The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

Collectors of Books

We pass now from the monastic circle to that of the learned book collectors before and after the Dissolution. Many of the best medieval book-buyers were Abbots or Priors, and the history of their collections is merged in that of their abbeys. Leaving them aside, we find in fourteenth-century England one name which everyone has heard—that of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, and author of the Philobiblion. I am inclined to think that he was a humbug; his book is of the kind that it is proper to translate, print on hand-made paper, and bind in a vellum wrapper, but it tells us just nothing of what books De Bury had or read, and I could not point to a single work of any importance which he was instrumental in bringing to light or preserving. Persons who take pains to advertise themselves as book-lovers or bibliomaniacs are rarely those who render great services to literature.

Perhaps the libraries of the pre-Reformation colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are the best hunting-grounds for traces of the early collectors. At Peterhouse, Cambridge is a large bequest from John Warkworth, Master late in the fifteenth century; another from J. Dyngley, Fellow, whose books were written expressly for him; yet another from H. Deynman, Master, who was interested in medicine. Here, too, we come upon the tracks of Roger Marchall, who must rank, on the whole, as a student of natural science. Books with his name and his carefully written tables of contents are at Peterhouse, Gonville and Caius, Lambeth, the British Museum, King's College; one at Magdalene College (Pepys Library) came thither from Peterhouse via Dr. John Dee. Walter Crome was another fifteenth-century benefactor of the University Library and of Gonville Hall, who, like Dyngley, had books written to his order. These are Cambridge data. Just such another list could be made out for some Oxford colleges, particularly Merton, Balliol, and New College. In this Bishops William Rede of Chichester, and John Trillek of Hereford, and William Gray of Ely, would figure prominently. The mention of this last name will serve as a pretext for introducing the Renaissance scholars. Gray, we saw, was one of those who dealt with Vespasiano Bisticci of Florence, though not nearly all of the many MSS. of his giving which are at Balliol are Italian-written; a good number are by Flemish and German scribes. The other men to whom I alluded in the same connection were for the most part benefactors of Oxford. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, beheaded in 1470 for treason, promised a large gift of books to the University, but they never reached it, nor do I know a single MS. to-day that was Tiptoft's property, though there can be no doubt that he was a considerable book-buyer. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (whom we are now forbidden to call "the Good"), did give the University what was then a large library; his name is inseparably associated with the great room of the Bodleian, but his books were swept away in Edward VI.'s days. Some few have come back to their old home, and others are in London and in Paris: twenty-nine is said to be the total. He intended further gifts, but he was cut off in 1444, and it is thought that one collection, perhaps his travelling library, was diverted to King's College, Cambridge. It is certain that soon after 1450 that college possessed some 174 MSS., among which such titles as Plato's Republic in Latin and a Greek-English dictionary betray a humanistic influence which is not likely to have been that of our founder, Henry VI. Moreover, the only one of those MSS. that remains is a Latin version of some orations of St. Athanasius, made by a secretary of the Duke, and dedicated to the Duke; and in the British Museum is another volume of Athanasius translated by the same man, which actually has Duke Humphrey's inscription in it. This is respectable evidence in support of the King's College story.

William Flemming, Dean of Lincoln, and founder of Lincoln College, Oxford, gave a number of books to that society which show him to have been interested in the revival of learning; Greek MSS. are among them.

John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells (d. 1498), is said by Leland to have bequeathed the large collection he brought from Italy to Jesus College, Cambridge. It is scattered and gone from there, but books of Gunthorpe's survive in a good many libraries. One deserves special mention—a Latin prose version of the Odyssey, which he picked up (not in Italy, though it is an Italian book, but at Westminster) in 1475. Probably it was the first copy of the Odyssey in any form that had come to this country since Roman times, unless, indeed, Archbishop Theodore brought one over in the seventh century. Archbishop Parker thought that he had, and the MS. which he fondly believed to be Theodore's was in his view the pearl of the collection he left to Corpus Christi. Certainly it has the name Theodorus in it in letters of gold; but, as certainly, it is a fifteenth-century book, and the Theodore for whom it was written was I believe Theodore Gaza, a humanist who lived in Italy.

