h i. The text in England xlvi
xlvi
T E X T U A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
is quite obscure. Mr. Philip Grierson has suggested that it may be a leaf from the 'Liber hystoriae aecclesiasticae gentis Anglie' given to St. Vaast at Arras by Seiwold, formerly abbot of Bath, about the time of the Norman Conquest. This was still at Arras in 1718, and perhaps fell a victim to the activities of an early nineteenth-century librarian, who is said to have cut up a third of the Arras manuscripts and sold them to bookbinders. If this should be so, it might have been a priceless witness to a kind of text current in pre-Conquest England.1
Bern, Burgerbibliothek 363, which contains the collections of a ninthcentury continental scholar of insular background, has on ff. i 88v~94 great part of book i: the text is quite eccentric.2
In Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud. misc. 610 is a partial version of books i and ii into Old Irish, which has been described as 'very free and often abbreviated'.3 One would gladly know what lies behind this.
Let us now see briefly what happened to the History in the later Middle Ages. h i. The text in England Of our two earliest surviving copies, the Moore M S. (M) seems to have gone abroad early, leaving no trace here, and the Leningrad
M S. (L) to have followed it; how soon, we do not know. Before doing so, it fathered a most handsome child:
British Museum, Cotton Tiberius A. xiv (CLA Suppl., no. 1703; Plummer's B), written in the mid-eighth century in Northumbria. Severe damage in the Cottonian fire of 1731 cannot conceal the high quality of both script and ornament. The text, the merits of which Plummer of course discerned, follows L closely. That it is actually a copy of L is hard to prove, with L so accurate and B so badly burnt: but it has features which, though in theory they could be due to chance, hardly admit any other explanation than direct copying.4 (a) Three omissions in B (f. 22v filii, f. 39 Doruuernis ecclesiae, f. 68v Anglorum sub rege
1 See the plate in E. G. Millar, Library of A. Chester Beatty . . . Western M SS, I (London, 1927), and Wright, p. 117 ; P. Grierson in Revue Bénédictine,
Lli (1940), 46-116, especially n o n. 22.
2 This is the famous 'Berne Horace', reproduced in facsimile by H. Hagen in the Leiden Codices Graeci et Latini, II (1897).
3 Kuno Meyer, in the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 11 (1899), 321-2, thought the version perhaps ninth-century; for the manuscript see Myles
Dillon in Celtica, v (i960), 64-76.
4 Mr. Amgart denies this (p. 34, n. 3 of the facsimile of L ); but he had been prevented by circumstances from examining B at first hand. In one place, B contains words not now in L, which would prove it not a copy; but the presence in L of a contemporary signe de renvoi indicates that the omitted words were added in the lower margin of L which is now lost.
T E X T U A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
xlvii Peada) seem quite uncalled-for, until we notice that they are 'runovers' in L (if. 15, 20v, 48v)—words written above their proper line in order to fill space otherwise blank at the end of the line above—and in the facsimile of L one can see how easily a transcriber might overlook them: (b) three other omissions (f. i8v humana presumptio hinc pietas inde, f. 108 in loco oportuno coepit sedulus, f. 116 non hoc segniter fecit) are exact lines in L (ff. i2 v, 74v, 82): (c) from time to time B, which has fewer lines to the column than L, follows exactly L 's division between lines (f. 39 = L f. 2ÓV seven lines identical, f. 48 = L f. 33 twelve lines, f. 1 16, n 6 v = L f. 82, 82v twenty-three lines out of twenty-nine).
This line-division is not suggested by the sense (as it sometimes is, for instance, in Biblical texts), and the parallel seems too close to be accidental: the scribe must have had L itself in front of him. We shall find one other copy of L when we pass to the Continent; B stayed here, and was carefully corrected to agree with the c-text. Where it found a home, we do not know. Two additions made in early hands at the beginning of i. 7 are found in manuscripts of a Gloucester-Winchcomb group (below, pp. li-lii): the sentence Remansit . . . certabant added in the fourteenth century at the end of i. 20 could be picked up anywhere in southern England.
All other known English copies are of the c-type of text. How it came down, we do not know; such is our ignorance of the con tents of English monastic libraries before the Norman Conquest.
There is a tantalizing record in the Glastonbury catalogue of 1247 of a 'fine ancient copy.'1 The British Museum has recently acquired from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum a beauti ful early-eleventh-century fragment containing v. 19-20 conualuit igitur . . . consecrata est aedificium (now M S. Egerton 3278); but it is a single leaf (26 lines to the page), of which we can make nothing. How many copies were in existence in the England of St.
Dunstan, and where were they ?
