The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

But, alas! such catalogues are very few; we have them for Durham, St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury (and partly also for Christchurch), St. Paul's Cathedral, Exeter Cathedral, Dover Priory, the Austin Friars of York (all now in print), and for not many more.

Next best it is to have a catalogue enumerating the contents of each volume; and next, and commonest, one which gives usually but a single title to each. Among the most useful I reckon those of Christchurch, Canterbury, Peterborough (an anomalous one), Glastonbury, Bury St. Edmunds, Rochester, Dover, Lincoln, Leicester Abbey (not yet printed in full), Ramsey, Rievaulx, Lanthony-by-Gloucester, Titchfield. There are a good many short catalogues for smaller houses, written on the fly-leaves of books, which do not, as a rule, help us much. The list of monastic catalogues, however, is dreadfully defective. We have none for St. Albans or Norwich or Crowland or Westminster, for Gloucester or Worcester, St. Mary's, York, or Fountains. What do we do in such cases?

The Evidence of MSS. Themselves

We have to depend, of course, on the evidence of the MSS. themselves. It was happily a common practice to write on the fly-leaf or first leaf Liber (Sancte Marie) de (tali loco). This is decisive. Then, again, some libraries devised a system of press-marks, such as "N. lxviii.," let us say. You find this in conjunction with the inscription of ownership; it is a Norwich book, you discover, that you have in hand, and all books showing press-marks of that form are consequently Norwich books too. Or you will find the name of a donor. "This book was the gift of John Danyell, Prior." Search in Dugdale's Monasticon will reveal, perhaps, that John Danyell was Prior of St. Augustine's, Bristol, in 1459. A clue to locality will often be given in such a case by the monk's surname, for it was their custom to call themselves by the name of their native village. Thus, a monk named John Melford or William Livermere will be a Suffolk man, and the abbey in which he was professed is likely to be Bury. Coming to later times, it is apparent that at the Dissolution groups of books from a single abbey came into the hands of a single man. If I find Dakcombe on the fly-leaf of a MS., I am almost entitled to assume that it is a Winchester book: John Stonor got his books from Reading Abbey, John Young drew from Fountains, and so forth. Lastly, and most rarely, you are justified in saying that the handwriting and decoration of this or that book shows it to have been written at St. Albans or at Canterbury. Hitherto the instances where this is possible are few, but I do not doubt that multiplication of observations will add to their number.

In questioning a MS. for any of these indications (except the last) you must be on the look-out for signs of erasures, especially on the margins of the first leaf and on the fly-leaves at either end. Here the owner's name was usually written. Often it was accompanied by a curse on the wrongful possessor, and at the Dissolution there were many wrongful possessors, who, whether disliking the curse or anticipating trouble from possible buyers, thought it well to erase name, and curse, and all. They seldom did it so thoroughly that the surface of the vellum does not betray where it was, and it can be revived by the dabbing (not painting) upon it of ammonium bisulphide, which, unlike the old-fashioned galls, does not stain the page. Dabbed on the surface with a soft paint-brush, and dried off at once with clean blotting paper, it makes the old record leap to light, sometimes with astonishing clearness, sometimes slowly, so that the letters cannot be read till next day. It is not always successful; it is of no use to apply it to writing in red, and its smell is overpowering, but it is the elixir of palæographers.

Yet, when all has been done, there is a sadly large percentage of MSS. which preserve an obstinate silence. They have been rebound (that is common), and have lost their fly-leaves in the process, or, worse than that, they have lain tossing about without a binding and their first and last quires have dropped away. In such cases we can only tell, from our previous experience in ancient handwritings, the date and country of their origin.

