Auchinleck manuscript
Encyclopedia
The Auchinleck Manuscript, NLS Adv. MS 19.2.1, currently forms part of the collection of the National Library of Scotland
. It is an illuminated manuscript
copied on parchment
in the 14th century in London. The manuscript provides a glimpse of a time of considerable political tension in England. The English were struggling to reclaim their language and national identity, and to distance themselves from the Norman
conquerors who had taken over the country after the Battle of Hastings
300 years before.
, who was a lawyer and supreme court judge in Edinburgh
, Scotland. Lord Auchinleck lived from 1706 to 1782, and was the father of James Boswell
who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson. It is not known how Lord Auchinleck came to possess the manuscript, but it is believed he acquired it in 1740 and gave the book to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh in 1744. It is a mystery who owned the book in the four hundred years from the time it was completed to when Lord Auchinleck first laid hands on it, but there are clues within. On some of the pages are names that have been added in, which are presumed to be previous owners and their family members. One of the quires of the manuscript is a list of Norman aristocracy and at the end of this list has been entered, in a different hand, the list of members from a family named Browne. Also sprinkled throughout the text, others have entered their names individually for posterity, such as Christian Gunter and John Harreis. These names have never been researched against church or town records.
s, who were laymen
, not monks as was usually the case. The number of scribes involved in the production is a source of debate with scholars of Middle English
. The controversy involves not only the number of scribes who actually wrote the text out, but if they, in fact, only copied the work from the exemplar
, the original, or translated the works from French
or Latin
, inadvertently into their own Middle English dialects.
Through the use of palaeography
, or the study of ancient handwriting, it has been determined that there had to be at least four, perhaps five, different scribes. Some scholars have argued that there were six scribes, yet most agree that the majority of the manuscript is in the hand of one man, who it is believed translated most of the literature. With this knowledge, when one looks at the photographs of the manuscript found on the website
of the National Library of Scotland, it is easy to see the discrepancies in the actual handwriting of the scribes. Some is tight and regimented, attributed to Scribe 1, while some more loose, as if the scribe did not make the correct adjustments for space and repeatedly ran out of room at the ends of the lines. While this makes for fun visual entertainment when looking at the folios, or pages, the historical importance is that it gives clues into how the book might have been produced in a time when the commerce of making books for private clients in a secular bookshop began to flourish.
but the language used has been determined to be several differing dialects that would have been used in different parts of England. These dialects further serve to determine the origins of the scribes, such as London as opposed to south-west Midlands
, as they would have written the language in the manner they spoke as well as the spelling they were taught, which furthers the question of translation.
Since the language is consistent within each lay
or romance, it is surmised the scribes worked independently on each whole story as opposed to the manner more commonly used in monasteries in which the monks would copy text directly from the exemplars, only one page at a time, with a catchword
inscribed at the bottom corner for later collation. Although there are catchwords in the manuscript, each scribe would have been responsible for all of the pages of each of his assignments. This newer method of production suggests that one production manager was responsible for contracting the work, gave each scribe assignments that included whole stories, while overseeing the project, and being the contact person to the client if the book was indeed bespoke
, or special order.
Also of significance is that the Auchinleck manuscript is the first known anthology
of English literature, particularly the largest collection of English romances up until that time. Previously the use of Latin or French had been almost exclusive in books, but English was beginning to be an acceptable language for pamphlet
s and literature. It was during this time that the English were beginning to shift away from French and to form a separate identity, socially and politically, so it would follow that the use of “Inglisch”, as it is referred to in the manuscript, in the written word would be a source of national unification.
