Passing over the painful subject of the wholesale destruction of MSS.
which must have followed the Dissolution, I will give a few lines to an
interesting question little mooted as yet. Is there evidence that
England possessed many ancient writings which have since disappeared, or
which have survived only in a few copies in other parts of Europe? Take
the classics first. Poggio, as I have said, writes in a disappointed
tone of his researches here, but these were neither long nor exhaustive.
We have better testimony from John of Salisbury, who in the twelfth
century quotes parts of the _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius which have dropped
out of all the MSS. we now have. He also read a tract attributed to
Plutarch, called the _Instruction of Trajan_; it was probably not by
Plutarch, but it was an ancient work, and is now lost. Petronius Arbiter
was known to him, even that longest and most interesting piece of
Petronius called the _Supper of Trimalchio_, for which our only
authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in
the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to
have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus,
Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian
antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of
the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have
ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, Ælfric knew, and rejected, a poem on
the adventures of St. Thomas in India). In one of its Homilies the same
Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St.
Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two
early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes,
a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few
copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost _Book of
Jannes and Jambres_; another a chapter of the _Book of Enoch_, valuable
as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current.
John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from
the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth
century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if
subsequently lost) is a title _Proverbia Grecorum_. What this book was
is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish
scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in
a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call
him the _Yorker anonymus_) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The
work of Irenæus _Against Heresies_ (we only have it complete in Latin)
was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England,
one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop
Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have
in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian
which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the
treatise _On Baptism_ which it contained depends wholly on his printed
text.
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 Ælfric'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.