The Cottonian M S. (C) is so much earlier than our other English copies, that it is not easy to be sure whether or not any of them are descended from it, as one would expect; scholarly activity in intervening centuries always tends to blur a pedigree.
But there is one which seems so close in text to C, that I would gladly think it a direct descendant:
Cambridge, Trinity College R. 7. 5 (743), of the early eleventh century, with some leaves rewritten in the twelfth. At the end is
1 Iohatmis Glastoniensis Chronica, ed. T . Heame (1726), 11. 428: 'Historiae Anglorum scriptae a Beda, bon. sed vetust.'
xlviii
T E X T U A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
a short paragraph on Lindisfarne and the translation of the see from there to Durham; and this appears in another book, which may well prove to be descended in its turn from Trinity R. 7. 5:
Cambridge, St. John's College S. 6 {254), in which our History is preceded by Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Britain and a sermon by St. Augustine on the Lord's Prayer. It is signed by the scribe, John
Mablethorpe or Malberthorpe, who in the mid-fifteenth century was a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and of Eton College (where other books of his are still to be found).1
There are other English manuscripts of what seems to be a pure c-type, whose relationships are yet to be established:
British Museuni, Additional 38130 (formerly Phillipps 16250), of the twelfth century, without ornament, contains the History, and prefixed to it in another hand an account of the life and translation of St. Neot, and the beginning of the Life of St. Edmund, king and martyr, by Abbo of Fleury. The provenance is unknown; it was lot 140 in the Libri sale of 1859, where Sir Thomas Phillipps bought it. Perhaps related in some way to British Museum Stowe 104 (below, p. liii).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley J12 (261g) is a handsome great book, well' written and illuminated—not forgetting the fore-edges—to the order of Robert Wyvill, bishop of Salisbury 1330-75: the pencilled instructions to the painter of the initials can still be deciphered in the margins. Bede's History is followed by the Gesta Regum of William of Malmesbury, the Chronicle of Martinus Polonus, and a Cronica Bede which has been identified as an Oseney-Abingdon compilation.2
Another volume of historical works made for Wyvill, now at Wor cester College, Oxford, was written by the same scribe, and actually at Salisbury.3 Late as it is, this copy preserves an early form of text, and, as we have seen, it offers C's peculiar reading meditaturum for meditan dum as an alternative in the first sentence of the preface.
British Museum, Royal 13 C. vii, of the late fourteenth century, in a very unattractive hand with inferior gold in the initials, was given to the London house of Carmelites by their provincial Robert Ivory, who died after 1390, together with two other volumes of chronicles which also survive in the Museum.4 The History is preceded by the first two books of the Chronicle of Freculf of Lisieux, and followed by the Church History of Eusebius-Rufinus.
1 A. B. Emden, Biographical Register of the Univ. of Oxford to A.D. 1500, ii (1958), 1198.
2 H. Rothwell, The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough (Camden Series 89,
1957), XXI.
3 R. W. Hunt in Bodleian Library Record, v ii (1962-7), 23-27.
4 Emden, BRUO , II (1958), 1009.
T E X T U A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
xlix We now come to two well-marked groups of manuscripts, isolated by Plummer (i, pp. civ-v), which share the distinctive feature of some additions to the chronological summary in v. 24, betraying a special interest in St. Wilfrid, and seem to be derived from a common parent which 'had the divisions between the chapters marked very imperfectly'. The more faithful of these groups consists of a Durham book and its eight descendants:
Durham Cathedral Library B. ii. 33, of the late eleventh century, is a composite volume of some importance in the development of historical studies in the North of England, of which the nucleus (ff. 36-150) is a copy of Bede's History given to the Cathedral by its Norman builder,
Bishop William of St. Carilef (who died in 1096). To this a Life of Bede and his Historia Abbatum were soon added, followed by Nennius'
Historia Brittonum and other historical materials, listed in Thomas Rud's catalogue of the Durham MSS. (1825) and in Durham Cathedral
M SS. to the end of the twelfth century (1937), no. 47. From this the following are derived:
British Museum, Harley 4124, twelfth century, is a well-written copy of the History, with the Life and the Historia Abbatum, of which the end is lost. It belonged in the fifteenth century, if not before, to the Augustinian priory of Worksop (Notts.), founded about the year 1120.
Cambridge, Pembroke College 82, twelfth century, contains also the Life and the Historia Abbatum, and has a list of the bishops of Lindisfarne at the beginning and a pedigree of Northumbrian kings at the end.
It comes from Tynemouth Priory, a cell of St. Albans in Northumber land (but under twenty miles from Durham), founded in the eleventh century.
