2025/07/10 by B. S. W. Barootes · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Historical and Archaeological Studies #Medieval Literature and History
paper · doi:10.1093/notesj/gjaf065
openalex publication_date 2025/07/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In his 1939 anthology, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, Carleton Fairchild Brown published a four-stanza, testamentary poem under the title ‘The Testament of a Christian’, which begins ‘Ffour poyntis, my will or I hence departe’.1 The twenty-eight-line poem (NIMEV 1488; DIMEV 2503) fails here and there to match its iambic pentameter ideal but follows a rime royal scheme throughout. In addition to its Middle English text, there appears a Latin incipit in leonine hexameters: Terram terra tegat, demon peccata resumat/Mundus res habeat, spiritus alta petat [Let the earth cover the earth; let the devil take the sins;/Let the world take the things; let the spirit reach the heavens].2 For his copytext, Brown used London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 762 (fol. 3r‒v), a commonplace book put together in the reign of Henry VIII.3 According to the New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV), there are four further copies of this poem.4 These are: Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 237 (fol. 243r); a hand-written copy on a flyleaf of Nicholas Statham’s Abridgement of Cases (Rouen, 1490; STC 23238); Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354 (fol. 199r; p. 417)5; and London, British Library, MS Add. 29729 (fol. 126r‒v).6 This short paper concerns a sixth, slight-variant copy of the testamentary poem, one which has eluded modern, scholarly notice despite having been discussed among casual antiquarians since 1853, having been referenced in its library catalogue since the last quarter of the twentieth century, and having been digitised in 2022.7 The ‘new’ copy is found in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates (Adv.) MS 53.3.14, fols. 25v–26r. In this brief paper, I offer first a summary of the previously known copies followed by a description of the manuscript in question. I also provide a short discussion of its provenance. In addition, I include a transcription of the poem that other scholars might have access for comparison. It is worth briefly considering here the volumes already known to contain this text, if not for the sole possibility that other scholars might make a connexion that escapes the current writer. Further, I present the following short accounts for scholars who might not otherwise have ready access to this information. In the discussion below, I have arranged the copies in ascending chronological order. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 237 is, to my mind, the oldest of the five previously known copies of this testamentary poem.8 It is, moreover, the most carefully assembled of the surviving volumes. Per to the most recent and most accurate catalogue account, that of Thomson, cited just above (n. 9), the Corpus 237 manuscript dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. The first 137 folia of the manuscript were written by a scribe who identifies himself as ‘EC’, quite likely the Edmund Carpenter noted as an owner on the front pastedown, but a number of other hands appear later in the volume. The testamentary poem is the manuscript’s penultimate item (fol. 243r); this is in a different, if not quite later, hand. This miscellany is particularly interesting for its clear devotional bent, one possibly intended to appeal to women, given the inclusion of two saints’ lives, those of Katherine of Alexandria and Margaret of Antioch, at its opening (fols. 1r–12r and 12v–16v, respectively), as well as an English translation of Guillaume Deguilleville’s Pélerinage de l’âme featuring many of Hoccleve’s contributions (fols. 17r–137r), a sinner’s lament (fol. 146r–v; NIMEV 172), the B-version of Lydgate’s Dance of Death (fols. 147r–157r; NIMEV 2590), and the B-version of Erthe upon erthe (fol. 240v; NIMEV 704) among others. Little information is available concerning the copy of the poem added to the 1490 edition of Statham’s Abridgement of Cases (Rouen, Le Tailleur for Richard Pynson; STC 23238). According to the entry in NIMEV, the volume was apparently last sold by Bonham’s, 2 October 2001 (lot 142); however, the auction house’s online historical catalogue does not reach back to that date (January 2003 being the limit). The poem was copied into the edition on the second front flyleaf, and, according to the NIMEV entry, itself possibly based on the Bonham’s listing, is executed in a fifteenth-century hand.9 Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354 is a Tudor commonplace book that belonged to, and was almost certainly in the hand of, Richard Hill, a London grocer and merchant active from the turn of the