressing “new formalisms” the tendency to “promote
either a methodological pluralism or advise the recovery of one particular method, sidelined or disparaged in current
critical practice....The central work of the movement as a whole is rededication,” with an emphasis on generating
“commitment to and community around the idea of form” (561).
710 Several of these papers have been expanded and included in a recent special edition (issue 47) of The Chaucer
Review edited by Alexandra Gillespie and Arthur Bahr. Their co-written essay “Medieval English Manuscripts:
Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text” offers a very good introduction to the scholarly questions central to this
line of inquiry.
711 We can see traces of this argument in, for example, Pamela Robinson’s claim regarding the circulation of rolls
that “the constraints of format conditioned literary structure” (“The Format of Books,” 43).
235
has been to extend that canon in order to understand how the same processes which supported
the rise of Chaucer’s texts also supported the rise of other texts in other places. One way of doing
this, I have found, is to question, as Michael Sargent suggests we should, the “teleological
narrative of the eventual ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of an author or text.”712
The making of a literary
canon is a competitive process, but also a process that inevitably admits some level of
randomness, as the right conjunction of forces aligns to propel a text into the limelight. We
would do well to remember that even texts which lacked the long-term success of the Canterbury
Tales, for instance, offer alternative entry points into examining England’s literary culture when
studied in their own moment. These alternative entry points have their own subtle complexities
and their own rewards for pursuit. One goal of my thesis has been to show that the study of these
texts will broaden our notions of England’s literary culture. I also think such work could provide
new depth to the study of texts traditionally understood to be at the centre of that culture.
The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie once remarked that there were two kinds of
historians: parachutists and truffle hunters. The parachutist observes the grand vista from a
distance while the truffle hunter keeps his nose close to the ground in search of elusive
morsels.713
In this dissertation, I have found myself in the position of needing both sets of skills;
my study synthesizes research upon a fairly substantial collection of manuscripts, produced over
a period of more than one hundred years and written in several languages. I have also engaged in
very minute examination of the features of some of these manuscripts. In so doing, I have sought
to lay the groundwork for an even larger and more in-depth study of Middle English non-
Chaucerian literature in its manuscript contexts, and to make apparent the real need for such
study at this juncture in the field of medieval English literary history and manuscript studies.
712 Sargent, “What Do the Numbers Mean,” 222.
713 Cf. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast.
236
237
Appendix
Transcriptions of MSS Lm, C, N, Wh
St. Alphege, ll. 39-116
MS Lm MS C MS N
¶Vor sein donston was longe ded . and after him oþer
þreo
Ffor sein donston was longe ded . & after him oþer þre[o] Ffor sein donston was longe ded . and after him oþer þreo
Er the bissops of kanterbury . as oure louerd it wold
biseo
Erche bissop of kanterburi . ar oure louerd it wolde bise[o] Erchebissops of kanterburi . ar oure louerd it wolde biseo
At þo nolde oure louerd noleng . þat it bileued were Ac þo nolde oure louerd no leng . þat hit bileued were Ac þo nolde oure louerd no leng . þat þis bileued were
Seint alphe was þo Imad . erche bissop þere Seint alphe was þo ymad . erche bissop þere Seint alphe was þo Imad . erchebissop þere
For ichose he was of al þe lond . and of þe pope also Ffor ichose he was of al þat lond . & of þe pope also Ffor ichose he was of al þat lond . and of þe pope also
And suþþe of þe pope of rome . Isacred he was þerto And suþþe of þe pope of Rome . isacred he was þerto And suþþe of þe pope of rome . Isacred he was þerto
¶ Erchebissop he was Imad . a þousand ȝer riȝt ¶ Erche bissop he was ymaked a þousond ȝer riȝt ¶ Erche bissop he was Imad . a þousond ȝer riȝt
And sixe after þat oure louerd . inis moder was aliȝt And sixe after þat oure louerd . inis moder was aliȝt And sixe after þat oure louerd . inis moder was aliȝt
And archebissop of kanterburi . six ȝer he was and
more
And erchebissop of kanterburi . sixȝer he was & more And erchebissop of kanterburi . six ȝer he was and more
Þo tonge ne may telle al . is wisdom ne is lore No tonge ne may telle . al is wisdom ne his lore No tonge ne mai telle al . is wisdom ne is lore
¶ So þat in þe seueþe ȝer . þat he þuder com ¶ So þat in þe seueþe ȝer. þat he þuder com ¶ So þat in þe seueþe ȝer . þat he þuder com
