III
The physical features and textual relationships of Bodleian MS.
Fairfax 16 have been most fully discussed by Miss E. P. Hammond and A.
A. Brusendorff.[31] They have shown
how this collection of long and short Chaucerian and post-Chaucerian
poems is made up of separable
booklets, of one or more quires each, corresponding partly in contents
(though not precisely in order) with those of Tanner 346, also divisible into
separate booklets, Bodley 638 and Digby 181, the so-called Oxford or
Hammond group with a common ancestry from which they derive some
unique and rare texts. A structure of such booklets, as in the mid-fourteenth
century Auchinleck manuscript or the productions of the later
fifteenth-century heirs of John Shirley, is often taken to imply commercial
pre-fabrication, ready for selection and combination to the taste and purse
of various purchasers.
[32] That Fairfax
16 was completed in this way from ready-made elements, rather than
commissioned from the start by its purchaser, is indicated by the fact that
the illustration opposite the opening of Chaucer's
Mars and
Venus, the first text, is on the last page of two preceding quires
otherwise left blank (except for the added list of contents), as were two at
the end of the volume, presumably meant for further augmentation of the
anthology, to some extent carried out in the later fifteenth and the sixteenth
century. The full-page miniature (with considerable historical and
iconographical interest) and the accompanying illuminated sprays, which
incorporate the armorial bearings of one of the Stanley family, are
stylistically of the second quarter or so of the fifteenth century and of a
high (probably metropolitan) standard.
[33] The membrane of the bulk of the book,
however, is not of the highest quality (being smooth and wavy, not matt
and flat, and sometimes flawed), and the hand responsible for all the
original contents, a fluent, clear, well-punctuated and apparently accurate
mixed cursive, with
fere-textura or bastard headings, is
modest in comparison with the illumination.
[34] The copying can also be assigned to the
second quarter of the century, not earlier, from
details of the script and the authorship
of some of the contents.
[35] The date
1450 on the manuscript has generally been accepted as contemporary
evidence, and a
terminus ante. Although the first owners may
have been from Cheshire,
[36] the
language as well as the decoration suggests London as the place of origin.
The copyist of the Fairfax booklets may well have used more than one
similar set as his source, to judge from the recurrence and rearrangement
of the texts in different surviving manuscripts. The amount of activity
implied, and the accessibility of authoritative (even unfinished) Chaucerian
originals, point in the same direction.