sixteenth century and throughout the first three decades of Henry VIII’s reign.10 As David R. Parker explains, based on dates entered in the book, which range from 1508 through to 1534, Hill’s commonplace book was a long-term endeavour, one that he began in the final years of Henry VII’s reign and likely continued up until late in his own life.11 The testamentary poem appears relatively late in the volume, at fol. 199r of a total of 253 leaves, in a section containing an eclectic mix of literary and household items, prayers, puzzles, and proverbs. Here, it is preceded by a perpetual calendar table for determining the date of Easter (fol. 193v) and by ‘The Myrrour of Mankind’ (fols. 194r–199r; NIMEV 1259). It is followed, appropriately enough, by ‘Farewell this world I take my leave forever’ (fols. 199r–v; NIMEV 407) and by William Dunbar’s ‘London thou art of towns a per se’, here titled ‘A treatise of London’ (fol. 199v–200r; NIMEV 922).12 London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 762 is, like Balliol 354, a Tudor commonplace book.13 Parker dates the transcription of the book to the 1520s and perhaps into the early 1530s.14 Like the section of Balliol 354 in which the testamentary poem occurs, the Lansdowne manuscript lives up to the concept of the ‘miscellany’: a portion of the volume is given over to devotional texts, but these are not always set apart from other materials; indeed, while some subjects appear in blocks or sections of texts, the manuscript’s ‘commonplace’ status is established by the often haphazard arrangement of its contents.15 For instance, the testamentary poem at the heart of this paper appears (fol. 3r) between ‘A certeyn letter the which King Henry the V. sente to the King of Fraunce’ (fol. 3r) and ‘Questions bitwene the maister of Oxinforde and his scoler’ (IPMEP 589; 3v–5r). The former is a wry epistolary response that Henry V is popularly supposed to have sent to Charles VI following the Dauphin’s delivery of a ‘gift’ of tennis balls (cf. Shakespeare’s Henry V, I. ii. 254ff.).16 The latter is a sustained dialogue, which concerns complex theological and philosophical issues, including God’s whereabouts at the time of creation (in the wind), Adam’s age when he was made (thirty winters), and what is the best and the worst thing among men (words).17 The London, British Library, Add. 29729 manuscript is by far the latest of the previously known manuscripts, as it is the product of the early seventeenth-century antiquarian John Stow. A collection of literary pieces both short and long, it is chiefly associated with works by John Lydgate, including six of his mummings. In this manuscript, the ‘Testament of a Christian’ poem (fol. 126r–v) appears between Lydgate’s Amor vincit omnia mentiris quod pecunia (fols. 124v–26r; NIMEV 698) and the poet’s paraphrase of the Eight Verses of St Bernard, ‘O sothefast son of all bryghtnes’ (fols. 126v–27v). As in the other copies, the poem is preceded by the Latin leonine hexameters, and these are subsequently divided into rubrics heading each of the four succeeding stanzas. Unlike all other copies, however, Stow’s Add. 29729 iteration features a rubric following the last line of the poem, ‘Amen quod Robartus Peet’, seemingly identifying the author of this short piece. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland (NLS), Adv. MS 53.3.14 is a late-medieval, Latin prayerbook. The book measures 160 mm × 227 mm; the pages are ruled to 22 lines. The earliest extant appraisal of the manuscript (1853) dates it to ‘the latter part of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century’; in the NLS catalogue, prepared by a twentieth-century scholar, the manuscript is described as ‘a 15th-century devotional manuscript written and illuminated in England’.18 However, the style of decoration that we find in Adv. MS 53.3.14—particularly the framing, the penwork, and the flourishing—existed for a relatively brief period: c. 1390‒c.1410.19 Advocates MS 53.3.14 contains an imperfect series of the Roman psalter collects (fols. 1r‒15v), the Psalter of St Jerome (fols. 16r‒24r), and a short Litany (fols. 24r‒25r). The main text of the prayerbook is written in textualis formata.20 Given the presence of four still-extant, large initials combined with floral partial borders, each of which contains arms representing family members of the FitzAlans, earls of Arundel, alongside the arms of associated noble families, the catalogue refers to the codex as ‘The FitzAlan Prayerbook’.21 As I will discuss elsewhere, the probable familial connexions for the manuscript are rather limited, but the options are nevertheless quite intriguing. The volume also contains, in a considerably later hand, the four-stanza testamentary poem which begins in this copy ‘In my iiij poyntes my will or I hens departe’ (NIMEV 1488). The library catalogue asserts that the Middle English