Incorporation in the text of glosses and marginal notes.
§ 24. One source of the corruption of the text of Asser is, I think, to be found in the fact that words and phrases, which were originally interlinear glosses, have become, as often happens, incorporated with the text[102]. In one case the text of Florence seems to show that the gloss has entirely expelled the original reading, at least in the printed copies[103].
In another instance a marginal note by a later scribe has got into the text. As this case is of some importance as bearing on the date of the composition, I must ask your particular attention to it. In the description of Alfred’s visit to the Cornish shrine, already alluded to, the following sentence occurs:—‘Cum … ad quandam ecclesiam … diuertisset, in qua S. Gueryr requiescit, et nunc etiam S. Neotus ibidem pausat, subleuatus est (erat enim sedulus sanctorum locorum uisitator, …) diu in oratione prostratus … Domini misericordiam deprecabatur[104],’ &c. Here the words ‘subleuatus est’ can by no possibility be construed, either with what goes before, or with what follows. Some time before I saw the meaning of them, I had underlined these words in my copy of the Monumenta, and noted on the margin ‘this seems to make nonsense.’ The explanation, I believe, is this:—The original scribe had stated the repose of St. Neot’s remains in his Cornish home as a present fact, ‘ibidem pausat.’ A later scribe notes on the margin ‘subleuatus est,’ ‘he has been taken up’; a word very fitly used of the taking up a saint’s body from the grave in order to place it in some elevated shrine, or translate it to some other abode. A subsequent copyist incorporated the note with the text, which is again a frequent phenomenon[105]. Now the translation of St. Neot to the site which bears his name in Huntingdonshire took place about the year 974[106]. The original text of this passage must therefore be anterior to that date; the marginal note, and a fortiori the MS. on which our present text of Asser rests, must be subsequent to it. If, as I think, the passage in which these words occur is itself an interpolation, the evidence for the genuine text of Asser is thrown yet further back. However, the argument for a text of Asser earlier than 974, derived from the use of the present tense ‘pausat,’ is quite independent both of my explanation of the words ‘subleuatus est,’ and of my views as to the spurious character of the passage in which they occur.
LECTURE II
THE SOURCES (continued)
Further evidence for the text of Asser in the tenth century.
§ 25. We saw in the last lecture that there was good evidence for the existence of our text of Asser, apart from the interpolations made by sixteenth and seventeenth century editors, about the year 975. Another argument pointing the same way is derived from the text of Simeon of Durham.
Simeon of Durham.
In that writer’s Historia Regum there exists a double recension of the Annals 848-951, both of which are, for the years 848-888, largely derived, mediately or immediately, from Asser. The explanation of this curious fact given by Mr. Thomas Arnold in his interesting and able introduction to the edition of Simeon in the Rolls Series, is as follows[107]. The earlier recension is the work of a Cuthbertine monk, writing at Chester-le-Street in the second half of the tenth century, who drew largely on Asser for the reign of Alfred, farcing the text however (to use a liturgical term) with many rhetorical flourishes of his own. When Simeon, at the beginning of the twelfth century, embodied the Cuthbertine’s work in his Historia Regum, his better taste was revolted by these florid insertions, and he rewrote these annals, not wholly discarding his predecessor’s work, but using in addition both the original text of Asser, and also the recent work of Florence of Worcester. (The fact, which can be demonstrated, that Simeon used (1) the original text of Asser; (2) Asser as farced by the Cuthbertine; (3) Asser as revised by Florence, is one which I commend to the notice of students of the synoptic problem[108].) Had Simeon lived to give his work the final revision, he would no doubt have cancelled the earlier version of these annals. As it is, his literary executors embodied both versions; and we may be thankful that they did so, as they have thereby preserved some interesting evidence both literary and historical.