Þe luþer prince of denmarch . gret poer wiþ him nom Þe luþer prince of denmarch . gret poer wiþ him nom Þe luþer prince of denmarch . gret poer wiþ him nom
And wende home here into engelond . as hy dude er
ilome
And wende hom her into engelond . as hi dude er ilome And wende hom her into engelond . as hi dude er ilome
Vor deneis and men of engelond . selde beoþ Isome Ffor deneis and men of engelond . selde beoþ ysome Ffor deneis and men of engelond . selde beoþ ysome
¶ Þo þis luþer prince and is men . to engelonde come Þo þis luþer prince & is . men to englonde come ¶ Þo þis luþer prince and is men . to englonde come
Hy barnde and robbede alto gronde . & heie men nome Hy barnde & robbede alto gronde . & heiemen nome Hy barnde and robbede alto gronde . & heiemen nome
Þo þis luþer prince and is men . to engelond come Þo þis luþer prince & is men . to engelonde come
Hy barnde and robbede alto gronde . and heie men nom Hy barnde & robbede al to gronde . & heiemen nome
¶ Þe kyng aþeldred was þo kyng . of engelonde ¶ Þe king aþeldred was þo king . of engelonde [Þe king aþeldred was þo kyng . of engelonde]
So simple he was and so milde . þat he nolde aȝen him
stonde
So simple he was & so milde . þat he nolde aȝen him stonde [So simple he was and so milde . þat he nolde aȝen him
stonde]
238
He was seint Edwardes broþer . þat is mode wiþ
outrage
He was seint edwardes broþer . þat is moder wiþ outrage He was seint edwardes broþer . þat is moder wiþ oute rage
Let martri for is loue . to wynne him þe eritage . Let martri for is loue . to wynne him þe heritage Let martri for is loue . to winne him þe eritage
And he was eke seint edwardes fader . þat kyng was
suþþe also
And he was ek seint edwardes fader . þat king was suþþe also And he was ek seint Edwardes fader . þat kyng was suþþe
also
And at westmistre was ibured . and in ssrine ido Þat at westmustre was ibured . & in ssrine ido Þat at westmustre was Ibured . and in ssrine ido
¶ Þe king aþeldred was so milde . and so hard lyf nom . ¶ Þe king aþeldred was so milde . & so hard lif nom ¶ Þe king aþeldrid was so milde . and so hard lif nom
Vor is broþer was aslawe . for is kynedom . Vor is broþer was aslawe .for is kynedom Ffor is broþer was aslawe . for is kynedom
Þat he ne tok bote lite ȝeme . of þe worles prute Þat he ne tok bote lite ȝeme . of þe worles prute Þat he ne tok bote lite ȝeme . of þe worles prute
þei me sede him of eny werre . he tolde þerof lute Þei me sede him of eny werre . he tolde þerof lute Þei ^me^ sede him of eny werre . he tolde þerof lute
Of bataille he nolde noþing do . bote held him euere
stille
Of bataile he nolde noþing do . bote huld him euere stille Of bataile he nolde noþing do . bote huld him euere stille
Þeruore hadde þe deneis . In engelond hore wille Þeruore hadde þe denys . into engelond hore wille Þeruore hadde þe denis . in engelond hare wille
¶ Kyrtel was þe prince ihote . þat was þo of deneis ¶ Kyrkel was þe prince ihote . þat was þo of deneis ¶ Kircel was þe prince ihote . þat was þo of deneis
Hider he com wel sterneliche . and broȝte lite peis Hider he com wel sturneliche . and broȝte lite peis Hider he com wel sterneliche . and broȝte lite peis
Ouer al ware he wende aboute . he broȝte al to schame Ouer al ware he wende aboute . he broȝte al to ssame Ouer al ware he wende aboute . he broȝte alto ssame
Is broþer was ma^i^ster of is ost . Edric was is name His broþer was maister of is ost . edrik was is name Is broþer was maister of is ost . edrik was is name
He let edrik is broþer . to kanterburi fare He let is broþer edrik . to kanterburi vare [folio lost]
And sle and robby þat he founde . and þe stretes make
bare
And sle and robby þat hy fonde . & þe stretes make bare
Ac þe men of kanterburi . somdel were iware Ac þe men of kanterburi . somdel were iware
So þat ope is owe heued . hy broȝte þe meste care So þat up is owe heued . hy broȝte þe meste care
¶ He cudde þat hi were of herte . and slowe him anon Hi cudde þat hi were of herte . & slowe him anon
And to gronde slowe eke al is men . þat hi miȝte of gon And to gronde slowe ek al is men . þat hi miȝte of gon
So þat to kirkil þe prince . þe tyþinge sone com So þat to kirkel þe prince . þe tiþinge sone com
Þat is broþer was aslawe . gret deol to him he nom Þat is broþer was aslawe . gret deol to him nom
¶ To kanterburi he wende anon . and bisette þane toun
faste
¶ To kanterburi he wende anon . & bisette þene toun faste
Þe toun men þei hi hardy were . somdel were agaste Þe toun þei hi hardi were . somdel were agaste
So þat kirkil þe luþer prince . wan hom attelaste So þat kirkil þe luþer prince . wan hom attelaste
Hore gynnes and hore strengþe also . sone by neþe he
caste
Hore gynnes and hore stregþe also . sone bineþe he caste
To noȝt he barnde al þane toun . & to gronde þat folk
slou
To noȝt he brende al þen toun . & to gronde þat folk slou
239
Þe erchebissop seint alphe . sory was Inou Þe erche bissop seint alphe . sori was Inou
¶ He wende him uorþ wel baldeliche . in oure louerdes
name .