British Museum, Additional 23014, late twelfth century, bears the erased ex-libris of the Cistercian abbey of Newminster in Northumber land (not much over thirty miles north of Durham), the eldest daughter of Fountains, founded in 1138: at the foot of f. 3 is a contemporary record of damage done in the monastery by the Scots on 15 July 1333, a few days before their defeat at the battle of Halidon Hill. The History is followed by Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede, and then come two short pieces, one on the subjection of the bishops of Whithorn in Galloway to the see of York and the other on the reasons for the par ticular veneration accorded in Scotland to St. Andrew. The book con tains a note in the hand of John Bale, bishop of Ossory (who died in 1563), and later belonged to the St. John family, earls of Gosford.
Vatican Library, Reginensis lat. 6g4, of the thirteenth century, also has Cuthbert's letter after the History, and bears in a very large early hand the ex-libris of the abbey of Coupar in Angus, founded in 1164.
T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
It is in a seventeenth-century English binding, with gilt centrepiece and spandrels.
Oxford, Corpus Christi College 279, fourteenth century, contains a copy of the History which has unfortunately been taken out of its context, and bound up in modern times with an eleventh-century copy of the Old English version (Ker, no. 354), perhaps by the Oxford antiquary Bryan Twyne (he died in 1644), who gave the volume to the College.
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotlahd, Advocates 18. 5. 1, also fourteenth century, but written in a hand that shows documentary influence, contains only the History, with references for nine lessons for the feast of St. Oswald at the end, and comes from Exeter Cathedral, where it is recorded in the catalogue of 1506.1 It later belonged to John, son of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, who gave it in 1585 to Richard Cosen: and in 1629 it was acquired by Sir James Balfour of Denmilne, Lord Lyon King-at-arms, whose manuscripts passed to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates.2
British Museum, Burney 310, is a collection of historical works, including the Life of Bede and his Historia Abbatum, copied from Durham B. ii. 35 in 1381 by a Breton scribe, Guillaume du Stiphel, for Uthred of Boldon, a well-known monk of Durham, sometime prior of its cell at Finchale.3
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 302 (2086), ff. 72-137, is an earlyfifteenth-century copy of the History, now bound up with other things; the quire that follows it contains pieces mostly relating to the affairs of Scotland. It bears the name of a sixteenth-century owner, George
Hull, and was given to the Bodleian soon after its foundation by the Oxford antiquary Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall.
So much for the 'Durham group', as Plummer rightly calls it; his 'Winchester group' (1, pp. cix-xiii), which has the same additions to the chronological summary, seems to betray an origin ultimately northern by the presence in its two earliest repre sentatives at the end of the History of Æthelwulf's long poem on the abbots of an unidentified monastery in the north of England, composed very early in the ninth century.4 These are:
Winchester, Cathedral Library I (Plummer's W ; Ker, no. 396), carelessly 1 G. Oliver, Lives of the Bishops of Exeter (1861), p. 369.
2 J. D. Mackie, The Denmilne M SS. in the Nat. Lib. of Scotland (Historical Association of Scotland, 1928).
3 Emden, BR U O , 1 (1957), 212-13.
4 Printed in T. Arnold's Symeon of Durham (Rolls Series 75, 1882), 1. 26594, by E. Dümmler in M G H , Poet. Lat. 1 (1881), 582-604, and by Professor
A. Campbell (Oxford, 1967).
T E X T U A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
li written in the early eleventh century by several scribes, of whom the last gives his name as Ædelelmus, and adds some lines of gibberish, described by Plummer as 'very poor Irish'. Most of the Æthelwulf poem has gone astray, and is now in the British Museum as Cotton Tiberius D. iv part ii, ff. 158-66. A note on the translation of St. Birinus in a fourteenthcentury hand suggests that the volume was then already in Winchester; but of its earlier history nothing is at present known.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 163 (2016), also of the early eleventh century (Ker, no. 304) contains besides the History and Æthelwulf's poem a copy of Nennius, and other short pieces mainly of historical interest. At least as early as the twelfth century, when the first leaf was replaced with another bearing a coloured initial by the same hand as the initial in the Peterborough Chronicle, it was at the abbey of Peterborough. It carries the names of Humphrey Natures, who was a monk of Peterborough at the time of the Dissolution, and of an unidentified Henry Stowkes, and was given to the Bodleian by John Barneston in 1605. It appears, as Plummer thought, to be a tran script of the Winchester M S . b u t the original text has been carefully altered, e.g. by the addition of iv. 14, omitted in the pure c-text, which brings it into conformity with the vulgate copies of the twelfth century, as we shall see. Whether it was the actual source of those copies, or was merely altered to agree with them, is an open question.
