Texts from the Margin: Lydgate, Recipes, and Glosses in Bühler MS 17

Bühler MS 17 of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, ¹ contains in the main (fols. 5r-133r) a copy of the Liber ruralium commodorum (Book of Rural Profits) by Petrus Crescentius (Pietro de Crescenzi), probably composed between 1304 and 1309. This treatise on medieval gardening and other country matters has attracted some attention, ² both for its text and for the miniatures that accompany it in some manuscripts, among them the French translation in Morgan MS M.232. ³ On the spare leaves preceding and following the Liber, Bühler MS 17 preserves, in addition, a number of short Latin and Middle English texts. The present article will offer a discussion of the English texts in the volume, together with a transcription of the unedited Middle English prose texts.

The English verse texts in Bühler MS 17 provide some clues about its dating. Previous cataloguers have dated both the main part of the manuscript and the flyleaf texts to the early fifteenth century. ⁴ Folio 4v preserves a verse stanza excerpted from Walton's Middle English translation of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae; ⁵ since manuscript colophons date Walton's Boethius to 1410, ⁶ this excerpted stanza can be no earlier than that date. Folio 2r-v preserves a copy of the first redaction of John Lydgate's "Verses on the Kings of England," ⁷ to which the MED assigns a date of ante 1449, that is, before Lydgate's death. But the poem in its various incarnations can probably be more narrowly dated. The last stanza in the Bühler MS version concerns Henry VI:

Henricus sextus
Sext henry broght furth in all vertue
Be iust titill borne be enheritaunce
aforne prouided be grace of criste ihesu
to were ij crownes of Ingland & in ffraunce
to whome god hase gifen souereyn suffisaunce
of vertuose life & chose hym for his knyght
long to reiose and regn here in his right.

(fol. 2v)

Emphasizing Henry's birth and rightful claim to the thrones of England and France, the stanza clearly belongs to the early part of his reign. More particularly, it belongs to a flurry of propagandist activity advocating his dual monarchy between the years 1422 and 1432. ⁸ The treaty of Troyes (May 21, 1420) had provided for Henry V or his heirs to succeed Charles VI as dual monarch of France and England. The future Henry VI was born December 6, 1421, and had a claim to the dual throne less than a year later, after the deaths of his father (August 31-September 1, 1422) and Charles VI (October 21, 1422). ⁹ The infant king's claim required some rigorous promotion. In 1423 Laurence Calot was commissioned to write some French verses in support of the title, and Lydgate began to translate these on July 28, 1426. ¹⁰ The result, "The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI," ¹¹ compares readily in tone and phrasing to the last stanza of the "Verses on the Kings." We read that Henry "Thurgh Goddis hond & purviaunce devyne, / Is iustly borne . . . / For to be kyng of Englond & of Fraunce" (145-147) and that he is "borne in Englond, / For to possede by enheritaunce / Crownes two of Englond and of Fraunce, / By true title" (227-30). ¹²

The two poems are clearly of a piece, with most likely the "Title" poem written first as a commissioned translation from Calot in 1426, and the "Verses on the Kings" written shortly thereafter as another salvo in the propaganda war, incorporating a few echoes from "Title" for its stanzas on Kings Henry V and VI. ¹³ The two poems are thought to have had a similar manner of initial publication in the form of posters accompanied by a genealogical diagram ("Title") ¹⁴ and medallion portraits of the monarchs ("Verses on the Kings"). ¹⁵ The "Title" poem certainly—and presumably the "Verses on the Kings...