An instance of a man interested in books and not unaffected by the Renaissance, though not himself a collector, may be introduced here. William Wyrcestre (or Botoner, or Worcester) is the man, and he deserves a special study. Some have called him the father of English antiquaries, in virtue of one of his notebooks which has been preserved, and which contains jottings about his travels in England; it is a sort of rude elementary Leland's Itinerary. It is by no means the only book of his compiling, nor the only one owned by him that we have. There are historical and literary collections of his, and not a few MSS. with his name in them. He knew John Free, the translator (reputed) of Diodorus Siculus, and he had read Cristoforo Buondelmonte's book on the islands of the Greek archipelago.

A long list of the Elizabethan book-collectors could be made, but I shall not attempt one here. Two libraries of the time, Sir Robert Cotton's and Archbishop Parker's, stand out. The main object of both men was to preserve English antiquities, and it is no exaggeration to say that if these two collections, which together number less than 1,500 volumes, had been wiped out, the best things in our vernacular literature and the pick of our chronicles would be unknown to us now. We should have no Beowulf or Judith, only inferior copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and of Matthew Paris, no Layamon, no Pearl—not to speak of the mass of invaluable State-papers gathered by Cotton, and the Reformation documents and letters stored up by Parker. One touch of blame rests on Sir Robert Cotton. He had a vicious habit of breaking up MSS. and binding together sections from different volumes. This disguises the provenance of the books, and by consequence obscures the history of their contents.

Enough information about the Cotton and Parker MSS. is easily accessible to absolve me from writing much about them here. Less is generally known of two dispersed collections, those of John Bale and John Dee.

Bale must, I fear, have been an unamiable man—certainly a very queer Christian. But his controversial works, on which he doubtless prided himself most, are dead and very rotten, while those devoted to the more peaceful science of bibliography are of abiding value. In his larger one, Scriptorum Britannicorum Centuriæ, he inserts a list of the MSS. he had once owned; they were no longer in his hands, but, it is to be supposed, in Ireland, left there when he fled from his bishopric of Ossory on Mary's accession. It is not a very scientific list, not one that gives the contents of each volume, but merely names of treatises, groups of which no doubt went to make up volumes, and this makes it difficult to determine how much of his library is in existence now. After his death it was in England, and a syndicate of Germans, including, as was said above, Flacius Illyricus, were negotiating for the purchase of it. Archbishop Parker also had an eye upon it; he had received books as gifts or loans from Bale in former years. I have not been able to make sure whether any of the books did actually go to the Continent; I doubt it, in fact. Many distinguished by Bale's curious small, "flat" handwriting are traceable among Cotton's and Parker's books, at Lambeth, at Cambridge, and doubtless also at Oxford (where there is at least the MS. of his Index Scriptorum, admirably edited by Mr. R. L. Poole and Miss Bateson). Bale was a Carmelite in his youth and interested in the history of his Order, and there is an a priori probability that any book dealing with Carmelite affairs will contain marks of his ownership.

Dr. John Dee's history has often been written, and the catalogue of the MSS. he owned has long been in print in a Camden society volume (Diary of Dr. John Dee) edited by Halliwell. The main facts of his life that concern us are that he lived at Mortlake, and in 1584 went on a wild journey to Poland. In his absence his house and collections were plundered by a mob, who, not without excuse, thought him a warlock. When he returned in 1589 he set himself to recover his scattered property, and to a great extent succeeded. He moved from Mortlake to Manchester, being made Warden of the college there in 1595; later on he returned, and died at Mortlake, much in debt, I think, in 1608. I find from Archbishop Ussher's printed correspondence that his books were still unsold in 1624; litigation may have prevented their being dealt with earlier. The lists we have of his MSS. date from before his foreign tour; that which is in print was made on the eve of his departure, and contains a little over 200 entries.

