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Title: The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
Helps for Students of History, No. 17.
Author: M. R. James
Release Date: February 25, 2009 [EBook #28187]
Language: English
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[Illustration: HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY
THE WANDERINGS AND HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS
M. R. JAMES]
HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY. No. 17
EDITED BY C. JOHNSON, M.A., AND J. P. WHITNEY, D.D., D.C.L.
THE WANDERINGS AND HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS
BY
M. R. JAMES, LITT.D., F.B.A.
PROVOST OF ETON
SOMETIME PROVOST OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
LONDON
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING
CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
THE WANDERINGS AND HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS
THE Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To
have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would
have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all
know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty
centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose to tell where
manuscripts were made, and how and in what centres they have been
collected, and, incidentally, to suggest some helps for tracing out
their history. Naturally the few pages into which the story has to be
packed will not give room for any one episode to be treated
exhaustively. Enough if I succeed in rousing curiosity and setting some
student to work in a field in which an immense amount still remains to
be discovered.
In treating of so large a subject as this--for it is a large one--it is
not a bad plan to begin with the particular and get gradually to the
general.
SOME SPECIMEN PEDIGREES OF MSS.
I take my stand before the moderate-sized bookcase which contains the
collection of MSS. belonging to the College of Eton, and with due care
draw from the shelves a few of the books which have reposed there since
the room was built in 1729.
The first shelf I lay hands upon contains some ten large folios. Four of
them are a single great compilation, beginning with a survey of the
history of the world and of the Roman Empire, and merging into the
heraldry of the German _noblesse_. It was made, we find, in 1541, and is
dedicated to Henry VIII. Large folding pictures on vellum and portraits
of all the Roman Emperors adorn the first volume. It is a sumptuous
book, supposed to be a present from the Emperor Ferdinand to the King.
How did it come here? A printed label tells us that it was given to the
college by Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, in 1750 (he had previously
given it to Sir Richard Ellys on whose death Lady Ellys returned it: so
much in parenthesis). Then, more by luck than anything else, I find
mention of it in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary; his
friend Thomas Jett, F.R.S., owned it and told him about it in 1722: he
had been offered £100 a volume for it; it was his by purchase from one
Mr. Stebbing. It was sold, perhaps to Palmerston, at Jett's auction in
1731. The gap between Henry VIII. and Stebbing remains for the present
unfilled. So much for the first draw.
Next, a yet larger and more ponderous volume, _Decreta Romanorum
Pontificum_--the Papal decretals and the Acts of the Councils. It is
spotlessly clean and magnificently written in a hand of the early part
of the twelfth century, a hand which very much resembles that in use at
Christchurch, Canterbury. I am indeed, tempted to call it a Canterbury
book; only it bears none of the marks which it ought to have if it was
ever in the library of the Cathedral Priory. Was it perhaps written
there and sold or given to a daughter-house, or to some abbey which had
a less skilful school of writers? Not to Rochester, at any rate, though
Rochester did get many books written at Christchurch. If it had belonged
to Rochester there would have been some trace, I think, of an
inscription on the lower margin of the first leaf. No; the only clue to
the history is a title written on the fly-leaf in the fifteenth century,
which says: "The book of the decrees of the Pope of Rome," and it begins
on the second leaf "_tes viii_." That does not tell us much; I do not
recognize the handwriting of the title, though I guess it to have been
written when the book came to Eton College. All I can say is that here
is an example of a large class, duplicates of indispensable and common
works, which the abbey libraries possessed in great numbers, and often
parted with, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to colleges and
private purchasers.
Next we take out a thin folio written on paper. This time it is a Greek
book which we open; it has the works of the Christian apologists
Athenagoras and Tatian, and a spurious epistle of Justin Martyr, copied
in 1534 by Valeriano of Forlí. A single MS. now at Paris, written in
914, is the ancestor of all our copies of these texts; but it has been
shown that this Eton book is not an immediate copy of that, but of one
now at Bologna. Obviously it was written in Italy. How does it come to
be here? Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of the college, spent the best part
of twenty years in Italy, mainly as Ambassador to the Court of Venice
for James I., and left all his MSS. to the college at his death in 1639.
There are numbers of MSS. from Italy in this bookcase, and, though
hardly any of them have Wotton's name in them, it is not to be doubted
that they came from him. A good proportion of them, too, can be traced
back a step farther, for they have in them the name or the arms or the
handwriting of Bernardo Bembo of Venice, the father of the more famous
Cardinal Pietro Bembo. This Justin volume is not of that number, but we
have a clue to its history which may be deemed sufficient.
I turn to another shelf and open a large book written somewhere about
the year 1150, which was given to the college in 1713 by one of the
Fellows; in 1594 it belonged to John Rogers (if I read the name right).
It contains St. Jerome's Commentary on Daniel and the Minor Prophets,
followed by a tract of St. Ambrose, and another ascribed to Jerome
(subject, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart), which was in reality, we
are now told, written by a Pelagian. It is a very uncommon text. After
that we have Jerome's (so-called) prophecy of the fifteen signs which
are to precede the last judgment--of which signs, let it be said in
passing, there is a fine representation in an ancient window in the
Church of All Saints, North Street, at York. Can we trace this volume
any farther back than 1594? I think so; the Ambrose and the two spurious
tracts of Jerome (one, as I said, being of very rare occurrence) are
entered, in that order, in the catalogue of the library of Peterborough
Abbey. The library has long been dispersed, but the catalogue remains,
and was printed by Gunton in his History of the Abbey. But the said
catalogue makes no mention of the Commentary of Jerome, which fills 323
out of the 358 leaves of our book. A serious obstacle, it will be said,
to an identification; yet a long series of observations, too long to be
set out here, has led me to the conclusion that our Peterborough
catalogue makes a practice of not entering the main contents of the
volumes, but only the short subsidiary tracts, which might else escape
notice. And without much hesitation I put down the book before me as a
relic of the Peterborough Library.
Somewhat higher up stands a very stout book bound in old patterned
paper. The material of it is paper too, the language is Greek, and the
contents, for the most part, Canons of Councils. There are two hands in
it; one is perhaps of the fourteenth century, the other is of the early
part of the fifteenth. This latter is the writing of one Michael Doukas,
who tells us that he was employed as a scribe by Brother John of Ragusa,
who held some position at a Church Council, unnamed. There were two
Johns of Ragusa, it seems, both Dominicans, one of whom figured at the
Council of Constance in 1413, the other at that of Basle in 1433. The
latter must be the right one, for there are still Greek MSS. at Basle
which belonged to the Dominicans of that city, and were bequeathed by
the second John at his death in 1442.
The book is important, because the first thing in it is the only copy of
a treatise ascribed to St. Athanasius, called a Synopsis of Holy
Scripture. This treatise was printed first in 1600 by an editor named
Felckmann, and no MS. of it has been used or known since. Where did
Felckmann find it? In a MS. which belonged to Pierre Nevelet, procured
for him (the editor) by Bongars, a distinguished scholar of Orleans.
Now, the Eton book has in it a whole series of names of owners, some
erased, but decipherable. The earliest seems to be Joannes Gastius, who
in 1550 gave it to Johannes Hernogius (as I doubtfully read it). Then
come Petrus Neveletus and his son, I(saac) N(icolas) Neveletus.
Evidently, then, we have here the MS. which Felckmann used, and we
arrive at some date after 1600. In 1665 or 1685 Daniel Mauclerc, Doctor
of Law, living at Vitry le François, is the owner. He leaves France (the
family were Huguenots), and brings the book to Holland. His son Jacques,
Doctor of Medicine, has it in 1700, in England; his nephew, John Henry
Mauclerc, also M.D., succeeds to it and enters his name in 1748, and
gives it to Mr. Roger Huggett, Conduct and Librarian of the College, who
died in 1769.
This is an unusually full and clear pedigree. One more, and I have done.
This time it is a copy of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, monk of
Chester; it was the popular history of the world and of England for
anyone who could read Latin in the fifteenth century. No abbey library
could be without it, just as no gentleman's library could be without a
copy of the English Chronicle called the Brut. Here is a case in which
we know the beginning and end of the book's wanderings, but not the
middle of the story. The arms of Eton adorn the beginning of each of the
seven "books" of the Chronicle, so we may take it that it was owned from
the first by a member of the foundation. An inscription tells us that
within the fifteenth century it belonged to the Carthusians of Witham in
Somerset, and was given to them by Master John Blacman. Here is light.
John Blacman was Fellow and Chanter of Eton, then Head of a House
(King's Hall) in Cambridge, and lastly a Carthusian monk. He was also
confessor to Henry VI., and wrote a book about him. In a MS. at Oxford
there is a list of the books he gave to Witham, and among them is this
Polychronicon. More: he has prefixed to the text a pedigree of the Kings
of England from Egbert, illustrated with drawings, the last of which is
the earliest known representation of Windsor Castle. We have not, then,
to complain of lack of information about the early stages of the
history; but then comes a gap, and between the Dissolution and the early
part of the nineteenth century, when Rodd of London had it and sold it
to the fourth Earl of Ashburnham, I can (at present) hear nothing of the
book. In quite recent years it passed from the Ashburnham family to Mr.
