University of Virginia Library

John Shirley and British Library, MS. Additional 16165
by
Ralph Hanna III

British Library, MS. Additional 16165 is a tolerably well-known book, and justly so.[1] This volume is absolutely central to the development of an English poetic canon — an early collection including some Chaucer lyrics and, with the nearly contemporary Cambridge University Library, MS. Gg. iv.27 (customarily dated c. 1415 — 25), the earliest manuscript to include Chaucer and Lydgate cheek by jowl. But the book is equally important, although it has seldom been discussed in this way, for its prose contents.

One's first perceptions of this volume, especially coming to it either from earlier large collected volumes, books like Bodleian Library, ms. Eng. poet. a.1 ("the Vernon ms.," 1390s?) and Cambridge, Magdalene College, ms. Pepys 2498 (c. 1375), or from those "early London" manuscripts identified by Doyle and Parkes, is likely to be shock. First, the material of the book is different and decidedly cheap: Additional 16165 is written on paper, rather than vellum. Moreover, the volume has minimal decoration: its ornament is restricted to some red initial capitals provided by the scribe. And in contrast to the formal display scripts one encounters in Vernon, Pepys, the Hengwrt Canterbury Tales, early copies of Gower, or the "Ilchester" Piers Plowman, the hand of the Additional manuscript is awkward and sprawling, if not downright ugly. The scribe, John Shirley, so far as we know, did his earlier writing as an aristocratic dependent: he was the secretary of a great lord, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (whose name will recur frequently in the pages which follow).[2] This earlier experience appears in the type of hand Shirley writes, "secretary" — a style originally for use in legal documents and introduced to England during his youth (he was born about 1356).[3] And

if one collates the copies, one can see that the care of reproduction which went into earlier English books is here absent: Shirley was a particularly sloppy and heedless copyist.

Additional — its pages are about the size of a modern sheet of typing paper — consists of 258 leaves, 254 of them paper folded in folio and distributed among twenty-two quires. The first of these gatherings, unsigned, comprises three vellum folios and contains Shirley's front-matter, including a verse "calendar" of contents originally paralleled in another of the three surviving manuscripts he copied.[4] The remaining quires, as the following table will indicate, are mostly twelves.

In both calendars of contents, Shirley claims to have produced the manuscripts by laborious acts of collection. (Lines 19 — 20 of the verses originally affixed to his Sion/Trinity manuscript allege that these efforts involved acquiring exemplars from across the Channel.) These ongoing acts of acquisition are in fact marked in Additional 16165 as part of its production, for the manuscript was copied as a sequence of three or four booklets (for the paper, I follow Lyall 16 — 19, an important description).

These production units, by and large, reflect Shirley's intent to group texts by literary types and authors, the latter an important concern of his contents calendar. Shirley insists upon the value of the "legende" he here assembles, and he alludes to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women with its assertion of the literary value of "remembraunce" (line 8); the book gathers the writings of those whom Shirley somewhat incongruously calls "olde clerkes . . . appreued in alle hir werkis" (lines 7 — 8). For the most part, the volume heralds, preserves, and disseminates the activity of the noble dead — it is an explicit canonizing act associated with the authors' eternality both in text and spirit:

The "olde clerkes" are divided among two production units and these joined with considerably more contemporary material — a sign of the ongoing enterprise of a single literary culture rooted in a not so distant past. Ef. 4 — 114 (the signed quires i — ix) contain Chaucer's Boece (composed in the early 1380s) and John Trevisa's translation of the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus (composed in the 1380s?). Quire ix includes an extra inserted leaf, the twelfth, a "casting-off" procedure typical of a fascicle ending: it allows the conclusions of a production unit and of a text to correspond. Ff. 115 — 200 (quires                                                                

