I take my stand before the moderate-sized bookcase which contains the
collection of MSS. belonging to the College of Eton, and with due care
draw from the shelves a few of the books which have reposed there since
the room was built in 1729.
The first shelf I lay hands upon contains some ten large folios. Four of
them are a single great compilation, beginning with a survey of the
history of the world and of the Roman Empire, and merging into the
heraldry of the German _noblesse_. It was made, we find, in 1541, and is
dedicated to Henry VIII. Large folding pictures on vellum and portraits
of all the Roman Emperors adorn the first volume. It is a sumptuous
book, supposed to be a present from the Emperor Ferdinand to the King.
How did it come here? A printed label tells us that it was given to the
college by Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, in 1750 (he had previously
given it to Sir Richard Ellys on whose death Lady Ellys returned it: so
much in parenthesis). Then, more by luck than anything else, I find
mention of it in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary; his
friend Thomas Jett, F.R.S., owned it and told him about it in 1722: he
had been offered £100 a volume for it; it was his by purchase from one
Mr. Stebbing. It was sold, perhaps to Palmerston, at Jett's auction in
1731. The gap between Henry VIII. and Stebbing remains for the present
unfilled. So much for the first draw.
Next, a yet larger and more ponderous volume, _Decreta Romanorum
Pontificum_--the Papal decretals and the Acts of the Councils. It is
spotlessly clean and magnificently written in a hand of the early part
of the twelfth century, a hand which very much resembles that in use at
Christchurch, Canterbury. I am indeed, tempted to call it a Canterbury
book; only it bears none of the marks which it ought to have if it was
ever in the library of the Cathedral Priory. Was it perhaps written
there and sold or given to a daughter-house, or to some abbey which had
a less skilful school of writers? Not to Rochester, at any rate, though
Rochester did get many books written at Christchurch. If it had belonged
to Rochester there would have been some trace, I think, of an
inscription on the lower margin of the first leaf. No; the only clue to
the history is a title written on the fly-leaf in the fifteenth century,
which says: "The book of the decrees of the Pope of Rome," and it begins
on the second leaf "_tes viii_." That does not tell us much; I do not
recognize the handwriting of the title, though I guess it to have been
written when the book came to Eton College. All I can say is that here
is an example of a large class, duplicates of indispensable and common
works, which the abbey libraries possessed in great numbers, and often
parted with, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to colleges and
private purchasers.
Next we take out a thin folio written on paper. This time it is a Greek
book which we open; it has the works of the Christian apologists
Athenagoras and Tatian, and a spurious epistle of Justin Martyr, copied
in 1534 by Valeriano of Forlí. A single MS. now at Paris, written in
914, is the ancestor of all our copies of these texts; but it has been
shown that this Eton book is not an immediate copy of that, but of one
now at Bologna. Obviously it was written in Italy. How does it come to
be here? Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of the college, spent the best part
of twenty years in Italy, mainly as Ambassador to the Court of Venice
for James I., and left all his MSS. to the college at his death in 1639.
There are numbers of MSS. from Italy in this bookcase, and, though
hardly any of them have Wotton's name in them, it is not to be doubted
that they came from him. A good proportion of them, too, can be traced
back a step farther, for they have in them the name or the arms or the
handwriting of Bernardo Bembo of Venice, the father of the more famous
Cardinal Pietro Bembo. This Justin volume is not of that number, but we
have a clue to its history which may be deemed sufficient.
I turn to another shelf and open a large book written somewhere about
the year 1150, which was given to the college in 1713 by one of the
Fellows; in 1594 it belonged to John Rogers (if I read the name right).
It contains St. Jerome's Commentary on Daniel and the Minor Prophets,
followed by a tract of St. Ambrose, and another ascribed to Jerome
(subject, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart), which was in reality, we
are now told, written by a Pelagian. It is a very uncommon text. After
that we have Jerome's (so-called) prophecy of the fifteen signs which
are to precede the last judgment--of which signs, let it be said in
passing, there is a fine representation in an ancient window in the
Church of All Saints, North Street, at York. Can we trace this volume
any farther back than 1594? I think so; the Ambrose and the two spurious
tracts of Jerome (one, as I said, being of very rare occurrence) are
entered, in that order, in the catalogue of the library of Peterborough
Abbey. The library has long been dispersed, but the catalogue remains,
and was printed by Gunton in his History of the Abbey. But the said
catalogue makes no mention of the Commentary of Jerome, which fills 323
out of the 358 leaves of our book. A serious obstacle, it will be said,
to an identification; yet a long series of observations, too long to be
set out here, has led me to the conclusion that our Peterborough
catalogue makes a practice of not entering the main contents of the
volumes, but only the short subsidiary tracts, which might else escape
notice. And without much hesitation I put down the book before me as a
relic of the Peterborough Library.