H. Y. Thompson, from him to Mr. George Dunn, and at his death was bought
back for its first home.
There, then, are half a dozen histories of MSS., fairly typical and
fairly diverse. Naturally I have picked out books which have some
traceable story. Very many have none. We can only say of them that they
were written in such a century and such a country, and acquired at such
a date: and there an end. Rebinding and loss of leaves, especially of
fly-leaves, have carried off names of owners and library-marks, and
apart from that there are but very few cases in which we are warranted
in proclaiming from the aspect and character of the script that a book
was written at one particular place and nowhere else.
I think it will be seen, from what has been said, that my subject is one
which depends for its actuality upon the accumulation of a great number
of small facts. There is, of course, a broad historical background: no
less than the whole history of Western Europe since the period of the
Barbarian invasions. That cannot be looked for here, of course; but
there are certain _data_ of capital importance which cannot be spared,
and some plotting out of the whole field is indispensable.
THE LIMITS OF THE SUBJECT
Greek and Latin MSS. are the main subject. Oriental books we do not even
touch upon, and vernacular books in English or French have to take a
secondary place; and we may treat first of the Greek, for it is by far
the most compact division. In the case of both Greek and Latin books we
shall ask where and when they were chiefly made, when and how they left
their early homes, and where they are to be found now.
We shall rule out the whole of what may be called the classical
period--the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon, the bookshops of
Martial's time--yes, and even the fourth-century library of Cæsarea--for
of these we have no relics. Our concern is with what exists to-day, or
what did exist until the nation, which has contributed so largely to
learning and history in the past, turned apostate, and to its lasting
shame destroyed and dispersed what more ignorant men had spared. The
mischief Germany has done--and it will be long before we learn the full
extent of it--she has done with open eyes.
We think primarily of Belgium and North-Eastern France as the scenes of
her worst devastations, but she has not confined her work of spoliation
to them. The Balkan provinces and Russia held great masses of Greek and
Slavonic MSS. as yet very incompletely known. The actual invasions of
German troops, and the wars and revolutions which Germany has fostered
in those regions, can hardly have been less mischievous than her
operations in the West.
GREEK MSS.: PRODUCTION AND DISPERSION
The area in which Greek MSS. were produced in the medieval period was
(with negligible exceptions) confined to Greece proper, "Turkey in
Europe," the Levant, and South Italy. In the monastic centres,
particularly Mount Athos, there were and are large stores of Greek
books, the vast majority of which are theological or liturgical; and the
theological authors most in vogue are those of the fourth and later
centuries. Copies of primitive Christian authors or classical ones are
comparative rarities. True, one or two of surpassing interest have been
found in such libraries; a famous Plato was brought by Dr. E. D. Clarke
from Patmos, and is at Oxford now; the treatise of Hippolytus against
heresies came in the forties from a monastery to the Paris library. But
these are exceptions. We have to look at Constantinople as by far the
most important centre of learning and of book-production. The city was
full of libraries, public and private, and of readers. The culture of
the place was, no doubt, self-contained; it did not aim at enriching the
outer world, which it despised; its literary productions were imitative,
the work of _dilettanti_ and decadents. Nevertheless, it preserved for
us wellnigh all that we now have of the best literature of Greece, and,
but for a few catastrophes, it would have handed on much more. Of
thirty-two historical writings read and excerpted by Photius in his
_Bibliotheca_, late in the ninth century, nineteen are lost; of several
of the Attic orators, Lysias, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus, he
possessed many more speeches than we have seen. Michael Psellus, who
died about 1084, is credited (I must allow that the evidence is not of
the best) with writing notes on twenty-four comedies of Menander, of
which, as is well known, we have not one complete. In the twelfth
century John Tzetzes and Eustathius apparently had access still to very
many lost authors. In short, before the Latin occupation of
Constantinople in 1204, the remains of ancient Greek literature very
notably exceeded their present bulk. Much of it, no doubt, was preserved
in single copies, and only a narrow selection of authors was in constant
use for educational purposes. Only three plays out of seven of Æschylus,
for example, were read in the schools. The rest, with Sophocles and
Apollonius Rhodius, practically depended for their survival on the
famous copy now at Florence. Instances might be multiplied. The threads
of transmission to which we owe most of the Euripidean plays, the
Anthology, the History of Polybius, the works of Clement of Alexandria,
the Christian Apologists, the commentary of Origen upon St. John, are
equally slender. We cannot doubt that the sack of Constantinople by the
Crusaders was, in its obliteration of works of art and of literature,
far more disastrous than the capture of the city by the Turks in 1453.
For the best part of a century before the latter date, the export of
precious MSS. to Italy had been going on, and many of our greatest
treasures were already safe in the hands of scholars when the crash
came. Nor is it possible, I believe, to show that between 1204 and 1453
many authors whose works no longer exist were read in Byzantine circles.
That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within
a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of
them, and the sale and export went on at a great rate.
EUROPEAN CENTRES FOR GREEK MSS.: CONTINENTAL
Thus the drafting of Greek MSS. into the libraries of Western Europe has
been a long and gradual process. Many of the best, that were secured by
individual scholars such as Giannozzo Manetti, Aurispa, and Niccolo
Niccoli, found their way into the Laurentian Library at Florence;
others, collected by Nicholas V. (d. 1455), are the nucleus of the
Vatican collection; a third set was the gift of the Greek Cardinal
Bessarion (d. 1468) to Venice. But probably in quality, and certainly in
quantity, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris excels even the Italian
storehouses of Greek MSS. The premier Greek MS. of France is a copy of
the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, which the Greek
Emperor Michael the Stammerer sent to Louis the Pious in the year 827.
It was long at the Royal Abbey of St. Denis, but strayed away somehow;
then, bought by Henri de Mesmes in the sixteenth century, it came into
the Royal Library in 1706, and has been there ever since. Its present
number is Bib. Nat. Grec 437. Another treasure of ancient times which
was once at St. Denis is the sixth-century uncial Greek MS. of the
Prophets known as Codex Marchalianus, now in the Vatican; but when it
came to France is not clearly made out. Coming to later times, the not
inconsiderable collection made by Francis I. received a notable increase
in that of Catherine de' Medici, once the property of Cardinal Ridolfi,
and the reigns of Louis XIV. and XV. were for it an epoch of rapid
growth. Between 1645 and 1740 the number of volumes swelled from 1,255
to 3,197. The Revolution period added the collection of Coislin, or
rather of Séguier--400 more. At the present day Paris must possess 5,000
Greek MSS.
In Central Europe Vienna may be reckoned the chief repository. It
contains the remarkable collection of the traveller Augier de Busbecq,
made in the East about 1570, which was once at Augsburg. Spain--I think
principally of the Escurial Library--has suffered from depredation and
from fire, and is poorer than the prominence of its early contributions
to the cause of learning deserves.
GREEK MSS. IN ENGLAND
It is a temptation, when one turns to England, to enlarge upon the early
history of Greek scholarship in the country, but it is a temptation
which must be resisted. We had a share in preparing for the revival of
learning. Roger Bacon and Grosseteste (I say nothing of the earlier age,
of Theodore of Tarsus and Bede) were men whose work in this direction
has hardly met with full appreciation as yet; and later on we gave
Erasmus a welcome and a home. But we did not rival Italy or France in
the early scramble for Greek books. Such classical MSS. of first-class
value as we possess have been importations of the seventeenth and later
centuries. Let me, however, speak somewhat more in detail.
There was a turbulent person called George Neville, who died Archbishop
of York in 1476. It is evident, though not, I think, from anything that
he wrote, that he was interested in Greek learning, and not only
theological learning. A MS. of some orations of Demosthenes now at
Leyden contains a statement by the scribe that he wrote it for
Archbishop Neville in 1472. This is our starting-point. Now, the scribe
in question--Emmanuel of Constantinople--generally writes a hand (ugly
enough) which no one who has once seen it can fail to recognize. This
hand appears in a not inconsiderable group of books: in a Plato and an
Aristotle now at Durham, in a Suidas given by the Chapter of Durham to
Lord Oxford (Brit. Mus., MS., Harl. 3,100), in a rather famous New
Testament at Leicester, in three Psalters at Oxford and Cambridge, and
in half of another copy of Suidas at Oxford. In this second Suidas
Emmanuel's hand is associated with another, equally easy to
recognize--that of Joannes Serbopoulos. Serbopoulos lived, I know not
how long, in the abbey at Reading, and transcribed several Greek MSS.
now in Oxford and Cambridge libraries; he was still at work in the first
years of the sixteenth century. This little episode is one that
demonstrates, in a rather pleasing way, the value of the study of
handwritings and of the inscriptions written by scribes; the light it
throws on the history of scholarship is unexpected, and is worth having.