Collation (folios)	Paper stock	Contents
Front matter
π4(-4) (1 — 3)[5]	Vellum	f. 1 Shirley motto and signature
		f. 2 contents list calendar poem (IMEV 1426)
Booklet I
i14 (4 — 17)	?	f. 4 Chaucer, Boece
ii12 (18 — 29)	a
iii12 (30 — 41)	b
iv12 (42 — 53)	c
v12 (54 — 65)	c
vi12 (66 — 77)	d
vii12 (78 — 89)	e
viii12 (90 — 101)	f	f. 94 Trevisa, Nicodemus
ix12+1 (+12) (102 — 114)	e
Booklet II
[x]12 (115 — 126)[6]	g	f. 115 Edward, Master of Game
[xi]12 (127 — 138)	g
[xii]14 (139 — 152)	g
[xiii]12 (153 — 164)	g
[xiv]12 (165 — 176)	g
xv12 (177 — 188)	f
xvi12 (189 — 200)	e	f. 190 Lydgate, "Complaint" (IMEV 1507)
Booklet III
xvii12 (201 — 212)	h	f. 201 Regula sacerdotum
		f. 206v Lydgate, "Temple" (IMEV 851)
xviii10 (213 — 222)	i
xix12 (223 — 234)	j
xx12 (235 — 246)	j	f. 241v "Anelida," opening of lyric sequence
? Booklet IV
xxi12+2 (-12, +13, +14, -14) (247 — 258)[7]	g (13, 14 Vellum)	f. 247 Lydgate sequence
		f. 256rv Chaucer?, "Complaint"
		f. 256v "Anelida"

x — xvi) provide Edward, duke of York's hunting treatise The Master of Game (composed 1406 — 13) and Lydgate's vision "The Complaint of a Lover's Life." The remainder of the book, ff. 201 — 258 (quires xvii — xxi) opens with a Latin "Regula sacerdotum" and Lydgate's "Temple of Glass." The manuscript concludes with a large group of lyrics (including a split text of Chaucer's "Anelida," the complaint at the head, the narrative at the very end of this portion).[8] The final lyric quire, with the exception of the concluding pair of texts, the possibly Chaucerian "Ballad of Complaint" and the narrative bit of "Anelida," is totally given over to a group of Lydgate's poems. This unit is conceivably separate from the rest of the lyric portion; but whatever its production status, it is marked as the conclusion of the codex, since Shirley extended the paper quire beyond the original twelve leaves, adding at least one parchment folio (there was probably a second, now lost), which would not only have provided space to conclude the text but would also serve as a guard for the paper pages.

Beyond these physical breaks — the booklets were presumably produced independently without, at least initially, any expectation of their juncture — the process of conglomeration by which the book was prepared is marked in other ways. For example, the red initials, unique in Shirley's work, cease in quire 3. Similarly, some rubrics, including a few with ascriptions, were only added later. And with the exception of some early quires, which, whatever Shirley's changes of plans, would have begun some possible codex, much of the volume was only signed and given catch-words after copying, and some portions, the greater part of Booklet II, were never signed.

Further, Shirley's affixed calendar omits one substantial item, Lydgate's "Complaint." This appears in the only signed portions of Booklet II, at the end of this sequence of quires, and looks to be a late, almost post-production, addition. The text plainly came separate from that of the other Lydgate vision, "Temple of Glass," and at an advanced stage of production there would have been no ready place to insert it in the consecutive vision-lyric portion of the codex which follows. The volume probably did not achieve anything approaching its current form or ordering until after the composition of the calendar, some point shortly before Shirley, as he tells us, had someone construct a binding for his quires (calendar, line 17).

Both the order of Shirley's copying and the period during which he prepared the volume, the earliest of his surviving literary efforts, can be rather narrowly defined on the basis of the paper-stocks. Doyle originally dated the watermarks shortly after 1419, but Lyall offers considerably more precise information. The very large number of stocks (eleven, including the unidentified stock of the first quire in Booklet I) and their piecemeal use (six of them — that of quire i, a, b, d, h, and i — occur in but a single quire) suggests that much of the manuscript was probably compiled on a patchwork basis, copied a few leaves at a time, over an extended, but, given Lyall's clustered dating of the papers, not an exceptionally protracted, period (contrast Lyall 16 — 17).