English Libraries

And now to turn to some individual libraries. Some of the most venerable have practically disappeared—that of Glastonbury, for instance, the premier abbey of England, the only one which lived through from British to Saxon times.3 To it we might reasonably look to trace many an ancient book belonging to the days of the old British Church. Leland, who visited the library not long before the Dissolution, represents himself as overawed by its antiquity. But almost the only record he quotes is one by "Melkinus," which most modern writers think was a late forgery. However, there is in the Bodleian one British book from Glastonbury, written, at least in part, in Cornwall, and preserving remnants of the learning of the British clergy. It has portions of Ovid and of Latin grammar, and passages of the Bible in Greek and Latin. The catalogue, too, shows that there were in fact a good number of old MSS., and also that the monks of the fourteenth century did not care much about them, for they are marked as "Old and useless," "Old and in bad condition" (debilis), and so on. The actual extant books which we can trace to this foundation are few and for the most part late.

St. Albans, founded by King Offa in the eighth century, has left us, as I said, no catalogue, but there are many of its books in our libraries. Two groups of them stand out. First are those procured by Abbot Simon (1166-1188) and Prior Mathias. These are very finely written. A typical and very interesting specimen is a Bible at Eton (26) which has three columns to a page—a rare distinction in the twelfth century, pointing, perhaps, to its having been copied from a very early and venerable model. It has a sister book at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and another—a New Testament—at Trinity College, Dublin. Then we have a large and important group of histories. The historiographers of St. Albans form a series reaching from Roger of Wendover (d. 1236) to Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422). The greatest of them was Matthew Paris (d. 1259). We have authentic and even autograph copies of many of these works, and especially of Paris's (at Corpus Christi, Cambridge (26 and 16), and in the British Museum, Royal 14, C. vii., Cotton Nero D. 1, etc.). And we have not only Paris's writing, but many of his drawings, for he was an accomplished artist. All these books furnish us with material for judging of the handwriting used at St. Albans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and we can speak with fair confidence of St. Albans books of that period.

As in other cases, I believe that many books were written there for other monasteries, either as gifts or as a matter of business. Not every one of the little priories scattered all over the country had its own scriptorium; it was only natural that they should apply to the big establishments when they wanted a Bible or service-book or commentary of really good quality. This practice explains the fact that we quite often find books which we could make oath are products of St. Albans or of Canterbury, and which yet have inscriptions, written when they were new books, showing that they were owned by some small house. Let me here note two other ways in which books wandered from the great abbeys. One: all the abbey libraries were full of duplicates; read any catalogue, and you will realize that. When the Orders of Friars were collecting libraries of their own, and when the colleges in the two Universities were doing the same, they found that the monks were often willing to part with one of their eight or nine sets of Gregory's Moralia or Augustine On the Trinity for a consideration. Two: most of the large abbeys maintained hostels at the Universities, singly or jointly, in which some of their younger members studied for degrees. These hostels were equipped with libraries, and the libraries were furnished from the shelves of the mother-houses. We have at least two lists of books so used: one of those which Durham sent to what is now Trinity College, Oxford; the other of those which Christchurch, Canterbury, deported to Canterbury College, Oxford, which stood on the site of Canterbury Quad, in Christ Church.

There was some compensation, by the way: the abbeys were not invariably the losers. A group of books (at Lambeth) was procured to be written by a Canon of Lanthony when he was studying at Oxford (about 1415), and given to the library of his priory.

We have digressed from the particular to the general. Returning to individual libraries, let us glance at the Norwich Cathedral Priory. Of this, again, we have no catalogue; it is a case in which press-marks and names of owners are our guides. Norwich has a system of press-marks consisting of a letter of the alphabet plus a Roman numeral: "N. lxviii." The press-marks of several other houses consist of just the same elements, but we can pick out that of Norwich by its size (not large) and its position (top of the first leaf of text); also there is usually added to it the name of the monk who procured it for the house, Henry de Lakenham or W. Catton—someone whose surname is the name of a Norfolk village. Over a hundred MSS. from Norwich are known to me, but they are a very small fraction of the library, as is shown by the numerals attached to the several class letters. Very few of them are as old as the twelfth century; late twelfth and particularly early fourteenth make up the bulk. I attribute this to the great fire of 1286, and I take it that then the greater part of the priory books were spoiled, and that energetic steps to refill the library were taken in the years that followed. There are more Norwich books in the University Library at Cambridge than anywhere else; it has not been proved, but I do not much doubt, that most of them were given by the chapter to Cambridge about 1574, at the suggestion of Dr. Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse, who was a member of the cathedral body and an enthusiast for the University Library.

