Statutes of Archbishops of Canterbury, concerning the Court of Arches; England (?Lambeth), s. xvi3/4, with item 5 s. xv2/4

Title

Statutes of Archbishops of Canterbury, concerning the Court of Arches; England (?Lambeth), s. xvi3/4, with item 5 s. xv2/4

Shelfmark

Christ Church MS. 112

Place of origin

England (?Lambeth)

Date

s. xv2/4

s. xvi3/4

Language

Latin

English

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Parchment (usually FSOS, but HSOS in quire 8–9), excepting added paper leaves at end (fol. 74–77; watermark pot, close to Briquet 12520)

Physical extent

Fols i (unnumbered, blank perhaps a former pastedown) + 88 (first fourteen numbered: i-xiv) + 4 (74–77, the added paper leaves) + 1

Hands

The calendar is in gothic textura quadrata, while the bulk of the manuscript is probably all by a single Parkerian scribe, though writing at several sittings. For the main part (fol. iii-viiiv, 1–64), he writes a bookhand which has been described as ‘formal secretary’, adorned with gothic display text. This combination of scripts by the same scribe is to be found in other manuscripts owned by Matthew Parker, appearing, for instance, at Cambridge: Corpus Christi College, MS 101, pp. 145–192, MS 61 and MS 488; through the good offices of Alexandra Gillespie, the scribe has been identified as Stephen Batman, on whom see M. B. Parkes, ‘Stephen Batman’s Manuscripts’ in Masahiko Kanno et al. ed., Medieval Heritage. Essays in honour of Tadahiro Ikegami (Tokyo, 1997), 125–56 [republished in Parkes’s Pages from the Past (Farnham, 2012), and A. S. G. Edwards & Simon Horobin, ‘Further Books annotated by Stephen Batman, The Library, 7th ser., 11 (2010), 227–31

Item 7 (fol. 64v-65) was added at a separate sitting in a similar script; that of item 12 (fol. 72–73r) is also similar but of a lower grade.

Item 11 (fol. 68–70v) was perhaps added next, to be followed by items 8–10 (fol. 65v-67av), all in a script which is more upright but shares enough features with the main hand to be equated with it; this script is also used for item 2 (fol. ii).

Of the manuscripts just mentioned, the first, Cambridge: Corpus Christi College, MS. 101 also, at its pp. 1–6, provides a match for the script seen in items 2 and 8–11. M. R. James tentatively identified the scribe as John Joscelyn (A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912), 2:190), but that attribution is to be rejected and it may, indeed, be another script by Batman, a protean scribe.

Decoration

In addition to its woodcut frontispiece (item 1) and inserted fifteenth-century quire with its filigree initials and entries in black, red and blue (item 5), the main part of this manuscript has decoration intended to impress. The title-page (item 3) opens its display script with a swag-capital from which grows a depiction of a lion and a leopard, both rampant. At the bottom of the text-block is painted Matthew Parker’s coat-of-arms (gules, on a chevron argent between three keys argent, three estoiles gules), topped by a cross, with the letters ‘M’ on one side and ‘P’ on another, the whole depicted as hanging on a drape held in place by two small lions sejant erect, each holding a flag-pole and atop a pillar.

At fol. 1, the same hand draws in pen-and-ink flowers each side of the title and a Tudor rose about the first line of text, which is written in gold, with the opening initial placed on a red square. A similar use of gold is to be found at fol. 47. Throughout the text, both the title to each piece and its first word are rubricated, a layout which is repeated in items 8–9.

Binding

Leather over millboards. Gold-tooled oval centrepiece and double border with flower at each corner, c. 1580–1620, for which there is no match in David Pearson, ‘English Centrepiece Bindings 1560–1640’, The Library, 6th ser., 16 (1994), 1–17 or id., English Bookbinding Styles, 1450–1800: a handbook (London, 2005). Sewn on five thongs. Two small holes near fore-edge of each board, demonstrating where cloth ties would have once been. No signs of chain staples. No pastedowns. Boards presently (April 2014) detached.

Provenance

This manuscript was made for Archbishop Matthew Parker, as is shown not only by the presence of his coat-of-arms at fol. 1 but also his distinctive red-crayon writing at top inner margin of fol. 53 and, as underlining, at fol. 3v, 49. It is also clear that it was made for him within his own circle, with the scribes at work here also appearing in other manuscripts produced for the Archbishop. The date of construction of this codicologically curious confection can be estimated with some precision: the main part, and the closing index, was presumably compiled a little before the Ordinance of 1568 which is the first addition, and which, alone of the texts contemporary to Parker’s lifetime, is included in the opening contents list. Further additions were then made in or following 1573.

Something of the later history of the volume is revealed by two letters from the antiquary, Samuel Drake (1687/8–1753), sent from his college of St John’s, Cambridge, to Archbishop Wake; they are now in our collection, among Wake’s documents as MS 244, items 75 and 78. Their context is that Drake was preparing his edition of Parker’s De antiquitate which was to appear in 1729 and be dedicated to the archbishop (a finely bound copy of which is in the Wake collection as WT.1.1). Wake, for his part, was particularly interested in the issue of Parker’s consecration, which had become a matter of controversy (on this, see Norman Sykes, William Wake Archbishop of Canterbury 1657–1737, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1957), 2:318–66). In the course of their discussions, in a letter dated 8th November 1725, Drake mentions ‘a MS. fell into my hands, which I beg leave to mention to your Grace’; he goes on to describe in some detail our manuscript. He also offers to have it sent to the Archbishop at Lambeth. The latter clearly wrote back in the affirmative, and, in response, on 22nd November, Drake sent the volume to him and explained a little more about how he came to see it: ‘the proprietor of it is Mr Cross vicar of Kintbury near Newbery Berks. I believe, My Lord, he wou’d be glad to restore it to the Lambeth Library, to which as your Grace conjectures, it most probably belong’d and was thence carried away in Prynne’s plunder’. The owner is identifiable as Latimer Crosse, second son of Joshua Crosse and a graduate of Wadham College, receiving his BA in 1688 and MA in 1692; he was vicar of Kintbury from 1719 until his death in August 1739 (AO, 356; TNA, PROB 20/648). That Crosse allowed Drake to use the volume is confirmed by the presence of the latter’s annotations at fol. iir-v (collating the text with another copy) and 70 (noting the early print history of the statutes included in this volume). That it then did reach Wake is confirmed by one word appearing in the margin of fol. 68, where Wake himself corrects the text from ‘Stafford’ to ‘Stratford’. Clearly, however, the volume did not pass into the library at Lambeth Palace and, rather, was donated to ChCh along with Wake’s other manuscripts, though it is not listed explicitly in the schedule of the manuscripts given by him, which is our MS 352/8. The inside of the upper board has a ChCh bookplate with both the foundation’s and Wake’s arms.

What remains unclear is the life of our manuscript after Archbishop Parker’s death in 1575 and before it was owned by Latimer Crosse. As has been noted, Wake hypothesised that the manuscript had been held at Lambeth until removed by William Prynne (1600–69) during Archbishop Laud’s trial. There is no internal evidence to corroborate the book’s presence on the South Bank. It is also perhaps to be doubted that the slip of paper which presently rests in the book before fol. 27 and on which is written ‘Th. Wentworth’ (s. xvii) can help us identify an owner; all that can be said for certain is that the script is not that of the divisive political figure, the earl of Stratford (1593–1641).