He wende him forþ wel baldeliche . in oure louerdes name
And bad for þe selymen . þat me broȝte to ssame And bad for þe selymen . þat me broȝte to ssame
And profrede is owe lyf . forto ȝiue for hore And propherede is owe lyf . forto ȝiue for hore
Þo þis luþer men hom hadde Inome . ioyuol hy were
þeruore
Þo þis luþer him hadde Inome . ioiuol hi were þeruore
¶ Hy nome verst þis holyman . and suþþe slou to
gronde
¶ Hy nome verst þis holyman . & suþþe slou to gronde
Is monkes and is oþer men . alle þat hy fonde His monkes & is oþer men . alle þat hy fonde
Þe my ministre also of kanterburi . hy robbede attelaste Þe ministre also of kanterburi . hi robbede attelaste
And suþþe hy nome þis holyman . & bounde him wel
faste
And suþþe hi nome þis holyman . & bond him vaste
And ladde him to grenewich . and þere hi helde him
longe
And ladde him to grenewich . & þere hi hulde him longe
þe half ȝer and somdel more . in prison swuþe stronge Half a ȝer and somdel more . in prison swuþe stronge
Þreo mile it is bi este londone . þe toun of grenewich Þreo mile it is bi este londone . þe toun of grenewich
So longe he lay in prison þer . þat he nas noman illich So longe he lay in prison þer . þat he nas noman illich
¶ As þis holyman in prison lay . as he longe hadde ido ¶ As þis holyman in prison lay . as he lange hadde ido
Þe friniȝt in þe ester wyke . þe deouel com him to Þe fri niȝt in þe ester wike . þe deuel com him two =diabolus
Alphe he sede wel þou beo . to þe ich am iwend Alphe he sede wel þe be[o] . to þe ich am iwend
An angel ich am of heuene . fram oure louerd isend An angel ich am of heuene . fram oure louerd isend
He nis noȝt ipaid he sende þe word . þat þou in prison
beo
He nis noȝt ipaid he sende þe word . þat þou in prison be[o]
Ac forto sauy engelond . he wole þat þou fleo Ac forto saui engelond . he wole þat þou fle[o]
¶ For holiore þanne seinte peter . þou ne derst make þe
noȝt
¶ Ffor holiore þanne seinte peter . þou ne derst þe make noȝt
Þat wende out of prison . as þe angel him hadde ybroȝt Þat wende out of prison . as þe angel him hadde ibroȝt
And sein poul by acupe . wende adoun also And sein poul bi an cupe . wende adoun also
By a walle þo þe giwes . to deþe him wolde do . Bi a walle þo þe giwes . to deþe him wolde do
¶ And oure louerd wende eke out of þe temple . in
hudels alone
& oure louerd wende ek out of þe temple . in hudels alone
To fleo þe deþ þo þe giwes . hene him walde wiþ stone To fleo þe deþ þo þe giwes . hene him wolde wiþ stone
Holiore þanne oure louerd sulf . Inot ware þou wost beo Holiore þanne oure louerd sulf Inot . ware þou wost be[o]
240
Þeruore as he þe sent word . hanne þou most fleo Þeruore as he þe send word . hanne þou most fle[o]
¶ Þis holyman iluuede him . & þat oure louerd him
þuder sende
¶ Þis holyman iluued him . & þat oure louerd him þuder
sende
And wiþ him out of prisone . al by niȝte wende And wiþ him out of prisone . al biniȝte wende
So þat þe deuel him ladde uorþ . ouer mani a uoul slade So þat þe deuel him ladde uorþ . ouer mani a foul slade
Ouer water and ouer oþer . þat al he was by wade Ouer water and ouer oþer . þat al he was biwade
¶ Ouer dich and ouer heeg . and ouer many a uoul slo Ouer dich and ouer heg . and ouer many a uoul slo
He harlede þis holymon . þat wel feble was þerto He harlede þis holyman . þat wel feble was þerto
Pilate, ll. 247-262
MS Lm MS N
Þo com þer so gret tempeste . þat þer aboute wel wide Þo com þer so gret tempeste . þat þere aboute wel wyde
Þat ssipes dreinte manyon . þer aboute in eche side Þat ssipes dreinte manion . þere aboute in eche side
¶ Al þe contreie hadde þerof doute . & nome ham to
rede
¶ Al þe contreie hadde þerof doute . and nome ham to rede
And into a water al fram men . þis licame gonne lede And into a water al fram men . þis licame gonne lede