, although not as ornately as the religious books of the era, such as Books of Hours
, yet many of the miniatures in the manuscript have been lost to thieves or people peddling the images for profit. The four remaining miniatures and the historiated
letters suggest it was beautifully, yet modestly, decorated at one time. It has been determined through comparing artistic styles that the illustration was done by a handful of artists who illuminated other manuscripts commercially produced in the London area. This points to a group of illuminators, who it is believed collaborated on other works that have been preserved from the Middle Ages, whom have been studied independently, and whose work is now being seen in a new light as a collective community.
of medieval narratives ranging from Saints' vitae
to conversion tales. The order of the contents (and respective folio numbers) is as follows:
National Library of Scotland
The National Library of Scotland is the legal deposit library of Scotland and is one of the country's National Collections. It is based in a collection of buildings in Edinburgh city centre. The headquarters is on George IV Bridge, between the Old Town and the university quarter...
. It is an illuminated manuscript
Illuminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...
copied on parchment
Parchment
Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
in the 14th century in London. The manuscript provides a glimpse of a time of considerable political tension in England. The English were struggling to reclaim their language and national identity, and to distance themselves from the Norman
Normans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
conquerors who had taken over the country after the Battle of Hastings
Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings occurred on 14 October 1066 during the Norman conquest of England, between the Norman-French army of Duke William II of Normandy and the English army under King Harold II...
300 years before.
History of possession
The manuscript is named after Alexander Boswell, Lord AuchinleckAlexander Boswell (judge)
Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, 8th Laird of Auchinleck was a judge of the supreme courts of Scotland. He was the father of the author and biographer James Boswell, and grandfather of songwriter Sir Alexander Boswell....
, who was a lawyer and supreme court judge in Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
, Scotland. Lord Auchinleck lived from 1706 to 1782, and was the father of James Boswell
James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson....
who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson. It is not known how Lord Auchinleck came to possess the manuscript, but it is believed he acquired it in 1740 and gave the book to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh in 1744. It is a mystery who owned the book in the four hundred years from the time it was completed to when Lord Auchinleck first laid hands on it, but there are clues within. On some of the pages are names that have been added in, which are presumed to be previous owners and their family members. One of the quires of the manuscript is a list of Norman aristocracy and at the end of this list has been entered, in a different hand, the list of members from a family named Browne. Also sprinkled throughout the text, others have entered their names individually for posterity, such as Christian Gunter and John Harreis. These names have never been researched against church or town records.
Production
Auchinleck is believed to have been produced in London around 1340, by professional scribeScribe
A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...
s, who were laymen
Layman
A layperson or layman is a person who is not an expert in a given field of knowledge. The term originally meant a member of the laity, i.e. a non-clergymen, but over the centuries shifted in definition....
, not monks as was usually the case. The number of scribes involved in the production is a source of debate with scholars of Middle English
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
. The controversy involves not only the number of scribes who actually wrote the text out, but if they, in fact, only copied the work from the exemplar
Exemplar
Exemplar, in the sense developed by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, is a well known usage of a scientific theory.According to Kuhn, scientific practice alternates between periods of normal science and extraordinary/revolutionary science...
, the original, or translated the works from French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
or Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, inadvertently into their own Middle English dialects.
Through the use of palaeography
Palaeography
Palaeography, also spelt paleography is the study of ancient writing. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of...
, or the study of ancient handwriting, it has been determined that there had to be at least four, perhaps five, different scribes. Some scholars have argued that there were six scribes, yet most agree that the majority of the manuscript is in the hand of one man, who it is believed translated most of the literature. With this knowledge, when one looks at the photographs of the manuscript found on the website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
of the National Library of Scotland, it is easy to see the discrepancies in the actual handwriting of the scribes. Some is tight and regimented, attributed to Scribe 1, while some more loose, as if the scribe did not make the correct adjustments for space and repeatedly ran out of room at the ends of the lines. While this makes for fun visual entertainment when looking at the folios, or pages, the historical importance is that it gives clues into how the book might have been produced in a time when the commerce of making books for private clients in a secular bookshop began to flourish.
Language
The Auchinleck, in its present state, consists of forty-three pieces of literature. All of these works are in Middle EnglishMiddle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
but the language used has been determined to be several differing dialects that would have been used in different parts of England. These dialects further serve to determine the origins of the scribes, such as London as opposed to south-west Midlands
English Midlands
The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...