As Lyall notes, one portion of the Additional manuscript clearly predates all remaining portions. This quire, xvii at the head of Booklet III, uniquely utilizes stock h, which Lyall sees as "very like" a 1406 Palermo paper. The text which opens this quire, a Latin rule for priests which includes provocative

commentary on lay-clerical relations, expresses a courtly interest foreign to the rather staidly literary texts which otherwise constitute the volume. But, given the early date of the paper, such a text might make a good deal of sense: lordly flirtations with Wycliffism (and with pre-existent but related interests in expropriation of clerical property) characterize substantial segments of aristocratic culture from the early 1370s until late in the reign of Henry IV (see Aston). They may even be perceived as having peaked at the 1407 "parliamentum illiteratum" at Coventry, an event provocatively close to the date of the paper's manufacture.

The remainder of the manuscript, including the extension of this pre-existent quire xvii into the lyric-vision Booklet III, was produced much later, although likely within a fairly brief span c. 1420 — 27.[9] Shirley's next datable work on the codex may have begun as early as c. 1415, and probably no later than c. 1420, as he began to copy Chaucer's Boece into what was eventually to become Booklet I. Slightly later (given the paper, c. 1423 — 25), he began the separate copying of Edward's Master of Game into a sequence of quires which would become Booklet II. Given the very long run of paper-stock g which characterizes this stint, Shirley may have worked at this portion of the codex with some persistence. And if the manuscript comprises four booklets, at this time and on the same stock, Shirley was at work on the Lydgate lyrics which appear in the final quire.

Shirley's finishing and joining the volume into a unit is marked by the use of identical papers at the end of Booklets I and II. These two stocks (e and f) are relatively contemporary in manufacture (1426 — 27) and appear in the same order at the conclusion of both booklets (f — e in quires viii — ix and xv — xvi). Moreover, the possibility that Lydgate's "Complaint," omitted from Shirley's contents list, in fact is the latest text in the volume, pre-supposes that Booklet III had already been extended to something like its current dimensions (stock j, in quires xix — xx, most resembles a Frankfurt paper of 1424): the Lydgate poem could not have been joined with its similar, "The Temple of Glass."

The latest datable contents, all of which appear in either the extended Booklet III or in Booklet IV, suggest relatively prompt copying. Most notably, the manuscript contains a virelai composed by Richard Beauchamp, Shirley's employer; this is addressed to Beauchamp's second wife as if his donna and, given the lord's reputation as "the flower of English chivalry," should only have been composed between 28 December 1422 and the following 26 November.[10] Similar datings are implied by other contents: Lydgate's "Departing of Thomas Chaucer on Ambassade to France" has usually been taken to

refer to events of 1417, but might allude to Chaucer's later appointments of 1420 or 1424. And Shirley's rubric to Lydgate's "Invocation to St. Anne" says that the poem was a command performance for Anne, countess of Stafford, a style strictly appropriate only during her son's minority — he was married and had his own countess by 1424. Further negative evidence implying that much of Shirley's work should be placed in the early to mid 1420s comes from other Lydgate materials: the two visions, "Complaint" and "Temple," appear here in their earliest forms. These are conventionally dated pre-1412, largely on the basis of a scholarly horror vacui (we assume Lydgate must have had some juvenalia before embarking on his major project, the Troy Book, dedicated to Henry V), but the poet later (the earliest evidence is from the 1430s) subjected both to extensive revision. And there is further indirect evidence implying a relatively early terminus for Shirley's collection of archetypes, if not his actual copying: the manuscript lacks those works Lydgate composed for Shirley's employers, the Beauchamp family, dated with some assurance c. 1423 — 27.[11]

Such a dating suggests that the Additional manuscript might well be dissociated from Shirley's other (and later) books. It is usually assumed that these reflect his activities at a period when he had set up residence at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Smithfield (where he rented a tenement and four shops). Unlike the calendar originally prefaced to Shirley's later Sion/Trinity manuscript, which presupposes a London locale (see lines 49 — 51), Additional refers to no place of manufacture (other than a metaphorical "hoome" in line 98). Moreover, the manuscript, on the basis both of the contents and the paper evidence, at least in part likely predates the earliest surviving reference to Shirley as "esquire of London" in 1429 (see Doyle, "New Light" 94 — 95).