After the vicissitudes which his collection suffered it is remarkable that one should still be able to identify as extant well over half of it. I have been helped in my searches by certain marks—a little ladder, or the astrological sign of Jupiter, or a Δ—which occur on the first page of many. His handwriting, too, in notes, and certain names of owners (particularly P. Saunders) are guides. Some of his MSS. were bought by Ussher, and are at Trinity College, Dublin, and a few were bought by Cotton. But the largest group of them is at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. These were acquired by the great Oxford antiquary, Brian Twyne, who hoped that his college would buy them from him, but this they would not do. Happily Twyne was not too much hurt by the refusal to leave them to the college at his death. I guess that one reason for his buying them was that some (perhaps many) of them had once belonged to his grandfather, John Twyne, a Canterbury man of some slight eminence, who in his turn had secured a considerable "lot" of MSS. from the library of St. Augustine's Abbey. In searching out the relics of that great library I found the combination, or pedigree, St. Augustine's—John Twyne—Dee—Brian Twyne—Corpus Christi, to be a frequent one, and this set me upon a general investigation of Dee's MSS. A little notebook of his at Corpus Christi showed that in early life he had borrowed a number of MSS. from Peterhouse and from Queen's College, Oxford. I did not find that these ever got back to their sources, but I do not think that Dee was dishonest in the matter; I believe he was allowed to keep them for some consideration received. Some of the Peterhouse books are traceable in the Ashmole collection, the Pepys Library, and the British Museum; of those of Queen's College I can say nothing. Dee was specially interested in mathematics, alchemy, and, as everyone knows, converse with spirits, but his library was not confined to books on these subjects; he had some excellent historical, literary, and theological MSS. One of them was the best copy of Alfred's translation of Orosius.

Another library of the sixteenth century deserves to be singled out from the many which offer themselves for notice. It is that of Lord Lumley (d. 1609); he inherited the books from Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (d. 1580). This collection had again been largely recruited from that of Archbishop Cranmer: the combination T(homæ) C(ranmeri) C(antuar)—Arundel—Lumley, is often found written on the lower margin of the first leaf of the MSS. concerned. These Arundel MSS., by the way, must not be confounded with the Arundel collection in the British Museum, nor with that remnant of the same collection which is owned by the College of Arms. The Arundel MSS., so-called, were collected largely by Lord William Howard (Belted Will) of Naworth, passed on to Thomas, Earl of Arundel (d. 1644), and devised by Henry Howard to the Royal Society, 1681; they were eventually transferred by the Society to the British Museum in 1831. The Arundel-Lumley books had a different destiny. Most of them also came to the Museum, but by another path. They were bought after Lumley's death by or for Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., and added to the Royal Library, and that became national property by the gift of George II. in 1757. We have a catalogue, made about 1609, of the whole library, which is among the Gale MSS. at Trinity College, Cambridge. It bears no name of owner, but is easily seen to be Lumley's. Not all the MSS. that we find bearing Lumley's name are in it, and not all the MSS. in it are in the old Royal Library. To the second class belong the English Bible at Wolfenbüttel, the Bible of Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester (a fine but plain book which is at Cheltenham in the Phillipps collection), and the Bosworth Psalter bought not long ago from a private owner by the British Museum. The first class is more numerous; about twenty MSS. at Lambeth alone have Lumley's name, but are not in his catalogue. I conjecture that they were presented by Lumley (who was a generous giver of printed books to the Universities) to Archbishop Bancroft when he was forming his collection.

So one might go on through Ussher, Laud, Selden, Rawlinson, Harley, Askew, Drury, Heber, etc., to Sir Thomas Phillipps, whose 30,000 MSS., good and bad, must be the largest mass of such things ever owned by a single collector. But I think I have said enough of the public and private accumulations of this country to give an adequate idea of the kind of results that attend research, and of the ways in which large blocks of MSS. have been handed on to us. The epoch of the sale-room I have not really touched; it demands special tools and a special historian, and it concerns individual books. Nor, I will confess, do I feel quite at ease in touching upon the private collections of the present day. There is less objection to surveying such things when they have passed as wholes into public institutions.