Bitwe hulles and wildernesse . and þer Inne hi him
caste
Bitwene hulles & wildernesse . & þer Inne hi him caste
Þe þondre smot to him anon . and þe lyȝtynge wel uaste Þe þonder smot to him anon . and þe lyȝtynge wel vaste
Þat body flet op and doun . icast here and þere Þat body flet up and doun . icast here and þere
Mid weder and tempest of water . þat ech mon hadde
fere
Wiþ weder and tempest of water . þat ech mon hadde fere
¶ Amidde þe water stod a roch . þo þe licame was þer
ney
Amidde þe water stod a roch . þo þe licame was þer Inne
Þe roch clef amidde atwo . as al þe uolk ysay . omitted
And as an arwe sset of abouwe . þat body sset þerInne omitted
Þe roch smot to gadere anon . þe body was wiþ Inne Þe roche smot to gadere anon . þe bodi was wiþinne
And þe wrecche licame þer liþ ȝute . to þis daye And þe wrecche licame þer liþ ȝute . to þis daie
Muche wo þer is ofte aboute . as men ofte isaye Muche wo þer is ofte aboute . as men ofte isaie
Þus pilatus endede is lyf . as he wel worþe was Þus pilatus ended is lif . as he wel worþe was
God ssulde ech cristenman . fram so deoluol cas God ssulde ech cristenman . fram so deoluol cas
241
St. Mary the Egyptian, ll. 1-64
MS Lm MS C MS N
SEinte marie egiptiake . In egipte was ybore SEinte marie gipciake . in egipte was ibore / De sancta maria
/ Egipciaka .
SEinte marie egipciake . In egipte was ibore / De sancto
maria egipciaka
Al hure ȝonge lyf heo ladde . In sunne and in hore Al hure ȝonge lif he[o] ladde . in sunne and in hore Al hure ȝonge lif heo ladde . In sunne and In hore
Vnneþe heo was twelf ȝer old . ar he^o^ gonne do folie Vneþe he[o] was twelf ȝer old . ar he[o] gonne do folie Vnneþe heo was twelf ȝer old . ar heo gonne do folie
Hure body and al hire wille take . to sunne of lecherie Hure body and al hure wille take . to sunne & lecherie Hure body and al hure wille tok . to sunne and lecherie
Her on heo ladde so gret delit . þat in hure owe londe Þer on he[o] hadde so gret delit . þat in hure owe londe Þer on heo hadde so gret delit . þat in hure owe londe
Heo ne miȝte noȝt al fol hire wille . þo gan heo vnder
stonde
He[o] nemiȝte noȝt al fol hure wille . þo gan he[o] vnder
stonde
Heo ne miȝte noȝt beo al for hure wille . þo gan heo vnder
stonde
And wende to þe lond of alysandre . and þere wonede
longe
And wende to þe lond of elisandre . & þere wonede longe And wende to þe lond of alisandre . and þere wonede longe
Alle þat wiþ hure sunegi wolde . gladliche heo wolde
auonge
Alle þat wiþ hure sunegi wolde . gladlich heo wolde auonge Alle þat wiþ hure sunegi wolde . gladliche heo wolde
auonge
¶ Heo ne sparede leinte ne oþer tyme . preost ne oþer
non
¶ He[o] ne sparede leinte ne oþer time . preost ne oþer non ¶ Heo ne sparede leinte ne oþer tyme . prest ne oþer non
Sik ne pouere ne wedded mon . þat heo ne let to hure
gon
Sik ne pouere ne wedded mon . þat he[o] ne let to hure gon Sik ne pouere ne wedded mon . þat heo ne let to hure gon
Men þat none wille nadde . þulke sunne to do Men þat none wille nadde . þulke sunne to do Men þat none wille nadde . þulke sunne to do
Wiþ fair wordes and fol semlant . heo broȝte hom þerto Wiþ fair wordes and fol semlant . he[o] broȝte þerto Wiþ faire wordes and fol semlant . heo broȝte hom þerto
No mester mon non nas inis mester . so preste ne so
quointe
No mester mon non nas inis mester . so prest ne so queinte No mester mon non nas inis mester . so prest ne so queinte
Þat heo nas to bringe men in sunne . queintore in eche
pointe
Þat he[o] nas to bringe men in sunne . queintore in ech pointe Þat heo nas to bringe men In sunne . queintore in ech
pointe
¶ Heo ne tok for þulke dede . of noman mede ne wynne ¶ He[o] ne tok for þulke dede . of noman mede ne winne ¶ Heo ne tok for þulke dede . of noman mede ne wynne
