FullReads

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 AElfric’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.

COLLECTORS OF BOOKS

We pass now from the monastic circle to that of the learned book collectors before and after the Dissolution. Many of the best medieval book-buyers were Abbots or Priors, and the history of their collections is merged in that of their abbeys. Leaving them aside, we find in fourteenth-century England one name which everyone has heard–that of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, and author of the Philobiblion. I am inclined to think that he was a humbug; his book is of the kind that it is proper to translate, print on hand-made paper, and bind in a vellum wrapper, but it tells us just nothing of what books De Bury had or read, and I could not point to a single work of any importance which he was instrumental in bringing to light or preserving. Persons who take pains to advertise themselves as book-lovers or bibliomaniacs are rarely those who render great services to literature.

Perhaps the libraries of the pre-Reformation colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are the best hunting-grounds for traces of the early collectors. At Peterhouse, Cambridge is a large bequest from John Warkworth, Master late in the fifteenth century; another from J. Dyngley, Fellow, whose books were written expressly for him; yet another from H. Deynman, Master, who was interested in medicine. Here, too, we come upon the tracks of Roger Marchall, who must rank, on the whole, as a student of natural science. Books with his name and his carefully written tables of contents are at Peterhouse, Gonville and Caius, Lambeth, the British Museum, King’s College; one at Magdalene College (Pepys Library) came thither from Peterhouse via Dr. John Dee. Walter Crome was another fifteenth-century benefactor of the University Library and of Gonville Hall, who, like Dyngley, had books written to his order. These are Cambridge data. Just such another list could be made out for some Oxford colleges, particularly Merton, Balliol, and New College. In this Bishops William Rede of Chichester, and John Trillek of Hereford, and William Gray of Ely, would figure prominently. The mention of this last name will serve as a pretext for introducing the Renaissance scholars. Gray, we saw, was one of those who dealt with Vespasiano Bisticci of Florence, though not nearly all of the many MSS. of his giving which are at Balliol are Italian-written; a good number are by Flemish and German scribes. The other men to whom I alluded in the same connection were for the most part benefactors of Oxford. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, beheaded in 1470 for treason, promised a large gift of books to the University, but they never reached it, nor do I know a single MS. to-day that was Tiptoft’s property, though there can be no doubt that he was a considerable book-buyer. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (whom we are now forbidden to call “the Good”), did give the University what was then a large library; his name is inseparably associated with the great room of the Bodleian, but his books were swept away in Edward VI.’s days. Some few have come back to their old home, and others are in London and in Paris: twenty-nine is said to be the total. He intended further gifts, but he was cut off in 1444, and it is thought that one collection, perhaps his travelling library, was diverted to King’s College, Cambridge. It is certain that soon after 1450 that college possessed some 174 MSS., among which such titles as Plato’s Republic in Latin and a Greek-English dictionary betray a humanistic influence which is not likely to have been that of our founder, Henry VI. Moreover, the only one of those MSS. that remains is a Latin version of some orations of St. Athanasius, made by a secretary of the Duke, and dedicated to the Duke; and in the British Museum is another volume of Athanasius translated by the same man, which actually has Duke Humphrey’s inscription in it. This is respectable evidence in support of the King’s College story.