Some scrappy evidence survives about Shirley's residence during this pre-1429 period. A registered copy of a signed letter (Register, entry 1223) shows him still directly engaged as Richard Beauchamp's personal secretary (although in a peripatetic household with numerous residences in the capital, provinces, and overseas) as late as spring 1423, when the manuscript should already have been well along in production.[12] At the time of this letter, he was writing from what had been the family seat of Beauchamp's first wife, Elizabeth Berkeley, Wotton-under-Edge (Gloucester). Shirley likely had frequent

resort to this manor-house from at least 1417, both since there were persistent legal problems over the countess's inheritance (Smyth 2:passim; Lowry 331, 335) and since his first wife (who died 1421) had been among her ladies-in-waiting (Ross 93).

This siting signals one important aspect of Shirley's status, his insider connections. He served a figure prominent in the courts of Henry V and VI and a person well-connected literarily by marriage: the father of Beauchamp's first countess was Thomas IV, Lord Berkeley, patron of John Trevisa and of an anonymous Vegetius translator (perhaps William Clifton, fourth master of the family's grammar school at Wotton; see Hanna 900 — 901). As a result, Shirley was well positioned to have special knowledge of earlier English literary production, in addition to special access to earlier texts. Given the form his copying takes, he presumably could access in-house exemplars at odd moments of leisure without worrying about their absence or their being required elsewhere. Shirley's book makes visible a prior tradition of private circulation among aristocratic coteries now, by and large, lost to us.

The three prose texts in Additional 16165 typify this personal contact extending back through coterie audiences to the original productions. Additional is the only surviving manuscript of any of these texts in which the compiler clearly and correctly ascribes each work to its proper author.[13] Moreover, in all three cases one can hypothesize a direct Beauchamp link which would explain such precise information. In the case of Boece, Shirley would have found material aid for connecting the work with Chaucer in the Beauchamp household: Elizabeth Berkeley had commissioned a verse translation of De Consolatione about 1410, and her translator, the Augustinian canon John Walton of Oseney, had for the most part versified Chaucer, al-although he had simultaneously consulted the Latin original and Nicholas Trivet's commentary on it. And further information was certainly available through the poet's son: Additional provides the unique copy of Lydgate's "Departing of Thomas Chaucer," and if the poem commemorates Chaucer's 1417 service in France, it alludes to a commission on which he served with Shirley's boss, Richard Beauchamp.

The other ascriptions rely on much more direct Beauchamp knowledge.

John Trevisa was the dependent cleric of Elizabeth's father and is identified as such in Shirley's calendar (lines 35 — 44; Shirley's claim there that Trevisa was an M.Th. may be a further sign of special knowledge, but the degree is not verifiable from any other surviving document). The ascription of The Master of Game to Edward of York even notices his death at Agincourt (calendar, lines 50 — 55, and the initial rubric to the text). Edward had been more than an acquaintance of Thomas Berkeley, and Shirley was in France with the Beauchamp retinue during the Agincourt campaign.[14] Nearer home, Beauchamp's second wife was Edward's niece. The precise information, and the contents themselves, were perhaps available to Shirley only because of his household affiliations.

The three full manuscripts Shirley copied resemble one another in content, as well as material and format. Each joins a substantial amount of recent prose with large collections of courtly verse.[15] For the most part, Shirley transmits Lydgate's poetry; but given the modest nature of the survivals, he also includes a large proportion of Chaucer's lyric output. These lyric contents are especially important for intuiting Shirley's readership, for they place the codices within an English literary community by and large upperclass and, in the case of Additional, perhaps specifically aristocratic.

The contents poems indicate Shirley's desire as compiler to delight his audience. He promises reading material "right vertuous, / Of maner of mirthe nought vicious" (Additional calendar, lines 3 — 4). And, especially in their perorations, the poems presuppose an audience with both the leisure and inclination for an interest in the indoor sport of love, the subject of the included lyrics and visions. At the date when Additional was prepared, at any rate, this was probably not the general social craze it was to become later in the century, yet one which might interest even so busy and noble a figure as the virelaying Richard Beauchamp.