Ffor non ne ssolde for defaute . bileue þe voule sunne Ffor non ne ssolde for defaute . bileue þe voule sunne Ffor non ne ssolde for defaute . bileue þe uoule sunne
Oþer mede bote hure voule wille . heo ne wilnede of
noman
Oþer mede bote hure voule wille . he[o] ne wilneþ of noman Oþer mede bote hure voule wille . heo ne wilneþ of noman
Mid spinnynge & mid souwynge . hore lyflode heo won Mid spinnynge & mid souwinge . hure lif lode heo wan Mid spinnynge and mid sowinge . hure lyflode heo iwan
It is sunne and ssame to eny mon . to þenche oþer to
<w>ite
Hit is sunne & ssame to eny mon . to þenche oþer to wite It is sunne and ssame and sunne to eny man . to þenche
oþer to wite
Þe voule dede & þe wrecche sunne . þat we vyndeþ of
hire iwrite
Þe voule dede and þe wrecche sunne . þat we vyndeþ of hure
iwrite
Þe foule dede & þe wrecche sunne . þat we findeþ of hure
iwrite
¶ Ffor also heo sede hure sulf . þat ssame it was to hure ¶ Ffor also he[o] sede hure sulf . þat ssame it was to hure ¶ Ffor also heo sede hure sulf . þat ssame it was to hure
So muche sunne an eorþe ido . of eny creature So muche sunne an eorþe ido . of eny creature So muche sunne an eorþe ido . of eny creature
242
And þat þe eorþe yopened nadde . as heo hire sulf gan
telle
And þat þe eorþe yopened nadde . as he[o] hure sulf gan telle And þat þe eorþe yopened nadde . as heo hure sulf gan telle
And iswolwe as heo ȝeode an eorþe . in to þe put of
helle
And iswolwe as heo ȝeode an eorþe . into þe put of helle And iswolwe as heo ȝeode an eorþe . In to þe put of helle
Such fol lyf heo ladde in alysandre . ȝeres seuentene, Such fol lif heo ladde in alisandre . ȝeres seuentene Such fol lyf heo ladde in alisandre . ȝeres seuentene,
Þat so muche vil dede <..> a womman . nas neuere iseie
ich wene
Þat so muche vil dede of a womman . nas neuere iseie ich
wene
Þat so muche fil dede of a womman . nas neuere iseie ich
wene
¶ Ope aday in haruest <..> as þis womman biheld
aboute
¶ Vp a dai in haruest as þis womman . bihuld aboute ¶ Ope aday in haruest . as þis womman bihuld aboute
Muche folk heo sey b<..>þe þe wey . and of hom gret
route
Muche volk he[o] sei bi þe wey . & of hom gret route Muche folk heo sei bi þe wei . and of hom gret route
Hure þoȝte heo wa<..> yknewe . in alisandre in ech
ende
Hure þoȝte he[o] was so iknowe . in alisandre in ech ende Hure þoȝte heo was so iknowe . in alisandre in ech ende
¶ Þe lasse haunt heo hadde of folye . þanne heo wolde
wende
Þe lasse hant he[o] hadde of folie . þanne he[o] wolde wende Þe lasse haunt heo hadde of folye . þanne heo wolde wende
Heo þoȝte among st<..>ge men . so mony as ich yseo He[o] þoȝte amang stronge men . so many as ich ise[o] Heo þoȝte among stnge men . so many as ich iseo
Muche ich may of<...>ille habbe . wiþ hom ichelle beo Muche ich may of mi wille habbe . wiþ hom ichelle be[o] Muche ich may of mi wille habbe . wiþ þulke ichelle beo
¶ Among hom heo <....>d esste of hom . wuderward hi
þoȝte
Among hom he[o] com & esste of hom . wuderward hi þoȝte Among hom heo com and esste of hom . wuderward hi
þoȝte
Hi seide hy wolde to ierusalem . and þe holy rode hy
soȝte
Hy seide hy wolde to ierusalem . & þe holi rode hi soȝte Hi seide hy wolde to ierusalem . & þe holy rode hy soȝte
Þat ssolde þe holy r<..>e day . ech mon yssowed beo Þat ssolde þe holirode day . echmon issowed be[o] Þat ssolde þe holy rode day . echmon issowed beo
And þat mony godeman þuder wolde . to honury þat
swete treo
And þat moni godman þuder wolde . to honuri þat swete
tre[o]
And þat moni godman þuder wolde . to honury þat swete
treo
¶ Mot ich quaþ þis womman þo . mid ȝou þuder wende ¶ Mot ich quaþ þis womman þo . mid ȝou þuder wende ¶ Mot ich quaþ þis womman þo . mid ȝou þuder wende
And of mister þat ich habbe ylerned . Ichelle beo ȝou
prest & hende