Oxford, Balliol College 176, of the twelfth century (second half), in which the History is followed by Bede's commentary on St. Mark, was identified by Plummer as derived in the History from the Winchester
MS. Its original monastic home is unknown: it came to Balliol with the library of William Gray, bishop of Ely, who died in 1478.
The absence from the c-text of the long account of a miracle of St. Oswald, which we know as iv. 14, did not remain undetected, and by the end of the eleventh century at latest it had been incorporated from some manuscript of the m family. All the c-type manuscripts of which we are now to treat contain it, and show other changes also, some of which were clearly intended to make portions of the text more suitable for public reading in choir or in refectory. Where these changes were made, is not known.
Let us start with a small group (Plummer, 1, pp. cxiv-vii), which has at its head a manuscript from Gloucester, and shares one or two readings (above, p. xlvii) with Cotton Tiberius A. xiv:
British Museum, Royal 13 C. v, eleventh century (second half), is a copy of the History in several large bold hands, now wanting its last
1 In the hand of the Bury Gospels at Pembroke Coll., Cambridge, according to T. A. M. Bishop in Trans. Cambr. Bibliog. Soc. I (1953), 441.
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T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
leaf. It bears the ex-libris of the abbey of St. Peter, Gloucester, and also per Richardum Hanley abbatem\ he was abbot from 1457 to 1472, but it does not follow that the volume did not belong to Gloucester before his time. Careful corrections have been made, and these are found in the text of other members of the group; it is thus not unlikely, though not yet proven, that they are all descended from it. On the fly-leaf, in an early-sixteenth-century hand, is a note of two reasons for Bede's name of Venerable; his preaching to the stones, which replied 'Amen, venerabilis pater', and the cutting of his epitaph by angelic hands.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 368, early twelfth century with handsome initials, comes from Winchcomb abbey, sixteen miles north east of Gloucester, for which it was no doubt written, as the History is followed by a life of Winchcomb's patron St. Kenelm.1 One would gladly think this admirable book to be a direct copy of the Royal M S.: but though the Bodleian authorities kindly sent it to London, so that the two could be laid side by side, I was unlucky in the search for proofs that this is so, and it remains only a probability.
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 381 (formerly Hengwrt 102), twelfth century (first half), is another fine book, in its original binding, though badly damaged (I think, by rats). It contains only the History, and bears a large early pressmark not yet identified
' <1 Quartum :A :', and the signatures of two post-Dissolution owners, John Canon of Blagdon and Clement Burdett, I suppose the Burdett of Sonning (Berks.), who secured many books from Reading abbey.2
Oxford, New College 308, late twelfth century, is a handsome book with wide margins, which attracts attention by the penwork animals and birds in its capital letters, unusually expert even for a period when it is easy to take good work for granted.
Oxford, Pembroke College 3, late twelfth century, was such another, but now it is only a ruin: for, though the original binding survives, five quires and one leaf are lost at the beginning and two more leaves after f. 38. Its history is unknown: scribbled in three places is an earlyseventeenth-century name 'Anthonye Cole of Cadwych'.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barlow 3g (6462), thirteenth century, contains the History followed by a life of Bede, wanting the first thir teen leaves and another after f. 39. Its original home is not on record:
Plummer states that it is 'unquestionably a transcript' of the Winchcomb copy.
At this point it will be convenient to mention a few copies, whose 1 Winchcomb was the home of that Prior Aldwin who was inspired by his reading of the Historia Anglorum to lead the mission of three men and a donkey that restored monastic life in Northumbria after the Conquest (Symcon of Dur ham, I. 108).
2 J. R. Liddell in Bodleian Quarterly Record, vm (1938), 51-53.
T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
tiii relation to the more clearly marked groups has not yet been established:
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud. misc. 243 is written in several hands of the twelfth century (first half), and is not very far removed from the Gloucester tradition. Special changes have been made, as recorded by Plummer (1, p. cxviii), to provide an account of St. Oswald to be read in public, and on f. 42, where his name occurs in the text, it is twice written in capitals and rubricated. Oswald was a name held in honour in both Gloucester and Worcester, but also in the Fens.
British Museum, Stowe 104, of the end of the twelfth century, contains the History, followed by Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede, and by a set of verses on the Archbishops of Canterbury (beginning Dux
Augustinus precellit in ordine primus, also found in Bodleian MS. Tanner 348), with some other pieces.
London, College of Arms possesses a copy of the second half of the twelfth century, in what are perhaps its original boards, with the letter on Bede's death at the end. It carries the medieval pressmark of Chichester Cathedral.
