Clement of Llanthony, Oon of Foure; England, s. xiv/xv

Title

Clement of Llanthony, Oon of Foure; England, s. xiv/xv

Shelfmark

Christ Church, Allestree Library MS. L.4.1

Place of origin

England

Date

s. xiv/xv

Language

Middle English (1100-1500)

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Parchment (FSOS). All flyleaves modern paper flyleaves, excepting last at front which is parchment and integral to the manuscript.

Physical extent

Fols: iii + 126 + ii

Hands

Written in gothic textura quadrata, with items 1 and 2 each having their own scribe and 3 written in a smaller script by the scribe of 4.

Punctuation by punctus elevatus, double point, virgula, and occasional middle point.

Decoration

Headings in red. At textual divisions, blue lombards with red flourishing, four- and five-line at openings of books, three-line for chapters, two-line in the prefatory quires. Red letters in the margins to identify biblical lections, non-biblical materials underlined in red. Running titles for the parts in red preceded by a blue paraph. The text is divided by red-slashed capitals, red paraphs, and in some portions, blue paraphs.

Binding

Dark brown leather over millboards, with a frame in blind, s. xix. Sewn on four thongs. In the top spine compartment in gilt the title, ‘Clementis de Lanthonia Unum ex Quatuor Anglice’. Pastedowns modern paper, the printed Allestree label (see MS F.1.1) on the front pastedown.

Provenance

There is some sign of use of the manuscript in the presence of annotations by a fifteenth-century reader (fol. 13v, 14, 15, 22v, 41v, 44, 84v).

There is, though, only one sign suggesting ownership and that from the seventeenth century: a note at fol. iii is in the hand of Richard James, librarian to Sir Robert Cotton. On the basis of John Bale, he claims that ‘opus hoc transtulisse videtur in Anglicanum sermonem Joh. Wicklefus’. There is no other internal evidence to confirm that James wrote this note for Cotton and that, thus, this was in his ownership, but the placing of the note is very much like those found in other Cotton manuscripts. If it was owned by him, the note must date from the period when James was his librarian, that is, from 1625 until his death in 1638 (see Tom Beaumont James in Oxford DNB). The volume may not have stayed long in Cotton’s library and it certainly does not seem to appear in the lending lists: Colin G. C. Tite, The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library(London, 2003). It is known that Cotton gave away other Wycliffite manuscripts, some of them to James Ussher: Colin G. C. Tite, ‘“Lost or stolen or strayed”: a survey of manuscripts formerly in the Cotton Library’ in C. J. Wright ed., Sir Robert Cotton as Collector(London, 1997), 262–306 at 268–69 & 282. No gift to Allestree from Cotton is known and perhaps it moved indirectly from the one collection to the other. Like the rest of his collection, the manuscript was bequeathed by Richard Allestree in 1681.