Not very dissimilar was the action of Exeter Chapter, who in 1602 gave over eighty of their MSS. to Sir Thomas Bodley's new library in Oxford, Bodley's brother being then a Canon of Exeter; and not long after the Canons of Worcester picked out a score of their MSS., for Dean Williams's new library at Westminster Abbey. These, however, I believe were never actually sent off. It is just as well, for the Westminster MSS. were burnt in 1694. Of Bury St. Edmunds I have attempted to write the history elsewhere, but it is not likely that many readers of this book will be familiar with my former publication. The only catalogue we have for this abbey is an early one (eleventh to twelfth century) written on the fly-leaves of a copy of Genesis (glossed) at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Thus it contains no fourteenth or fifteenth century books, nor, indeed, has it many entries of extant books of earlier date which we are sure belonged to Bury; but it is not to be despised, though we depend more upon press-marks than upon it for guidance. Bury press-marks were an introduction of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Soon after 1400 Abbot Curteys built a library, and it was under the care of the monk, John Boston, who, I think, is responsible for the press-marks, as he certainly is for the copious bibliographical notices which occurred in some of the books. The press-marks consist of a capital letter and an arabic numeral (A. 130). Here, again, one has to be familiar with the handwriting of the marks and their position (top of first leaf and fly-leaf) in order to distinguish them from those of Exeter (often on last fly-leaf and large) or of the Hereford Franciscans (large, on first fly-leaf). However, in most cases they are backed up by the older inscription Liber S. Ædmundi regis et martiris. Bury library has, on the whole, fared well; an Alderman of Ipswich, William Smart, procured over 100 of its MSS., which he gave to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1599, and about 150 others are scattered up and down the country. One Bury book of extreme interest—not a library book, but a register—was taken across the Channel in the sixteenth century by a Bury monk to the settlement of the Benedictine refugees at Douai. Since the Revolution it has been (perhaps still is) in the town library there. Its importance is that it contains a list of the benefactors of the abbey, and among other things records the burial-places of the Abbots, including the famous Samson. In recent years it has guided excavators to the discovery of his bones. With it is a Psalter of extraordinary beauty, one of a group of marvellous books done in East Anglia—some say at Gorleston—soon after 1300. I grieve to hear that it has been severely damaged by damp. It has in it the name of an Abbot, John, who, I wish to believe, was of Bury, but doubt is thrown on this.

English MSS. on the Continent

A digression is allowable here as to English books that have passed to the Continent. According to Bale and Dee, there was a great expatriation of them at the Dissolution. In Archbishop Parker's correspondence there is talk of the negotiations of a German scholar, Flacius Illyricus, who wanted to buy Bale's MSS. after his death. At an earlier time Poggio visited England in the hope of unearthing classical authors, but writes as if he had been unsuccessful. Then, again, Sigismund Gelenius in 1550 edits at Basel treatises of Tertullian from a MS. belonging to the Abbey of "Masbury" (which I take to be Malmesbury), lent to him by Leland. More instances could no doubt be collected, but not, I think, very many more. When we come to enquire what English books are to be found now in Continental libraries, the results are not very impressive. I exclude the very early exportations, some of which have been mentioned, and confine myself to the books which were taken over at and after the Dissolution. There is a Bury Psalter with drawings at the Vatican, a St. Albans Psalter at Hildesheim, a fine Book of Hours at Nuremberg, a Winchester Pontifical at Rouen, a Sherborne Book at Paris, a Ramsey Psalter at an Austrian abbey, another English Psalter at the Escurial. The Canterbury Codex Aureus is at Stockholm. The famous Utrecht Psalter, written, perhaps, in the Rheims district, strayed from the Cotton collection to its present home in Holland, we do not know how. All these, and some other remarkable illuminated books that could be named (I ought not to omit a Peterborough Psalter at Brussels), are not library books, but rather properties of great ecclesiastics or nobles. The largest collections have never yet been thoroughly searched. I myself have made many enquiries and some examinations with small result. One case there is, however, brought to light by the late Rev. H. M. Bannister, which gives hope of better things when a systematic search is carried out. He found that in the Vatican Library there are quite a large number of MSS. from the libraries of the Friars at Cambridge. They are late and not very important books, but no matter for that: the point is that they are there. Other instances known to me are—one at least of Sir Kenelm Digby's MSS. and one of Lord Burleigh's (a fourteenth-century volume of English historians) at Paris; the Greek Demosthenes already noticed at Leyden, and a MS. from Pembroke College (Seneca), also there. The Vossian collection at the same place has other books which I suspect were once in England; most notable is its Suidas, which is said by M. Bidez to be the parent of the English copies I mentioned, and which I think must be Grosseteste's own copy. This, however, is a Greek MS. A volume containing poems of Milo of St. Amand is most likely a Canterbury book. But the early books in Irish script, of which there are several, were probably written on the Continent.

