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.
