The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

by M. R. James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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