Two Biblical MSS. of high importance came to England as gifts to our
Sovereigns. One was the well-known Codex Alexandrinus (A), given to
Charles I. in 1628 by Cyril Lucar, the reforming Patriarch of
Constantinople. Of the other I shall take leave to say more. It was that
known as the Cottonian Genesis, which was brought over by two Greek
Bishops "from Philippi" and presented to Henry VIII. It was a
sixth-century copy of the Book of Genesis, written in uncial letters and
illustrated, we are told, with 250 pictures. Queen Elizabeth passed it
on to her tutor, Sir John Fortescue, and he to Sir Robert Cotton, the
collector of a library of which we shall hear more in the sequel, and in
that library it remained (when not out on loan) till Saturday, October
23, 1731. On that day a fire broke out in Ashburnham House in
Westminster (where the Cotton and Royal Libraries were then kept), and
the bookcase in which the Genesis was suffered horribly. The Cotton
MSS.--for I may as well explain this matter now as later--were kept in
presses, each of which had a bust of a Roman Emperor on the top. They
ran from Julius to Domitian, and were supplemented by Cleopatra and
Faustina. Augustus and Domitian had but one shelf each (Augustus
contained charters, drawings, and the like; Domitian was originally,
perhaps, a small case over a doorway); the others had usually six
shelves, lettered from A to F, and the books in each shelf were numbered
from i. onwards in Roman figures. The Genesis was Otho, B vi., and the
three presses of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were those in which the fire
did most mischief. No complete leaf is left of Genesis; there are bits
of blackened text and pictures, a few of which strayed to the library of
the Baptist College at Bristol. The text had been examined by competent
scholars for editions of the Greek Old Testament, and we are able to
judge of its value; but of the pictures, alas! no list or description
had been made. Still, something is known. An eminent French polymath,
the Sieur de Peiresc (whose life by P. Gassendi is well worth reading),
borrowed the book from Cotton, and had careful copies of one or two of
the illustrations made for him, and these exist. And a further
interesting fact has come out: by the help of our scanty relics a
student of art, Professor Tikkanen, of Helsingfors, in Finland, was able
to show that the designers of a long series of mosaic pictures from
Genesis in St. Mark's at Venice must have had before them either the
Cotton Genesis or its twin sister, so closely do the mosaics follow the
compositions in the MS.
In somewhat similar fashion, by gift from the reformer Theodore de Béze,
the University of Cambridge acquired its greatest Greek treasure, the
Codex Bezæ (D) of the Gospels and Acts in Elizabeth's reign. The riddles
which its text presents have exercised many brains, and I do not know
who would allow that they are finally solved. Another famous MS., the
unique Lexicon of Photius, was acquired by Thomas Gale, Dean of York,
early in the eighteenth century--one would like to know where. To my eye
it bears signs of having been long in Western Europe, if not in England.
Roger Gale gave it, with his own and his father's other MSS., to Trinity
College, Cambridge, in 1738. On the whole, however, Cambridge has not
been nearly so fortunate as Oxford in accumulating Greek books. Oxford
had a magnificent present in 1629 from its Chancellor, the Earl of
Pembroke, of 240 MSS. purchased in block from the Venetian Barocci, and
in 1817 made a great and wise purchase of 128 more, contained in the
collection of another Venetian, the Abate Canonici. In the interval such
diverse benefactors as Laud and Cromwell had enriched it with some very
notable gifts. The pedigree of one of Laud's MSS. may be familiar, but
is too illuminating to be omitted. It is a seventh-century copy of the
Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin. The earliest home to which we
can trace it is Sardinia; a document connected with that island is
written on a fly-leaf. Then we find indisputable evidence that Bede,
writing early in the eighth century, had access to it; he quotes in his
_Retractations_ on the Acts readings which are characteristic of it; and
as he never left his monastery in the North, we may be sure that the
book was at Jarrow or Wearmouth in his time. After that it disappears
until Laud buys it. Like many of his books, it came to him from Germany,
a spoil of the Thirty Years' War. These various _data_ are best linked
up if we suppose (1) that the MS. was brought from Italy to England by
Theodore of Tarsus or his companion Abbot Hadrian in 668; (2) that it
was taken from England to Germany after Bede's death by one of the
companions of St. Boniface, the apostle of that country, and remained
there, in or near Fulda, perhaps, until the convulsion which threw it
back upon our shores.
Take another illustration. When John Leland, in Henry VIII.'s reign,
visited the library of Canterbury Cathedral, he saw there part of the
Old Testament in Greek--chiefly the poetical books and the Psalter. He
does not mention the Pentateuch. Nevertheless, it can be shown that that
was also there, for among the Canonici MSS. in the Bodleian is one of
the thirteenth century containing Genesis to Ruth in Greek, which has on
a margin the inscription, legible though erased: "liber ecclesie Christi
Cantuarie." How it left England at the Dissolution one may guess easily
enough, but what its fortunes were before it came to light again at
Venice I believe there is nothing to show.
* * * * *
Speaking broadly, then, of the destinies of Greek MSS., I may repeat
that they were produced in a comparatively small area, that a great many
of the most precious ones were concentrated in one place, and that from
the fourteenth century onwards they became objects of desire to the
great ones of the earth, who vied with each other in sending special
emissaries to collect them. As a result, the greatest treasures were
soon locked up in the libraries of princes and prelates, and became less
commonly exposed to dispersion and sale than Latin books. We must
remember, too, that as a rule the monasteries of Western Europe did not
collect Greek MSS.; they possessed a chance one here and there, as we
have seen, but rather as curiosities than as books to be used.[A] To
the noble and the scholar there was a flavour of distinction about a
Greek MS. which was wanting to all but the most venerable and beautiful
of the Latin ones.
There is still much to be done in the investigation of the history and
relationships of Greek MSS. In spite of the numberless editions of the
great authors, and the labour that has been lavished upon them, I
believe that scholars would agree that in very few cases, if any, is the
transmission of the text at all perfectly known. For some writings we
have too little MS. evidence, for some so much as to be embarrassing. In
no case can we afford to neglect and to leave unrecorded anything that a
MS. can tell us as to its place of origin, its scribe, or its owners.
Names and scribblings on fly-leaves, which to one student suggest
nothing, may combine in the memory of another into a coherent piece of
history, and show him the home of the book at a particular date, and by
consequence unveil a whole section of the story of its wanderings. With
one little instance of this kind I will bring to an end my remarks on
this first and shorter portion of my subject. In the library of Corpus
Christi College at Cambridge is a Greek Psalter written in the middle
of the twelfth century. On one of its last pages is scribbled in Greek
letters by a later hand the name of John Farley ("[Greek: Hiôhannês
pharlehi]"). Only about five-and-twenty volumes away from this stands a
MS. containing letters written by the University of Oxford on public
occasions. One of these is signed by J. Farley. A little enquiry elicits
the fact that John Farley was official scribe of that University near
the end of the fifteenth century. The Greek Psalter, then, was pretty
certainly at Oxford in Farley's time. What do we know of Greek MSS. then
at Oxford? We know that Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln owned such
things, and that he bequeathed his books to the Franciscans of Oxford at
his death in 1254; and when we examine the Psalter again, we find that
it is full of notes in a hand which occurs in other Greek MSS. known to
have belonged to Grosseteste, and which I take to be Grosseteste's
autograph. So the mere occurrence of John Farley's name helps us to
write the history of the book from within a hundred years of its making
until the present day. Procured by Grosseteste some time before 1254, it
passes to Oxford, and remains there till the Grey Friar's Convent is
dissolved by Henry VIII. Then there is a gap of a generation at most.
Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, acquires it (believing it,
absurdly enough, to have belonged to Archbishop Theodore in the seventh
century), and bequeaths it to his college of Corpus Christi in 1574.
LATIN MSS.
We turn to the Latin division, and here the difficulty of selecting
lines of procedure is very great. A paragraph of historical preface, at
any rate, must be attempted.
At the period of the Barbarian invasions--the fifth century--the learned
countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of
these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but
she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other
two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were
destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we
have lately begun to realize--namely, that in the case of France there
was a transplanting of culture to another soil. A number of teachers
fled the country, and some at least came to Ireland. This, as far as we
can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so
widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth
century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in
the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the
eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian
Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a prey to the Danes,
the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a
vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from
Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh
centuries must figure as a period of degeneration; the twelfth as one of
immense intellectual and artistic vigour, culminating in the thirteenth.
In the fourteenth the foundations of what we call the Renaissance are
already being laid, and we have hardly passed the middle of the
fifteenth before the MS. has received its death-blow in the publication
of the first printed Bible.
