Fifteenth-century single text codex of John Harding's Chronicle.

Title

Fifteenth-century single text codex of John Harding's Chronicle.

Shelfmark

MS. Ashmole 34

Place of origin

English, London

Date

15th century, third quarter, perhaps 1470s (after 1464)

Language

Latin

Middle English (1100-1500)

Contents

Form

codex

Support

parchment

Physical extent

ii (paper endleaves, seventeenth century) + 1 (parchment, with woodcut) + 176(parchment, with text) + 3 (parchment endleaves, blank) + ii (paper endleaves, seventeenth century).

Hands

One hand throughout which writes the text and marginal glosses. Bastard secretary, in a professional and consistent hand. Sarah Peverley identifies the same hand in MS. Douce 345.

Decoration

Folio 1v contains a full-page pastedown woodcut, hand-coloured, which depicts a priest with a book and prayer-beads on a blue background. The border has been painted with a thick black paint, but traces of green leaves are visible beneath. In each corner are pasted fragments of parchment with illuminated decoration (likely from a border, of the second quarter of the fifteenth century) in red, blue, green, and gold. These fragments cover four coats of arms which were original to the woodcut, likely in an attempt to repurpose the woodcut for its present context. (Pächt and Alexander iii. 1069, pl. C) At the figure’s foot is a shield party per bend sinister argent and gules - comparison with an unmutilated copy of this woodcut in a 1577 edition of Des Hochwirdigen reveals this shield is original. Above the figure is a pastedown strip of parchment which reads ‘The portratvre of Iohn Harding maker of these chronicles’. D.R. Woolf identifies the woodcut as a portrait of the German prince George III, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau (1507-1553) by Lucas Cranach the younger.

Heraldic shields are drawn in the margins of fols. 34r (the arms of St George and Constantyne - argent, a cross gules) and 38v (argent a cross gules with bars).

Folio 2r opens the text with a six-line illuminated decorated initial, red and blue on gold background, from which extends a two-side spray border with red and blue leaves. Kathleen Scott identifies the limner as the English Illuminator whose work is found in other manuscripts produced in 1470s London, and connects MS Ashmole 34 to a large group of manuscripts (including MS Arch. Selden B.10) which were produced between 1470-80 in the same London workshop. (Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390-1490, vol. ii, p. 354).

Illuminated initials on a blue and red background with white filigree work and spray work extending along the margin on fols. 6r, 8v, 12r, and 100r.

Paraphs mark the start of almost every stanza, inconsistently alternating between red and blue.

The change of monarch in the text is marked with two, three, or four-line lombardic capitals, blue with red flourishes that extend along the margin. The first letter of each line has a yellow wash. After folio 136r, ascenders on the top line are occasionally flourished and filled with the same yellow wash.

Glosses in red and black. Rubricated glosses marked with a blue paraph with red flourishes.

Binding

Late seventeenth-century calf binding typical of Elias Ashmole's collection.

Acquisition

The manuscript was kept in the Ashmolean until 1860, when the Bodleian Library acquired the collection.

Provenance

The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval England qualifies MS Ashmole 34 as containing a mixed, but northern, Middle English dialect, and suggests the manuscript is a southern copy of an earlier northern exemplar. (See McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin, I. p. 145.)

Kathleen Scott identifies the illuminator of the manuscript as the English Illuminator, who was also responsible for decorating the London Skinners' Company Book of the Fraternity of the Assumption of our Lady, which contains the date 1477/8. This evidence, combined with the presence of green lobes in the border decoration, suggests a production date in London in the early 1470s.

The manuscript was owned by the judge and antiquary Sir Peter Manwood (1571-1625), who purchased the volume in 1604. Folio 177v contains his note: bought the 14th day of februarie. 1604. pretium – 20s. Pe: Manwood. Another manuscript owned by Manwood, now MS Bodl. 885, contains a similar ownership note in the same hand. Manwood was acquainted with Elias Ashmole and is known to have gifted him manuscripts. A colophon on folio 1r of MS Ashmole 1511 notes (in Ashmole's hand) This booke was gyven mee by my good freinde William Man esquire, this thirde day of August 1609. Peter Manwood. Another of Manwood's manuscripts ended up in Ashmole's collection: now MS Ashmole 849. It is not certain when MS Ashmole 34 entered Ashmole's collection.

Ashmole bequeathed the manuscript to the Ashmolean Museum in 1692 as part of his donation of 1,100 printed books and 600 manuscripts.