British Museum, Additional 14250 is a well-written late-twelfthor early-thirteenth-century copy: it bears the ex-libris of Plympton, the Augustinian priory in Devonshire, and the History is followed by brief annals, which include early Plympton entries.
Next there is a group of copies which seems to have its home in Yorkshire—easily recognized because in the parent manuscript, which has not been identified, the History was unfinished or damaged at the end, and its last words were martyrologium de nataliciis in v. 24. Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede followed.1
Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 27 (722), early twelfth century, with initials of some merit, has lost its first quire, and its origin is unknown, but the points picked out by marginal notes seem to be of northern interest. There seems no reason to suppose that, as has been suggested, it comes from Canterbury. On f. 90v is a sixteenth-century scribble
'Robert Cherwell'.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 12 (^92), twelfth century, which contains the Life of St. Edmund, king and martyr, by Abbo of Fleury after the Cuthbert letter, bears the ex-libris of Selby abbey (Yorkshire,
West Riding), which was founded soon after the Norman Conquest.
The text has been altered in places to that of the 'Digby group', of which later.
* This is the 'Burney group' of Mr. E. van K. Dobbie (see p. 579, n.), and in what follows, his work on the classification of manuscripts containing the Cuthbert letter has been invaluable.
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T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
Oxford, Lincoln College lat. 31, mid-twelfth century, was given to the College by a Yorkshireman, the humanist Robert Flemmyng, dean of Lincoln cathedral, who died in 1483. The first quire is now lost, but two blank quires have been supplied to receive the missing text at the next opportunity, probably in the fifteenth century which is the date of the present binding: and it was perhaps then that Bede's commentary on the Catholic Epistles was joined with the History. Here too the text has been altered to make it agree with the following group (see Ker, no. 356).
Oxford, St. John's College 99, twelfth century (second half), bears the ex-libris of Jervaulx (Yorkshire, North Riding), the Cistercian abbey, founded in 1156. After the Cuthbert letter come St. Bernard's life of St. Malachy, who died in 1148, and the Historia Brittonum of Nennius.
British Museum, Additional 38817 (formerly Phillipps 25402), twelfth century (second half), from the Augustinian priory of Kirkham
(Yorkshire, East Riding), founded circa 1122, must be closely related to the St. John's MS., for though it now contains only the History and the Cuthbert letter (with a somewhat later note at the beginning on the dis covery of the body of St. Ragner of Northampton), the list of contents shows that the life of St. Malachy and Nennius originally followed, and then came a collection of visions of the next world—Wettin, the Twelve
Dancers, Barontus, and the boy Orm, who died in 1126.1
London, College of Arms, Arundel 16, early fourteenth century, con tains now only ff. 37-84 out of a larger volume, written in two columns, with marginalia of the late sixteenth or seventeenth century.
British Museum, Burney 297, fourteenth century, in an ugly hand writing between lines ruled in pairs, looks like a copy of Additional
38817: at the end of the Cuthbert letter it has the same scribal verse 'Felix qui scripsit sit et qui talia fixit'—not, I think and hope, a com mon one.
The late Mr. H. L. Bradfer-Lawrence of Sharow End, Ripon, owned a fourteenth-century copy formerly at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, which is classed with these by Mr. Dobbie (p. 89). It comes from the Cistercian abbey of Fountains (Yorkshire, West Riding).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C 162, late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, in which the History and the Cuthbert letter are preceded by the Ymago Mundi (normally ascribed to Henry of Hunting don, but here to Bede), formerly made one volume with a copy of Alfred of Beverley (now MS. Rawlinson B 200) and William of Malmes bury's Gesta Pontificum (now MS. Rawlinson B 199). The whole volume was bequeathed to York Minster by John Newton, treasurer of York,
1 On him see D. H. Farmer in Analecta Bollandiana, l x x v (1957), 72-82.
T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
lv who made his will on 4 May 1414.1 It belonged in the early eighteenth century to Bertram Stote of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Cambridge, Fitzzoilliam Museum, McClean log (formerly Phillipps 15601), fifteenth century, may perhaps be mentioned here, for I suspect it of being related to MS. Fairfax 12: it does not contain the Cuthbert letter, and now breaks off in v. 12. This is a horrid book, on paper, which once belonged to Lincoln Cathedral by bequest of William
Dadyngton of Barton-on-Humber (in Lincolnshire, but with the East Riding just across the river). In the late seventeenth century it was in the libraries of Thomas, Lord Fairfax and John Thoresby of Leeds.
