University of Virginia Library

The Manuscript of Sanctus Tewdricus: Rediscovery of a "Lost Miracle Play" from St. Omers
by
Stephen K. Wright [*]

Histories of early English drama frequently mention a lost miracle play on the life of St. Tewdricus of Wales. The work first came to the attention of theatre historians in 1919, when George R. Coffman included it in his list of medieval performance records. Coffman speculated that the play of St. Tewdricus may have been staged in Bangor, but did not assign a definite date to this supposed performance.[1] More recently, the play has been included in lists of Middle English miracle plays compiled by Hardin Craig, Alfred Harbage, and David M. Bevington, all of whom depend on Coffman as their authority.[2]

In fact, Coffman's description of the play of St. Tewdricus was not based on firsthand knowledge of the text, but relied instead on an entry in the 1876 report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. The inventory of the library of Reginald Cholmondeley of Condover Hall, Shropshire, mentions a quarto volume containing a fragmentary copy of Alfred of Beverley's Annales sive Historia de gestis regum Britanniae, miscellaneous letters by Bishop Lloyd, John Selden, and others, and the text of a "Latin play with the title 'Sanctus Tewdricus sive Pastor bonus, Rex et Martyr,' in 9 scenes."[3] Alfred J. Horwood, who surveyed the Condover House library over a century ago, was thus the last person to examine the volume containing the play of St. Tewdricus. There are no reports of any firsthand studies of the manuscript after Horwood's inventory of 1876. When Reginald Cholmondeley's books were sold at auction on 24 November 1887, the play was essentially lost to theatre historians. The purpose of this paper is to report the rediscovery of the manuscript and to offer a general introduction to its contents and provenance.

The volume containing Sanctus Tewdricus sive Pastor Bonus is now in the archives of the Cheshire Record Office, where it is catalogued as Crewe Cowper Collection, ref DCC 13.[4] It is impossible to say precisely when the play was bound into this miscellaneous collection of chronicles and letters, but it must have been sometime before 9 November 1701, when, according to a note on the flyleaf, the book passed from the library of Dr. Humphrey

Humphreys, bishop of Bangor, into the hands of an unidentified owner known to us only as "R. D."[5] Humphreys, a renowned Celtic scholar who was "excellently well versed in the antiquities of Wales," evidently had the play bound into his copy of Alfred of Beverley's Annales and then donated it to "R. D." when he was translated from Bangor to the see of Hereford in November 1701.[6] A bookplate affixed to the inside cover indicates that in the early eighteenth century the volume came into the possession of William Cowper of Colne, Lancashire, the last known owner of the book until its appearance in the Cholmondeley family library at Condover House.

The play itself is the only item preserved in a paper manuscript consisting of thirty-four leaves. The leaves measure 15 cm in width and 20 cm in length; they are untrimmed and bound in their original order. A cover sheet (fol. 1r) bears the inscription "Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam," a clear indication that the play is a product of the Jesuit order. The scribe has embellished this motto with ornate and highly fanciful penwork. The upper loop of the G, for example, is decorated with frondlike flourishes which frame the names "Iesus," "Maria," "Ioseph," "Ignatius," and "Ludovicus." At the bottom of the page there is a crudely drawn winged angel's head flanked by a pair of coiled serpents. Beneath this rough emblem stands the name of the play-book's principal copyist: "Henricus Matthaeus Chamberling Scripsit." The title page (fol. 2r) reads as follows:

A final preliminary page (fol. 2v) briefly outlines the plot and ends with a colophon that again points to the Jesuit origin of the work: "Ad maiorem Dei et Sancti Ignatij gloriam."

The text of the play runs from fol. 3r to fol. 28v. At the end of each of the play's nine scenes one finds an underlined name offset so as to be flush with the right margin. Since a note on fol. 2v indicates that the creation of the play was a collaborative effort ("Composuêre Poetae"), it is safe to conclude that these are the names of the joint authors, each of whom was responsible for one short episode. The nine companions who wrote Sanctus Tewdricus sive Pastor Bonus are Richardus Simonis (fol. 5r), Gulielmus Parraeus (fol. 7v), Richardus Smithaeus (fol. 9r), Franciscus Simonis (fol. 11v), Daniel Giffordus (fol. 14r), Henricus Chamberlingus (fol. 16v), Carolus Peeters (fol. 21r), Thomas Beveridge (fol. 26r), and Nicholaus Tempest (fol. 28v). Their identities will be discussed in detail below.

