Chapter 2

all printed, and waits only for the Introduction, that Prof. E. C. K. Gonner has kindly undertaken to write for the book. Canon Wordsworth of Marlborough has given the Society a copy of the Leofric Canonical Rule, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, Parker MS. 191, C.C.C. Cambridge, and Prof. Napier will edit it, with a fragment of the englisht Capitula of Bp. Theodulf. The _Coventry Leet Book_ is being copied for the Society by Miss M. Dormer Harris--helpt by a contribution from the Common Council of the City,--and will be publisht by the Society (Miss Harris editing), as its contribution to our knowledge of the provincial city life of the 15th century.

Dr. Brie of Berlin has undertaken to edit the prose _Brut_ or _Chronicle of Britain_ attributed to Sir John Mandeville, and printed by Caxton. He has already examined more than 100 English MSS. and several French ones, to get the best text, and find out its source.

The Extra-Series Texts for 1904 will be chosen from Lydgate’s _DeGuilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man_, Part III, edited by Miss Locock; Dr. M. Konrath’s re-edition of _William of Shorcham’s Poems_, Part II; Dr. E. A. Kock’s edition of Lovelich’s _Merlin_ from the unique MS. in Corpus Christi Coll., Cambridge; the _Macro Plays_, edited from Mr. Gurney’s MS. by Dr. Furnivall and A. W. Pollard, M.A.; Prof. Erdmann’s re-edition of Lydgate’s _Siege of Thebes_ (issued also by the Chaucer Society); Miss Rickert’s re-edition of the Romance of _Emare_; Prof. I. Gollanez’s re-edition of two Alliterative Poems, _Winner and Waster_, &c, ab. 1360, lately issued for the Roxburghe Club; Dr. Norman Moore’s re-edition of _The Book of the Foundation of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London_, from the unique MS. ab. 1425, which gives an account of the Founder, Rahere, and the miraculous cures wrought at the Hospital; _The Craft of Nombrynge_, with other of the earliest englisht Treatises on Arithmetic, edited by R. Steele, B.A.; and Miss Warren’s two-text edition of _The Dance of Death_ from the Ellesmere and other MSS.

These Extra-Series Texts ought to be completed by their Editors: the Second Part of the prose Romance of _Melusine_--Introduction, with ten facsimiles of the best woodblocks of the old foreign black-letter editions, Glossary, &c, by A. K. Donald, B.A. (now in India); and a new edition of the famous Early-English Dictionary (English and Latin), _Promptorium Parvulorum_, from the Winchester MS., ab. 1440 A.D.: in this, the Editor, the Rev. A. L. Mayhew, M.A., will follow and print his MS. not only in its arrangement of nouns first, and verbs second, under every letter of the Alphabet, but also in its giving of the flexions of the words. The Society’s edition will thus be the first modern one that really represents its original, a point on which Mr. Mayhew’s insistence will meet with the sympathy of all our Members.

The Texts for the Extra Series in 1906 and 1907 will be chosen from _The Three Kings’ Sons_, Part II, the Introduction &c. by Prof. Dr. Leon Kellner; Part II of _The Chester Plays_, re-edited from the MSS., with a full collation of the formerly missing Devonshire MS., by Mr. G. England and Dr. Matthews; the Parallel-Text of the only two MSS. of the _Owl and Nightingale_, edited by Mr. G. F. H. Sykes (at press); Prof. Jespersen’s editions of John Hart’s _Orthographie_ (MS. 1551 A.D.; blackletter 1569), and _Method to teach Reading_, 1570; Deguilleville’s _Pilgrimage of the Sowle_, in English prose, edited by Prof. Dr. L. Kellner. (For the three prose versions of _The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man_--two English, one French--an Editor is wanted.) Members are askt to realise the fact that the Society has now 50 years’ work on its Lists,--at its present rate of production,--and that there is from 100 to 200 more years’ work to come after that. The year 2000 will not see finisht all the Texts that the Society ought to print. The need of more Members and money is pressing. Offers of help from willing Editors have continually to be declined because the Society has no funds to print their Texts.

