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II
The Mellish manuscript, deposited in Nottingham University Library (Me LM1), has been recently discussed by Professor Norman Davis (see fn. 2 above), but his first-hand description is confined to the one page (f. 20r) containing the poems he prints and he refers to Henry Bradshaw for a fuller account of the volume and to Brown and Robbins for the other English verse therein. Each of these is however incomplete and it is possible to say something more about the relationship of the English contents to the rest of the manuscript and its background. The book is made up of good membrane leaves of the best matt finish, measuring about 15 x 101/2 inches, and includes a Sarum kalendar, hours of the Blessed Virgin, vigils of the dead, a liturgical psalter, with litanies and prayers, and Originalia doctorum (i.e. quotations from Bernard, Augustine, Jerome and others)—all in Latin except for an English rubric;[21] and several English pieces before and after the kalendar, some uniform in style of script and decoration with the remainder of the volume, but others obviously added later in spaces left blank. The illumination of the first page of the hours (f. 21r), incorporating the arms of the Harpur family in what seems to be the original work, is a good specimen of a style current in the second quarter and middle of the fifteenth century, with which that on other pages agrees.[22] The same escutcheon appears however to be a subsequent addition to the first page of the psalter (f. 79r), where there is also a miniature of King David in original illumination of the same period. The litany after the psalms and canticles invokes a number of relatively unusual Anglo-Saxon and more recent English saints, whom it is not easy to connect with a single locality or particular interest, though they suggest a deliberate choice.[23] The second portion of the volume may therefore have been adapted, not made or completed
The leaves (ff. 1-5r) before the kalendar are ruled in two columns and contain, in a proficient small text-hand, with initials and paraphs flourished in an equally expert mid-fifteenth century manner, like those of the bulk of the volume, in verse the Dietary, the Kings of England up to Henry VI (with space originally left at the end for continuation), and three stanzas from the Fall of Princes,[25] all by Lydgate but not ascribed here; and a prose history of the Russhale family from the Norman Conquest until the marriage of Eleanor, the heiress, with John Harpur, and her parents' deaths.[26] The dates of the latter (1429-30) are amongst entries in the kalendar by a cursive hand which resembles that responsible for the copy of Chaucer's Gentilesse and the Proverbs on f. 20r (judged to be mid to late fifteenth-century by Professor Davis), and it could be William Ball's, first Harpur chaplain and vicar of Rushall, whose own death in 1455 is recorded by another hand.
The copy of Chaucer's Truth and a further stanza from Lydgate's
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