The group designated Henry Matthew Chamberling, the author of the sixth episode, to decorate the cover sheet and transcribe the final fair copy of their work. The body of the play (fol. 3r-28v) is copied out fair from lost originals in Chamberling's graceful and uniformly legible cursive script. He regularly employs only two abbreviations: a double loop on the descender of the letter q to indicate the enclitic conjunction -que, and a sweeping suspension mark to represent a final m following a penultimate vowel. There are twenty-three lines of text per page. Rubrics designating the speaker stand in the left margin.

Chamberling also provides line numbers in the left margin to mark every tenth line, which, in conjunction with other evidence to be discussed below, suggests that the manuscript was meant to be used as a stage director's script or promptbook. There are two notable inaccuracies. The first instance is a mistake on fol. 19v, where the line count skips from 750 to 780. Since no lines are missing from the passage in question, the error is simply one of faulty enumeration. A second and far more interesting lapse occurs in scene eight. In this case, the line count breaks off after line 974 (fol. 24v) and resumes with line 975 (fol. 26r). Here, the interruption in the enumeration coincides exactly with a passage assigned to the Angelus Brittanniae Tutelaris. The angel's speech consists of thirty-five elegiac couplets which are numbered separately from the rest of the text. Moreover, this passage is the only one in the entire play that lacks a carefully justified left margin; here, every other line is deeply indented to call attention to the fact that the speech is written in couplets. The interruption of the normal line count, the indentation of alternate lines, and the unusual nature of the verse form all suggest that the speech of Britain's guardian angel is a later addition to a pre-existing play. After inserting the new speech, Chamberling simply returned to the enumeration and page layout of his source.

Chamberling's transcription of the play of St. Tewdricus was later revised by several contemporary hands. The changes and additions are of three kinds. First, several unknown revisers have made minor interlinear corrections to individual words, phrases, and speech-prefixes. Second, a writer

characterized by a heavier and more compact cursive hand than that of Henry Chamberling has added marginal notes to specify entrances and exits, stage business, and the use of props (fol. 3r, 4r, 5r, 6r, 6v, 11r, 11v, 13v, 15r, 15v, 16v, 17r, 18r, 22v, 28r). These stage directions are obviously included for the benefit of a director or prompter, thus providing additional evidence that the play was intended for actual performance rather than private reading. Third, several lengthy speeches and songs have been appended to Chamberling's script for inclusion at various points in the play. These additions consist of the lyrics and complete notation to a song composed by Thomas Beveridge for the end of scene four (fol. 28v-31r), a speech and song performed at the end of scene seven by a new character known as "Genius Sylvae" (fol. 32r-32v), and two prose interludes—a "Diludium" and "Diludium secundum"—to be performed during the course of scene seven and at the end of scene eight (fol. 33r-34r). What is more, these substantial additions also show signs of having been corrected by a still later hand. Taken together, this evidence establishes that Sanctus Tewdricus was revised for repeated performances on several different occasions.

In order to assess the aims, methods, and achievements of any history play, it is necessary to examine the work in the light of the source materials available to its maker. The only surviving account of the life of Tewdricus (Tewdrig ap Teithfall) is found in the Liber Landavensis (the Book of Llandaff), where one learns that he was a fifth or sixth-century prince of Glamorgan who abdicated in favor of his son Mauricus (Meurig) to become a hermit at Tintern.[7] When the west country was attacked by Saxons, an angel instructed Tewdricus to lead his people in battle. Tewdricus and his followers defeated the invaders at Tintern ford on the river Wye, but the holy man was mortally wounded by a Saxon spear. The next morning a cart drawn by two stags appeared outside his door to carry him to the beautiful meadow where he was destined to die. Miraculous springs flowed forth wherever the stags stopped to rest along the way. When Tewdricus finally arrived at the meadow of Echni, the cart burst asunder and he ordered the stags to run free again. The saint then commended his soul to God and died. Meurig buried his father at Merthyr Tewdrig (Mathern), where he is still venerated as patron of the parish church.

