Three Newly Recovered Leaves from the ‘Winchester Anthology’

The ‘Winchester Anthology’ (London, British Library, MS Additional 60577) is a late fifteenth-century collection of miscellaneous verse and prose in English, Latin and French.¹ The scribe, who dates a portion of his work to 1487, also copied BL MS Harley 172, a contemporary and similar collection.² Acquired by the British Library in 1979, the Additional manuscript, which includes a unique Middle English verse translation of part of Petrarch’s Secretum, was almost immediately made available in facsimile by Edward Wilson and Iain Fenlon.³ The editors noted that a number of leaves once present were now lost. Apart from a lacuna of an estimated four quires, several leaves have also been removed individually or in small groups, leaving eleven stubs scattered throughout at the manuscript’s gutter.⁴

Three of these missing leaves survive and can be assigned to their places in the codex. They came into the hands of the antiquary Thomas Hearne (1678–1735), who pasted them into one of his notebooks, in use between 1 November 1712 and 28 January 1713.⁵ The leaves have previously been catalogued in the Bodleian’s Summary Catalogue: ‘at page 96 is a leaf of an English paper 15th cent. MS. relating to the monastery of Hales: and at page 101 is a fragment (two leaves) of a 15th cent. Latin and English parchment MS. containing an English prophecy in verse (beg. ‘In the londe of more bretayngne’)’.⁶ It can none the less be asserted with some confidence that these leaves are all in the same hand, that of the Winchester scribe, and furthermore that the two parchment leaves once stood in the ‘Winchester Anthology’ between the current fols. 66 and 67, while the paper leaf stood between the current fols. 116 and 117.

Hearne’s leaves have all been trimmed into an irregular shape, but each page bears a ruled text block of 158 × 90 mm, consistent with the rest of the ‘Winchester Anthology’.⁷ As is also standard for the codex, each block is pricked and ruled with 32 pencil lines, double horizontals define the first and last lines, and the pages differ as to whether the first line of writing sits above or below the first line of ruling. Every last written line on Hearne’s leaves rests on the last ruled line, except on p. 104, where the text extends two lines below to keep a quatrain intact.⁸ In their situation in the notebook, the leaves have been folded to fit within the octavo format and mounted backwards.⁹

Table 1.

Winchester foliation against Hearne’s pagination

Fig. 1.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hearne’s Diaries 42, p. 96.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

As a result, Hearne’s pagination of the material runs against the actual flow of the text (see Table 1).

The paper leaf is quarto in format and carries half a watermark, the lower part of a double-banded shield with protruding ‘potences’ along the bands, identifiable in Briquet’s catalogue as the Arms of Troyes.¹⁰ This matches one of the two watermarks found in the ‘Winchester Anthology’, the Arms of Troyes topped with a Maltese Cross (Briquet 1040).¹¹ There are only two points in the Winchester manuscript where a dislocated leaf was once conjugate with a folio bearing the upper half of the watermark: after fols. 189 and 116 respectively. A placement for Hearne’s leaf after fol. 116 is confirmed by offset from the detached leaf on to the full manuscript (Fig. 1, line 14; fol. 116^v, line 14), as well as a portion of Hearne’s initial T visible on the stub following fol. 116. Similarly, identification of Hearne’s parchment leaves with the two parchment stubs of a missing bifolium after fol. 66 can be confirmed by circumstantial details including runover of the text from Hearne’s p. 101 on to fol. 67^r and aligned damage to...