For example, the MSS. collected by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres were acquired in 1892 for the John Rylands Library at Manchester. The Latin section of these I have had occasion to examine. It consists of nearly 120 items. The earliest and most remarkable of these almost all own the pedigree of Libri-Bateman-Crawford. Of Libri enough has been said to make it necessary to note here that none of the Crawford MSS. owned by him were pilfered from French libraries. The library of Bateman of Youlgrave was dispersed in 1893; the Libri purchases in it are mostly traceable in the Libri sale catalogue of 1859. Three tenth-century Spanish MSS., two from the Abbey of S. Pedro de Cardeña, one from Silos, happen, by an odd and lucky accident, to be elaborately described in Berganza's España Sagrada; how it was that exactly these books came into Libri's hands it is not likely that we shall discover. For the rest, Lord Crawford's purchases at the Howell Wills sale of 1894 were considerable in quantity, and he acquired three fine books at that of Ambroise Firmin Didot in 1878. Three others came from the Bollandist Fathers' Library at Brussels. One of these had for some years formed part of the very choice collection of the Fountaines at Narford, in Norfolk, scattered in 1894.

Of less choice quality, but of extreme usefulness to the student, are the 200 MSS. bequeathed by Frank McClean in 1904 to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and collected by him in the ten or fifteen years before that. Here we have few coherent groups of books, unless we reckon as such a certain number of volumes from the Cistercian Abbey of Morimund in North Italy, acquired singly, perhaps, by Mr. McClean from Hoepli of Milan. The Phillipps sales account for a good many, the Barrois and Ashburnham Appendix (1901 and 1897) for a few more, but most of the books were picked up one by one in auction-rooms or from dealers' catalogues.

In both these cases examples of illumination and calligraphy have been primary objects in the collectors' eyes, and that is the ruling passion with most of those who buy MSS. nowadays. At the beginning of the nineteenth century what was more coveted was the accumulation of copies of the classics. It had hardly been realized that few of the Renaissance classical MSS. made in Italy have independent textual value, and collectors like Askew, Drury, Canonici, Burney, thought that the more of them they had the better. Lord Fitzwilliam (d. 1816), who devoted himself to buying French Books of Hours for the sake of the pictures, was something of a pioneer (at least in England) in this respect. Francis Douce (d. 1834) was another; his treasures are in the Bodleian. As for Sir Thomas Phillipps, he must have bought by the cart-load: Nihil manu scriptum a se alienum putabat. In spite of the large amount of rubbish among his 30,000 odd volumes, I can never hear without a bitter pang the tale that the University of Oxford many years ago shied at his offer of them, accompanied as it was by some tiresome conditions; their fate has been gradual dispersion to every part of Europe and to America.

I have said that I cannot embark here upon the history of sales of MSS. in the last hundred years. But my abstention, due to considerations of space, must not be imitated by my readers. Those who deal with modern collections or make collections of their own—a thing still possible for quite modest purses, in spite of the inflated prices which the great books command—are not absolved from the study of sale catalogues; that they will pay attention to book-plates, bindings, and names of owners, I need not repeat. The list of such catalogues issued by the British Museum they will find invaluable; the catalogues themselves, alike those of dealers and of sales, will often enable them to trace a particular MS. back through a whole century to some Italian palace or Flemish abbey, sold up or secularized under the stress of revolution. This period of MS. history has been less well worked than the earlier ones; it is but just ripening, in fact; but to anyone who is bitten with the passion for the books it will prove just as fascinating as the others.

Curiosities of Research

By way of conclusion let me come back from generalities to particulars, and attempt to kindle interest and stir the imagination by a few words on waifs and strays—the curiosities of MS. research. Some few leading instances have been mentioned, but in thinking over the collections I have examined and the documents I have had to copy or edit, others, less immediately showy, occur to my memory.

What has become of the Red Book of Eye in Suffolk? It was a copy of the Gospels which St. Felix of Burgundy, the apostle of the East Angles, brought with him in the seventh century. It was after his death in a monastery at Dunwich. Then it passed to a little priory at Eye, where Leland saw it. After the Dissolution it remained with the Corporation of Eye—now extinct—and people took oaths upon it. It is traceable in the records down to a comparatively late date—within the nineteenth century. Can there be truth in the tale I have heard that it was sent for safe keeping to a mansion not far off, and there cut up for game labels? I cannot believe it.