The brief synopsis that appears on the title page of the Sanctus Tewdricus sive Pastor Bonus (fol. 2r) is consistent with the tale recounted above, thus leading one to suspect at the outset that the play's action must be closely patterned on the legend recorded in the Liber Landavensis. However, the plot departs from the legend in so many important respects that it is very likely that other sources were consulted as well. The play opens in the Welsh camp, where Mauricus reads a letter informing him that a Saxon attack is imminent and that his younger brother Arthurus, who is not even mentioned by the Llandaff chronicler, has joined the ranks of the enemy. Mauricus agonizes over Arthurus' defection and eventually decides to abdicate in his brother's favour in order to spare his homeland from the ravages of war. Malcolmus encourages the prince to resist, reminding him of the injuries his

people and his hermit father would suffer under the godless Saxons. Mauricus agrees to send Malcolmus to his brother incognito in order to negotiate a settlement; meanwhile, he will summon the troops to fight if necessary. The second scene is set in the Saxon camp, where Sigertus, Fridericus, and Otho boast of their victories over the Christians. Arthurus is horrified when the three warlords begin stabbing a crucifix that they have hurled to the ground. Sigertus mocks Arthurus' futile protests and, when the prince tries to dissuade them from their sacrilege, he stabs Arthurus in the hands. In scene three, Arthurus' companion Ulfadus comes to summon him to the battle against his kinsmen. Arthurus swears vengeance against Fridericus and convinces Ulfadus to go to the Welsh camp and beg for forgiveness. Tewdricus' hermitage is the setting for scene four. The Angel of the Forest calls upon the reluctant saint to leave the beauty and silence of the woods for the tumult and agony of the battlefield. The Guardian Angel of Britain announces that the trees will soon confirm this divine decree, and the Angel of the Forest promises to become invisible and follow the saint to war. Tewdricus hesitates until the green leaves of a nearby oak suddenly wither and a laurel branch is miraculously transformed into a crown. Music fills the air as Tewdricus takes up his armor. The scene shifts to the battlefield, where Malcolmus, who has failed to reach the Saxon camp, wanders in aimless panic. The Angel of Britain announces that the Welsh army has been routed and that Mauricus is prepared to surrender to the usurpers. Malcolmus casts aside his shield and helmet in despair. When Ulfadus appears, Malcolmus expects to be killed. Instead, Ulfadus reports that Arthurus has renounced his allegiance to the Saxons and wishes to return home. The sixth scene finds Fridericus in pursuit of Mauricus. Ulfadus returns from the front and encourages Arthurus with the news that his brother still lives. Arthurus beheads Fridericus, puts the gory trophy and the fallen crucifix into a bag, and prepares to flee the Saxon camp. In scene seven, Arthurus, Mauricus, and Tewdricus meet by chance in the woods. After a tearful reunion, the saint inspires his sons to launch a counterattack. In the Saxon camp, Sigertus and Otho swear to commemorate the death of Fridericus by massacring the Welsh. After their exit, the Angel of Britain describes the offstage battle. He announces that Mauricus leads the Welsh to victory while Arthurus expiates his guilt with his sword. In the closing scene, Malcolmus again meets Ulfadus on the battlefield. Fearing that Ulfadus will try to trick him to escape capture by the Welsh, the cowardly Malcolmus kills his erstwhile friend. Sigertus surrenders to Tewdricus. Arthurus urges that the defeated king be put to death, but Tewdricus orders that he be spared. The treacherous Saxon stabs Arthurus, and Tewdricus dies of wounds he has suffered in battle.

Clearly, the play preserves a much more detailed and spectacular account of the life of Tewdricus than the version of the Liber Landavensis. The baroque style of the verse is matched by the elaboration of a plot featuring the pathos of potential fratricide, horrifying acts of sacrilege, disguised messengers, angelic lyrics, miraculous omens and apparitions, a gruesome decapitation, the return of the apostate child, and the death of the saintly

father-king at his moment of triumph. Where did these additions come from? Given the assumption that our nine playwrights would not have felt free to populate their pious history play with quite so many invented characters and episodes, it seems likely that the play is based at least in part on oral traditions that are now lost to us. As we shall see below, it is even possible to make a reasonable guess as to the identity of the individual who persuaded his fellow playwrights to dramatize (and perhaps elaborate) legendary material from his native Wales.