Somewhat higher up stands a very stout book bound in old patterned
paper. The material of it is paper too, the language is Greek, and the
contents, for the most part, Canons of Councils. There are two hands in
it; one is perhaps of the fourteenth century, the other is of the early
part of the fifteenth. This latter is the writing of one Michael Doukas,
who tells us that he was employed as a scribe by Brother John of Ragusa,
who held some position at a Church Council, unnamed. There were two
Johns of Ragusa, it seems, both Dominicans, one of whom figured at the
Council of Constance in 1413, the other at that of Basle in 1433. The
latter must be the right one, for there are still Greek MSS. at Basle
which belonged to the Dominicans of that city, and were bequeathed by
the second John at his death in 1442.
The book is important, because the first thing in it is the only copy of
a treatise ascribed to St. Athanasius, called a Synopsis of Holy
Scripture. This treatise was printed first in 1600 by an editor named
Felckmann, and no MS. of it has been used or known since. Where did
Felckmann find it? In a MS. which belonged to Pierre Nevelet, procured
for him (the editor) by Bongars, a distinguished scholar of Orleans.
Now, the Eton book has in it a whole series of names of owners, some
erased, but decipherable. The earliest seems to be Joannes Gastius, who
in 1550 gave it to Johannes Hernogius (as I doubtfully read it). Then
come Petrus Neveletus and his son, I(saac) N(icolas) Neveletus.
Evidently, then, we have here the MS. which Felckmann used, and we
arrive at some date after 1600. In 1665 or 1685 Daniel Mauclerc, Doctor
of Law, living at Vitry le François, is the owner. He leaves France (the
family were Huguenots), and brings the book to Holland. His son Jacques,
Doctor of Medicine, has it in 1700, in England; his nephew, John Henry
Mauclerc, also M.D., succeeds to it and enters his name in 1748, and
gives it to Mr. Roger Huggett, Conduct and Librarian of the College, who
died in 1769.
This is an unusually full and clear pedigree. One more, and I have done.
This time it is a copy of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden, monk of
Chester; it was the popular history of the world and of England for
anyone who could read Latin in the fifteenth century. No abbey library
could be without it, just as no gentleman's library could be without a
copy of the English Chronicle called the Brut. Here is a case in which
we know the beginning and end of the book's wanderings, but not the
middle of the story. The arms of Eton adorn the beginning of each of the
seven "books" of the Chronicle, so we may take it that it was owned from
the first by a member of the foundation. An inscription tells us that
within the fifteenth century it belonged to the Carthusians of Witham in
Somerset, and was given to them by Master John Blacman. Here is light.
John Blacman was Fellow and Chanter of Eton, then Head of a House
(King's Hall) in Cambridge, and lastly a Carthusian monk. He was also
confessor to Henry VI., and wrote a book about him. In a MS. at Oxford
there is a list of the books he gave to Witham, and among them is this
Polychronicon. More: he has prefixed to the text a pedigree of the Kings
of England from Egbert, illustrated with drawings, the last of which is
the earliest known representation of Windsor Castle. We have not, then,
to complain of lack of information about the early stages of the
history; but then comes a gap, and between the Dissolution and the early
part of the nineteenth century, when Rodd of London had it and sold it
to the fourth Earl of Ashburnham, I can (at present) hear nothing of the
book. In quite recent years it passed from the Ashburnham family to Mr.
H. Y. Thompson, from him to Mr. George Dunn, and at his death was bought
back for its first home.
There, then, are half a dozen histories of MSS., fairly typical and
fairly diverse. Naturally I have picked out books which have some
traceable story. Very many have none. We can only say of them that they
were written in such a century and such a country, and acquired at such
a date: and there an end. Rebinding and loss of leaves, especially of
fly-leaves, have carried off names of owners and library-marks, and
apart from that there are but very few cases in which we are warranted
in proclaiming from the aspect and character of the script that a book
was written at one particular place and nowhere else.
I think it will be seen, from what has been said, that my subject is one
which depends for its actuality upon the accumulation of a great number
of small facts. There is, of course, a broad historical background: no
less than the whole history of Western Europe since the period of the
Barbarian invasions. That cannot be looked for here, of course; but
there are certain _data_ of capital importance which cannot be spared,
and some plotting out of the whole field is indispensable.