No doubt MSS. were cut up for game labels. I have seen—years ago—in a London shop one that had turned up in a billiard-room, and its blank margins had been many of them removed for that purpose. But there was a fashion equally reprehensible a hundred years ago of cutting out illuminations from MSS. and making scrap-books of them. It was especially common in the case of the great antiphoners and other huge service-books which stood on the lecterns in Italian churches. The remainder of the books went to the gold-beaters, perhaps (they used parchment, and in England bought MSS. sometimes to cut up), or to a like destination. Occasionally books so mutilated have been reconstituted. A leading example is that of a Josephus, illuminated in part by the great Tours artist Jean Foucquet. This the late King Edward VII. and Mr. H. Y. Thompson were able to combine in restoring. The King had a number of the pictures, cut out, in his library at Windsor; Mr. Thompson had the mutilated text and a pictured leaf or so. The fragments were brought together and presented to the Paris Library, which already possessed the first volume of the set.

A miniature, cut, no one knows how long ago, from a fine twelfth-century Bible, was shaken out of a pile of printed copies of a funeral sermon at a country house. The book to which it belonged I believe to be one at Lambeth.

In 1890 Mr. Samuel Sandars bought at a London sale a scrap-book containing two leaves of a beautiful and very early Book of Hours. He gave them to the Fitzwilliam Museum. In 1894 came the Fountaine sale, and then Mr. William Morris bought the MS. from which these leaves had come. An arrangement was made between him and the museum that he should possess the leaves, replaced in the book, for his life, and then the museum should acquire the whole at an agreed price. Alas! he did not live to enjoy the ownership of them long.

To find, as the late Mr. Greenwell of Durham found, a leaf of a sixth-century Latin Bible from Wearmouth or Jarrow (or perhaps even from Cassiodorus's library) in a curiosity shop, is a chance that comes to few. But I have always lamented that I did not pass through the streets of Orléans at the time (not many years back) when an illustrated Greek MS. of the Gospels on purple vellum and in gold and silver uncials was exposed for sale in a shop window. A French officer had picked it up at Sinope, and used it to keep dried plants in. However, it went to its rightful and proper home, the Bibliothèque Nationale.

It is getting on for thirty years now since a small parish library in Suffolk, founded in 1700, gave to the world the book of the Gospels owned by St. Margaret of Scotland (at Oxford), and the unique life of St. William, the boy martyr of Norwich, and Nicholas Roscarrock's Register of British Saints (both at Cambridge). Not as long since, in a private library in Italy, some leaves were found of the early MS. (from Hersfeld Abbey in Germany) of the minor writings of Tacitus from which all our extant fifteenth-century copies descend. Still more recently, among a collection of scraps of MSS., a half leaf of an eleventh or twelfth century MS. in Welsh was detected (a very great rarity); its generous finder (the late Mr. A. G. W. Murray, librarian of Trinity College) gave it to the Cambridge University Library, and thus added one more to the already remarkable collection of bits of early Welsh which Cambridge owns. It deals with the dry topic of finding Easter, but linguistically it is above price.

And now for an example which shows the odd wanderings of texts. There is a volume at Vienna, from Bobbio, made up of palimpsest leaves from many MSS., Biblical and classical. Two of these, apparently from one book, stand next to each other. They have only recently been deciphered; they are in Latin uncials of the fifth century. One of them is from the Apocalypse of Thomas, a book named in an old list of Apocryphal writings, but thought until a few years ago to be hopelessly lost. We now know complete MSS. of it at Munich and a fragment at Verona, as well as an Anglo-Saxon version in the Vercelli MS. The other Vienna leaf is from an equally apocryphal "epistle of the Apostles," never mentioned by old writers, but seemingly of the second century. It gives a dialogue between our Lord and the Apostles after the Resurrection. About 1897 Dr. Carl Schmidt, a leading Coptic scholar, published an account of a Coptic MS. of the greater part of the book (the MS. is at Berlin, and some time will be edited); and about 1913 a French scholar, Abbé Guerrier, published a complete version of it from Ethiopic MSS. which had been in Europe for half a century. It is about the last book I should have expected to find in a Latin version, and current in Italy in the fifth century. The combination of Egypt and Abyssinia is common enough; but that Bobbio should be added to that, and Asia Minor and Greece omitted, is indeed a strange thing. Perhaps Africa was the parent of the Latin version.