Between Customer and Court: A Brief Abstract of the Genealogie and Race of All the Kynges of England and its Lost Source

A Lost Genealogy of English Kings

Printed English Histories have a long history of their own. As Louis B. Wright has shown, they were very popular in Elizabethan England, finding their way 'into the libraries of plain men'.¹ Not only were they best-sellers, they were also amongst the earliest books printed in English: when movable type came to England, Caxton's The Chronicle of England (1480) and his edition (1482) of the Polychronicon, in Trevisa's translation, were not far behind. Yet popular as such 'full-length' chronicles may have been, there is evidence of shorter printed works dealing with English history that catered even more specifically to plain men's interests —and to shallow purses. In 1520, according to an entry in his daybook, the Oxford bookseller John Dorne sold a 'cronica anglie' in two quires for a penny.² Going at the price of two broadside ballads, the chronicle must have been very short and cheaply produced. Its text may well have consisted merely of John Lydgate's brief Chronicle of the English Kings, of which several early-sixteenth-century editions have been preserved. Dating from the early fifteenth century, this rhymed genealogy was eagerly copied by hand into scrapbooks and other utilitarian documents.³ About 1518 Richard Pynson printed an updated revision of it, with a list of saints and martyrs.⁴ In 1530 it was reprinted by Wynkyn de Worde with regnal information for each king added marginally; two years later Robert Wyre included part of it in a brief historical compendium.⁵

Short, cheap printed texts such as these suggest a particular kind of popular readership, namely one that could not afford full-length histories; their form —short ballade stanzas of doggerel verse, giving minimal information about each king —makes them popular in style as well. Lydgate's rhymed chronicle clearly continued to be attractive to printers, and c. 1552 it was published, probably also by Wyre, in broadside ballad format.⁶ Certainly rhyming stanzas were to be a common feature of cheap royal genealogies in centuries to come, and must have contributed both to their popularity and to ease of memorization. John Aubrey, for instance, testified that his nurse 'had the History from the Conquest down to Carl I. in Ballad'.⁷ Ballads, songs, and short rhymes of this kind flourished in the eighteenth century and continued to be popular well into the nineteenth.⁸

After the 1552 broadside no further updates of Lydgate's genealogy have been preserved, and by 1562 it had been succeeded by a far more lavish publication, Giles Godet's A Brief Abstract of the Genealogie and Race of All the Kynges of England (STC 10022). True to its title, this work not only covered (in rhyme) the post-Conquest kings, but also (in prose) their predecessors; moreover, it did so with an accompanying series of large portraits for all monarchs, printed from woodblocks and coloured by hand. Its combination of brief text and elaborate pictures evidently catered to the taste of a lay public that, while satisfied with superficial historical information, could afford the expense of its craftsmanship and took pride in showing it. Such illustrated genealogies became more widely and cheaply available in the following centuries, taking the form of broadside ballads with crude woodcuts, chapbooks, or even board and card games. The early sixteenth century, on the other hand, offers no ready evidence for them: in the extant English genealogies from this time text invariably outweighs illustration. This even applies to John Rastell's The Pastyme of People: The Cronycles of Dyuers Realmys and Most Specyally of the Realme of Englond, of 1529–30, which features the novelty of a series of English kings' portraits.⁹

As I shall argue, it is very likely that a brief rhymed and illustrated genealogy of the kings was produced in England shortly after the publication of Rastell's book. Evidence for its existence can be derived from Godet's genealogy in combination with several other texts...