And of myster þat ich habbe ileorned . ichelle be[o]ȝou prest
& hende
And of mister þat ich habbe ileorned . Ichelle beo ȝou prest
& hende
ȝe sede on ȝif þ<..> miȝt . aquiti þi ssipes hure ȝe sede on ȝif þou miȝt . aquiti þi ssipes hure ȝede sede on ȝif þou miȝt aquity . þi ssipes hure
Oure companie worþ amended muche . of isuch
creature
Oure companie worþ amended muche . of a such creature Oure companie worþ amended muche . of a such creature
Nabbe ich heo sede oþer moneie . bote my sulue her Nabbe ich he[o] sede oþer moneie . bote mi sulue her ¶ Nabbe ich heo sede oþer monie . bote my sulue her
¶ Ichelle beo cor<...>s of þat ich habbe . aȝen þe
mariner
Ichelle be[o] corteis of þat ich habbe . aȝen þe mariner Ichelle beo corteis of þat ich habbe . aȝen þe mariner
To him and to <...> also . Ichelle beo prest and hende To him and to ȝou also . ichelle be[o] prest and hende To him and to ȝou also . Ichelle beo prest and hende
Þat it ne ssel ȝou of þenche noȝt . þei ich wiþ ȝou
wende
Þat it ne ssel ȝou of þenche noȝt . þei ich wiþ ȝou wende Þat it ne ssel ȝou of þenche noȝt . þei ich wiþ ȝou wende
¶ Þis womman wende uorþ wiþ hom . wiþ gret sunne
alas
Þis womman wende forþ wiþ hom . wiþ gret sunne alas Þis womman wende forþ wiþ hom . wiþ gret sunne alas
243
To eche þat wolde do folye . aredy euere heo was To eche þat wolde do folie . and redi euere he[o] was To eche þat wolde do folie . and redy euere heo was
¶ Þo heo com to þe se . atte uerste þinge ¶ Þo he[o] com to þe se . atte ferste þinge ¶ Þo heo com to þe se . atte feorste þinge
Þe mariner heo ȝaf al hire body . to lede hure ouer &
brige
Þe mariner he[o]ȝaf al hure body . to lede hure ouer & bringe Þe mariner heo ȝaf al hure body to lede hure ouer anbringe
To þe mariner and to alle his . and to alle oþere þat þer
were
To þe mariner & to alle his . and to alle oþere þat þer were To þe mariner and to alle his . and to alle þat þere were
Prest heo was to sunegy . heo nadde þerof no fere Prest heo was to sungy . he[o] nadde þer of no fere Prest heo was to sunegi . heo nadde þerof no fere
Ou Ihesus muche is þi miȝte . muche þoledestou þere Ou ihesus muche is þi miȝte . muche þoledestou þere Ou ihesus muche is þi miȝte . muche þoledestou þere
Þat wa<...> oþer ssip hom wolde bere . þat hy adronke
nere
Þat water oþer ssip hom wolde bere . þat hi adronke nere Þat water oþer ssip hom wolde bere . þat hi adronke nere
ȝif en<.> was þat for drede nolde . þulke sunne do ȝyf eny was þat for drede wolde . þulke sunne do ȝif eny was þat for drede nolde . þulke sunne do
Mid f<..> semlant and faire wordes . heo broȝte hom
þerto
Mid fol semlant & faire wordes . he[o] broȝte hom þerto Mid fol semlant and faire wordes . heo broȝte hom þerto
¶ To uore þe holy rode day . to ierusalem heo com ¶ Touore þe holy rode day . to ierusalem he[o] com ¶ To fore þe holy rode day . to ierusalem heo com
Alle þat <..> dede wolde do . gladliche heo þer nom Alle þat fol dede wolde do . gladliche he[o] þer nom Alle þat fol dede wolde do . gladliche heo þer nom
¶ Þo þe <..>ly rode day com . þat me ssewede þat swete
treo
Þo þe holy rode day com . þat me ssewede þat swete tre[o] ¶ Þo þe holy rode day com . þat me sschowede þat swete
treo
Monymon to þe temple ȝeode . þe swete rode to seo Monymon to þe temple ȝeode . þe swete rode to se[o] Monymon to þe temple ȝeode . þe swete rode to seo
Þo <..>rie wiþ oþer was . to þe temple dore icome Þo marie wiþ oþer was . to þe temple dore icome Þo marie wiþ oþer was . to þe temple dore icome
Heo ne miȝte a uot þer in wende . hure miȝte hire was
bynome
He[o] nemiȝte a uot þer Inne wende . hure miȝte hure was
binome
Heo ne miȝte a fot þer Inne wende . hure miȝte hure was
bynome
Hure þoȝte wanne heo wolde In gon . þat me hure aȝen
drou