Other Yorkshire copies, perhaps cognate with these, are on record in the thirteenth-century library catalogues of Bridlington and Rievaulx; in the fourteenth century at the Austin Friars,
York;2 and in the list of libri stadiales existing at York on the death in 1453 of William Duffield, canon of York, Southwell, and Beverley.3
And, while we are in Yorkshire, we may remember the former Phillipps M S. 9428, which passed through the London sale-room again in the autumn of 1964. In this book, prima facie a fifteenthcentury epitome of no interest, the place near Catterick which was the home of James the heroic deacon (in the last paragraph of Book ii) is identified as 'Seynt Iemestret', which suggests, as Plummer says (11, p. 1 18), that 'the scribe probably had local knowledge'.
We now come to a considerable family, which it seems safe to describe as the common text of southern England in the later
Middle Ages. This shows signs of deliberate editorial activity; for example, at the end of i. 20 is added the sentence Remansit autem in insula gens utraque, hostes et dues, Angli et Britones, quorum
Anglipro regno, Britones pro uita certabant; in i. 25 hue has become in regnum meum and Dorobernensi has been added after duitati, in i. 26 et non paud after plures. Within this family two main groups present themselves, in both of which the History is followed by Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede.4 One comprises the following:
Testamenta Eboracensia, 1 (Surtees Society 4, 1836), 366; this identification was made by Mr. N. R. Ker.
* Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen, ix (1892), 203; M. R. James, Catalogue of M SS. of Jesus College, Cambridge (1895), p. 48; Fasciculus J . W. Clark dicatus (Cambridge, 1909), p. 36, no. 164.
1 Test. Ebor. h i (Surtees Soc. 45, 1865), 132-3; Emden, BRUO, I. 601-2.
4 This is the 'Digby group' of Mr. Dobbie; see his pp. 76-83.
Ivi
T E X T U A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
Hereford Cathedral P. v. I, with a detached fragment in Bodleian MS. e Museo 93 (3632) (Ker, no. 121), early twelfth century; which, as Mr. Ker says, 'belonged at the time of the Dissolution of monasteries to the cell of Battle Abbey at Brecon, and appears to have been pre viously at Battle itself'. It contains notes in the hand of Sir John Prise, purchaser of Brecon Priory, and later in the sixteenth century belonged to Walter Herbert. Mr. Dobbie (p. 82) lias shown that the man who added on f. n 6 v the Old English words of Caedmon's song, omitted by the original scribe, had Bodleian MS. Laud. misc. 243 before him.
Oxford, Magdalen College lat. 103 (Ker, no. 357), mid-twelfth century, a good book of its kind, the origin of which is not known. At the end, probably in the scribe's hand, are four lines on the author, and a dedicatory couplet inspired by the first sentence of Bede's preface
(printed below, p. lxxiv).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 2 11 (1812) (Ker, no. 321), twelfth century (second half), a handsome book with the ex-libris of the Augustinian abbey of the Holy Cross at Waltham (Essex), founded in 1177.1
Cambridge, St. John's College B. 3 (27), fourteenth century, and unusually well written for its date: it belonged to the secular college at Pleshey (Essex), founded in 1394, which is nineteen miles from Waltham.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 10 1 (1702), early fourteenth century, does not contain the letter on Bede's death; the History is followed by a copy of William of Newburgh in the same hand.
Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 22 (717), part 1, fourteenth century, an unattractive copy in a somewhat unusual hand, of which the pro venance is not known.
Oxford, Merton College 95 (K . 3. 6), fourteenth century; the History now breaks off in v. 20, but was originally followed by the Cuthbert letter, and by Bede's de Naturis rerum and de Temporibus. It was bequeathed to Merton by Robert Ketrynham, rector of St. Gregory's in the City of London, who died in 1374.2
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 348 (10,173), fifteenth century, in a small current hand. After the letter on Bede's death follows the versified list of the archbishops of Canterbury, also found in British
Museum MS. Stowe 104.
Oxford, A ll Souls College 31, fifteenth century, in a good current hand. The History is followed, not by the Cuthbert letter, but by the 1 Part of the Cuthbert letter is reproduced by N. R. Ker in Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, N.s. xxni (1942-5), opposite p. 310.
2 F. M. Powicke, The Medieval Books of Merton College (Oxford, 1931), no. 525; the 'unintelligible addition' to the preface (Plummer, 1, p. cxxv) is tempore pro Domino sanguinem fuderunt from the title of i. 7.
T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
lvii Vastacio Troie of Dictys Cretensis and the historical work of Henry of Huntingdon.
