Anglo-Saxon

22. The Legend of the Cross, first half of the 11th century, Anglo-Saxon text with Latin glosses by the "tremulous Worcester hand".

Found as binding reinforcement inside the upper cover of a copy of the 1636 edition of Barclay his Argenis (C34).

This leaf is the only evidence for this early version of the Legend of the Cross apart from two narrow strips of vellum from the same manuscript now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Shown beside the manuscript leaf is the leather of the binding in which it was found, with some of the text in mirror image.

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Special Collections has often attempted to acquire particular books for researchers; sometimes we have acquired more than we expected.

In 1957, at the request of Prof. Kenneth Rothwell of the KU English Department, the Department bought a copy of John Barclay's Barclay his Argenis (London: Printed for Henry Seile, 1636; STC 1392.5), from Pearson's Book Rooms in Cambridge for 4 guineas. A very ordinary appearing book in an undistinguished binding, this copy seemed to have little history, only the names of Frances Appleton, Isaack Preston, and Jo: Coleman of Wodnesber (Wednesbury?), scribbled on the endpapers with the date "1656". However, this common book proved to carry some uncommon baggage.

Between the thin cardboard and the thick ill-pasted brown calf cover of both boards there was a leaf of manuscript used as reinforcement. Discovered by John Siedzik, then manuscripts librarian, these leaves were removed from the binding by Max Adjarian of the Grolier Bindery, Mission, KS. Once out of their hiding place, the two leaves proved not to be the usual castoff leaves of liturgical Latin but two leaves of 11th century Anglo-Saxon text, somewhat damaged, some of their text actually pulled off onto the leather, but still legible. They were studied, identified and published (Speculum 37:1, January 1962, 60-78), by Bertram Colgrave, Durham University, and Ann Hyde, University of Kansas, now Curator of Manuscripts in the Spencer Library. Both glossed by the 13th figure known only as "the tremulous Worcester hand" from his shaky handwriting, the leaves were probably in their parent books in the library of Worcester Cathedral from the 11th century to the 16th and both were almost certainly removed and later discarded by Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-1575), who owned a number of Worcester manuscripts, to end up on the same anonymous binder's scrap heap, some time between 1636 and 1656.

Reinforcing the upper board was a leaf of the "Legend of the Cross", an Anglo-Saxon text of the first half of the 11th century, with Latin glosses of the 13th century (Pryce MS C2:1). This leaf is the only evidence for this early version of the Legend of the Cross apart from two narrow strips of vellum from the same manuscript which are now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (C.C.C.C. MS 557; Ker 73). These were found in the bindings of two books dated 1563 and 1573, both formerly belonging to Matthew Parker.

Reinforcing the lower board was a leaf of a homily by Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham, De uno confessore, an Anglo-Saxon text of the late 11th century, also with glosses of the 13th century (Pryce MS C2:2). The parent manuscript (Hatton 115) of this leaf is now at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, one of four important Worcester Anglo-Saxon manuscripts acquired by Sir Christopher Hatton in 1644 and left to the library in 1670. Our leaf had been removed by Parker or his secretary, John Joscelyn, before Hatton's acquisition.

These two leaves, with a glossary leaf (Ker 240) from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, acquired from the Kansas City bookseller Frank Glenn in 1954 in "a lot of fragments", give the Spencer Library three of the baker's dozen of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere.

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23. Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, A Testimonie of antiquitie, London: John Day, [1566?]. The second edition.

At least two printed states prior to the first edition reveal how the work was produced. As the sheets were printed, they were carefully compared to the manuscripts, which had been marked up to make proofreading as easy as possible. The states prior to the first edition show a progressive shift in punctuation to the Anglo-Saxon usage, the introduction of new passages, and the reduction of printing errors. The editor, John Joscelyn, added letters and extracts during the proof stages that increased the work by one-half and must have caused Day, already coping with the problems of an unfamiliar language in a new type face, considerable difficulty. The second edition, illustrated here, is a further corrected version which was probably set immediately after the first. The Spencer copy was acquired from Bernard Quaritch in 1972; it once belonged to Maurice Johnson of Spalding (1688-1755), librarian of the Royal Society and eminent antiquary and bibliographer.

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In 1963, Merrel Clubb (professor of English at KU) asked the library to purchase a copy of Franciscus Junius' edition of Caedmonis monachi Paraphrasis poetica Genesios (Amsterdam, 1655; Clubb C 1655.1) from John Bryson, Librarian of Balliol. With this as a basis, Ann Hyde of the Spencer Library, working mainly with the Devon bookseller I. Morton-Smith, developed the Clubb Collection (named in honor of Professor Clubb and his son Roger) into not only the best known -- perhaps the only -- intentionally built collection of books printed in Anglo-Saxon typefaces but also an excellent source for the beginnings of English historical and textual scholarship. Now under the care of Richard Clement, also of the Spencer Library, the collection includes more than 300 volumes of the works of the great septentrional antiquaries.

