Abstract
This note reports the recovery of three folios missing from the late-fifteenth-century miscellany known as the ‘Winchester Anthology’ (British Library, MS Additional 60577) within the collections of the Bodleian Library, inside one of the eighteenth-century notebooks of the antiquarian Thomas Hearne (MS Hearne's Diaries 42). An account is given of the material composition of the leaves as well as their textual content; as part of this discussion, a suggestion is offered as to where precisely these leaves were originally situated inside the ‘Winchester Anthology’.
The ‘Winchester Anthology’ (London, British Library, MS Additional 60577) is a late fifteenth-century collection of miscellaneous verse and prose in English, Latin and French.1 The scribe, who dates a portion of his work to 1487, also copied BL MS Harley 172, a contemporary and similar collection.2 Acquired by the British Library in 1979, the Additional manuscript, which includes a unique Middle English verse translation of part of Petrarch's Secretum, was almost immediately made available in facsimile by Edward Wilson and Iain Fenlon.3 The editors noted that a number of leaves once present were now lost. Apart from a lacuna of an estimated four quires, several leaves have also been removed individually or in small groups, leaving eleven stubs scattered throughout at the manuscript's gutter.4
Three of these missing leaves survive and can be assigned to their places in the codex. They came into the hands of the antiquary Thomas Hearne (1678-1735), who pasted them into one of his notebooks, in use between 1 November 1712 and 28 January 1713.5 The leaves have previously been catalogued in the Bodleian's Summary Catalogue: ‘at page 96 is a leaf of an English paper 15th cent. MS. relating to the monastery of Hales: and at page 101 is a fragment (two leaves) of a 15 th cent. Latin and English parchment MS. containing an English prophecy in verse (beg. ‘In the londe of more bretayngne’)’.6 It can none the less be asserted with some confidence that these leaves are all in the same hand, that of the Winchester scribe, and furthermore that the two parchment leaves once stood in the ‘Winchester Anthology’ between the current fols. 66 and 67, while the paper leaf stood between the current fols. 116 and 117.
Hearne's leaves have all been trimmed into an irregular shape, but each page bears a ruled text block of 158 × 90 mm, consistent with the rest of the ‘Winchester Anthology’.7 As is also standard for the codex, each block is pricked and ruled with 32 pencil lines, double horizontals define the first and last lines, and the pages differ as to whether the first line of writing sits above or below the first line of ruling. Every last written line on Hearne's leaves rests on the last ruled line, except on p. 104, where the text extends two lines below to keep a quatrain intact.8 In their situation in the notebook, the leaves have been folded to fit within the octavo format and mounted back-wards.9 As a result, Heame's pagination of the material runs against the actual flow of the text (see Table 1).
Winchester foliation against Hearne's pagination
| Original Winchester folios | Hearne's page numbers |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] | p. 104 |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] | p. 103 |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] | p. 102 |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] | p. 101 |
| fol. 116br [paper] | p. 96 |
| fol. 116bv [paper] | p. 95 |
| Original Winchester folios | Hearne's page numbers |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] | p. 104 |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] | p. 103 |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] | p. 102 |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] | p. 101 |
| fol. 116br [paper] | p. 96 |
| fol. 116bv [paper] | p. 95 |
Winchester foliation against Hearne's pagination
| Original Winchester folios | Hearne's page numbers |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] | p. 104 |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] | p. 103 |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] | p. 102 |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] | p. 101 |
| fol. 116br [paper] | p. 96 |
| fol. 116bv [paper] | p. 95 |
| Original Winchester folios | Hearne's page numbers |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] | p. 104 |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] | p. 103 |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] | p. 102 |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] | p. 101 |
| fol. 116br [paper] | p. 96 |
| fol. 116bv [paper] | p. 95 |
The paper leaf is quarto in format and carries half a watermark, the lower part of a double-banded shield with protruding ‘potences’ along the bands, identifiable in Briquet's catalogue as the Arms of Troyes.10 This matches one of the two watermarks found in the ‘Winchester Anthology’, the Arms of Troyes topped with a Maltese Cross (Briquet 1040).11 There are only two points in the Winchester manuscript where a dislocated leaf was once conjugate with a folio bearing the upper half of the watermark? after fols. 189 and 116 respectively. A placement for Hearne's leaf after fol. 116 is confirmed by offset from the detached leaf on to the full manuscript (Fig. 1, line 14; fol. n6v, line 14), as well as a portion of Hearne's initial T visible on the stub following fol. 116. Similarly, identification of Hearne's parchment leaves with the two parchment stubs of a missing bifolium after fol. 66 can be confirmed by circumstantial details including runover of the text from Hearne's p. 101 on to fol. 67rand aligned damage to the inner top corners of fol. 66 and pp. 103-4.12
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hearne's Diaries 42, p.96. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
The texts on Hearne's leaves are, like their companions in the ‘Winchester Anthology’, miscellaneous and multilingual in nature, including English verse alongside seemingly educational, school-text material. They form four separate works (or parts of works) in Latin and English verse and prose (see Table 2).