At Wolfenbüttel is a "Wycliffe" Bible, large and handsome, which belonged to Lord Lumley (d. 1609), and also a copy of Gervase of Tilbury (that from which the text was first printed by Leibnitz) from the library of St. Augustine of Canterbury. There, too, are many MSS. collected by Flacius Illyricus, who made purchases in England. He printed many of the rhyming Latin poems attributed to Walter Map; for a good many his edition is the only authority, his MSS. having disappeared. I had hoped to find some of them at Wolfenbüttel, but they do not seem to be there. What I did find was a small group of MSS. from St. Andrews in Scotland, containing rhyming poems set to music; they are books of the thirteenth century, well written and decorated. Scotch monastic MSS. are of rare occurrence. There are few enough in Scotland itself, not many in England, and, of course, still fewer anywhere else. At Upsala is a book written by Clement Maydestone of Sion for Wadstena, the Swedish mother-house of the Brigittine Order to which he belonged.

There were probably some English books at Turin, which was a mixed collection, but the fire of 1904 has made away with them. The old catalogue by Pasini notices at least one service-book with English saints. But it is time to bring this excursus to an end. Let me only add that the most famous English book on the Continent—the Vercelli MS. of Anglo-Saxon poems and homilies—seems to have been where it is now since the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

Remains of Medieval Libraries

Once again we return to these shores, and now we will enquire what medieval libraries, besides those we have glanced at, have left really considerable remains. Some few have kept their books in situ—the monastic cathedrals of Durham and Worcester best of all; each has some hundreds of MSS. The secular cathedrals, Lincoln, Hereford, Salisbury, come next. Rochester has nothing on the spot, but a great many MSS. in the old Royal Library in the British Museum. The two great libraries of Canterbury (Christchurch and St. Augustine's) are well represented, but their books are much scattered. Winchester, York, Exeter, have few but precious books.

There are important MSS. from Thorney at the Advocates Library, Edinburgh; from St. Mary's York, at Dublin; not a few from Cirencester at Jesus College, Oxford, and at Hereford; St. John's, Oxford, has many from Reading and from Southwick (Hants). There must, I am sure, be many Peterborough books to be found, but they are rarely marked as such, and the character of the catalogue makes identification very hard.

Of all minor libraries, that of Lanthony, near Gloucester, has, I believe, been best preserved. A great block of it was retained by the last Prior of the house, John Hart, who retired to a country house near by, and whose sister married a man of good position, Theyer, in the neighbourhood. He kept the books together, and had descendants who valued them and added largely to their number. At the end of the sixteenth century Archbishop Bancroft conceived the idea of founding a library at Lambeth for his successors, and he seems to have bought about 150 Lanthony MSS. from Theyer,4 which are now at Lambeth. Other Lanthony books are at Trinity and Corpus Christi, Oxford. A fourteenth-century catalogue of the books among the Harley MSS. shows that we possess at least a third of the whole collection.