The question still remains as to the provenance and performance history of the play of St. Tewdricus. Was it ever performed in Britain during the Middle Ages as Coffman, Craig, Harbage, and Bevington claim? Ian Lancashire was the first to question this assumption. In his recent survey of British performance records, Lancashire speculates that the work might not have been a medieval English play at all, but rather an early seventeenth-century play from the Jesuit academy at St. Omers in Spanish Flanders, a school for expatriate English Catholics founded in 1592.[8] Such plays are known to have existed at St. Omers from as early as 1597, and they continued to be presented there until the dissolution of the school in 1762.[9] The oldest surviving play from the school is a short Latin dialogue composed for performance on the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, 29 December 1599.[10] It resembles the play of St. Tewdricus in that it consists of a prologue, nine scenes, and an epilogue. As might be expected, the community of exiled Catholic scholars often drew their subject matter from English historical and hagiographical sources ranging from Bede to Camden and Stow. Over the years the amateur playwrights produced plays on Humphrey of Mercia, Guy of Warwick, King Oswy of Northumbria, King Kenelm of Mercia, King Sigibert of East Anglia, Edward the Confessor, St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Alban, the martyrdom of Thomas More, the fall of Henry VI, the Battle of Hastings, and the rebellion of the Earl of Warwick and Perkin Warbeck. The St. Omers plays were all in Latin with the exception of three experimental works, one in English, one in French, and one in Greek. Even on the basis of this circumstantial evidence, one might well be tempted to concur with Lancashire's inspired guess as to the provenance of the play of St. Tewdricus.

There is, however, far more solid evidence that proves beyond a doubt that the play of St. Tewdricus was produced at St. Omers in or very shortly before 1679. Even though the boys frequently adopted false names to avoid persecution at home, it is nevertheless possible to identify seven of the nine individuals named in connection with the play as students at St. Omers during the years 1678-1679.[11] (1) Thomas Beveridge, the author of the eighth scene and the composer of the music at the end of the play, was the alias of Thomas Eberson of Leicestershire (1660-1733), a student at the school from 1678 (or shortly before) until 1679. (2) Daniel Gifford was the alias of Daniel Coulster, son of Sir Joseph Coulster. He was a student at St. Omers from 1672 to 1679. (3) William Parry was the alias of William Conway of Flintshire (1659-1689), a student at St. Omers from about 1674 until

1679. Parry is the most likely member of the group to have suggested the idea of composing a play on the life of a folk hero from his native Wales. (4) Charles Peeters (d. 1690), the son of John and Elizabeth Petre of Fithelers, Essex, was enrolled at St. Omer until 1679. (5) Francis Simons was the alias of Francis Plowden (1662-1736), the son of Edmund and Penelope Plowden of Plowden Hall, Shropshire. It is not known when he arrived at St. Omers; he stayed until 1682. (6) Richard Simons' true name was Richard Plowden (d. 1729); he was the brother of Francis Plowden and was enrolled at St. Omers until 1679. (7) Richard Smith (1660-1735), the son of John Smith of Sussex, was a student at the school from 1673 to 1679.

The other two names linked with the play in the Crewe Cowper manuscript are more difficult to trace. A Nicholas Tempest from Lancashire (c. 1631-1679) was at St. Omers from around 1649 until 1652 (Holt, p. 259), but his dates are far too early for him to have been one of the collaborators associated with our play. However, it must be remembered that Holt's list of students is far from complete. Unless a boy's name appears by chance in a surviving account book, prize list, letter book, or similar piece of archival material, it simply disappears from the historical record. In this regard, it is worth pointing out that no fewer than sixteen other boys named Tempest, many from a large Yorkshire family, are known to have studied at St. Omers and Bruges. The surname was also the alias of at least six students. Perhaps the lost Nicholas Tempest of the class of 1678 or 1679 was related to one of the Yorkshire students of that name, or perhaps Tempest was merely a cover name for an otherwise unknown boy. In light of what we know about Nicholas Tempest's seven fellow playwrights listed above, the latter possibility seems by far the more likely. Finally, although several students named Chamberlain attended St. Omers and others chose the surname as their alias (Holt, p. 61), there is no record of the Henry Matthew Chamberling who composed the play's sixth scene, transcribed the fair copy of the entire work, and decorated the title page. The most prominent member of the group thus remains its most mysterious one as well.