An urgent appeal is hereby made to Members to increase the list of Subscribers to the E. E. Text Society. It is nothing less than a scandal that the Hellenic Society should have nearly 1000 members, while the Early English Text Society has not 300!

Before his death in 1895, Mr. G. N. Currie was preparing an edition of the 15th and 16th century Prose Versions of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s _Pilgrimage of the Life of Man_, with the French prose version by Jean Gallopes, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., he having generously promist to pay the extra cost of printing the French text, and engraving one or two of the illuminations in his MS. But Mr. Currie, when on his deathbed, charged a friend to burn _all_ his MSS. which lay in a corner of his room, and unluckily all the E. E. T. S.’s copies of the Deguilleville prose versions were with them, and were burnt with them, so that the Society will be put to the cost of fresh copies, Mr. Currie having died in debt.

Guillaume de Deguilleville, monk of the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis, in the diocese of Senlis, wrote his first verse _Pèlerinaige de l’Homme_ in 1330-1 when he was 36.[1] Twenty-five (or six) years after, in 1355, he revised his poem, and issued a second version of it,[2] a revision of which was printed ab. 1500. Of the prose representative of the first version, 1330-1, a prose Englishing, about 1430 A.D., was edited by Mr. Aldis Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1869, from MS. Ff. 5. 30 in the Cambridge University Library. Other copies of this prose English are in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Q. 2. 25; Sion College, London; and the Laud Collection in the Bodleian, no. 740.[3] A copy in the Northern dialect is MS. G. 21, in St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, and this is the MS. which will be edited for the E. E. Text Society. The Laud MS. 740 was somewhat condenst and modernised, in the 17th century, into MS. Ff. 6. 30, in the Cambridge University Library:[4] “The Pilgrime or the Pilgrimage of Man in this World,” copied by Will. Baspoole, whose copy “was verbatim written by Walter Parker, 1645, and from thence transcribed by G. G. 1649; and from thence by W. A. 1655.” This last copy may have been read by, or its story reported to, Bunyan, and may have been the groundwork of his _Pilgrim’s Progress_. It will be edited for the E. E. T. Soc., its text running under the earlier English, as in Mr. Herrtage’s edition of the _Gesta Romanorum_ for the Society. In February 1464,[5] Jean Gallopes--a clerk of Angers, afterwards chaplain to John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France--turned Deguilleville’s first verse _Pèlerinaige_ into a prose _Pèlerinage de la vie humaine_.[6] By the kindness of Lord Aldenham, as above mentiond, Gallopes’s French text will be printed opposite the early prose northern Englishing in the Society’s edition.

The Second Version of Deguilleville’s _Pèlerinaige de l’Homme_, A.D. 1355 or -6, was englisht in verse by Lydgate in 1426. Of Lydgate’s poem, the larger part is in the Cotton MS. Vitellius C. xiii (leaves 2-308). This MS. leaves out Chaucer’s englishing of Deguilleville’s _ABC_ or _Prayer to the Virgin_, of which the successive stanzas start with A, B, C, and run all thro’ the alphabet; and it has 2 main gaps, besides many small ones from the tops of leaves being burnt in the Cotton fire. All these gaps (save the A B C) have been fild up from the Stowe MS. 952 (which old John Stowe completed) and from the end of the other imperfect MS. Cotton, Tiberius A vii. Thanks to the diligence of the old Elizabethan tailor and manuscript-lover, a complete text of Lydgate’s poem can be given, though that of an inserted theological prose treatise is incomplete. The British Museum French MSS. (Harleian 4399,[7] and Additional 22,937[8] and 25,594[9]) are all of the First Version.