This absurdly condensed review of ten centuries has, I believe, some
truth in it, in spite of the fact that every clause needs qualification.
We shall have to go over the same ground again a little more slowly. At
present we will devote a little time to the beginnings of our period.
A few relics of the days before the Barbarian invasion have reached us.
I am not thinking of the library of rolls found at Herculaneum in the
eighteenth century, the unrolling and decipherment of which still goes
on slowly at Naples, nor of the many precious fragments of rolls and
books which have come in our own generation from Egypt, but rather of
those which have been preserved above ground in libraries. Such are the
Virgils of the Vatican, of St. Gall, and of Florence.
Perhaps a word about these ancient Virgils will not be unwelcome. They
are cited in all the textbooks, it is true, but I think they are apt to
be confused; at any rate it is easy to confuse them.
They are five in number: three very fragmentary, two more or less
complete. The surnames they go by are _Sangallensis_, _Augusteus_,
_Vaticanus_, _Romanus_, _Mediceus_.
_Sangallensis_ and _Augusteus_ are practically the only pieces of books
we have which are written in the old square capitals, like those of the
Roman inscriptions. _Sangallensis_ consists of a few leaves which were
found by Von Arx, a librarian of St. Gall, in the bindings of books in
that abbey's library. Of _Augusteus_ there are four leaves at Rome
(_Vaticanus latinus_ 3,256) and three at Berlin; and somewhere, perhaps
in a private library in France, is or was another bit which was known to
scholars in the seventeenth century. This copy was once at the Royal
Abbey of St. Denis. Both of these are fourth-century books at latest.
_Vaticanus_ (_lat._ 3,225) is a more complete copy, illustrated with
fifty paintings in good classical style, and is also assigned to the
fourth century.
_Romanus_ (_Vat. lat._ 3,867), once at St. Denis, is a pictured copy
too, but not nearly so good in style.
_Mediceus_, written before A.D. 494, is at Florence (a single leaf of it
is bound up with _Vaticanus_). It was formerly in the abbey library of
Bobbio.
These three books are written in "rustic capitals."
A larger, but still small, group of books of "classical" date are the
palimpsests, the most famous of which are at Milan and Rome. There was a
time, early in the nineteenth century, when Angelo Mai, afterwards
Cardinal, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, was constantly launching
fresh surprises upon scholars, the results of his work in what was then
an almost untouched field. Large fragments of Cicero's _Republic_, of
lost orations of Cicero, of the works of the rhetorician Fronto, were
issued at short intervals: and all the most important of these were
recovered from palimpsests in the Ambrosian or the Vatican Library. They
had all come, too, from one place, the same Bobbio which has been
already named. Bobbio was founded by the Irishman St. Columban (d. 615).
The list of the early and valuable MSS. which can be traced to it would
take up a large share of my available space; but among the precious
things it owned was a number of quite ancient volumes, the Cicero and
Fronto and others--books sumptuously written in uncial letters in the
fourth century, which, sad to say, the Bobbio monks themselves broke up,
washed out the earlier writing, and covered the pages with texts more
immediately useful to them. Whence did they come? An answer to that
question has been offered recently which finds favour among experts.
They are the relics, it is said, of the library formed by Cassiodorus at
his monastery of Vivarium or Squillace, in South Italy. Cassiodorus is
a great figure in the history of his own time, and in his influence upon
the general course of learning. He was private secretary to Theodoric
King of the Goths; in his old age he retired from public to monastic
life, and his last years were devoted to equipping the monks he had
gathered about him for study--first and foremost the study of the
Scriptures, but also, as leading up to that, the study of languages, of
history and geography, and, as conducing to the general welfare, of
medicine, botany, and other useful arts. It had been a cherished project
of his to found an academy at Rome where all such learning might be
fostered, but that plan failed, and Cassiodorus took into his retreat at
Vivarium all the store of books he had accumulated, and wrote a little
manual to guide his monks to the right use of them. His _Institutes_ (as
the book is called) do not give a set catalogue of his library, but
there are many and striking coincidences between the manual and the
literary works which can be traced to Bobbio. A specimen may be given:
he recommends a writer on gardening called Gargilius Martialis. Hardly
anyone else mentions this person, and his work had disappeared until Mai
found pieces of it in a palimpsest at Naples which had come from Bobbio.
We owe much to Cassiodorus in any case, for it was he who commended
secular learning to monks, and the fact that monks were the great
preservers of ancient literature cannot be dissociated from his
influence. I shall be glad if the theory I have stated (it is that of
the late Dr. Rudolf Beer) proves sound; to have some of the very volumes
which Cassiodorus handled would be worth much.
There is a link between the library of Cassiodorus and our own country.
A famous Latin Bible now at Florence, the _Codex Amiatinus_, is known to
have been once in England, at Wearmouth or Jarrow, and to have been
taken abroad by Ceolfrid, Abbot of those monasteries, in 716 as a
present to the Pope, whom it never reached, for Ceolfrid died at Langres
on his way to Rome. The story has often been told, and needs not to be
dwelt upon here; but a view has been broached, and is stoutly maintained
by Sir Henry Howorth, which does deserve mention and is not yet
familiar. It is that the first quire in the Amiatine Bible, which
contains pictures and lists of Biblical books, is actually a portion of
a Bible written for Cassiodorus. There is much to be said for this, and
at the least we may be sure that it is a direct copy from such a Bible.
Sir Henry would go farther, and claim the whole book as Cassiodorian. I
do not know that expert opinion is prepared to endorse this.
The mention of Cassiodorus has led us below the date of the "classical"
period, for he died in 583. For one moment I revert to the earlier time
to record an interesting example of wandering. Illustrated books of the
early centuries are the greatest of rarities. The two Virgils, the
Vienna and the Cotton Genesis, the Homer at Milan, the Gospels of
Rossano in Calabria and those of Sinope now at Paris, the Dioscorides at
Vienna, the Pentateuch of Tours, the Joshua-roll at the Vatican--these
are the most famous, and there are very few beside them. Among those few
are some pieces of a Latin Bible written in the fourth century, and
containing parts of Samuel and Kings, with paintings which, when fresh,
must have been of high excellence. They have unhappily suffered grievous
damage, for they were used in the seventeenth century to make covers for
municipal documents at the royal and ancient abbatial town of
Quedlinburg (the scene of Canning's _Rovers_). The painted leaves are
now at Berlin; a leaf of plain text remains at Quedlinburg. No one
doubts that the book to which they belonged was made in Italy, and the
likeliest history that can be imagined for it is that it was brought as
a gift to the abbey by a German prince, say in the tenth century. It is
hard to explain the neglect and mutilation of so noble a book, in whose
contents there was nothing to offend Protestant or other religious
susceptibilities. Only we find, by numerous examples, that the MSS. we
should most prize now, those written in capitals or uncials with the
words undivided, or in Irish or English scripts which became
unfamiliar, were uniformly despised and neglected by the readers of
later centuries. We meet with notes of this kind in monastic catalogues:
"It cannot be read," "Old and useless," and the like. Still, one would
have thought that the pictures of the Quedlinburg book would have saved
it, even in a German nunnery.
CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY
Since this little book is not a treatise on palæography, a manual of
art, or a history of learning, and yet has to touch upon all three
provinces, it is important to keep it from straying too far into any of
them, and this is one of the most difficult tasks that I have ever
enterprised. The temptation to dilate upon the beauty and intrinsic
interest of the MSS. and upon the characteristic scripts of different
ages and countries is hard to resist. And, indeed, without some slight
elucidation of such matters my readers may be very much at fault.
I had begun a geographical survey of the field, taking countries as the
units, and had written upon Italy and Spain, and attempted France. But I
found that when the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were reached my
tract was becoming a disquisition upon palæography, art, and learning,
and, of course, was failing to do justice either to any one of them or
to what it had promised in its title. I now think that a chronological
survey will be more practicable, and that it will be best to take first
the subject of book-production, looking at each country in turn in a
single period, instead of following the course taken by each, from the
sixth century to the fifteenth.
_Sixth and Seventh Centuries._--Italy, France, and Spain are the main
centres. Ireland is active in learning, and in the second half of the
seventh century England, under Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian,
produces schools which rival the Irish, and, in the person of Bede, has
the greatest scholar of the time. Some of the great Irish monasteries,
such as Bobbio, Luxeuil, St. Gall, are founded on the Continent.
Books are produced in considerable numbers in Italy, France, Spain; and
from Italy they are exported, especially by English pilgrims, such as
Benedict Biscop. The Gospel harmony written in 546 by or for Bishop
Victor of Capua comes to England, and goes abroad again, with St.
Boniface, perhaps, and now rests at Fulda, where also his body lies. A
copy of St. Jerome on Ecclesiastes, written in Italy in the sixth or
seventh century, has in it the Anglo-Saxon inscription, "The book of
Cuthsuuitha the Abbess." The only Abbess Cuthsuuitha we know of presided
over a nunnery in or near Worcester about 690-700. Her book travelled to
Germany with some British or English missionary, and is at Würzburg.