, as they would have written the language in the manner they spoke as well as the spelling they were taught, which furthers the question of translation.
Since the language is consistent within each lay
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
or romance, it is surmised the scribes worked independently on each whole story as opposed to the manner more commonly used in monasteries in which the monks would copy text directly from the exemplars, only one page at a time, with a catchword
Catchword
A catchword is a word placed at the foot of a handwritten or printed page that is meant to be bound along with other pages in a book. The word anticipates the first word of the following page. It was meant to help the bookbinder or printer make sure that the leaves were bound in the right order or...
inscribed at the bottom corner for later collation. Although there are catchwords in the manuscript, each scribe would have been responsible for all of the pages of each of his assignments. This newer method of production suggests that one production manager was responsible for contracting the work, gave each scribe assignments that included whole stories, while overseeing the project, and being the contact person to the client if the book was indeed bespoke
Bespoke
Bespoke is a term employed in a variety of applications to mean an item custom-made to the buyer's specification...
, or special order.
Also of significance is that the Auchinleck manuscript is the first known anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
of English literature, particularly the largest collection of English romances up until that time. Previously the use of Latin or French had been almost exclusive in books, but English was beginning to be an acceptable language for pamphlet
Pamphlet
A pamphlet is an unbound booklet . It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths , or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book...
s and literature. It was during this time that the English were beginning to shift away from French and to form a separate identity, socially and politically, so it would follow that the use of “Inglisch”, as it is referred to in the manuscript, in the written word would be a source of national unification.
Illumination
The Auchinleck manuscript was illuminatedIlluminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...
, although not as ornately as the religious books of the era, such as Books of Hours
Book of Hours
The book of hours was a devotional book popular in the later Middle Ages. It is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. Like every manuscript, each manuscript book of hours is unique in one way or another, but most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and...
, yet many of the miniatures in the manuscript have been lost to thieves or people peddling the images for profit. The four remaining miniatures and the historiated
Historiated initial
A historiated initial is an enlarged letter at the beginning of a paragraph or other section of text, which contains a picture. Strictly speaking, an inhabited initial contains figures that are decorative only, without forming a subject, whereas in a historiated initial there is an identifiable...
letters suggest it was beautifully, yet modestly, decorated at one time. It has been determined through comparing artistic styles that the illustration was done by a handful of artists who illuminated other manuscripts commercially produced in the London area. This points to a group of illuminators, who it is believed collaborated on other works that have been preserved from the Middle Ages, whom have been studied independently, and whose work is now being seen in a new light as a collective community.
Assessment
The Auchinleck manuscript is not well known outside of scholarly circles, yet it is one of the most important English documents we have from the Middle Ages. Within its folios, it tracks not only the literature of the day, reflecting the tastes of the people in the days of Chaucer's birth and how that literature was beginning to break from the Church, but also the development of a language as part of a national self image. It speaks to us of the independence of spirit with which the English people wanted to identify themselves as separate from their French cousins by claiming their own language in a very fundamental expression, in their literature.Contents
The Auchinleck manuscript is a codexCodex
A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...
of medieval narratives ranging from Saints' vitae
Vitae
Vitae is a Latin word, meaning or pertaining to life.* The Academia Vitae is a liberal arts college in Deventer, The Netherlands.* Aqua vitae is an archaic name for a concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol....
to conversion tales. The order of the contents (and respective folio numbers) is as follows:
- The Legend of Pope Gregory (ff.1r-6v)
- f.6Ar / f.6Av (thin stub)
- The King of TarsThe King of TarsThe King of Tars is a medieval English chivalric romance, an amplified version of the oldest variant found in the Reimchronik, which is found in three manuscripts including the Auchinleck manuscript. It contains many specific religious phrases, and is consistently religious in intent.-Synopsis:A...