In light of the well-established tradition at St. Omers of performing Latin plays based on English historical and hagiographical sources, there would seem to be little need to posit a specific occasion that might have given rise to the composition of the play of St. Tewdricus. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that the performance of a play honoring an otherwise obscure Welsh saint was intended as an oblique commentary on a crisis that wrought havoc among the English Catholic community and nearly brought the academy at St. Omers to ruin. From 10 December 1677 until his expulsion on 23 June 1678, the notorious Titus Oates (1649-1705) was a student at St. Omers (Holt, p. 195). After returning to London, Oates, whose vindictiveness was matched only by his talent for perjury, became the chief architect of the pretended discovery of the so-called Popish Plot.[12] On 8 October 1678, Oates appeared before the Privy Council and denounced a number of prominent Jesuits as traitors to the crown. He claimed that he had attended a meeting in London the previous spring where a group of conspirators had plotted to

assassinate Charles II, launch a wholesale massacre of Protestants, and attempt a French-supported coup d'etat on behalf of the Catholic Duke of York. On the basis of these accusations, at least thirty-five priests and lay brothers were tried and executed.

Of particular interest for our purposes is the case of Thomas Whitbread, the Jesuit Provincial in England, who along with four companions was denounced by Oates in October 1678 and brought to trial on 23 June 1679. Whitbread and three of his codefendants had been educated at St. Omers.[13] What is more, it is surely no coincidence that it was Whitbread himself who had dismissed Titus Oates from the school on moral grounds the previous summer. In December 1678 a deputation was sent to St. Omers to hear the evidence of the masters and boys, who swore that it was impossible for Oates to have discovered a conspiracy in London as he claimed, since he had in fact been in residence at the school on the day of the alleged meeting. During the trial itself, fourteen boys were sent to London to testify on Whitbread's behalf. Among them were two of the authors of our play, namely, William Parry (Conway) of Flintshire and Daniel Gifford (Coulster).[14] The unsettling experience of testifying before a crowd of hostile onlookers was made all the more traumatic for Gifford, who was arrested with two of his classmates "upon suspicion of being a priest," interrogated in the Tower by Sir William Waller, and only released by special petition so that he could testify at Whitbread's trial.[15] Whitbread and his companions were found guilty and executed at Tyburn in July 1679. The anti-Catholic hysteria aroused by the affair of the Popish Plot led to the persecution of others affiliated with St. Omers as well. Among them was Philip Evans, a Welsh priest and graduate of St. Omers, who was arrested in Glamorganshire in December 1678 and executed in Cardiff the following summer.[16] It is perhaps not too much to suggest that the 1679 performance of the play of St. Tewdricus, a Glamorganshire saint who defends his faithful Christian companions against the machinations of the idolatrous Saxons, was inspired by the boys' recent experiences in London and the news of the martyrdom of Philip Evans. This theory of the play's composition would also explain Henry Chamberling's cryptic note that the work was intended as a treatise for the bishops of England: "in commentum Episcopis Angliae" (fol. 2r).

The rediscovery of the Sanctus Tewdricus manuscript has implications for students of both medieval and Restoration drama. To begin with, future histories of the early English stage will have to omit the Sanctus Tewdricus sive Pastor Bonus from the list of lost Middle English miracle plays. The Welsh hagiographical tradition from which the play draws its material is indeed an ancient one, but the text undoubtedly dates from the reign of Charles II. At the same time, the manuscript enlarges our understanding of a little-known category of seventeenth-century drama. Until now, the only dramas from St. Omers thought to have survived were the 1599 dialogue for the feast of Thomas à Becket, the three plays of William Banister, and the five tragedies of Fr. Joseph Simeon (Emmanuel Lobb) published in Liège in 1656.[17] There are no extant plays from the hand of Maurice Newport (Ewens)

or P. Clarcus, the only other previously identified playwrights from the school (Chadwick, p. 136). To this scant number must now be added the Sanctus Tewdricus by the nine classmates of 1678-1679, seven of whom can be positively identified. Similarly, the interludes and songs accompanying Joseph Simeon's Zeno have long been thought to be the only surviving music from the theatre at St. Omers (Chadwick, p. 137 and Plate 3). In this regard, the discovery of Thomas Beveridge's score for the incidental music to Sanctus Tewdricus (fol. 28v-31r) can shed new light on the teaching and composition of music in the schools. Finally, the apparent connection between the anti-Catholic hysteria of 1678-1679 and the amateur playwrights' choice of subject matter demonstrates that school dramas could be far more than innocuous exercises for Prize Day. For all its extravagance and bombast, Sanctus Tewdricus sive Pastor Bonus is clearly the product of a genuine crisis. Inasmuch as St. Tewdricus' resistance to persecution mirrors the heroism of the school's recently martyred alumni and their youthful defenders, the original audience must surely have understood the play as a memorable commentary on the quality of their classmates' courage in the face of religious intolerance.

Notes