Würzburg is an Irish foundation; its apostle and patron, St. Kilian, is
said to have been assassinated in 689. From Italy, too, came (most
likely) the illustrated Gospels now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
(286), which belonged once to Christchurch, Canterbury; and the
beautiful little copy of St. John's Gospel at Stonyhurst College, which
was found in the coffin of St. Cuthbert (d. 687) when it was opened in
1104. And St. Gall must have acquired its ancient Virgil from Italy
also--when, we do not know.
Spain kept her books very much to herself, one would guess, judging from
the very few Spanish MSS. of this age which are to be met with in the
rest of Europe. The guess, however, would not be quite correct. There
was one great Spanish scholar in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville
(636), and his encyclopædia (The _Etymologies_ or _Origins_), which fed
many later centuries with learning, made its way all over educated
Europe very quickly. Not only so, but we find English scholars (Aldhelm
and Bede) quoting Spanish writers on grammar and Spanish poets who were
almost their own contemporaries.
_Eighth Century._--This sees the last part of Bede's career (d.
734)--the zenith of English scholarship, the mission of St. Boniface (d.
758) to Germany, the meeting of Alcuin with Charlemagne (781), and the
beginning of the Carolingian Renaissance. But, on the other hand, Spain
is overrun by the Moors, Italy is inert, England begins to be harried
by the Northmen. On the whole, if there really was a Dark Age, the
middle of the eighth century seems to answer the description best. But,
of course, there were points of light. The great centres of Northern
France, such as Corbie and Laon, particularly Corbie, were beginning
their activities of collecting and copying books. Ireland was capable of
producing such a work as the Book of Kells--whether it actually falls
within the century or not I will not be positive, but work of the same
amazing beauty was carried out before 800. Nor was the export of
treasures from Italy to England quite stopped, in spite of difficulties.
At the Plantin Museum at Antwerp is a copy of the writings of the
Christian poet Sedulius, which has pictures of the old Italian sort,
such as we find in the frescoes of the Roman catacombs. In it is a note
connecting it with a Bishop of the name of Cuthwin, who held the East
Anglian see and died about 754. Another MS., at Paris, has a note
describing an elaborately illustrated life of St. Paul, which, it says,
the same Bishop Cuthwin brought with him from Rome.
_Ninth Century._--There is immense activity, literary and artistic,
afoot at the Court of Charlemagne (d. 814) and of his successors. The
German abbeys--_e.g._, Lorsch, Fulda--and cathedral schools (Mainz,
Bamberg, etc.) are full of scribes and teachers. Irishmen who know
Greek flock to the Continent, driven from home by Danish invasion: such
are Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Sedulius Scottus. They haunt Liége,
Laon, Aix-la-Chapelle, and penetrate to Italy. Not less prolific are the
French houses: at Tours the handwriting called the Carolingian
minuscule, the parent of our modern "Roman" printing, is developed,
though not at Tours alone. At Corbie, Fleury on the Loire, (now called
St. Bénoit sur Loire), St. Riquier by Abbeville, Rheims, and many
another centre in Northern and Eastern France, libraries are accumulated
and ancient books copied. Of St. Gall and Reichenau the same may be
said. In Italy, Verona is conspicuous. The archdeacon Pacificus (d. 846)
gave over 200 books to the cathedral, where many of them still are; and
at Monte Cassino, the head house of the Benedictine Order, books were
written in the difficult "Beneventane" hand (which used to be called
Lombardic, and was never popular outside Italy). Spain has its own
special script at this time, the Visigothic, as troublesome to read as
the Beneventane; its _a_'s are like _u_'s and its _t_'s like _a_'s.
England is still overrun by the Danes, and does nothing before the very
end of the century, when King Alfred exerts himself to revive education,
and starts a vernacular literature.
An enormous proportion of the earliest copies we have of classical Latin
authors come from this century, when old copies of them were actively
sought out and transcribed. Often great liberties in the way of revision
and even abridgment of the text were taken by the scholars of the time,
and, once transcribed, the old archetypes were neglected or even
destroyed.
Books of very great beauty--Bibles, Gospels, Psalters--were produced for
the Emperors and the great nobles and prelates. In these there is a
marked effort to imitate and continue the traditions of classical art.
_Tenth Century._--The tradition of study and scholarship lives on, but
the impulse from Britain and Ireland has worked itself out, and few
geniuses are born on the Continent. There is a period of splendour and
vigour in England under the Kings Athelstan and Edgar and the
Archbishops Odo and Dunstan. The calligraphic school of Winchester
achieves magnificent results. At the end of the century the great
teacher and scholar Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II.) is a prominent figure
at the Imperial Court. The Ottos emulate Charlemagne in their zeal for
literature and for fine works of art, but their attainment is slighter.
_Eleventh Century._--Men still live on the traditions of the Carolingian
Revival in the early part: there is later an awakening, principally,
perhaps, in France and Italy. Great names like those of Anselm, Abelard,
Bernard, come forward. Monastic reform is active; great schools, as at
Chartres, take their rise; there is a preparation for the wonderful
vigour of the next century. The First Crusade brings East and West
together in a new fashion.
_Twelfth Century._--The strength and energy of Europe is now tremendous
in every department, and not least in that with which we are concerned.
Our libraries are crammed to-day with twelfth-century MSS. The
Gregories, Augustines, Jeromes, Anselms, are numbered by the hundred. It
is the age of great Bibles and of "glosses"--single books or groups of
books of the Bible equipped with a marginal and interlinear comment
(very many of which, by the way, seem to have been produced in North
Italy). Immense, too, is the output of the writers of the time; Bernard,
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, Peter Comestor, Peter Lombard. The two
last are the authors of two of the most popular of medieval
textbooks--Peter Lombard of the _Sentences_ (a body of doctrine), Peter
Comestor of the _Historia Scholastica_ (a manual of Scripture history).
The Cistercian Order, now founding houses everywhere, is, I think,
specially active in filling its libraries with fine but austerely plain
copies of standard works, eschewing figured decoration in its books, as
in its buildings, and caring little for secular learning. The University
of Paris is the centre of intellectual vigour.
_Thirteenth Century._--This is commonly regarded as the greatest of all
in medieval history; and truly, when we think of achievements such as
Westminster, Amiens, and Chartres, and of men such as St. Louis, St.
Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, Dante, Edward I., Roger Bacon, we must
agree that the popular estimate is sound. Certainly we see in France and
in England the fine flower of art in buildings and in books.
Paris is still the centre. The "Gothic" spirit is concentrated there.
The book trade is enormous. It is passing--under the influence of the
University, most likely--out of the hands of the monastic scribes into
those of the professional "stationers"; while great individual artists,
such as Honoré, arise to provide for Royal and noble persons examples of
art which stand as high to-day as when they were first produced.
It is now that we find a large multiplication of textbooks. If the
twelfth century was the age of great Bibles, the thirteenth is the age
of small ones. Thousands of these exist, written with amazing minuteness
and uniformity. Only less common are the Aristotles, the _Sentences_,
the _Summæ_, and the other works of the golden age of scholasticism. The
Orders of Friars, Franciscan and Dominican, form libraries--partly of
duplicates procured from older foundations, partly of new copies to
which they were helped by charitable friends.
Towards the end of the century Italy comes forward as the great purveyor
of books of a special sort. The University of Bologna becomes the great
law school of Europe, and exports in numbers copies of the immense texts
and commentaries of and upon the Church (Canon) and Roman (Civil) law
which were indispensable to the unfortunate student. These books become
common at the end of the thirteenth century, and run over well into the
fourteenth. They are prettily (but often very carelessly) written in a
round Gothic hand, sometimes christened "Bolognese." Some were not only
written but decorated (with poorish ornament) on the spot, but very many
were exported in sheets and provided, in France or England, with such
decoration as the purchaser could afford. A leading example is a copy of
the Decretals in the British Museum (Royal 10, E. iv.) which belonged to
St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield. It is in Italian script, but on each of
the spacious lower margins of its many pages is a picture by an English
artist; these pictures run in sets, illustrating Bible stories, legends,
and romances.
As the centuries go on, the material they have left increases in bulk,
and the complication of the threads is proportionately greater. I cannot
hope in a survey like this to give prominence to every factor; but we
shall not be wrong in fixing upon Northern France and England as the
areas of greatest productiveness and the sources of the best art in the
thirteenth century.
Before we pass to the next century a word must be devoted to a not
unimportant class of books which seem to have been manufactured chiefly
in Picardy and Artois, the illustrated Romances--_e.g._ the Grail and
Lancelot--of great bulk, usually in prose, which served to pass the
winter evenings of persons of quality. A few of these, and a book of
devotions to take to church (oftenest a Psalter at this time; later on a
book of Hours), were the staple books owned by the upper classes.