The Texts on Heame's Leaves
| Winchester Folio / Hearne's Page Numbers | Textual Content |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] (p. 104) | Beginning on the first line, a Middle English verse translation of the ‘Lynx’ or ‘Great Prophecy’ from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetia Merlini (IMEV, 1552).16 ‘IN the londe of more bretayngne | Schal benn a lorde of gret renoune […]’. |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] (p. 103) | Middle English poem ends twelve lines down the page. ‘Explicit’. Followed by a short Latin prose history describing events in the relations between England and Scotland during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with a focus on charters and papal correspondence. ‘Nota quod in |
| Carta Edgari | Regis scocie dunellmum continetur […]’. |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] (p. 102) | Remaining four lines of the Latin prose. |
| Followed by two of Cato's Distichs (II 14, 16).17 ‘Esto forti animo cum sis dampnatus inique […]’. Followed by a longer series of Latin vulgaria. ‘Quanto facilis aliquid est | tanto suscepcius est […]. | |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] (p. 101) | The vulgaria continue, curtailed mid-sentence by the end of the page. |
| fol. ii6br [paper] (p. 96) | Beginning on the first line, a piece of Middle English prose describing the relic of Christ's blood coming to Hailes abbey in Gloucestershire and subsequent privileges and indulgences granted to the abbey. ‘The yere of our lorde millesimo. CClxx. Edmond pe nobyll Erle of Cornuale brou3t a porcyon of precyous blode of Cryste Ihesu that he Shedde for mankynde apon the crosse vn to pe Abbey of haylys […]’. |
| fol. ii6bv [paper] (p. 95) | The Hailes text continues for thirteen lines. The remaining ruled space is blank. |
| Winchester Folio / Hearne's Page Numbers | Textual Content |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] (p. 104) | Beginning on the first line, a Middle English verse translation of the ‘Lynx’ or ‘Great Prophecy’ from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetia Merlini (IMEV, 1552).16 ‘IN the londe of more bretayngne | Schal benn a lorde of gret renoune […]’. |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] (p. 103) | Middle English poem ends twelve lines down the page. ‘Explicit’. Followed by a short Latin prose history describing events in the relations between England and Scotland during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with a focus on charters and papal correspondence. ‘Nota quod in |
| Carta Edgari | Regis scocie dunellmum continetur […]’. |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] (p. 102) | Remaining four lines of the Latin prose. |
| Followed by two of Cato's Distichs (II 14, 16).17 ‘Esto forti animo cum sis dampnatus inique […]’. Followed by a longer series of Latin vulgaria. ‘Quanto facilis aliquid est | tanto suscepcius est […]. | |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] (p. 101) | The vulgaria continue, curtailed mid-sentence by the end of the page. |
| fol. ii6br [paper] (p. 96) | Beginning on the first line, a piece of Middle English prose describing the relic of Christ's blood coming to Hailes abbey in Gloucestershire and subsequent privileges and indulgences granted to the abbey. ‘The yere of our lorde millesimo. CClxx. Edmond pe nobyll Erle of Cornuale brou3t a porcyon of precyous blode of Cryste Ihesu that he Shedde for mankynde apon the crosse vn to pe Abbey of haylys […]’. |
| fol. ii6bv [paper] (p. 95) | The Hailes text continues for thirteen lines. The remaining ruled space is blank. |
The Texts on Heame's Leaves
| Winchester Folio / Hearne's Page Numbers | Textual Content |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] (p. 104) | Beginning on the first line, a Middle English verse translation of the ‘Lynx’ or ‘Great Prophecy’ from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetia Merlini (IMEV, 1552).16 ‘IN the londe of more bretayngne | Schal benn a lorde of gret renoune […]’. |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] (p. 103) | Middle English poem ends twelve lines down the page. ‘Explicit’. Followed by a short Latin prose history describing events in the relations between England and Scotland during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with a focus on charters and papal correspondence. ‘Nota quod in |
