Medieval Manuscript Fragments

One of our prettiest finds so far is this leaf from a 15th-century liturgical manuscript, which contained the Latin liturgy for the year along with musical notation. It was once a very handsome manuscript, with a beautifully illuminated initial ‘S’ that begins the chant ‘Sapienciam sanctorum narrant populi’. At some point, this manuscript was cut up and reused as some kind of binding material or wrapper, as the middle fold suggests.

A lot of the manuscript’s history can be reconstructed from this single leaf. Take the rubrics – headings and sets of instructions written in red, or Latin ruber, from which they take their name. The rubric at the top of the left-hand column notes that this is the liturgy according to the Use of Sarum (‘secundum usum sarum’), which largely governed English liturgical usage from shortly after the Norman Conquest until the Reformation.[1] We can narrow down its date thanks to the rubric at the top of the right-hand column, which ends on the feast of the translation of St Osmund (‘Translacio sancti osmundi’). St Osmund was only translated – i.e. his relics were moved from their original resting place – in 1457.[2] The manuscript probably dates from shortly afterwards in the later 15th century.

It was clearly still being used during the reign of Henry VIII. We can see that two references to the feast of St Thomas Becket in the left-hand rubric (‘translacione sancti thome martyris’) have been crossed out. That’s because Henry VIII particularly disliked Thomas Becket, a saint famous for opposing Henry II, and had him removed from the church calendar in 1538.[3] But these corrections weren’t enough to save this manuscript. When the newly reformed Church of England adopted a new liturgical order, the Use of Sarum became obsolete, and that’s probably when the manuscript was cut up for scraps.

Other manuscript fragments are harder to trace. This double leaf is part of several surviving leaves of a 13th-century manuscript that contained the Satires of Persius, followed by Horace’s Ars poetica.

This fragment gives us a glimpse into a medieval classroom. The Latin verses – written out in well-spaced lines in the middle column – are crowded by glosses and extensive commentaries in the margins, not unlike a modern student edition.

 That’s not surprising, since the Ars poetica was one of the key texts for the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages,[4] and it was often combined with other classics like Persius’s Satires in manuscript compilations.[5] But our fragments don’t match any of the best-known commentaries, and so the origins of this manuscript remain unclear.

Sometimes, identifying manuscript fragments involves solving a puzzle. These strips of parchment originally belonged to a late 13th-century bilingual psalter, in which the Latin Psalms were accompanied by their Anglo-Norman French translation. It’s only by arranging three strips together that we can see that they were once all part of the same double leaf, with two columns –Latin and French – on each page, and the central fold running down the middle.

Helpfully, someone pencilled in the shelfmark of the book in which these strips were found: K.5.7, which points us to a medical and legal treatise printed in Italy in 1600.[6] However, the book was apparently bound in England, since the psalter fragments are clearly English in origin. The text of the French translation mostly derives from a 12th-century Anglo-Norman version of the Psalms.[7] Clare actually also owns a complete late 12th-century psalter from Cambridgeshire that similarly combines Latin and Anglo-Norman French psalms.[8]

Compared with those texts, our fragments contain interesting copying errors. In the first fragment, a part of Vulgate Psalm 65 reads ‘And my mouth spoke in my distress’ (‘Et locutum est os meum : in tribulatione mea’). Instead of the correct French translation as it appears in the complete Clare manuscript (‘Parlat la meie buche ; en ma tribulatiun’),[9] the fragment gives us ‘Because my mouth is in my distress’ (‘Kar la meie buche est en ma tribulatiun’). This is an error that’s likely to have arisen over several stages of copying.

We’re still very far away from identifying all fragments in the Fellows’ Library. Not all of them are nice and readable. This narrow strip of parchment seems to come from a Latin philosophical manuscript, but it doesn’t reveal enough of the text to allow us to identify it with certainty. Much more work remains to be done.

And who knows what else is still waiting to be discovered?