Bury St. Edmunds, Cathedral Library owns a fifteenth-century copy of this kind in its original binding, which was given in 1490 by Robert
Elyot, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, to the Brigittine monastery of Syon in Middlesex, where it appears as no. K. 59 in the catalogue.1
It was given to Bury (then) parish church library by Augustine Stywarde in 1595. At the end are the same six lines of verse as in Oxford,
Magdalen College lat. 105, and then seven couplets giving the name Beda in the different grammatical cases; Sancte pater Beda, temptantis deprime feda; / Ne sibi sim preda, protectorem mihi te da, and so forth, headed Isti uersus extracti erant de quadam parua rotula doctoris Gastth (?).
It is easy to suppose that the copy bequeathed to Pembroke College, Cambridge by Hugh Damlett, who died in 1476 as rector of St. Peter's
Cornhill in the City of London,2 may well have been another of the same class.
The copies forming the second group within this family show certain changes of text; for example, the author's request for the prayers of his readers appears at the end of the Preface (as in the tfi-text) as well as at the end of the whole work. These changes have been made by a later hand in Bodleian M S. Hatton 43 (our O), and hence Plummer (1, pp. xcv, cxxviii) infers that they are descended from it. If this were so, one would expect to find the same changes in the closely related group we have just passed in review; and I prefer to think that O was altered in order to bring it into conformity with the group we have now before us. This contains, after Bede's History and Cuthbert's letter on his death
(which is here entitled Epilogium de obitu eximii doctoris Bede), a Latin version of the well-known anonymous Old English tract on the Resting-places of the English saints. This was translated, according to F. Liebermann the editor of the original,3 at St.
Augustine's, Canterbury, between 1033 and 1085; and perhaps the home of our group is to be sought in that part of the country.
Two copies of the History are recorded in the medieval catalogue of St. Augustine's,4 but the only survivor is a fragment reused as 1 M. Bateson, Catalogue of the Library of Syon Monastery (Cambridge,
1898), p. 87.
2 A. B. Emdcn, Biographical Register of the Univ. of Cambridge to A.D. 1500
(1963), p. 176.
3 F. Liebermann, Die Heiligen Englands (Hannover, 1889), p. xvii.
4 M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge, 1903), nos. 445 and 446 on p. 238.
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fly-leaves in the Missal of St. Augustine's (now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 270); this consists of two leaves only, in a good eleventh-century hand, and gives no clue.
Surviving members of the group are these:
British Museum, Harley 3680, early twelfth century, from the cathedral priory of Rochester, where it was probably written; it appears in the Rochester catalogue of 1202. The tract on the Resting-places is added by a second, but I think contemporary, hand; and one might w'onder whether this is in fact the common parent of all the volumes in which that tract follows the Cuthbert letter.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, e Museo 115 (3537), twelfth century, has lost its first leaf and now breaks off in v. 21: but the medieval list of contents shows that the Epilogium followed, and to this is added in the hand of Sir John Prise, the sixteenth-century antiquary who owned the Hereford MS., the words De locis sepulturae nonnullorum sanctorum
Anglie.1
Dublin, Trinity College E. 2. 23 (492), twelfth century (second half), is a handsome book from the abbey of Bury, where it bore the press-mark
B 296: the usual Bury foliation is missing, but it may have been cut off by the binder. There are a few glosses in the vernacular (Ker, no. 104).
Oxford, Christ Church 99, fourteenth century (first half), is a miscel laneous volume still in its medieval boards, of which six quires (ff. 51114) contain the History, the Epilogium, and the Resting-places, in a fairly good hand. The name 'Thomas Spaine' (fifteenth century) is scribbled inside the lower cover.
Cambridge, Trinity College R. 7. 3 (741), early fourteenth century, is beautifully written, with ornament of high quality, evidently to the order of some wealthy man. On the fore-edge is an heraldic pattern, which should identify him; perhaps a coat of arms, Gules three chevrons argent, on a vine-leaf background, while the lower edge is half Cheeky argent and sable, half Cheeky argent and gules, the latter half crossed by what is perhaps a fess argent charged zvith three ermine-spots.2
British Museum, Arundel 74, late fourteenth century, is another handsome book in its kind; the initial on the first leaf incorporates the coat of arms of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich 1370-1406, and that on f. 2V was intended to contain Bede seated writing, but this was left unfinished and shows only the first pencil sketch.3 After the tract
1 The first page is reproduced by N. R. Ker in The Library, fifth series, X (1955). Pii- 2 Argent three chevrons gules is attributed to John Langton, bishop of Chi chester and sometime chancellor of England, who died in 1337; but on what authority, I do not know.
3 We have seen above a copy written for a fourteenth-century bishop of Salisbury (p. xlviii). Another fourteenth-century prelate and chancellor, Simon
T E X T U A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
lix on the Resting-places of the Saints comes Bede's treatise on the last chapter of Proverbs, De muliere forti.
