Chapter 6

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.

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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.

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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.