Besides his first _Pèlerinaige de l’homme_ in its two versions, Deguilleville wrote a second, “de l’ame separee du corps,” and a third, “de nostre seigneur Iesus.” Of the second, a prose Englishing of 1413, _The Pilgrimage of the Sowle_ (with poems by Hoccleve, already printed for the Society with that author’s _Regement of Princes_), exists in the Egerton MS. 615,[10] at Hatfield, Cambridge (Univ. Kk. 1. 7, and Caius), Oxford (Univ. Coll. and Corpus), and in Caxton’s edition of 1483. This version has ‘somewhat of addicions’ as Caxton says, and some shortenings too, as the maker of both, the first translater, tells us in the MSS. Caxton leaves out the earlier englisher’s interesting Epilog in the Egerton MS. This prose englishing of the _Sowle_ will be edited for the Society by Prof. Dr. Leon Kellner after that of the _Man_ is finisht, and will have Gallopes’s French opposite it, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., as his gift to the Society. Of the Pilgrimage of Jesus, no englishing is known.

As to the MS. Anglo-Saxon Psalters, Dr. Hy. Sweet has edited the oldest MS., the Vespasian, in his _Oldest English Texts_ for the Society, and Mr. Harsley has edited the latest, c. 1150, Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter. The other MSS., except the Paris one, being interlinear versions,--some of the Roman-Latin redaction, and some of the Gallican,--Prof. Logeman has prepared for press, a Parallel-Text edition of the first twelve Psalms, to start the complete work. He will do his best to get the Paris Psalter--tho’ it is not an interlinear one--into this collective edition; but the additional matter, especially in the Verse-Psalms, is very difficult to manage. If the Paris text cannot be parallelised, it will form a separate volume. The Early English Psalters are all independent versions, and will follow separately in due course.

Through the good offices of the Examiners, some of the books for the Early-English Examinations of the University of London will be chosen from the Society’s publications, the Committee having undertaken to supply such books to students at a large reduction in price. The net profits from these sales will be applied to the Society’s Reprints.

Members are reminded that _fresh Subscribers are always wanted_, and that the Committee can at anytime, on short notice, send to press an additional Thousand Pounds’ worth of work.

The Subscribers to the Original Series must be prepared for the issue of the whole of the Early English _Lives of Saints_, sooner or later. The Society cannot leave out any of them, even though some are dull. The Sinners would doubtless be much more interesting. But in many Saints’ Lives will be found valuable incidental details of our forefathers’ social state, and all are worthful for the history of our language. The Lives may be lookt on as the religious romances or story-books of their period.

The Standard Collection of Saints’ Lives in the Corpus and Ashmole MSS., the Harleian MS. 2277, &c. will repeat the Laud set, our No. 87, with additions, and in right order. (The foundation MS. (Laud 108) had to be printed first, to prevent quite unwieldy collations.) The Supplementary Lives from the Vernon and other MSS. will form one or two separate volumes.

Besides the Saints’ Lives, Trevisa’s englishing of _Bartholomæus de Proprietatibus Rerum_, the mediæval Cyclopædia of Science, &c, will be the Society’s next big undertaking. Dr. R. von Fleischhacker will edit it. Prof. Napier of Oxford, wishing to have the whole of our MS. Anglo-Saxon in type, and accessible to students, will edit for the Society all the unprinted and other Anglo-Saxon Homilies which are not included in Thorpe’s edition of Ælfric’s prose,[11] Dr. Morris’s of the Blickling Homilies, and Prof. Skeat’s of Ælfric’s Metrical Homilies. The late Prof. Kölbing left complete his text, for the Society, of the _Ancren Riwle_, from the best MS., with collations of the other four, and this will be edited for the Society by Dr. Thümmler. Mr. Harvey means to prepare an edition of the three MSS. of the _Earliest English Metrical Psalter_, one of which was edited by the late Mr. Stevenson for the Surtees Society.

Members of the Society will learn with pleasure that its example has been followed, not only by the Old French Text Society which has done such admirable work under its founders Profs. Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris, but also by the Early Russian Text Society, which was set on foot in 1877, and has since issued many excellent editions of old MS. Chronicles, &c.