These details provide at least suggestive evidence that the book may have been prepared for an audience differing from that at St. Bartholomew's. Such an audience would have been in some sense aristocratic and joined by centralized interests, members of the Beauchamp household. If my inferences are correct, Additional 16165 probably emerges from a great house aristocratic coterie. But rather than reading Anglo-Norman translations, as did earlier audiences of this type, this coterie, while expected to have a similar interest in translated prose (as well as such simple Latin as the "Regula sacerdotum"), received those texts in English.

Shirley, although he clearly distinguishes himself from those he calls his "auctores" and identifies himself merely as "þe wryter" of the book, might be taken as a later, secularized version of Anglo-Norman household clerics. For example, in the mid-thirteenth century, the domestic chaplain Robert of Gretham composed two lengthy vernacular devotional texts derived from Latin sources, precisely for the edification of his employers, Alain and Aline. Like Robert, Shirley was certainly his lord's dependent, a long-term member of his retinue, and presumably employed in part for his writing ability as the earl's secretary. To this useful employment, he appears to have added a second writing task: in his role of dependent squire, Shirley assembled materials which might be used as entertainment for the varied and often dispersed group which comprised Beauchamp's household. Indeed, the two tasks interface more closely than one might expect: at least some of the more fulsome rubrics for which Shirley is well-known may be carryovers of that language of deference one might associate with his "true" professional career as copyist (if not author) of Beauchamp's correspondence.

Part of Shirley's service as Beauchamp dependent — the informal and unremunerated part — involved offering the materials of domestic entertainment. Shirley differs from Robert of Gretham or from his "auctour" Trevisa in that this was not material which he composed — he only disseminated it. This process, as the contents poems make clear, was a bit of volunteerism, a personal gesture superadded to Shirley's normal employment. And it does not seem to have been a gesture in the interests of profit, but a further form of service to the household community. The contents calendars, Additional at some length, insist that the books exise simply to be loaned for entertainment:

Shirley is creating a domestic library. He envisions borrowing of his book for private and unsupervised use, perhaps even recopying, with eventual return to him. The book belongs within a social situation, one in which, like in the game of love, life is thoroughly imbued with literary activity. Apparently successful at this "superadded" household service. Shirley went on to similar, but more public, activities in the capitol; this second phase of his career was to guide a number of later book producers, who kept his archetypes in circulation through the reign of Edward IV.[16]

The aristocratic coterie nature of Additional 16165 deserves a few additional comments. In many ways, the manuscript is overly familiar, testimony

to the ongoing tradition of English courtly verse: it includes Chaucerian snippets (and Chaucerian misascriptions — for example, two lyrics redolent with double entendre)[17] coupled with newer productions, the work of Lydgate. But this material coexists with something one should recognize (Shirley is no innovator here) as an equally courtly mode of an earlier "Chaucerian" generation, prose translation. Over two-thirds of the manuscript is devoted to something which is not verse.

Shirley is renowned primarily as a transmitter (and very frequently, establisher) of the Chaucer and Lydgate canons. But all three of his surviving codices adhere to the same pattern: each provides extensive prose as well as verse. And his sense of Chaucer's canon includes not simply the lyric but Boece as well. Indeed, Shirley was enough committed to this form of aristocratic literary output to practice it himself. Late in life (c. 1440 and later), "in his last yeres and febull age" as he puts it, he turned foreign materials into English prose — and not simply once but four times. (The translations survive in British Library, MS. Additional 5467, from Shirley's holograph but not in his hand.) After a generation of serving his "auctores," those whom in the Additional calendar verse he heralds as the noble dead of the preceding generation, Shirley sought to emulate them. From merely copying the "auctour" Trevisa, he evolved into him (cf. Lerer 117 — 146).