| Carta Edgari | Regis scocie dunellmum continetur […]’. |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] (p. 102) | Remaining four lines of the Latin prose. |
| Followed by two of Cato's Distichs (II 14, 16).17 ‘Esto forti animo cum sis dampnatus inique […]’. Followed by a longer series of Latin vulgaria. ‘Quanto facilis aliquid est | tanto suscepcius est […]. | |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] (p. 101) | The vulgaria continue, curtailed mid-sentence by the end of the page. |
| fol. ii6br [paper] (p. 96) | Beginning on the first line, a piece of Middle English prose describing the relic of Christ's blood coming to Hailes abbey in Gloucestershire and subsequent privileges and indulgences granted to the abbey. ‘The yere of our lorde millesimo. CClxx. Edmond pe nobyll Erle of Cornuale brou3t a porcyon of precyous blode of Cryste Ihesu that he Shedde for mankynde apon the crosse vn to pe Abbey of haylys […]’. |
| fol. ii6bv [paper] (p. 95) | The Hailes text continues for thirteen lines. The remaining ruled space is blank. |
| Winchester Folio / Hearne's Page Numbers | Textual Content |
|---|---|
| fol. 66br [parchment] (p. 104) | Beginning on the first line, a Middle English verse translation of the ‘Lynx’ or ‘Great Prophecy’ from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetia Merlini (IMEV, 1552).16 ‘IN the londe of more bretayngne | Schal benn a lorde of gret renoune […]’. |
| fol. 66bv [parchment] (p. 103) | Middle English poem ends twelve lines down the page. ‘Explicit’. Followed by a short Latin prose history describing events in the relations between England and Scotland during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with a focus on charters and papal correspondence. ‘Nota quod in |
| Carta Edgari | Regis scocie dunellmum continetur […]’. |
| fol. 66cr [parchment] (p. 102) | Remaining four lines of the Latin prose. |
| Followed by two of Cato's Distichs (II 14, 16).17 ‘Esto forti animo cum sis dampnatus inique […]’. Followed by a longer series of Latin vulgaria. ‘Quanto facilis aliquid est | tanto suscepcius est […]. | |
| fol. 66cv [parchment] (p. 101) | The vulgaria continue, curtailed mid-sentence by the end of the page. |
| fol. ii6br [paper] (p. 96) | Beginning on the first line, a piece of Middle English prose describing the relic of Christ's blood coming to Hailes abbey in Gloucestershire and subsequent privileges and indulgences granted to the abbey. ‘The yere of our lorde millesimo. CClxx. Edmond pe nobyll Erle of Cornuale brou3t a porcyon of precyous blode of Cryste Ihesu that he Shedde for mankynde apon the crosse vn to pe Abbey of haylys […]’. |
| fol. ii6bv [paper] (p. 95) | The Hailes text continues for thirteen lines. The remaining ruled space is blank. |
The English texts on Hearne's leaves have long been known to scholars in their current context. The only medieval witness to the Middle English prophecy poem translating Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetia Merlini is constituted by these folios.13 The poem has twice been edited by Rossell Hope Robbins, who notes that the prophecy was widely circulated in Latin.14 Caroline D. Eckhardt emphasizes that English translations of the Prophetia Merlini were unusual and selects Hearne's poem for discussion.15 The historical text discussing the blood relic at Hailes, printed by Hearne as an appendix to Leland's Collectanea, has also been scrutinized.18 J. C. T. Oates suggests a possible relationship between this text and a lost section of an anonymous early Tudor work (c. 1515) printed by Richard Pynson, Λ Little Treatise of Divers Miracles Shown for the Portion of Christ's Blood in Hayles; this section is alluded to in a seventeenth-century catalogue as ‘the Pardons graunted by Popes & Cardinalls & Reliques’.19 The Latin material does not seem to have attracted scholarly attention. The vulgaria can now be situated as the first part of a previously acephalous collection in the ‘Winchester Anthology’.20 For Wilson, the presence of the vulgaria in the codex provides the lynchpin for his argument that the manuscript is at least partly educational in purpose.21
