Manual to miscellany: stages in the commercial copying of vernacular literature in England.

Taylor, Andrew

ABSTRACT

The origins of the commercial book trade in England can be traced back as far as the mid-thirteenth century, when professional scriveners began to copy Anglo-Norman romances and works of pastoral instruction, such as Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour and William of Waddington's Manuel de peches. These texts often circulated in small independent fascicles, which allowed the scriveners to provide an expanding readership with a broader choice of material. Small portable collections of these fascicles, sometimes referred to as 'manuals', in due course gave way to the larger Middle English miscellanies, such as the famous Auchinleck manuscript of c. 1330.

If the term 'grubstreet' is taken to refer to the commercial production of sensationalist fiction by anonymous hacks working in the heart of the city of London, then its origins go back much further then is commonly supposed. 'That fatal revolution' deplored by Oliver Goldsmith, 'whereby writing is converted to a mechanic trade; and booksellers, instead of the great, become the patrons and paymasters of men of genius', (1) is well in evidence by the 1330s when a team of six London scriveners produced a massive compendium of popular English material, MS Advocates 19.2.1 in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, the famous Auchinleck manuscript. The attraction of the volume lay in the broad range of material it offered: forty-four items in all, including saints' lives, secular and religious romances, miracles of the Virgin, couplets on the Seven Deadly Sins, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Pater Noster, religious debates, and other poems of moral instruction, but also humorous tales and political satires. It was, as Derek Pearsall puts it in his part of the introduction to the facsimile, 'the first, and much the earliest, of those "libraries" of miscellaneous reading matter, indiscriminately religious and secular, but dominated by the metrical romances, which bulk large in the popular book-production of the late Middle Ages in England'. (2) Well represented in the collection are the tail-rhyme romances, such as Horn Child, Guy of Warwick, and Beves of Hamtoun, that Chaucer satirized mercilessly in his Tale of Sir Thopas. (3) Yet if much of the material seems little better than competent hack work, the book is a handsome one, carefully copied into double columns with generous use of rubrication and marginal flourishes in green, blue, and red ink, and a series of what were once probably over thirty miniatures, although only five survive.

An obvious question about the construction of the Auchinleck MS is how so large a team might have been assembled. One possible explanation, first proposed by Laura Hibbard Loomis in 1942, might be that the scribes worked together under the same roof in a single atelier or bookshop. (4) But as A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes point out, there is little to indicate that vernacular copying had reached this stage of commercial organization so early. (5) As we have learned more about the way stationers and scriveners in London or Oxford were squeezed into a few streets, often cheek-by-jowl with parchment makers and illuminators, an alternative explanation has emerged. (6) If a scribe wanted to produce a large book in a hurry, he could farm out sections to his neighbours, or call on one of them to complete the rubrication or decoration. Since the scribes were not all working under the same roof, they would not have been likely to have traded off in mid-page but would have worked on separate units. The Auchinleck MS could well have been produced in such a manner. It can be divided into a series of fascicles or booklets, independent sections comprised of anything from one to ten gatherings that are devoted to a single text or a group of thematically similar texts, and each of these fascicles was copied by a separate scribe.

The one major point of contention is whether the various fascicles were copied as a speculation in advance of any commission, as Derek Pearsall suggests (p. ix). Pamela Robinson has stressed the differences in layout between the fascicles, each of which has a slightly different ruled grid, and implied that they were. Timothy Shonk has stressed the consistency of rubrication and illustration and the large role played by the first scribe, who supervised the entire job, and argued that they were not. According to Shonk the different fascicles were always intended to be bound together and 'the contents of the book were probably established before the copying began' (p. 90). While much of what Shonk says about the large role of the first scribe, including the suggestion that he was probably the bookseller, is persuasive, his hypothesis does not fully account for the variation between the booklets. (7) On the other hand, the kinds of homogeneity noted by Shonk are not necessarily inconsistent with speculative production. If a buyer made a selection from fascicles that had already been copied, or demanded familiar texts that the bookseller already had in stock, as Robinson suggests, the first scribe might well have wanted to give these fascicles as homogenous an appearance as possible by employing a single rubricator and a single artist for the decorated initials.