Oxford, Merton College once possessed a volume which may be placed here, for this reason; the tract on the Resting-places is stated by the antiquary John Leland (who died in 1552) to have existed in a Merton manuscript,1 and this is likely to have been a copy of Bede's History like the six we have just seen which contain the tract. Of the two copies recorded in the medieval Merton documents, it was not Powicke's no.
525, which still exists and never contained the tract: it may well have been the lost no. 258, which would then belong to our Rochester group.
Close to these in text, but without the Epilogium and Resting-places, is Oxford, Bodleian Library, Holkham misc. 7 (formerly MS. 460 in the library of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall in Norfolk), which stands a little apart, and light on its origin would be welcome. It is written on twelve-leaf quires of paper, watermarked with the Arms of France and the letter t (Briquet nos. 1742 ff.), in a late-fifteenth-century hand, which looks French.
In the same family falls a late copy like Worcester Cathedral F. 148, fourteenth century (second half), well written, but badly damaged by damp before it entered the Cathedral library at the end of the seven teenth century. The first twenty-two quires are lost, and it is not known what they contained: the History now begins at the end of i. 14, and there are gaps of one leaf and six leaves further on. Bede's Commentary on the Catholic Epistles follows.
Thus far it has proved possible to arrange the English copies, following Plummer's example, into groups; but of course the tendency to textual change as a result of error, or 'improvement', or cross-breeding between one strain of text and another, is always present. Especially as we approach the end of the Middle
Ages it becomes with some texts increasingly difficult, without labour and uncertainty, to determine the heredity of any given copy. This must serve as an excuse for listing here a number of later English manuscripts, for no better reason than that their textual affinities are still undetermined.
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 264, fourteenth century; the History is the last item in a volume of historical collections which belonged to Simon Bozoun, prior of Norwich.
Langham, archbishop of Canterbury 1366-76 and cardinal, owned a copy, preceded by the Chronicle of Martinus Polonus and followed by a Life of St.
Thomas, which he bequeathed to Westminster; J. Armitage Robinson and M. R. James, The M SS. of Westminster Abbey (Cambridge, 1909), p. 6.
1 Collectanea de rebus Britannicis, ill. 86 (iv. 80 in the edition of 1774).
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Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 359, fourteenth century; the History is followed by the Life of Bede, Cuthbert's letter on his death, and his De naturis rerum.
Cambridge, Emmanuel College I. 1. 3 (3), dated A.D. 1481; it contains after the History the Topographia Hiberniae of Giraldus Cambrensis and belonged, as the ornament shows, to John Gunthorpe, the humanist dean of Wells.
Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College A. 2. 8 (30) part ii, late fourteenth century; the History only, in a competent current hand. Belonged in 1592 to John Pilkington, canon of Durham.
Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College A. 5. J7 (102), fifteenth century; the History, with B 295 on the first page, showing that it lay next to the Dublin manuscript in the library of Bury Abbey. Early in Bede's account of his own life (p. 566 below), at the word digessi, the text breaks off, and with no warning except a coloured capital continues with an extract from some work on chronology written in a.d. 1108: after which, with an initial letter, Bede's sentence is concluded, and the History ends normally.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 189, fifteenth century, con tains an abbreviation of the History followed by the Cuthbert letter, and preceded by a fourteenth-century copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The Bede portion was written for one William of Writtle, and the volume was given to Hatfield Peverel, a cell of St. Albans in Essex, by John Bebseth afterwards prior, while William Heyworth was abbot of the mother-house, that is, 1401-20. On the first leaf is a note that it was found in St. Albans in 1537, and a brief entry, partly in Welsh, in the hand of Sir John Prise is on f. 3.
A mere mention must suffice for:
British Museum, Cotton Vitellius E. i (with two leaves now in E. vii), twelfth century, which is thought to come from the Augustinian priory of Guisborough in Yorkshire (North Riding), and later belonged to Sir Henry Savile of Banke.1 The History was followed by Cuthbert's letter on the death of Bede, his Historia Abbatum and the Life of Bede,
Nennius, Bede's prose Life of St. Cuthbert, a list of the bishops of Lindisfarne and Durham, a Durham relic-list, and other pieces. It suffered very badly in the Cottonian fire of 1731: but this at least seems to be clear, that it was not a member of our Durham group.
Other texts which have not been examined, and might be of English origin, are a copy formerly in the library of Lord Mostyn;
1 No. 14 in the list of his library printed by J. P. Gilson for the Bibliographical
Society in 1909; the contents are also listed in Thomas Smith's Cottonian catalogue of 1696.