The intensive study of Anglo-Saxon texts and the printing of them began with Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-1575). Parker, moved not only by the motives of disinterested scholarship but by a political need to prove the antiquity of the English church, collected manuscripts assiduously (and unscrupulously) and in 1566 hired John Day to cut the first Anglo-Saxon types. This font is represented in the Clubb collection by three examples: Ælfric's A Testimonie of Antiquitie (London, 1566), the first book printed in this type and perhaps the first book printed in England in a font designed, cut, and cast in England by an Englishman, William Lambarde's [Archaionomia], sive De priscis anglorum legibus libri (London, 1568), and Parker's edition of Asser's Ælfredi Regis Res gestae (London, 1574), a curious production— a Latin text printed in Day's Anglo-Saxon types. The interest in English antiquities aroused by Parker became a consuming one for the next two centuries and the printing of texts continued rapidly.

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24. The printer's copy for part of Spelman's Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones, London: P. Stevens and C. Meredith; R. Badger, 1639.

The Spelman-Macro miscellany (MS E107) is a composite manuscript made up of a number of individual items, most from the 17th century. The first section consists of a fair copy in Anglo-Saxon of the Decrees of the Council of Eynsham (1009), probably made around 1630 for Sir Henry Spelman (1564?-1641). It is marked by the printer. The second section contains copies of extracts from Latin language charters, chronicles, genealogies, and the like. The third part consists mainly of a heavily revised draft of Spelman's Concilia marked for the printer; and part four consists of a number of 17th-century poems—one of them on the comet of 1652—and prose. The Spelman items apparently came into the hands of Cox Macro (1683-1767) who bound up the papers with some of his own. The volume (bought by the Spencer Library from Theodore Hofmann in 1969) passed from Dr. Macro to John Patteson, thence by sale in 1820 to Hudson Gurney, and was in the library of J.H. Gurney in 1891.

The manuscript, the printer's copy for the Concilia, is open to the beginning of a section concerning the duties and position of a priest; in the printed Concilia (No. 25; Clubb E 1639.1) it begins in the middle of p. 586.

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25. [omitted]

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26. Portrait miniature of Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756) in her The English-Saxon Homily on the Nativity of St. Gregory, London: W. Bowyer, 1709.

This copy (one of two in the Spencer Library—the other belonged to Thomas Hearne) bears the bookplate of one of the original subscribers, James Bertie, Esq., of Stanwell. The library acquired it from John Bryson, librarian of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963.

Despite the opinion of her guardian, who thought that one language was enough for a woman to know, Elizabeth Elstob learned Anglo-Saxon from her brother William, an Oxford-educated scholar, who encouraged her to learn as many as eight languages, including Latin. She acted as his housekeeper, but in fact was his partner in scholarship. She worked on a number of texts and in 1709 published one of Aelfric's homilies as The English-Saxon Homily on the Nativity of St. Gregory (London: W. Bowyer, 1709) with an English translation and a preface which secured for her a reputation as a linguist and a scholar. In 1715, she published The rudiments of grammar for the English-Saxon tongue, first given in English: with an apology for the study of northern antiquities, Being very useful for the understanding of our ancient English poets (London: William Bowyer, 1715), the first Anglo-Saxon grammar written in English rather than Latin. Miss Elstob explains in her preface that the Grammar is intended to instruct young ladies in the rudiments of the language, but in fact it was used far more widely. In America, for example, Thomas Jefferson made extensive use of it in his own investigations of Anglo-Saxon.

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The Spencer Library owns, in addition to the Homily and the Grammar, one of Miss Elstob's manuscripts (MS B93), a quasi-facsimile transcription of a 10th century Latin canticle with 12th century Anglo-Saxon glosses (from Salisbury Cathedral MS 150) and of a letter of Charles II to Paul Testard. This was made as a gift to her brother's patron, the antiquarian scholar William Nicholson, Bishop of Carlisle, and bears his note of receipt of the gift, dated Nov. 7. 1709.

Although texts continued to appear after the publication of the last great monument of Anglo-Saxon printing, Wilkins' Concilia (London, 1737), the number diminished and in the early 19th century when interest rose again the use of Anglo-Saxon fonts was largely abandoned. One of the old fonts has been used in the present century: the Elstob types. These types, designed by the great palaeographer Humphrey Wanley for Elizabeth Elstob's Grammar of 1715, to replace Bowyer's earlier types (destroyed by fire) in which Miss Elstob had printed her edition of one of Aelfric's homilies in 1709, were acquired by the Oxford University Press before 1764. In 1900 they were used by Horace Hart in some notes on typography, and in 1910 (after some modification) for Robert Bridges' "On the Present State of English Pronunciation" (Essays and Studies, Oxford, 1910).