I
The Melbourne text of the A B C (like five other
copies) is in a manuscript of the English prose version of Deguileville's
Pilgrimage of the Manhood, followed by that of his
Pilgrimage of the Soul, which has been described at some
length by Dr. K. V. Sinclair.[7] This
is the only surviving volume known to me in which the two occur
together,[8] but there was a copy of
the two together in the collection of Henry Savile of Banke (W. Yorks., d.
1617)[9] which could have been the
same
as another in the library of the Earl of Kingston, said to have been
destroyed by fire in 1745.
[10] The
Savile manuscript is said in his catalogues to have been written or compiled
by John Lacy, Dominican friar and anchorite of Newcastle upon Tyne, who
wrote and illuminated an extant Latin and English volume sometime
between 1420 and 1434, and owned a copy of the earlier version of the
Wycliffite New Testament.
[11] Like
Lacy's, apparently, the Melbourne manuscript treats the two
Pilgrimages as the first and second book of one work, to
which it gives the title
Grace Dieu, the name of the pilgrim's
guide in the
Manhood, but somewhat paradoxically attached
in other surviving manuscripts not to that but to the
Soul,
where that personification plays a smaller part.
[12] The texts are also peculiar in that the
Manhood contains another poem
[13]
as well as Chaucer's
A B C, and the
Soul eight
extra (likewise unknown elsewhere) besides the usual fourteen, to three of
which there are additional stanzas.
[14]
The prose of the
Soul is modified to accommodate these
hymns, especially at the end, where other copies vary considerably, some
giving the date 1413 and a translator's colophon with the cryptogram Ak,
not found in Melbourne.
[15] The
additional verse in both
Pilgrimages, strongly latinate in its
vocabulary, derivative from liturgical sources, is not very different from the
usual pieces in the
Soul which have been attributed to
Thomas Hoccleve because of the occurrence of one of them in his
autograph
collection, Huntington HM 111, where there is nothing attributable to
anyone else.
[16] It may, however, have
been appropriated for the
Soul (as, presumably, Chaucer's
A B C was for the
Manhood) with the others
made to match, and so too the Melbourne imitations. Whether John Lacy
was responsible for the last is an open question; the English of his extant
writing is not consistently or strongly northern and could have been
modified by re-copying. The language of the Melbourne manuscript has
been assigned to Lincolnshire,
[17] and
the writing of the main scribe, who signs himself Benett, is probably of the
second quarter of the fifteenth century or thereabouts, a very well-formed
even
cursiva anglicana formata with an admixture of
letter-forms from secretary script (occasional alternative simple
a,
g constantly and final
s usually).
[18] Although his þ and
y are quite distinct, he sometimes oddly uses the former in
initial positions for the latter. One leaf only, the first of the
Pilgrimage of the Soul (folio 96), is by another hand, a good
set secretary of the second or third quarter of the century with alternative
reversed
e from
anglicana, and its orthography
also appropriate to Lincolnshire. It matches Benett in having high
decorative whiplike ascenders in the top line and "secundus liber prima
pars" as a running title (both f. 96
v), but the spaces left for an opening
rubric, miniature and decorated initials are not filled, as they are in the rest
of the volume with pen-drawings of an expressive unpretentious style and
standard blue and red flourished penwork initials, to complete a piece of
very competent provincial book-production.
[19] The drawings seem to be independent of
those in other copies of the
Pilgrimages, which deserve
further study. Sir John Rouclyff of
Cowthorpe (W. Yorks., d. 1531), whose name is on the book, was
bequeathed by his father Sir Brian in 1495 all his English, Latin and French
books, and his father, Guy (d. 1460), could have been its first owner in
regard to date, though his will is silent.
[20]
