More Evidence for the Date of A Testimonie of Antiquitie

A testimonie of antiquitie shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord is an important book for several reasons.¹ As John Bromwich argued in 1962, it is probably the first edition of an Old English text in Anglo-Saxon Types, a milestone in the recovery and public study of Old English.² It was prepared under Archbishop Matthew Parker's direction by his Latin secretary, John Joscelin; it was printed by a prominent stationer, John Day; and beyond its two original editions its text was reprinted many times, beginning with its near wholesale inclusion in the second English edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (STC 11223, 1570). An example of Parker's religious propaganda, it is a significant piece in the controversies that raged in print during Elizabeth's reign, and, for this reason, it is also important for understanding English Reformation history. Knowledge of A Testimonie's date of publication is, therefore, potentially useful for understanding the book in its context. But that date remains problematic. The first edition of STC (1926) gave the date as 1567, but the revised edition (1976–91), basing its decision on the article by Bromwich, who had drawn on the work of Eleanor N. Adams, changed the date to '[1566?]'.³ In 1997 I pointed out that Adams misread a portion of Arber's index to the Stationers' Registers, mistaking the latter for a kind of sixteenth-century Books in Print, which led her to believe (and many to follow) that the book appeared in the last months of 1566.⁴ Though Adams's reason was mistaken, the date itself might not have been. There is evidence to suggest that the first edition of the book was, in fact, in the final stages of preparation during a three- or four-month window between October 1566 and January 1567.⁵

My 1997 note was an attempt to correct an error perpetuated for decades, and I wish to correct some errors that I myself kept alive in that note, especially since they have a bearing on dating the book. First, I repeated a claim that a British Library copy of A Testimonie, with the potentially confusing shelfmark Add. MS 18160 (though a printed book, it is kept as part of the manuscripts collection), contains a signature by Sir Peter Manwood (1571–1625) dated 1567.⁶ Even were Manwood's birth as early as 1560, as some used to think, he is unlikely to have been the possessor of what is now Add.18160 at the age of seven. This copy is important because it seems to have been Archbishop Parker's own. As another owner, the Victorian medievalist William Maskell (who donated it to the British Museum in 1850), remarked in a note dated August 1846 tipped in at the end of the volume, 'This volume is of very great importance and curiousity: and I do not doubt that it is the identical copy which, as Strype says, the Archbp. retained in his own possession, as "the record of the subscriptions".'⁷ Add. 18160 represents an early state of the first edition of A Testimonie, from which the second edition may have been set. It contains not only John Joscelin's marginalia and textual corrections, but also occasional markings in Parker's own red pencil. Most significantly, as Maskell points out, the volume also contains 'the record of the subscriptions', the original signatures of the bishops named in the printed edition along with two bishops' signatures whose names for some reason were not printed. The copy's path from Parker to Manwood is fairly easily surmised, since Manwood's father, Roger, who was a Baron of the Exchequer, was a close friend of the archbishop and, apparently, also of Dr John Parker (1548–1619), the archbishop's son.⁸ Whether Roger Manwood received the book from the elder or the younger Parker, I think it likely that it passed into his hands first. When Roger Manwood died in 1592 his library...