University of Virginia Library

"The London Thornton Manuscript: A New Collation," Manuscripta, 23 (1979), 99-103; "The Watermarks of the Thornton Manuscripts," N&Q, 225 (1980), 385-386. These notes grow out of a response to the important reevaluation of Additional 31042, Karen Stern, "The London 'Thornton' Miscellany," Scriptorium, 30 (1976), 26-37, 201-218.

The foliation of the manuscript includes four flies (ff. 1-2, 182-83), in fact pastedowns from an earlier binding. Except for catchwords on ff. 8v, 32v, and 73v (which occur in nonproblematic positions), the manuscript lacks catchwords and signatures.

Manuscripta, 23 (1979), 103, n.13.

For the best summary of biographical information, see George R. Keiser, "Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe," Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979), 158-180. For collation of the Lincoln manuscript, see D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen, The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91) (1975), pp. xii-xvi; and Owen's correction (the lost bifolium ff. 147a+159a ignored in the Scolar description), TCBS, 6, iv (1975), 221.

The final quire, an 18, may have been deliberately small.

The classic demonstration, although dealing with quarto folding and complex in its attention to the direction of the folds, is Stephen Spector's "Symmetry in Watermark Sequences," SB, 31 (1978), 162-177.

See Brewer and Owen, Thornton Manuscript, pp. viii-ix, for a description of the separate fascicles of Lincoln 91.

This failure to distinguish necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of a fascicle or booklet also bedevils the most significant recent work on the subject, Pamela Robinson's "The 'Booklet,' A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts," Codicologica, 3 (1980), 46-69; Brewer makes similar statements, Thornton Manuscript, p. viii. I examine the ramifications of the problem more fully in a forthcoming article on Westminster School MS. 3. For an example analogous to Thornton's technique here one might compare British Library MS. Harley 2250. This codex, like Additional 31042, now exists as mounted single sheets and has not been collated, but one should note the tendency to begin new texts unconnected with preceding materials at the head of the next available page (not necessarily a recto, and thus surely not a quire boundary) and the concomitant presence of filler items; see ff. 49v, 72 (column 2), 83v, 84v (column 2), and 87rv (the end of the ms.). The last three instances likely occur within a single quire. See the description provided by Clifford Peterson, Saint Erkenwald (1977), pp. 3-6.

These losses have been recognized on three grounds—survival of stubs in the manuscript (as at ff. 110a and 110b), incompleteness of texts when compared with other copies (as at ff. 143a, 143b, and 143c, although there could be only two missing leaves and the quire a 22) and by inference in the case of unique texts (f. 77a in The Siege of Milan is posited on the basis of a break in the stanza form and some narrative discontinuity). For a definitive description of contents, see Stern, Scriptorium, 30 (1976), 214-18; for identification of lost leaves, see Stern, Scriptorium, 30 (1976), 28-30, with corrections by Horrall, Manuscripta, 23 (1979), 101-102.

Other efforts to place all these sheets into the same quire, or into two adjacent, but separate, quires are possible, but all will show similar inconsistencies. For example, splitting into two ten-leaf quires will give three full sheets with no watermark (ff. 103 + 110, 112 + 117, 114 + 115) and two sheets with two watermarks (ff. 105 + 108, 106 + 107), as opposed to only five normal full sheets.

And more complicated examples in quires 10 and 15, where three stocks of paper are involved.

Other examples include National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392 (the Hengwrt Canterbury Tales), quire 22, where the supplemented quire reflects difficulties in the scribe's supply of copy (see A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, The Canterbury Tales [1979], pp. xxxi-xxxii); two examples where scribes increase their writing space from without, by quiring an existing gathering within other bifolia, Huntington HM 144, quire 9 (see John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 8 vols. [1940], I, 289-292) and Trinity College Cambridge R.14.45, part 6, quire 1 (see G. S. Ivy, in Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright eds., The English Library Before 1700 [1958], p. 42). Similar, but after the fact, are the several insertions of originally independent quires into existing ones in the Findern Miscellany, a text prepared by about thirty scribes; see Richard Beadle and A. E. B. Owen, The Findern Manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS. Ff.i.6 (1977), pp. viii-xi.

This view, of course, assumes that Thornton had a rational paper supply in which he obtained sheets of the same manufacture in largish lots, rather than constantly working with odds and ends. But certainly not all examples reflect later suppletion: quire 5 of Lincoln Cathedral 91 looks as if Thornton was at the end of his stock B and simply filled out the (eighteen-leaf) quire with stock L, which he had in profusion. (A total of 44 sheets in Lincoln 91 represent this stock.) If that was the case, quire 9, later in the same fascicle, and quire 3 of Additional 31042 were already partially copied before quire 5 was constructed. On Thornton's exemplars, no work has succeeded Angus McIntosh's ground-breaking "The Textual Transmission of the Alliterative Morte Arthure," in Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn eds., English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien (1962), pp. 231-240.

A fair amount of evidence supports such conjectures. The leaves of the manuscripts show very uneven wear, but particularly heavy wear on folios one might hypothesize to have been the outsides of individual fascicles. (In fact, text-bearing first folios of quires have fared particularly badly in Thornton manuscripts: at least six, two with their conjugates, are missing in the sixteen quires of Lincoln 91.) The fascicles may have had several years of use as loose booklets before binding; they required some tailoring to be fitted together into codices. Thus the verso of Lincoln 91, f. 52, originally leaf 10 of quire 3, was given a catchword and the eight subsequent folios cancelled, probably at the time of binding. Partial correspondence of paper stocks (the two manuscripts share five stocks) seems to indicate that the texts were in progress simultaneously and their contents only divided later.

Although the enormous quire 16 of Lincoln 91 was created as a self-contained book of medical recipes, the thirty-leaf quire 15 could have originally been an 18, with extra leaves inserted in its center.

Halfsheets appear fairly regularly in paper manuscripts, and it is surprising that there are no clear examples in Thornton's work. As an example, Huntington HM 114, with paper sheets folded in quarto within a vellum sheet (which becomes the center and outer bifolia of each quire) has about 10% halfsheets. Given the unbound state of his fascicles, Thornton may have preferred replacing a full bifolium to using halfsheets.

My colleague, William O. Harris, has offered me helpful advice on the whole paper, but especially on this section: his arguments convince me that trying to view ff. 97-102 as substantially complete only creates difficulties, the postulation of such features as cancels or inserted singletons.

Most of the lost sheets at the end are probably cancels, since Winner appears nearly complete, with only a few lines lost at the end.