_Fourteenth Century._--If the thirteenth century gives us on the whole
the noblest books, the early part of the fourteenth affords the
loveliest. They come from England, France, and the Netherlands. A
noticeable element in their art is that of the grotesque and burlesque,
never, of course, quite absent even from early books, but now most
prominent and most delightful. The defect of the art of this time is
lack of strength and austerity; its delicacy is above praise.
The middle of the century sees Petrarch, and with him the Renaissance
begins. Italy has been producing great men in every field, but the work
of Petrarch reached farther and was more enduring than that of any
other.
France, tortured by wars, put forth little in the middle years, but then
came Charles V., a King who was really interested in books, and the
library he formed at the Louvre gave a stimulus to book-production which
spread wide and lasted long. Under Richard II. and through his Queen,
Anne of Bohemia, a foreign influence makes itself felt in England, and
some lovely results are achieved; but on the whole English art is
waning.
The Universities, and to some extent the monasteries, were throughout
this century great customers for the bulky books of scholastic divinity
(Duns Scotus, Albertus, and the like) and the later generation of
commentators on the Bible, such as Nicolas de Lyra and Hugo de S. Caro.
Many shelves are filled with these.
_Fifteenth Century._--The fifteenth century is our last; it ends the MS.
period. Under the influence of the Renaissance, now enormously potent,
every Italian noble forms a library. The scholars are seeking out the
ninth-century copies of the classics, and they discard the Gothic
(black-letter) hands of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in
favour of the Carolingian minuscule (or, some say that of the twelfth
century). As early as 1426 we find books written in a script adapted and
refined from this; we call it a Roman hand, though the great centre of
its propagation seems to have been Florence. In all essentials it is the
parent of the type in which this page will be printed.
Italy, then, is the hub of the universe for books; and in Italy,
Florence, Naples, and Rome are the most active _nuclei_. We have a
record written by a Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano Bisticci, in the
form of short biographies of great persons, many of whom had dealt with
him. For some he provided whole libraries, as for Frederick, Duke of
Urbino, whose books are now mostly in the Vatican. Such a man as this
would not look at a printed book--which in Vespasiano's mind is, of
course, very greatly to his credit; for the press was bound to put an
end to his particular industry. We still find, by the way, this
prejudice against print in the very last years of the century. Some rich
persons had MS. copies actually made from printed editions and
elaborately illustrated. Such a one was Raphael de Marcatellis, natural
son of Philip the Good of Burgundy and titular Bishop of Rhossus, near
Antioch.[B] Part of his library may be found at Ghent, part at Holkham,
and stray volumes at Cambridge (Peterhouse) and in the Arundel
collection at the British Museum. They are very handsome books, and many
have full-page paintings by capable artists, but the resulting
impression is on the whole that of decadence.
Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary (d. 1490), is a name famous among old
bibliophiles. He got together a library of fine books, mostly recent
copies made for him, and it was dispersed and sacked by the Turks in
1526. It is spoken of with bated breath by the old writers, as if it had
contained priceless treasures. I am sceptical.
Ferdinand of Aragon and Calabria was a collector of the same kind, whose
beautiful books, adorned with his arms in the lower margin of the first
page, are many of them at Valencia, having passed to the University
there by way of the Abbey of St. Miguel de Los Reyes. These are of
Italian and not of Spanish manufacture, and very fine they are.
These last-mentioned libraries have been scattered, but there are still
some of the Renaissance period which survive in their original homes.
The Laurentian at Florence and the Vatican at Rome stand at the head of
all. With regard to the latter it may be said that though earlier Popes,
of course, had libraries (that of Avignon was quite considerable), yet
Nicholas V. (d. 1455) must be regarded as the founder of the Vatican
library in its present state. So, too, the Marciana at Venice and the
Malatestiana at Cesena must rank as genuine Renaissance collections.
It was not only the great men who loved to have books. The tribe of
scholars, foreign as well as native, who coveted them was numerous.
Every library now has its quota of humbler copies of the classics, often
on paper, in the Roman or the more cursive Italic hand, not written by a
professional scribe. Often these are of infinitesimal value,
transcripts of extant copies of no greater age; but there is always the
possibility that they may be a competent scholar's own careful apograph
of some ancient MS. which a Poggio had unearthed at St. Gall, and which
has since vanished. A glance at the _apparatus criticus_ of a few
editions of classics will show that often a fifteenth-century MS. ranks
high among the authorities for the text. Pedigree is what matters, not
beauty of hand, nor, necessarily, date.
It has been the fate of these scholars' books, as it is the fate of all
MSS., to be absorbed into great libraries, and many of them lurk there
still unexamined and their origin undetermined. Discoveries, no doubt,
yet remain to be made among them.
Whether or not a breath of influence from Italy was the cause, it is
plain that library-making was popular in countries and circles which
were not obviously affected by the Renaissance. The monasteries of
England were certainly not so affected, yet we find many of them setting
their books in order and building special rooms to contain them.
Christchurch at Canterbury and Bury St. Edmunds are leading instances.
Now, too, Universities and colleges made fresh catalogues, and received
large accessions of books.
If the Renaissance did not touch the English public as a whole in this
century, it made some proselytes. Among Englishmen who dealt with our
Florentine Vespasiano were John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, Humphrey,
Duke of Gloucester, William Gray, Bishop of Ely, Andrew Holes, of Wells.
Others who resorted to Italy were John Free, Thomas Linacre, John
Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells, William Flemming, Dean of Lincoln, William
Tilley of Sellinge, Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury. We shall see
later on what traces some of these have left on our libraries.
In places to which the Italian influence did not penetrate the humdrum
trade of copying went on. Anselm, Bernard, and Augustine; sermon-books
by the score; Burley on Aristotle, etc. Then, in another class, the
production of books for use in church was very large. There were few
Bibles, but Missals, Breviaries, large choir-books to be laid on the
lectern, Graduals and Processionals, are legion. Then, again, every
well-to-do person must have his or her Book of Hours, illuminated if
possible. Such things were common wedding-presents, it seems. Upon the
best of them really great artists were employed, like Foucquet of Tours
and Gerard David; we even find Perugino painting a page in one, but the
average are shop work made for the Italian market at Naples or Florence,
for the French at Paris, Tours, or Rouen, for the English very often at
Bruges, where also many sumptuous chronicle books and French versions
of secular history and romances were turned out. Edward IV. had a
considerable number of such in his library.
These private Prayer Books are, of course, incomparably the commonest of
all illuminated manuscripts. They vary from loveliness to
contemptibility. Perversely, they figure in catalogues, and are lettered
on their backs, as Missals; our ancestors of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries forgot that a Missal must contain the service of
the Mass, and that none of these books do.
There, then, is a second survey of our ground, somewhat more detailed
than the first, but woefully sketchy. Everyone who has studied MSS. of
any class or period would detect omissions in it which for him would
vitiate the whole story. The best I can hope is that the assertions in
it are not incorrect, and that it gives a true notion of the general
course of book-production in medieval times.
WANDERINGS OF LATIN MSS.: THE CONTINENT
We are now to concern ourselves with the later destinies of the books
which we have seen in the making. Here generalities will be less in
place; nevertheless, I must begin with some.
There are two main classes of persons interested in MSS.: those who care
for their literary contents, and those who prize them for their artistic
beauty. Roughly speaking--very roughly--the precious literary things of
ancient times were preserved in monastic and cathedral libraries, and
the beautiful things in palaces and castles and church treasuries. I do
not forget that poetry and romance in the vernacular were chiefly in the
hands of the laity, nor do I depreciate their value as literature.
The ancient books, pagan and Christian, are perhaps to be regarded as
the backbone of the subject, and therefore the first part of my enquiry
shall be devoted to the ecclesiastical libraries, and considerations of
space shall rule me on the other head.
The monastic and cathedral libraries can be best treated by countries.
France, Germany, and England will serve as specimens. Of Italy perhaps
enough has been said incidentally to attract attention to the most
important centres, such as Bobbio, Monte Cassino, and Verona, and upon
the whole I do not think that in Italy this class of library played so
great a part in the later Middle Ages as it did in the rest of Europe.
France is full of Latin MSS. Every considerable town, besides many that
are inconsiderable, has its public library, into which at the Revolution
were collected the remains of the libraries of the religious houses of
the district. France's Dissolution came at a time when many eyes were
open to the possible value of ancient books, and strings could be
pulled and influence exercised to stem the unreasoning fury that said:
We'll pull all arts and learning down,
And hey, then, up go we!
It is easier, also, to rescue books than buildings. The Revolutionists
tore down a cathedral, and it is gone; but books are portable and,
moreover, do not burn or tear or drown easily, especially vellum MSS.;
and when the first hurricane of idiocy had blown over they were very
likely found, rather dustier than before, still on their shelves.