Hearne does not specify a friend or colleague as his source in the way he does elsewhere in his notebooks when incorporating medieval material.22 As a result, the provenance of the ‘Winchester Anthology’ manuscript between the second half of the sixteenth century and the second half of the twentieth remains shadowy.23 None the less, the recovery of Hearne's leaves renders it at least conceivable that more missing material from the ‘Winchester Anthology’ may yet be found; eleven lost leaves remain at large, along with the four quires that once followed fol. 37. As has happened previously, material may surface in other collections which once belonged to the same manuscript as fragments collected by Hearne.24 At the same time, the immense potential of Hearne's own collections is highlighted by this discovery of the leaves’ provenance; similar feats of identification may be possible for other items in the great bulk of fragmentary material gathered by the antiquary, both in his notebooks and in large bound collections in the Bodleian.25 These rich areas of enquiry belie Hearne's modest tone when he refers to the ‘old Fragments’ in his possession, and indeed Alexander Pope's cruelty in referring to Heame as ‘Wormius’?on ‘parchment scraps y-fed’.26
Footnotes
1 The paper and parchment manuscript contains 226 folios in 25 quires. For a full description see The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577, ed. by Edward Wilson and Iain Fenlon (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981), pp. 1–16.
2The Winchester Anthology, pp. 8–9. The main hand has dated fol. 107v to 1487 in a colophon, while the manuscript's inclusion of Earl Rivers’ translation of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers dates fols. 38r–44v after the end of 1477. A note on the front pastedown identifies the scribe as a monk of St Swithun's priory, that is, Winchester cathedral priory. The discovery of the shared hand of Additional MS 60577 and Harley MS 172 was made by A. I. Doyle, as credited by Wilson in The Winchester Anthology, pp. i, 4.
3The Winchester Anthology. The manuscript has since been digitized by the British Library and is available online at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts. On the Secretum translation (fols. 8r–22r) see Edward Wilson, ‘An Unrecorded Middle English Version of Petrarch's “Secretum”? A Preliminary Report’, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, 25 (1982), 389–90; Daniel Wakelin, ‘Religion, Humanism, and Humanity: Chaundler's Dialogues and the Winchester Secretune', in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 225–44; Alessandra Petrina, ‘The Humanist Petrarch in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 12 (2013), 45–62. Edward Wilson's edition of the text is currently being prepared for publication by The Early English Texts Society as A Middle English Translation of Petrarch's Secretum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
4 Wilson estimates that four quires of ten have been removed between fols. 37 and 38 (The Winchester Anthology, 3). The stubs can be found following fol. 56 (one, ruled), fol. 66 (two, ruled), fol. 116 (one, ruled) fol. 184 (one, ruled), fol. 189 (one, ruled), fol. 218 (three, ruled), and preceding fol. 224 (two, no ruling visible).
5 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hearne's Diaries 42, pp. 95–96, 101–4. The notebook previously had the shelfmark MS Rawlinson K. 42. Between the first leaf and the second two leaves Hearne has inserted a paper leaf with a mezzotint image of the antiquarian Anthony Wood (pp. 97–98).
6 Richard William Hunt and Falconer Madan, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, iii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), p. 410. Similarly, in the printed edition of Hearne's notebooks, the editor lists ‘a fragment in MS. printed by H. in Leland's Collectanea, Vol. 6, pp. 283–84 … some MS. educational exercises for boys; and a 15th cent. MS. fragment of a rhymyng ‘prophecy’ beginning ‘In the Lond of more bretaynge’; Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. by Charles Edward Doble, David Watson Rannie and H. E. Salter, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), iv, 42.
7 Wilson gives an average of 6¼ in. by 3⅝ in. (The Winchester Anthology, p. 6).
8 For similar instances of rhyme schemes breaking the last ruling in the ‘Winchester Anthology’, see fols. 22v–24r and 65v– 66r.