Hure þoȝte wanne he[o] wolde In gon . þat me hure aȝen drou Hure þoȝte wan heo wolde In gon . þat me hure aȝen drou
Vor among al oþere heo stod wiþ oute . of ssamed sore
Inou
Ffor among al oþere he[o] stod wiþoute . of ssamed sore Inou Ffor among al oþere heo stod wiþ oute . of ssamed sore
Inou
¶ Heo ȝeode in estward & hure þoȝte . þat me hure aȝen
pulte
¶ He[o] ȝeode In estward & hure þoȝte . þat me hure aȝen
pulte
¶ Heo ȝeode In estward and hure þoȝte . þat me hure aȝen
pulte
Heo wep for ssame and biþoȝte . þat it was for hure
gulte
He[o] wep for ssame & biþoȝte . þat it was for hure gulte Heo wep for ssame and biþoȝte . þat it was for hure gulte
244
St. Bridget, ll. 5-25, 39-59
MS C MS N MS Wh
A seruant he hadde inis hous . broksek was hure name A seruaunt he hadde inis hous . broksek was hure name A seruant he hadde inis hous . brocsech was hure name
Þis duptak bisoȝte hure . of lecherie and ssame Þis duptak bisoȝte hure . of lecherie and schame Þis duptac bysoȝte hure . of lechorie and ssame
On hure he biȝat a child . in spousbruche & wiþ wou On hure biȝat a child . in spousbruche and mid wou On hure he byȝat a child . in spous bruche and wiþ wou
Þo is owe wif it underȝet . sori he was Inou Þo is owe wif it vnder ȝet . sory he was Inou Þo is owe wif hit vnder ȝet . sory he was ynou
¶ Mest he[o] dradde hure of þat child . þat it ssolde so
wel þe[o]
¶ Mest heo dradde of þat child . þat it ssolde so wel iþeo Mest heo dradde hure of þat child . þat hit ssolde so wel
yþe
To sourmonte hure owe children . hor maister to be[o] To sormonte hure owe children . hore maister to beo To sormonte hure owe children . hor maister vorto to be
Þer uore he[o] cride on hure louerd . to be[o] iwar
byuore
Þer uore heo cride on hure louerd . to beo iwar byuore Þer uore heo cride on hure louerd . to boe iwar byuore
And sulle out of londe þe seruant . ar þat child were
ibore
And sulle out of londe þe seruant . ar þat child were ybore And sulle out of londe þe seruant . ar þat child were ybore
Þe hosebonde nolde it grante noȝt . for he hadde loþ it
do
Þe hosebonde nolde it grante noȝt . for he hadde loþ it do Þe hosebonde nolde it grante noȝt . vor he hadde loþ it do
Þis wif cride niȝt and day . ȝif he[o] miȝte it bringe
þerto
Þis wyf cride niȝt and day . ȝif heo miȝte it bringe þerto Þis wif cride niȝt and day . ȝyf heo myȝte it bringe þerto
So þat it fel þer afterward . þat þis hosebonde So þat it byuel þere afterward . þat þis hosebonde So þat hit fel þer afterward . þat þis hosebonde
Wiþ is seruante alone wende . in a cart ouerlonde Wiþ is seruante alone wende . in a cart ouerlonde Wyþ his seruante alone wende . in a cart ouerlonde
A chantor was in þulke stude . as were bi olde dawe ¶ A chantor was in þulke stude . as were bi olde dawe ¶ A chantor was þulke stude . as were by olde dawe
As oure louerd it wolde . bi is hous þe cart gan euene
drawe
As oure louerd it wolde bi is hous . þe cart gan euene drawe As our louerd hit wolde by is hous . þe cart gan euene
drawe
He sat and hurde hou þis cart . bi is gate wende He sat and hurde hou þis cart . bi is gate wende He sat and hurde hou þis cart . by ys gate wende
Anon he clupede on of is men . and hasteliche out sende Anon he clupede on of is men . and hasteliche out sende Anon he clupede on of his men . and hasteliche out sende
Lokeþ he sede hasteliche . wat þing is þat ich hure Lokeþ he sede hasteliche . wat þing is þat ich hure Lokeþ he sede hasteliche . wat þing is þat ich yhure
Vor þe soun of þulke weoles. is vnder a god creature Ffor þe soun of þulke weoles . is vnder agod creature Vor þe son of þulke woeles . is vnder a god creature
Þe nobloste creature is . wiþ Inne þulke tre[o] Þe nobloste creature is . wiþ Inne þulke treo Þe nobloste creature . is wiþ Inne þulke tre
