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.