9 For discussion of cut-and-paste modes of manuscript appreciation and preservation, see Christopher de Hamel, Cutting Up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit (Charlottesville: Book Arts Press, 1996); Adam Smyth, ‘“Shreds of holinesse”? George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England [with illustrations]’, English Literary Renaissance, 42 (2012), 452–81.
10 C. M. Briquet, Les Filigranes: Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en 1600, 4 vols (Paris: Picard, 1907), 1, items 1038–55.
11 Briquet, I, 1040; found between 1467 and 1480. Noted by Wilson: The Winchester Anthology, p. I.
12 The text flows seamlessly (mid-word, ‘sco-larium’) from Hearne's p. 101 on to fol. 67r, part of the vulgaria. For a view of the ‘original’ organization of the manuscript's quires see A. G. Rigg, ‘The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577’, Speculum, 59 (1984), 218–19 (p. 219). I am grateful to Edward Wilson for directing my attention towards this review.
13 The poem appears also in a seventeenth-century context in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 3041 (previously MS Mostyn 133).
14 Rossell Hope Robbins, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth: An English Fragment,’ English Studies, 38 (1957), 259–62; and Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, I959), pp. 113–15, 307–9).
15 Caroline D. Eckhardt, The Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Fifteenth-Century English Commentary (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1992), pp. 17–19.
16 The Prophetia Merlini forms the seventh book of the Historia Regum Britanniae: ed. and trans. by Michael D. Reeve and Neil Wright, Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae] (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007, repr. 2009), pp. 143–59. Carlton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (IMEV) (New york, Ny: Columbia University Press, 1943), as in Julia Boffey and A. S. G Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) (London: British Library, 2005). The lyric is 2607 in the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV), at http://www.dimev.net, ed. by Linne R. Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, Elizabeth Solopova & others, ‘In the land of More Brittany’.
17 J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets (London: Heinemann, 1934), p. 606.
18 18 Hearne, Joannis Lelandi Antiquarii de Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, 6 vols (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1715), vi, 283–84.
19A Little Treatise of Divers Miracles Shewed for the Portion of Christ's Blood in Hayles, Bodl. Ded. 324 (not paginated), on loan from the Gloucester Library. J. C. T. Oates, ‘Richard Pynson and the Holy Blood of Hayles’, The Library, v, 13 (1958), 269–77 (p. 275). See also Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 138, n. 5.
20 Item 132 (fols. 67r–77r) in The Winchester Anthology, p. 26.
21The Winchester Anthology, p. 13.
22 For example, the two mid-fifteenth-century fragments in vol. 38 of ‘Remarks and Collections’ (MS Hearne's Diaries 38, pp. 260–64) are accompanied by a note: ‘The following old Fragments given me by Thomas Rawlinson, Esquire’, p. 260.
23 See The Winchester Anthology, pp. 12–13. The codex's last known owner before the twentieth century was William Way, his name appearing on multiple folios (57r, 222v, 223r, 223v, 224v, 225r and 225v). Way seems to have been a lay singing-man at Winchester Cathedral and his name appears in cathedral records up to 1563. Nothing further is known about the manuscript until it surfaces in a Sotheby's sale in 1979, acquired by the British Library in the same year.
24 Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2585 contains mid-fifteenth-century material from the same manuscript as the two fragments given to Hearne by Thomas Rawlinson in MS Hearne's Diaries 38. See Jayne Ringrose, Summary Catalogue of the Additional Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge University Library Acquired Before 1940 (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009), p. 12.
25 Compilations of fragments once belonging to Hearne include MS Rawlinson D. 893, MS Rawlinson D. 894, MS Rawlinson D. 1164, MS Rawlinson D. 1373, and MS Rawlinson Q. b. 4. See Theodor Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 144–45.144–45.
26 See note 22 above. The Dunciad, ed. by James Sutherland, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 5 vols, 3rd edn (London: Methuen, 1963), iii, 184 (p. 171).
*I am grateful to Daniel Wakelin for first suggesting the Winchester codex and its scribe as the source of Hearne's leaves, and for his later help with the development of this paper. I am further indebted to Elaine Treharne, Orietta Da Rold and Ralph Hanna for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. I wish finally to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting this work in the form of funding for a Master of Studies degree (2013-14).