Trying to determine at exactly what stage a hypothetical patron began to shape a book might seem futile. There are too many possibilities, and since they can only be sketched out speculatively, they easily become muddled. I. C. Cunningham, for example, in his part of the introduction to the facsimile, implies that the Auchinleck MS was 'bespoke', without any indication that this position conflicts with that of his co-author. (8) What is really at stake here, however, is the likely scale of the market for Middle English writing in the 1330s, a matter of broader significance. It might seem risky at this early period for a bookseller to accumulate too large a stock, which is Shonk's point. But we should not forget that the Auchinleck scribes were steeped in the idiom of Middle English romance. As Pearsall notes, the people who worked on the manuscript were not just copying exemplars but also translating and modifying them. They knew the conventions of romance and had developed a considerable fluency in Middle English versification and must therefore have been in the habit of copying such texts on a regular basis. All this suggests that the Auchinleck MS represents but one surviving element from what was once a full commercial system in which these and similar fascicles circulated in their hundreds. Although Pearsall left as an open question whether the book should be regarded as 'exceptional in fact or only in the accident of its survival' (p. vii), the latter possibility can never have seemed that likely. Such extensive commercial copying is not feasible without a well defined market in which recognizable commodities are sold at stable prices to meet predictable demands. While the Auchinleck MS might indeed have been an exceptionally hefty example, there must have been many other compendia made up of fascicles of Middle English romances that had been copied by the very same scriveners or these scriveners would have gone out of business.

In fact there is considerable evidence of commercial copying of romances nearly a century earlier, although it is copying of Anglo-Norman. (9) David J. A. Ross draws attention to one of the earliest instances. A copy of the Chanson d'Aspremont, dating from the second quarter of the thirteenth century and now British Library MS Lansdowne 782, contains forty-five colour-washed pen drawings, mostly of knights in combat. The style of these illustrations is remarkably similar to that in a fragmentary copy of the Roman de Toute Chevalerie, now Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.9.34, which dates from the same period. Although Ross sees enough minor differences between the two to be convinced they are not by the same artist, he finds that their numerous similarities 'point to a single workshop as their place of origin' and thus to 'the existence of a lay establishment specialising in the copying and illustration of secular Anglo-Norman literature in the second quarter of the thirteenth century'. (10) Here too a scribal quarter seems as likely an explanation as a single large-scale workshop, but otherwise Ross's argument is convincing. Nigel Morgan provides a few more examples of commercial copying of vernacular texts in London or Westminster in the 1250s. (11) These would include the Westminster Psalter of c. 1250 (British Library MS Royal 2. A. xxii) and La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei (Cambridge University Library MS Ee. 3. 59), a verse life of Edward the Confessor that has been illustrated in a Westminster style. As our knowledge of Anglo-Norman manuscript production increases, it will become possible to fill out the picture. (12)

