University of Virginia Library

The Ordinatio of the First Booklet

The ordinatio of the manuscript, as a whole, moves from the relatively well defined and elaborate to the reduced and indefinite. But even though the ordinatio of the MS in the first booklet is inconsistent, virtually all the works are set off by clear division boundaries and discrete formatting. The

exception to this pattern is the conflation of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the ballad, "Truth." None of Chaucer's works is attributed to him and none has a title. By contrast, some of Lydgate's works are given titles and attribution, and two of them, St. Albon and "Uppone a Cross," have both. St. Albon, given a short title at the beginning, has an extended colophon that indicates, in addition to the author, the name of the person for whom Lydgate translated the work from French and Latin.[9] The elaborateness and detail of title and attribution are unique in the MS. For other ascribed works, as the poem, "Uppone a Cross," the attribution is by initials only, i.e. "JL," identifying Lydgate as the author. Two other poems that have the monograph "JL" at the end, "Midsomer Rose" and "Song of Virtue," do not have titles.[10] The title of "Uppone a Cross," which follows the Clerk's Tale-Truth, consists of the first two lines of the poem in Latin (f84). The other work that has a title, but no attribution of authorship, is Lydgate's Testamentum. So if one judges by the ordinatio, the works of Lydgate are accorded more importance than Chaucer's, with the Life of St. Albon, the first and longest work in the manuscript, having first place in the hierarchy.

An examination of the mise-en-page of the folios reveals even more clearly the changes that occurs in the design and execution of the booklet's formatting. Although the format of HM140 is plain compared with many other manuscripts (such as the richly designed and executed Ellemere MS), the ordinatio of its first booklet changes from the fairly detailed format of St. Albon, where, for example, rubrication is used for marking text divisions and capitals, to a much simpler page format in the other works, as a comparison between St. Albon and the Clerk's Tale will demonstrate.

For St. Albon, the layout, rubrication and capitalization are clearly well planned and consistently executed throughout. The first folio has thirty-three lines of text, and there are between thirty-three and thirty-six lines per folio, with an average of thirty-five. The text is organized in a rhyme royal stanza, its form set off by rubricated initial capitals and by spacing between stanzas. Decoration of the text is simple, but the use of rubrication is extensive. Besides the initial stanza capitals, the initial line capitals are ornamented with red. In addition, rubrication is used to underline key words in the text, usually proper names or nouns. There are from twelve to twenty-two of these underlinings per folio, which I think act as a guide to reading the text.[11] Whole

words are rubricated as well, usually the divisio markers, highlighting the ends and beginnings of sections within the narrative. For example, on f14, at the end of the first part, a division marker appears in red letters: "Here Endith the First Boke and Begynnyth the Prologg of the Second Lyne of the Conuersion of the Blessid Prothomartir of all Inglond Seint Albone."[12] Occasionally there are marginal glosses in red ink, such as "Verba Auctoris" (f13v). Finally, at the end, the colophon is in red ink.

The design and execution of the formatting of the text of St. Albon are done with obvious care. The work is titled and attributed. The stanza form is clearly marked with rhyme, rubrication, enlarged capitals, and spacing. Text divisions are marked in red, as are line capitals, and key words are underlined in red.

In contrast, the layout of the second work in the manuscript, Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, is both less elaborate and less clearly marked. The Clerk's Tale begins on f68 and ends on f83v. If "Truth" is considered a conclusion to the tale, as I believe it should be, the ending is on f84. Unlike St. Albon, the tale contains few signals or directions for reading in its formatting. It has no title, no headings, no division markers of its parts, and no attribution of authorship. There is no "Prologue," the text beginning at the opening of Chaucer's Tale, E57 (IV.57): "There is ryght atte the West Syde of Ytaile. . . ." "Truth" is appended directly after the end of the tale's envoy, without title or break in the continuous line format, with an "Explicit" following the ballad.

The number of lines per folio page is irregular, ranging from thirty-one lines on f68 to thirty-seven on f77, with the average being thirty-three lines. The initial letter of each line is capitalized and sometimes the initial capital of a page is slightly larger than the rest. The only large rubricated capital in the text is the tale's initial "T," which is three lines high. The other initial line capitals are only splashed with red, and this decoration ends at f78. There is no other rubrication. Except for the rhyme scheme of rhyme royal, which is disrupted, the stanza form is not marked or isolated; consequently, the text runs continuously, without spacings from beginning to end. None of the features which Parkes argues were commonly used to mark a verse format (i.e. spacing, illumination, capitals, rubrication, underlining, or paragraph markers) is present in the format of the tale ("Punctuation" 130). The tale in HM140 thus has a reduced, prosaisized format.

Comparison of the formatting of St. Albon and the Clerk's Tale clearly shows that a shift occurred in the book's production between these two works.

The well designed and executed format of St. Albon gives way to the much less carefully formatted and decorated text of the Clerk's Tale and the plainer format of the shorter works that follow in the booklet.[13] The modification in the format plan and execution of the Clerk's Tale marks a significant shift in the booklet's ordinatio and reflects a change in the status of the manuscript's production. The most obvious indication of this change is in the decorative detail, the splashing of the initial capitals with red ink, which stops about two thirds of the way through the text of the tale.

This downscaling in the priority of the booklet's production might have resulted from a decommissioning of the manuscript's project. But without documentary evidence it is impossible to determine what the causes were for lowering the production priority, and for concomitant changes in the bibliographical text of the booklet. Consequently, the ordinatio or intentional structure of the manuscript remains ambiguous. The alteration in the booklet's ordinatio is also reflected in the transcription of its texts, where we see a similar reduction in the quality of the scribal copying near the end of the first booklet.