Nowadays our methods are more effective, of course; but I have said as
much about that as I can bear.
If, then, one took a map of France and marked down the principal abbeys,
one would have a fair _prima-facie_ indication where to look for their
MSS. From Corbie, you would say, they went to Amiens, from Cîteaux to
Dijon, from Bec and Mont St. Michel to Avranches, and so on. This would
be right, but there are exceptions. Corbie, a specially important
library, is one.
When in 1636 the French under Louis XIII. regained that territory from
the Spaniards, the precarious situation of its treasures was recognized,
and 400 select MSS. were taken to Paris. The Reformed Benedictines of
the Congregation of St. Maur had done much at Corbie for the
preservation of the books, and they now petitioned that the Corbie MSS.
might not be alienated from the Order, "n' ayant personne qui soit si
jaloux de conserver l'héritage de leurs pères que les propres enfants."
The petition was successful, and the MSS. were placed in the Abbey of
St. Germain des Près at Paris. This was in 1638. In 1791, during the
Revolutionary troubles, there was a fire at the abbey, and in the
confusion a batch of early books was stolen. These came into the hands
of a Russian envoy, Dubrowsky, and most of them, if not all, are (or
were until a more recent Revolution) in the Imperial Library at
Petrograd. The rest, still a great collection, were drafted out of St.
Germain into the National Library in 1795-96. Meanwhile a large number
(including some very important books) had remained at Corbie, and these
did go to Amiens in or about 1791.
But before 1636 Corbie MSS. had begun to stray from home. One fairly
clear case seems to be that of the Harley MS. 3,063, which was once in
the library founded late in the fifteenth century at Cues, on the
Moselle, by Cardinal Nicholas of Cues (_Cusanus_). It is one of two
copies of the Latin version of Theodore of Mopsuestia's Commentary on
the Pauline Epistles. The other is a Corbie book at Amiens. Both show
the same gaps and blanks in the text, but the one is not believed to be
a direct copy of the other. Both go back to a common original.
Other Corbie books are at Montpellier. They had a long roundabout
journey to get there. Part of a magnificent collection formed by
successive Bouhiers (seven of whom were Presidents of the Parlement de
Bourgogne, and lived at Dijon), they were bought in 1781 from the heir
of the last Bouhier by the last Abbot but one of Clairvaux. Then, when
Clairvaux was suppressed at the Revolution, its library went to Troyes.
Government commissioners were sent round to look through the
departmental libraries and note the most valuable MSS. and printed
books. One of those who visited Troyes was a Montpellier professor, Dr.
Prunelle. The 300 and odd MSS. which he put aside would, if precedent
had been followed, have gone to Paris, but they did in fact go to the
famous old school of medicine at Montpellier, and there they are at this
day.
One at least of the remarkable collection given by Archbishop Parker to
Corpus Christi College at Cambridge (193), is a Corbie book--a product
evidently of the Corbie _scriptorium_, though it bears on its first leaf
the traces of an inscription of ownership which, illegible as it is,
does seem to be that of another monastery. Parker's is, on the whole, so
English a collection that the presence of this early French book arrests
attention. It does not, however, stand quite alone; there is a rather
similar one (334) which Professor Lindsay tells me is a Laon book of
about the same (eighth-century) date.
Corbie has occupied a considerable space, but it is entitled to do so on
several accounts. The number of early MSS. traceable to it is very
large, their intrinsic interest is high, and for a third reason I may
again quote Professor Lindsay as having decided, from a minute study of
the abbreviations used by Corbie scribes, that Anglo-Saxon influences
were at work in the formation of its peculiar hand.
Corbie was, as I have hinted before, but one of many venerable centres
of learning in the northern half of France. I shall not attempt a list
of them, but go on to note one salient fact, that the southern half of
the country is noticeably the poorer in MSS.
At Autun and Lyons, both of them magnificent cities in Roman times, some
very ancient books did linger, and here is room for a digression. Lyons
had a Pentateuch in Latin which was a great rarity, for not only was it
in uncials of the fifth century, but it was of the Old Latin version,
that made from the Greek before St. Jerome made his version from the
Hebrew, which we call the Vulgate.
Rather before the middle of the nineteenth century an Italian adventurer
of some learning and little virtue, the Chevalier Guglielmo (etc.)
Libri, obtained employment under the French Government in the Department
of Public Instruction, and was sent on a tour of inspection among
provincial libraries. He made this the occasion for increasing a
collection of MSS. which he had already begun for his private uses.
Where he found that the town librarian was a good easy man, he removed
(silently) from his keeping a selection of the most precious volumes,
or, if it seemed unsafe to take the whole of a MS., he detached some few
quires. Now and then he left a less valuable book in the place of the
other. His best hunting-grounds were Tours, Orléans, and Lyons. At Lyons
he conveyed away the Book of Leviticus and part of Numbers out of the
Pentateuch. He had skilled workmen in his pay at Paris, who wrote names
of other (generally Italian) monasteries and former owners on the first
page of the stolen books, and otherwise disguised them; when he had made
up a selection of a suitable bulk and attractiveness, he looked about
for a wealthy purchaser, and found one in the Earl of Ashburnham, who
bought _en bloc_, and whose manuscripts were not readily made accessible
to the public. So the Lyons Leviticus and an illustrated sixth-century
Pentateuch from Tours and many other precious things from Fleury (near
Orléans) and elsewhere reposed in England until the early eighties, when
M. Leopold Delisle made public the result of a most patient and most
subtle investigation of the whole fraud, and a selection of the best of
the plunder was got back for France. Sad to say, the municipalities
which had been most negligent in keeping their MSS. refused to
contribute to the recovery of them. They are still at Paris, to the
advantage of students, but to the discredit of the provinces.
Meanwhile Libri's reputation had been thoroughly blown upon, and he
retired from France, and was dead in Italy or elsewhere before his
crimes had been atoned for. A great mass of his accumulations was bought
from the Ashburnhams by the Italians and is now at Florence. Madame
Libri survived, like Madame Fosco, to defend his memory.
To return. In spite of the long history and great wealth of Bordeaux,
Marseilles, Arles, Narbonne, Toulouse, you will not trace many famous
books to those places. The city which, on the whole, has preserved its
early manuscripts best is Albi, but it was never a great centre of
learning, and its library, though extremely interesting, is not large.
However, we need not be surprised at the poverty of a region which has
had to undergo Albigensian crusades, English occupation, wars of
religion, and a revolution.
Some of the great early libraries of Germany were mentioned in our
historical survey. Fulda and Lorsch were as remarkable as any. At the
present day Fulda retains only the few Bonifacian MSS. which rank as
relics of the saint--the blood-stained volume of Ambrose which was on
Boniface when the pagans killed him, his pocket copy of the Gospels,
the MS. written for Victor of Capua. The bulk of its abbey library,
which remained together until the close of the sixteenth century, is
dispersed and gone, no one knows where. Some books are at Cassel in the
ducal library. Lorsch has nothing _in situ_, but a good deal in the
Vatican. Both houses were instrumental in preserving the classics; we
owe to them Suetonius, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and part of Livy.
The Thirty Years' War was responsible for a good deal of dispersion.
Cargoes of books made their way to England, and Archbishop Laud bought
and gave to the Bodleian many from Würzburg and Erfürt; in the Arundel
collection at the British Museum the German contingent is large. Sweden
also profited at this time, and got its lovely _Codex Aureus_ (once at
Canterbury), its _Codex Argenteus_ (the Gothic Gospels at Upsala), and
its _Gigas_, or Devil's Bible, which came from Prague.
In the Revolutionary period there was extensive secularization of
abbeys, and whole libraries passed into central depots, as at Munich,
which has the MSS. of St. Emmeram of Ratisbon and of Tegernsee,
Benedictbeuern, Schäftlarn, and many other houses. Those of the old and
rich foundation of Reichenau passed to Carlsruhe. Precious books, like
the gold-covered Gospels of Lindau, were exported. This particular gem
was bought by Lord Ashburnham, and in recent years has gone to America.
Fine Gospels and other service-books from Weingarten are at Holkham;
they appeal to the Englishman, for they contain pictures of our sainted
King Oswald, of whom Weingarten owned a relic.
North Germany's contribution is far inferior to that of Bavaria and the
Rhine provinces. The inhabitants of large regions were pagans till a
late date (some might say they were so still), and have never, we
conceive, been really civilized. Few books were made there before the
fourteenth century, and I know of no good libraries that existed there
in the medieval period. A good part of the contents of one at Elbing,
near Dantzic, came somehow to Cambridge (Corpus Christi) in the
seventeenth century; it is a dreary collection, mostly on paper, of
scholastic theology, sermons, meditations, and a little medicine.