Examples of the press-marks used by the various houses have been collected by the New Palæographical Society, and may be seen in their publications. They are, of course, most useful in cases where the inscription of ownership has not been inserted or has disappeared. The second case may be that of any book; the first is common to the Canterbury libraries, to Dover, the London Dominicans, St. Mary's York, Fountains, Titchfield, Ely. To the press-marks figured by the Society more will doubtless be added. I can instance one, that of the Franciscans of Lincoln, which is of this form:

.

Disappearance of Classical and other MSS

Passing over the painful subject of the wholesale destruction of MSS. which must have followed the Dissolution, I will give a few lines to an interesting question little mooted as yet. Is there evidence that England possessed many ancient writings which have since disappeared, or which have survived only in a few copies in other parts of Europe? Take the classics first. Poggio, as I have said, writes in a disappointed tone of his researches here, but these were neither long nor exhaustive. We have better testimony from John of Salisbury, who in the twelfth century quotes parts of the Saturnalia of Macrobius which have dropped out of all the MSS. we now have. He also read a tract attributed to Plutarch, called the Instruction of Trajan; it was probably not by Plutarch, but it was an ancient work, and is now lost. Petronius Arbiter was known to him, even that longest and most interesting piece of Petronius called the Supper of Trimalchio, for which our only authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, Ælfric knew, and rejected, a poem on the adventures of St. Thomas in India). In one of its Homilies the same Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St. Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes, a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost Book of Jannes and Jambres; another a chapter of the Book of Enoch, valuable as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current. John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if subsequently lost) is a title Proverbia Grecorum. What this book was is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call him the Yorker anonymus) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The work of Irenæus Against Heresies (we only have it complete in Latin) was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England, one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the treatise On Baptism which it contained depends wholly on his printed text.

I cannot doubt that among the books imported in the seventh century from Italy by Benedict Biscop and Theodore and Hadrian, and in the great library of York, which Alcuin panegyrizes in his poem on the saints of York, there were texts now lost. But the Danes made a clean sweep of all those treasures, as they did of the whole vernacular literature of Northumbria, undoubtedly a rich one. The scattered indications I have collected in the preceding paragraphs point to the fact that some strange and rare books did lurk here and there in English libraries. It is almost a relief that catalogues do not tell us of supremely desirable things, such as Papias on the Oracles of the Lord, or the complete Histories or Annals of Tacitus.

Another word on a topic akin to the last. I have said more than once that the men of the later Middle Ages did not value early books as such; they were difficult to read, and often in bad condition. At first they were apt to be made into palimpsests; but when good new parchment became abundant and comparatively cheap, this practice was dropped. I conjecture that there is no important palimpsest whose upper writing is later than the eleventh century. The fate of the early books is rather obscure to me, but I see that bits of them were not uncommonly used for lining covers and fly-leaves for MSS. of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and perhaps still oftener as wrappers for documents. Binders of the sixteenth century, and especially those who lived after the Dissolution, used up service-books and scholastic theology and Canon law to a vast extent, but early books not so lavishly. There are cases in which one is left doubtful as to whether the binder or his employer did not insert the old leaves with the definite wish to preserve them. I think of the leaves of a Gospel book bound at the end of the Utrecht Psalter, of a fragment of another fine Gospels in an Arundel MS. at the College of Arms, of some splendid Canons of the Gospels in the Royal MS. 7. C. xii; but in the cases that follow I think that accident and not design has been at work, viz.: the fragments of several venerable volumes at Worcester, admirably edited of late by Mr. C. H. Turner; the leaves of a great sixth-century Bible found by Mr. W. H. Stevenson wrapping up Lord Middleton's documents at Wollaton; uncial fragments of Eucherius in the Cambridge University Library; other uncial leaves at Winchester College; bits of Ælfric's Grammar at All Souls'; of a Gallican Missal at Gonville and Caius; of an early Orosius (from Stavelot) in the British Museum and elsewhere; of an Orosius and Fortunatus at Pembroke College, Cambridge; and so on. My examples are set down almost at random.