University of Virginia Library

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

like the first portion, for John Harpur, who gave it and other books for use in the chapel he endowed at Rushall (Staffordshire), his wife's ancestral home.[24] The English verses which explain his intentions are written on the page (f. 20v) facing the first of the hours, in a fine large text-hand, with alternate lines in different colours and decorated initials matching those of the preceding kalendar and of the rest of the volume. Latin verses in the kalendar concerning the consecration of the church "et locus extra", 1440, added by a similar textura quadrata, provide a terminus for the assembly and assignment of the whole book, which is not contradicted by any other internal or external evidence, but its main parts could have been commissioned or procured up to ten years previously, and possibly from London rather than from a provincial shop, in view of the standards of execution and the spelling of the original English contents.

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

Fall [27] occupy the space on f. 2v originally left vacant after the Kings and Fall stanzas. Both are in a different convention of script from that of the other additions: a "bastard anglicana" which combines the vertical and rectilinear characteristics, broken strokes and angular feet, and some of the letter-forms (d, g, final s) of text-hand, with the looped or hooked ascenders (b, h, k, l), long f, r and s, and other forms (D, S, e, w) from traditional English cursive.[28] "Le bon councell de Chawcer" is in fact written in the margin in a smaller and less bastard style, though probably by the same hand; and in the second column, while the title, "A Balade for dysceyuors", is in textura, the Lydgate stanza itself is in a less emphatic version of bastard anglicana, though still apparently by the same scribe. There is not perfect regularity or evenness in the performance of either mode, but it is competent enough to make arguable an identification with the scribe of f. 20r, whose ink at least is similar.[29] Filling up the space at the end of the Kings might imply that it was done before Henry VI's first deposition in 1461 or his death in 1471, after each of which continuation stanzas were composed, yet not necessarily available everywhere and not often added to existing copies.[30] Altogether it is likely that the copy of Truth is of the same era as that of Gentilesse, both added to the Mellish (Nottingham) manuscript after its chaining in the church at Rushall, by a versatile amateur hand, perhaps of one of the clergy or family, in augmentation of an anthology which had a distinctly secular as well as a religious aim.