In Austria the abbeys were let alone till 1918. Such houses as Melk on
the Danube, St. Florian, St. Paul in Carinthia, Admont in Styria, still
owned their estates, their revenues, and their libraries. That of Melk
is noticeable, and at St. Paul is, oddly enough, one of the very
earliest Irish vernacular MSS. I believe it came thither in fairly
recent times from St. Blasien in the Black Forest. But, on the whole,
these places were too remote from the main stream to accumulate many
treasures of the very first quality.
LATIN MSS. IN ENGLAND
Let me now turn to England, and treat in greater detail of the monastic
and cathedral libraries there, and what happened to them. The
Dissolution, as we know, occurred here near on 400 years ago, which
makes the task of tracing the books at once harder and more fascinating
than in the case of France or Germany, where a whole library may be
found practically intact in a town near its old home. Of course, what
was done there ought to have been done here. Leland, the King's
antiquary, the abusive Protestant, John Bale, and the foolish but
learned Dr. John Dee, begged that it might be done. Yet, whatever Henry
VIII's or Mary's or Elizabeth's intentions may have been at times as to
the foundation of a "solempne library" where the ancient books of the
realm might be stored, they got but a very little way. Leland did secure
some MSS. for the Royal Library, perhaps most from Rochester, but upon
the whole the work was left in Elizabeth's days to individual
enthusiasts--Sir Robert Cotton, Archbishop Parker, and Dee and Bale
themselves. Others who did good work were Henry Fitzalan, Earl of
Arundel; Lord William Howard; Long Harry Savile of Bank; Laurence
Nowell, who rescued Anglo-Saxon books; Nicholas Brigam, who was
interested in English literature and built Chaucer's tomb in the Abbey;
the Theyers of Brockworth, near Gloucester. These are names to some of
which we shall return; it would be well at this moment to take a few
libraries one by one and see what can be said of them.
CATALOGUES OF MSS.
But, first, what are our means for pursuing such an investigation? We
are best off if we have a catalogue of our abbey library, and preferably
a late one; for in that case not only will the library be at its
fullest, but probably the cataloguer will have set down, after the title
of each book, the first words of its second leaf. Does this need
explanation? Perhaps. In MSS., unlike printed books, the first words of
the second leaf will be different in any two copies, say, of the Bible;
the scribes did not make a page for page or line for line copy of their
archetype--in fact, they may probably have avoided doing so purposely.
By the help of such a catalogue we can search through collections of
MSS., noting the second leaves in each case, and, it may be, identifying
a considerable number of books. It is a laborious but an interesting
process.
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.[C] 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,[D] 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: [Illustration: Symbol].
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.
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 [Greek: Delta]--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.
THE MORAL
So texts and books wander, and so do discoveries sometimes lie near our
hands. The moral is: Be inquisitive. See books for yourself; do not
trust that the cataloguer has told you everything. I am a cataloguer
myself, and I know that, try as he may, a worker of that class cannot
hope to know or to see every detail that is of importance. The creature
is human, and on some days his mind is less alert than on others. Nor is
he interested in everything alike: an apocryphal fragment or an obscure
saint will excite me, while a letter of St. Bernard which may be
unpublished leaves me calm. But in spite of the imperfections of
cataloguers, catalogues must be used, and they must be read and not only
referred to. The mere juxtaposition of treatises in a volume will often
reveal its provenance or its pedigree; besides, there is always the
chance I have suggested, that the describer of any MS. may have failed
through ignorance or want of attention to see that some article in it
is of extreme interest and rarity. So it was that in reading Lambecius's
(eighteenth-century) catalogue of the Greek MSS. at Vienna I noted down
an entry that seemed unusual; and some years after, when I had an
opportunity of getting a friend at Vienna to look at the tract in
question, it was found to be the unique copy of the very most heretical
(and therefore interesting) episode of the apocryphal Acts of St. John,
written in the second century, and copied, to our lasting astonishment
and perplexity, by some honest orthodox cleric in the fourteenth.
May discoveries infinitely more pleasing fall to the lot of many of my
patient readers!
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The student may consult the following works:
J. W. CLARK: The Care of Books. Cambridge, 1901.
E. A. SAVAGE: Old English Libraries. London, 1911.
Containing a useful bibliography.
M. R. JAMES: The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury
and Dover (Cambridge, 1903); the Abbey of St.
Edmund at Bury, (1895) and the Catalogues of the
MSS. of the Libraries at Eton and at Cambridge, by
the same author.
M. BATESON: Catalogue of the Library of Syon
Monastery, Isleworth. 1898.
List of Catalogues of English Book Sales,
1676-1906, now in the British Museum. London,
1915.
E. A. LOEW: The Beneventan Script. Oxford, 1914.
TH. GOTTLIEB: Ueber Mittelalterliche Bibliotheken.
Leipzig, 1890.
T. DUFFUS HARDY: Descriptive Catalogue of
Materials relating to the History of Great
Britain. Rolls Series, 1862-71.
* * * * *
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Let not the 400 MSS. given by Coislin to the Abbey of St. Germain
des Prés at Paris be quoted against me. They were the collection of a
great noble, the Chancellor Séguier, and the library to which they were
presented was practically a public one, whose permanence was seemingly
assured.
[B] _See_ Eubel, _Hierarchia Catholica Medii Ævi_, ii. 248.
[C] We have its catalogue admirably reproduced by Thomas Hearne, at a
time (early in the eighteenth century) when it was rare to find anyone
who would take the trouble to make a faithful copy of such a record,
with all its erasures and alterations.
[D] Subsequently Theyer, as I said, went on collecting MSS., and finally
Charles II. bought the whole lot for the Royal Library.
HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY.
=No. 1. EPISCOPAL REGISTERS OF ENGLAND AND WALES.=
By R. C. FOWLER, B.A., F.S.A. 6d. net.
=No. 2. MUNICIPAL RECORDS.= By F. J. C. HEARNSHAW,
M.A. 6d. net.
=No. 3. MEDIEVAL RECKONINGS OF TIME.= By REGINALD L.
POOLE, LL.D., Litt.D. 6d. net.
=No. 4. THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE.= By CHARLES
JOHNSON. 6d. net.
=No. 5. THE CARE OF DOCUMENTS.= By CHARLES JOHNSON.
6d. net.
=No. 6. THE LOGIC OF HISTORY.= By C. G. CRUMP. 8d.
net.
=No. 7. DOCUMENTS IN THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE,
DUBLIN.= By R. H. MURRAY, Litt.D. 8d. net.
=No. 8. THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION.= By ARTHUR A.
TILLEY, M.A. 6d. net.
_BY SIR A. W. WARD, Litt.D., F.B.A.:--_
=No. 9. THE PERIOD OF CONGRESSES, I. Introductory.=
8d. net.
=No. 10. THE PERIOD OF CONGRESSES, II.= Vienna and
the Second Peace of Paris, 1s. net.
=No. 11. THE PERIOD OF CONGRESSES, III.=
Aix-la-Chapelle to Verona. 1s. net. (Nos. 9, 10,
and 11 in one volume, cloth 3s. 6d. net.)
=No. 12. SECURITIES OF PEACE.= A Retrospect
(1848-1914). Paper 2s.; cloth 3s. net.
=No. 13. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE.= By ARTHUR A.
TILLEY, M.A. 8d. net.
=No. 14. HINTS ON THE STUDY OF ENGLISH ECONOMIC
HISTORY.= By W. CUNNINGHAM, D.D., F.B.A., F.S.A.
8d. net.
=No. 15. PARISH HISTORY AND RECORDS.= By A.
HAMILTON THOMPSON, M.A., F.S.A. 8d. net.
=No. 16. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF COLONIAL
HISTORY.= By A. P. NEWTON, M.A., D.Litt., B.Sc.
6d. net.
=No. 17. THE WANDERINGS AND HOMES OF MANUSCRIPTS.=
By M. R. JAMES, Litt.D., F.B.A. Paper cover, 2s.;
cloth boards, 3s. net.
=No. 18. ECCLESIASTICAL RECORDS.= By the REV.
CLAUDE JENKINS, M.A., Librarian of Lambeth Palace.
=No. 19. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF
AMERICAN DIPLOMACY.= By CARL RUSSELL FISH, Ph.D.,
Professor of American History in the University of
Wisconsin. 1s. net.
=No. 20. HINTS ON TRANSLATION FROM LATIN INTO
ENGLISH.= By ALEXANDER SOUTER, D.Litt. 6d. net.
=No. 21. HINTS ON THE STUDY OF LATIN.= (A.D.
125-750.) By ALEXANDER SOUTER, D.Litt. 8d. net.
=No 22. REPORT OF THE HISTORICAL MSS. COMMISSION.=
By R. A. ROBERTS., F.R.H.S., Sometime Secretary of
the Commission.
(_=Others to follow.=_)
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
The original text had one page containing the list of Helps on the second
page and it was concluded on the last page. The first page was moved to
join the last.
Page 96, M. Bateson was all-capped to match the rest of the format of
the Bibliography.
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