lyric, which it lists as Item IV, is written in a sixteenth-century hand. However, J. R. Mattison suggests that the hand could perhaps date to a period a bit earlier than 1500, although likely from after the establishment of the Tudor dynasty. Dr Mattison writes that the hand ‘shows a high degree of influence from lettre batarde while maintaining an Anglicana feature here and there’ and offers the rough dates of c. 1475 to c. 1515 for this Middle English verse addition to the manuscript.22 The first modern, scholarly engagement with the text occurred when Christopher Lynch (d. 1860), the one-time owner, brought the volume to a meeting of the British Archaeological Society in 1852.23 The exhibition of the manuscript and consultation with members of the Society was discussed in the ‘Proceedings’ published in the subsequent issue of the BAS journal.24 The next identified owner after Lynch was the actuary, mathematician, and antiquary, William Rae Macdonald (1844–15 August 1923), Albany Herald from 1909 to his death, whose bookplate is found at the back of the volume. While Macdonald would have been too young to have attended Lynch’s exhibition of the manuscript, it was doubtless his dealings in matters armorial that brought the book into his possession.25 In late 1924, Macdonald’s widow bequeathed the FitzAlan prayerbook to the Advocates Library. The following year, the Advocates Library presented the FitzAlan prayerbook to the National Library of Scotland, alongside all its other non-legal materials, on the occasion of the latter’s foundation. When the manuscript was first added to the National Library’s collection, it only received a cursory catalogue entry in the accession records. A new box for the item was made in 1972, and a revised, more-detailed description of the manuscript was created sometime thereafter, likely by the early 1980s and clearly by a staff member with expertise in medieval manuscripts. This later twentieth-century, typewritten description was used to create the online catalogue description as part of the NLS’s 2017 retro-conversion project. The FitzAlan prayerbook was digitised in 2022, and, because the manuscript already had a retro-converted catalogue entry, its data were left as-is in favour of attending to newly digitised materials with no catalogue entries.26 The edition that follows is the first published form of the testamentary poem as found in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 53.3.14 (A).27 Three other editions of this poem have previously been published. The first, edited by Thomas Wright and James Halliwell and published in 1845, is based on London, British Library, MS 762 (L). Another edition, edited by Carleton Brown and published in 1939, is likewise based on this manuscript. As the Brown edition corrects slight oversights from the earlier publication, references to L are based on the latter publication. A third edition, based on Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354 (B), edited by Roman Dyboski, was published in 1908. In the following, I have provided a transcription true to the text as it appears in Adv. MS 53.3.14. I have elected to forego adding modern punctuation; the puncti and virgulae appear as they do in the manuscript. (The Dyboski and Brown editions both feature editorial punctuation.) I have maintained original spelling, including precise orthography (e.g., thorns where used, <th> where those letters appear), although I have silently expanded shorthand forms. The Latin leonine hexameters that appear at the head of the poem and are subsequently divided up and set at the left-hand side of the corresponding stanzas also appear as they are repeated in the manuscript. In B, these partitioned phrases do not appear at all. In L, they appear above each of the respective stanzas to which they refer, including the first. The notes provide the variants found in the B and L manuscripts. However, in these notes I have only documented substantive changes rather than minor differences in spelling owing to scribal or dialect differences (e.g., soondry for sundry in line 10 are not noted). Textual Notes [fol. 25v] 1 In] Om. L 7 In A, this single line of the first stanza is written as two lines, breaking partway through the clause. I have maintained the line as it appears in the manuscript in my transcription; I have counted it as a single line in my enumeration. 7 poynt] parte BL 7 Is] Om. in BL 9 lyen] bene B 9 many a folde] many fold BL (Brown’s edition, based on L, hyphenates: many-fold) 10 sundry] many B 13 ijde] second BL [fol. 26r] 15 goodes] good B 15 to me] Om. B 18 I not] I wot not L (Both A and B thus preserve the older elided form. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for bringing this preservation to my attention.) 18 nor] ne L 20 iijde] thirde BL 20 is clerly] is of clerly L 25 payse] weyen L (B preserves the reading from A.)