Members will also note with pleasure the annexation of large tracts of our Early English territory by the important German contingent, the late Professors Zupitza and Kölbing, the living Hausknecht, Einenkel, Haenisch, Kaluza, Hupe, Adam, Holthausen, Schick, Herzfeld, Brandeis, Sieper, Konrath, Wülfing, &c. Scandinavia has also sent us Prof. Erdmann and Dr. E. A. Kock; Holland, Prof. H. Logeman, who is now working in Belgium; France, Prof. Paul Meyer--with Gaston Paris as adviser (alas, now dead);--Italy, Prof. Lattanzi; Austria, Dr. von Fleischhacker; while America is represented by the late Prof. Child, by Dr. Mary Noyes Colvin, Miss Rickert, Profs. Mead, McKnight, Triggs, Perrin, &c. The sympathy, the ready help, which the Society’s work has cald forth from the Continent and the United States, have been among the pleasantest experiences of the Society’s life, a real aid and cheer amid all troubles and discouragements. All our Members are grateful for it, and recognise that the bond their work has woven between them and the lovers of language and antiquity across the seas is one of the most welcome results of the Society’s efforts.

ORIGINAL SERIES.

1. _Early English Alliterative Poems_, ab. 1360 A.D., ed. Rev. Dr. R. Morris. 16s. 1864

2. _Arthur_, ab. 1440, ed. F. J. Furnivall, M.A. 4s. „

3. _Lauder on the Dewtie of Kyngis, &c._, 1556, ed. F. Hall, D.C.L. 4s. „

4. _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_, ab. 1360, ed. Rev. Dr. R. Morris. 10s. „

5. _Hume’s Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue_, ab. 1617, ed. H. B. Wheatley. 4s. 1865

6. _Lancelot of the Laik_, ab. 1500, ed. Rev. W. W. Skeat. 8s. „

7. _Genesis & Exodus_, ab. 1250, ed. Rev. Dr. R. Morris. 8s. „

8. _Morte Arthure_, ab. 1440, ed. E. Brock. 7s. „

9. _Thynne on Speght’s ed. of Chaucer_, A.D. 1599, ed. Dr. G. Kingsley and Dr. F. J. Furnivall. 10s. „

10. _Merlin_, ab. 1440, Part I., ed. H. B. Wheatley. 2s. 6d. „

11. _Lyndesay’s Monarche, &c._, 1552, Part I., ed. J. Small, M.A. 3s. „

12. _Wright’s Chaste Wife_, ab. 1462, ed. F. J. Furnivall, M.A. 1s. „

13. _Seinte Marherete_, 1200-1330, ed. Rev. O. Cockayne; re-edited by Dr. Otto Glauning. [_Out of print._ 1866

14. _Kyng Horn, Floris and Blancheflour, &c._, ed. Rev. J. R. Lumby, B.D., re-ed. Dr. G. H. McKnight. 5s. „

15. _Political, Religious, and Love Poems_, ed. F. J. Furnivall. 7s. 6d. „

16. _The Book of Quinte Essence_, ab. 1460-70, ed. F. J. Furnivall. 1s. „

17. _Parallel Extracts from 45 MSS. of Piers the Plowman_, ed. Rev. W. W. Skeat. 1s. „

18. _Hali Meidenhad_, ab. 1200, ed. Rev. O. Cockayne, re-edited by Dr. F. J. Furnivall. [_At Press._ „

19. _Lyndesay’s Monarche, &c._, Part II., ed. J. Small, M.A. 3s. 6d. „

20. _Hampole’s English Prose Treatises_, ed. Rev. G. G. Perry. 1s. [_Out of print._ „

21. _Merlin_, Part II., ed. H. B. Wheatley. 4s. „

22. _Partenay_ or _Lusignen_, ed. Rev. W. W. Skeat. „

23. _Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt_, 1340, ed. Rev. Dr. R. Morris. 10s. 6d. „

24. _Hymns to the Virgin and Christ; the Parliament of Devils, &c._, ab. 1430, ed. F. J. Furnivall. 1867

25. _The Stacions of Rome, the Pilgrims’ Sea-voyage, with Clene Maydenhod_, ed. F. J. Furnivall. 1s. „

26. _Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse_, from R. Thornton’s MS., ed. Rev. G. G. Perry. 2s. [_Out of print._ „

27. _Levins’s Manipulus Vocabulorum, a ryming Dictionary_, 1570, ed. H. B. Wheatley. 12s. „

28. _William’s Vision of Piers the Plowman_, 1362 A.D.; Text A,