Þat is nouþe in eny londe . lokeþ wat it be[o] Þat is nouþe In eny londe . lokeþ wat it beo Þat is nouþe in eny londe . lokeþ wat hit beo
¶ Þo ne fonde hi in þis cart . namo bote hom to ¶ Þo ne founde hy in þis cart . namo bote ham two Þo ne fonde hy in þis cart . namo bote hom to
Ffor þis womman ssel a doȝter bere . þat ssine ssel so
clere
Ffor þis womman ssel a doȝter bere . þat ssyne ssel so clere Vor þis womman ssal a doȝter bere . þat ssyne ssel so clere
245
Amang alle þat an eorþe be[o]þ . in as cler manere Among alle þat on eorþe beoþ . in as cler manere Among alle þat on erþe beþ . in as cler manere
As amang alle oþer sterren . þe sonne briȝtore is As amonge alle oþer sterren . þe sonne brittore is As among alle oþer sterren . þe sonne briȝtore is
Also ssel he[o] an eorþe ssine. amang oþer men iwis Also ssel heo an eorþe ssyne . among oþer men iwis Also ssel heo an erþe ssyne . among oþer men ywis
In a god time he[o] worþ ibore . & wonderliche also In a god tyme heo worþ ibore . and wonderliche also In a god tyme ȝo worþ ybore . and wonderlich also
Ffor noþer wiþ Inne hous ne wiþoute . þe dede worþ
ido
Ffor noþer wiþ inne hous ne wiþoute . þede worþ ido Vor noþer wiþ inne hous no wiþoute . þe dede worþ ydo
¶ Duptak was þo doȝterles . for he nadde neuere none ¶ Duptak was þo doȝter les . for he nadde neuere er none Duptak was þo douterles . uor he <......>euer er none
Ioiuol he was and glad Inou . for he bihet hure one Ioyuol he was and glad Inou . for he bi ȝet hure one Ioyuol he was and glad ynou . uor he bihet hure one
Suþþe it biuel þer afterward . þat anoþer enchanteor
wende
Suþþe it byuel þer afterward . þat anoþer enchanteor wende Suþþe hit by uel þer after ward . þat an oþer enchanteor
wende
And of duptak boȝte þis seruante . as oure louerd grace
sende
And of duptak boȝte þis seruante . as oure louerd grace sende And of duptak boȝte þis seruante . as oure louerd grace
sende
Ffor þe wif nolde neuere fine . ar it were þerto ibroȝt Ffor þe wyf nolde neuere fyne . ar it were þerto ibroȝt Vor þe wyf nolde neuere fine . ar it were þerto ybroȝt
Ac þe child þat was in hure wombe . duptak ne solde
noȝt
Ac þe child þat was in hure wombe . duptak ne solde noȝt Ac þe child þat was in hire wombe . duptak <..> solde noȝt
Fforþ he ladde þis womman . þat he hadde dere iboȝt ¶ Fforþ he ladde þis womman . þat he hadde dure iboȝt Vorþ he ladde þis womman <..........>de dere yboȝt
And weddede hure as is owe wif . & uolwede is þoȝt And weddede hure as is owe wyf . & folwede is þoȝt ¶ regina
praegnans
And weddede hure as is owe wif . and volwede is þoȝt
¶ So þat a quene of þe londe gret mid childe was ¶
Regina / pronnans
So þat a quene of þe londe . gret mid childe was So þat a quene of þe londe . gret myd ^wit^ childe was
& was upe þe point to habbe child . wanne oure louerd
ȝaf þe cas
And was ope þe point to habbe child . wanne oure louerd ȝaf
þe cas
And was upe þe point to habbe child . wenne oure louerd
ȝef þat cas
Of þe chanteor he let of esse . wanne god time were Of þe chanteor he let of esche . wanne god tyme were Of þe chanteor he let of este . wanne god time were
ȝif it were ibore þe oþer sede . as mi bok me deþ lere ȝif it were ibore þe oþer sede . as my bok me deþ lere ȝyf hit were ybore þe oþer sede . as my boc me deþ lere
In þe morwenynge to morwe . wanne me may þe sonne
ise[o]
In þe morwenynge to morwe . wanne me may þe sonne yseo In þe morwenynge to morwe . wanne me may þe sonne yse
Þer ne ssolde in al þe worlde . þe childes per be[o] Þer ne ssolde in al þe worlde . þe childes per beo Þer ne ssolde in al þe worlde . þe childes þer beo
¶ Þo bad þe quene uaste . þat it moste be[o] þo ibore ¶ Þo bad þe quene faste . þat it moste beo þo ybore ¶ Þo bad þe quene vaste . þat it moste b<..> þo ybore
246
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