Nicholas Kempston and his Books

Forty years ago, Neil Ker and Richard Beadle made an extremely interesting and fruitful intervention concerning the book activities to be associated with Robert Elyot, vice-provost of Eton College from 1482 until his death in 1499.¹ Even though he rather inconsistently signed his volumes, Elyot was certainly the owner of a considerable library, one Ker suspected was a good deal larger than might overtly appear. Moreover, he was a voracious reader, distinctively marking and often dating his book encounters. From the persistent annotations he left in books, Ker just about doubled the number of books to be assigned to the medieval library of Eton College.

Moreover, as Ker pointed out, Elyot was intent on ensuring the continued use of his library through his making of donations to others. Ker cited the inscription in one such volume, reading in part, ‘et nullo pacto vendatur, sed gratis succesorie tradatur ab uno studioso in alium’, and requesting prayers in return for this benefaction; he offered further citations of similar purport inscribed in volumes by the benefactors of Elyot’s largesse. Ker thus described Elyot as ‘someone … concerned that his books should not be sold’, and Elyot’s inheritors carried on his pious example.²

Neither Ker nor Beadle noticed one rather interesting fact about Elyot’s insistent injunctions for book-use. He had inherited these prescriptions, and he was—just as some of his own imitative beneficiaries did—merely fulfilling the wishes of another. The most overt, and long published, example of this activity appears on the flyleaf of the volume Beadle added to Ker’s list of Elyot’s books, Cambridge, St John’s College, MS A. 15; M. R. James offered this transcription:

Liber quondam Magistri Nicholai Kempton’ Anno domini 1477, nunquam vendendus secundum ultimam voluntatem defuncti, sed libere occupandus a sacerdotibus instructis ad predicandum uerbum dei, ab uno sacerdote ad alterum, sine precio tradendum quamdiu duraruerit. Orate igitur pro anima eius.³

Yet even Kempston can scarcely be described as original. For example, in his unpublished 1953 Cambridge thesis, Ian Doyle identified a sequence of London ‘common-profit’ books in English, intended to be handed on to successive priests and pious readers. And while lacking the ‘common profit’ inscriptions that identify Doyle’s collections, such benefactions are reasonably commonplace in fifteenth-century clerical culture.⁴

While this is scarcely unusual behaviour, the length and insistence of Kempton’s inscription, for which, following James and Ker, one can adduce at least seven or eight further parallels, is certainly striking. In the following pages, I want to examine rather more thoroughly Kempton’s acquisitions, his gifts, and their various fates.

Kempton’s inscription appears in the following volumes:⁵

1. 1. Cambridge, St John’s College, MS A.15. Composite: [1–2] Grosseteste, Summa iusticie and Templum Dei; [3] Hugh of St Victor on Isaiah; [4] sermons and bestiary; ss. xv, xiii¹, xiii/xiv, and xiii^ex respectively. Inscription on front flyleaf; signature on fol. 143^v.

2. 2. Eton College, MS 18. Robert Holcot on Wisdom, s. xiv/xv. Inscription on fol. i^r; tables and indexes (part dated 1475) in Kempston’s hand.

3. 3. Eton College, MS 36. Martin of Troppau’s canon law tables; Aquinas, Quaestiones; comment on Mt 26, s. xiii/xiv. Signature on fol. iii^v, inscription on fol. iv^v.

4. 4. Eton College, MS 77. Glosses on Matthew, s. xii^ex. Signature and inscription on fol. iii^v.

5. 5. Eton College, MS 117. Composite: [1] Grosseteste, Dicta; [2] Grosseteste, De cessatione, Malachi of Ireland, Ridevall on Fulgentius; s. xiv^med and xiv/xv respectively. Inscription on fol. iv^v, as well as Kempston’s annotations.

6. 6. London, Middle Temple, MS Anc. 1. Lathbury on Lamentations, s. xvⁱⁿ. Signature only, on fol. iii^v, as well as Kempston’s textual corrections and some recopied texts.

7. 7. Longleat House, the Marquess of Bath, MS 9. Ps. Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum, ad 1388. Inscription at end of tabula, signature on fol. 21 (?).⁶

8. 8. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A. 446. Composite: Grosseteste, Deus est; John Belet; Lombard’s Sentences...