(ff.7ra-13vb) Middle English text - The Life of Adam and Eve (E ff.1ra-2vb; ff.14ra-16rb)
- Seynt Mergrete (ff.16rb-21ra)
- Seynt Katerine (ff.21ra-24vb)
- St Patrick's Purgatory (ff.25ra-31vb)
- þe Desputisoun Bitven þe Bodi and þe Soule (ff.31vb-35ra stub)
- The Harrowing of Hell (ff.?35rb-?37rb or 37va stub)
- The Clerk who would see the Virgin (ff.?37rb or 37va stub-38vb)
- Speculum Gy de Warewyke (ff.39ra-?48rb stub)
- Amis and AmilounAmis and AmilounAmis and Amiloun is a Middle English romance in tail rhyme from the late thirteenth century. The 2508-line poem tells the story of two friends, one of whom is punished by God with leprosy for engaging in a trial by ordeal after the other has been seduced and betrayed...
(ff.?48rb stub-?61va stub) - The Life of St Mary Magdalene (ff.?61Ava stub-65vb)
- The Nativity and Early Life of Mary (ff.65vb-69va)
- On the Seven Deadly Sins (ff.70ra-72ra)
- The Paternoster (ff.72ra-?72rb or ?72va stub)
- The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (?72rb or ?72va stub-78ra)
- Sir Degarè (ff.78rb-?84rb stub) Middle English text
- The Seven Sages of Rome (ff.?84rb stub-99vb)
- Gathering missing (c1400 lines of text)
- Floris and BlancheflourFloris and BlancheflourFloris and Blancheflour is the name of a popular romantic story that was told in the Middle Ages in many different vernacular languages and versions. It first appears in Europe around 1160 in "aristocratic" French...
(ff.100ra-104vb) Middle English text - The Sayings of the Four Philosophers (ff.105ra-105rb)
- The Battle Abbey Roll (ff.105v-107r)
- f.107Ar / f.107Av (thin stub)
- Guy of WarwickGuy of WarwickGuy of Warwick is a legendary English hero of Romance popular in England and France from the 13th to the 17th century. The story of Sir Guy is considered by scholars to be part of the Matter of England.-Plot:...
(couplets) (ff.108ra-146vb) - Guy of Warwick (stanzas) (ff.145vb-167rb)
- Reinbroun (ff.167rb-175vb)
- leaf missing.
- Sir Beues of HamtounBevis of HamptonBevis of Hampton is a legendary English hero and the subject of Anglo-Norman, French, English, Venetian and other medieval metrical romances that bear his name...
Text ( (ff.176ra-201ra) - Of Arthour & of Merlin (ff.201rb-256vb)
- þe Wenche þat Loved þe King (ff.256vb-256A thin stub)
- A Peniworþ of Witt (ff.256A stub-259rb)
- How Our Lady's Sauter was First Found (ff.259rb-260vb)
- Lay le Freine text (ff.261ra-262A thin stub)
- Roland and Vernagu (ff.?262va stub-267vb)
- Otuel a Knight (ff.268ra-277vb)
- Many leaves lost, but some recovered as fragments.
- Kyng Alisaunder (L f.1ra-vb; S A.15 f.1ra-2vb; L f.2ra-vb; ff.278-9)
- The Thrush and the Nightingale (ff.279va-vb)
- The Sayings of St Bernard (f.280ra)
- Dauid þe King (ff.280rb-280vb)
- Sir Tristrem (ff.281ra-299A thin stub)
- Sir OrfeoSir OrfeoSir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English narrative poem, retelling the story of Orpheus as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king.-History and Manuscripts:...
(ff.299A stub-303ra) - The Four Foes of Mankind (f.303rb-303vb)
- The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle (ff.304ra-317rb)
- Horn Childe & Maiden Rimnild (ff.317va-323vb)Middle English text
- leaf missing.
- Alphabetical Praise of Women (ff.324ra-325vb)
- King Richard (f.326; E f.3ra-vb; S R.4 f.1ra-2vb; E f.4ra-vb; f.327)
- Many leaves lost.
- þe Simonie (ff.328r-334v)