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  • Cutting Up the Heyneman Brut
  • A. S. G. Edwards (bio)

The Robert G. Heyneman manuscript of the Middle English prose Brut has been identified by Kathleen Scott in her standard account of later medieval English illumination as a manuscript of ‘exceptional importance’ in terms of its illustrative programme. As it currently survives it has ‘eight small format miniatures’ and ‘fifty-eight historiated initials’ a total of sixty-six illustrations in a work that rarely includes any.1 Only one other manuscript of the Brut, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 733, contains a comparable illustrative programme.2

This manuscript was first recorded in a Sotheby’s sale on 18 April 1932 when it was sold as lot 8, the property of Major E. W. McDonald. The manuscript was acquired (for £60) by the London firm of dealers, Myers, and included in their Catalogue 291 (March 1933), no. 299 (for £140). It was bought by the American collector, Julius Wangenheim (1866–1942) and passed by descent to his grandson, Robert G. Heyneman, the last recorded owner.

The manuscript is described in both the Sotheby’s and Myers’ catalogues as containing ’73 illuminated initials’ with ‘eight similar initials cut away’. Therefore, at a point before it was sold, the manuscript had eighty-one initials, presumably either historiated initials or actual miniatures.3 Hence there are several stages in the reduction of the number of existing miniatures to the sixty-six recorded by Scott. There is a further discrepancy between the descriptions of the Heyneman manuscript made at different times that indicate another aspect of its mutilation: descriptions in both the sale catalogues record it as containing a hundred and sixty-seven leaves. Scott reports a hundred and sixty; she notes that the Heyneman manuscript lacks fols. 15, 16, 18, 22, 25, 57, 162.4 [End Page 474]

In 1970, John C. Hirsh (not ‘Hirsch’ as Scott has it) described parts of several leaves from a Brut manuscript discovered in Lehigh University Library in Pennsylvania.5 Scott identified these fragments (which Hirsh numbered A, B, C) as parts of some of the missing leaves from the Heyneman manuscript: A = fol. 22; B = fol. 25; C = fol. 57; these are the page and line number of the Brut text for each fragment:6

  • [A]ra: 46/31–47/11

  • [A]vb: 48/11–29

  • [B]rb–va: 54/7–55/9

  • [C]r: 127/15–26, 127/33–128/9

  • [C]v: 128/16–27:, 129/6–19

It should be noted that this manuscript is unusual in presenting the text in a double-column format. Fragments A and B at Lehigh have been cropped to a single, full column of thirty-six lines. Fragment C has around twenty-one or twenty-two lines extending across both columns.

Hirsh in his account of the Lehigh fragments reports (p. 12) that

When found, they were enclosed in three separate picture frames, and when they were removed it was discovered that the fragments had been backed with newspaper tearings from the London newspaper The Sun (sic) dated 12 March, 1934,7 and with tearings from a catalogue published from the Chelsea Auction Rooms, Ltd, dated December 1933.

Recently, two further fragments of the Heyneman manuscript reappeared in a Christie’s sale in London, 13 July 2016, lot 106.8 These comprise:

  • [1]r: 33/25–34, 34/10–20

  • [1]v: 34/28–35/7, 35/15–24

  • [2]r: 38/9–21, 38/29–39/7

  • [2]v: 39/32–40/8

It seems likely that the Christie’s leaves correspond to parts of the missing fols. 16 and 18 of the Heyneman manuscript. They have both been cut horizontally in the same way as Lehigh Fragment C, across both columns and comprise about twenty-two lines of text.

Hirsh speculates with respect to the Lehigh fragments that ‘it seems probable that manuscript (sic) was cut up earlier in the present century, and [End Page 475] that the folios were sold separately, perhaps in London, so that the private owner could realize a high return’ (p. 20). This entirely reasonable conclusion can be refined by the evidence of the Christie’s fragments and...

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