This behavior should indicate something of the compelling power prose translation could exert, both in the Ricardian period and the early fifteenth century. Rather than aristocratic fiction, Additional is involved in the practical, if not the historically particular — Beauchamp's lyric and its relation to his remarriage, for example. And perhaps the surest guide to this sense of public life and public duties comes from the prose — all translations which look back, beyond their immediate audience, beyond their dead "auctores" as well, to fixed authoritative source texts which discuss behaviors pious, noble, and true.[18]

Works Cited

• Aston, Margaret. "'Caim's Castles': Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment." In R. B. Dobson, ed. The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century. Gloucester: Sutton, 1984. Pp. 45 — 81.
• Brusendorff, Aage. The Chaucer Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1925.
• Bühler, Curt F. "Lydgate's Horse, Sheep, and Goose and Huntington MS. HM 144." Modern Language Notes 55 (1940):563 — 570.
• Danielsson, Bror. "'The Kerdaston Fragment 'Library of Hunting and Hawking Literature' (early 15th c. fragments)." In Sigrid Schwenk, Gunnar Tilander, and Carl Arnold, eds. Et Multum et Multa. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. 47 — 59.
• Doyle, A. I. "English Books In and Out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII." In V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, eds. English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages. London: Duckworth, 1983. 164 — 181.
• ______. "New Light on John Shirley." Medium Ævum 30 (1961):93 — 101.
• ______. "An unrecognized piece of Piers the Ploughman's Creed and other work by its scribe." Speculum 24 (1959):428 — 436.
• ______ and Malcolm Parkes. "The Production of the Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century." In Parkes and Andrew G. Watson, eds. Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker. London: Scolar, 1978. 163 — 210.
• Edwards, A. S. G. "The Unity and Authenticity of Anelida and Arcite: The Evidence of the Manuscripts." Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988):177 — 188.
• GEC: G[eorge] E. C[ockayne], rev. Vicary Gibbs. The Complete Peerage. 12 vols. in 13. London: St. Catharines, 1910 — 59.
• Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
• Griffiths, Jeremy. "A Newly Identified Manuscript Inscribed by John Shirley." Library 6 ser. 14 (1992):82 — 93.
• Hammond, Eleanor P. "The Departing of Chaucer." Modern Philology 1 (1903):331 — 336.
• ______. English Verse Between Chaucer and Surrey. Durham: Duke University Press, 1927.
• ______. "Lydgate's New Year's Valentine." Anglia 32 (1909): 190 — 196.
• ______. "Omissions from the Editions of Chaucer." Modern Language Notes 19 (1904):35 — 38.
• Hanna, Ralph III. "Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage." Speculum 64 (1989):878 — 916.
• Hoccleve, Thomas, ed. M. C. Seymour. Selections from Hoccleve. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.
• Horstmann, C., ed. Yorkshire Writers. 2 vols. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895 — 96.
• IMEV: Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins. The Index of Middle English Verse. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.
• IPMEP: R. E. Lewis, N. F. Blake, and A. S. G. Edwards. Index of Printed Middle English Prose. New York: Garland, 1985.
• Irigoin, Jean. "La Datation par les filigranes du papier." Codicologica 5 (1980):9 — 36.
• Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Lowry, Martin. "John Roos and the Survival of the Neville Circle." Viator 19 (1988):327 — 338.
• Lyall, R. J. "Materials: The Paper Revolution." In Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall, eds. Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375 — 1475. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 11 — 29.
• Parkes, M. B. English Cursive Book Hands 1200 — 1500. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.
• Pearsall, Derek. John Lydgate. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970.
• The Register of Nicholas Bubwith, ed. Thomas Scott Holmes. Somerset Record Society 29 — 30. 2 vols. London, 1914.
• Ross, C. D. "The Household Accounts of Elizabeth Berkeley, Countess of Warwick, 1420 — 1." Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 70 (1951):81 — 105.
• Schirmer, Walter F., tr. Anne E. Keep. John Lydgate. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.
• Smyth, John, ed. Sir John Maclean. The Berkeley Manuscripts. 3 vols. Gloucester, 1883 — 85.
• South, Helen Pennock. "The Question of Halsam." PMLA 50 (1935):362 — 371.

Notes