The vast increase in the production of Anglo-Norman manuscripts in the thirteenth century is often attributed to two interconnected social developments, an increase in lay literacy and the church's encouragement of new forms of lay piety. The increase in lay literacy can be seen in the use of written documents for legal and bureaucratic purposes (the subject of M. T. Clanchy's famous study) (13) but it can also be seen in the increased lay demand for saints' lives, devotional works, and books of simple religious instruction. While the twelfth century provides some examples of monks and chaplains preparing Anglo-Norman compositions for lay patrons, the thirteenth century provides far more. Robert Greatham, who was probably an Augustinian canon, composed the Corset, a treatise on the Seven Sacraments, for Alan la Zouche, royal justice and household steward for Henry III, and a collection of sermons, the Miroir, for his wife. (14) The Benedictine monk Matthew Paris wrote several saints' lives for lay patrons, including a life of Saint Edmund that is dedicated to Isabel, countess of Arundel. He also loaned the countess a copy of his lives of Thomas and Edward, now Trinity College Dublin MS E. I. 40, and requested that she pass the book on to the countess of Cornwall. (15) Isabel was also the dedicatee for the Dominican Ralph Bocking's Latin life of Saint Richard de Wyche, bishop of Chichester, which he composed in about 1270. (16) This work was then translated by the Augustinian canon Pierre d'Abernon of Fetcham, best known for the Lumere as lais (light for the laity), his lengthy reworking of the Elucidarium of Honorius of Autun. Robert Grosseteste wrote a set of instructions, Les Reulles Saint Robert, for the countess of Lincoln to help her run her household and lands. (17) These numerous private commissions testify to the expanding readership that would in due course make commercial copying feasible.

The second crucial development is the drive for pastoral education in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The insistence in the decree Omnis utriusque sexus that all Christians, both men and women, confess at least once every year led to a massive drive to educate the clergy and the production of a whole range of simple instructional manuals for parish priests, which, when translated into the vernacular, also proved extremely popular with many of the laity. (18) In 1222 the Council of Oxford under archbishop Stephen Langton promulgated a number of constitutions to further this educational campaign in England, and the individual bishops followed suit, laying out a core body of doctrine and practice that everyone should know, including the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria, the Creed, the Seven Sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Cardinal Virtues. (19) The constitutions of Richard Poore, bishop of Salisbury, which are among the most detailed and the earliest, called explicitly for priests to instruct their parishioners in their own language, a point echoed in many of the other constitutions. (20) Energetic bishops who took their pastoral duties seriously promoted preaching in English, but they also became involved in the production and dissemination of religious writings, and for this they used Anglo-Norman. Walter Gray, archbishop of York for nearly forty years (1216 to 1255), may also have been active in this way, but the preeminent example is Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, who actually composed works of pastoral instruction himself. (21) Many of the most frequently copied Anglo-Norman texts fall into the general category of post-Lateran pastoralia.

Among such works, two stand out not only because they were so popular but also because there is some evidence they were disseminated through official channels. The first is the Manuel des peches, often attributed to William of Waddington, which survives in twenty-five manuscripts. The Manuel is a general summa of basic doctrine, covering such matters as the Twelve Articles of Faith, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Seven Sacraments. It also contains a number of sermons and prayers and a section on confession. Although the author of the Manuel initially chose to remain anonymous, the attribution to William 'Widdindune', 'Wadigtoun', 'Widigton' or the like appears in the epilogue of thirteen of the manuscripts. Waddington may have been the author (as Matthew Sullivan argues persuasively) or merely a subsequent compiler, who took over another's work. In either event, there is a strong likelihood that he can indeed be identified with the William de Widinton who was the seneschal of Walter Gray, archbishop of York, and who probably came from a Lancashire village that was spelt Widitun in Domesday Book but was more commonly spelt Waddington by the second quarter of the thirteenth century. (22) This identification of the writer with the archbishop's seneschal opens the possibility that Manuel was composed at the archbishop's behest and disseminated with his encouragement. As Sullivan points out, 'the speed with which the Manuel was circulated, starting from Waddington's base at York, and spreading north to Durham, south all the way to the Isle of Wight, east to Bury, and west perhaps as far as Ludlow, is evidence that medieval official publications [...] did not necessarily circulate haphazardly'. (23) If the Manuel was indeed promulgated in this fashion, then Walter Gray would emerge as one of the first great promoters of pastoral instruction in the vernacular. In this case Gray might even have established a tradition in the diocese, for a century later York would once more lead the way in the dissemination of vernacular pastoralia, when archbishop John Thoresby arranged for his Injunctions of 1357 to be translated into English by the Benedictine John of Catterick, as the text now known as The Lay Folk's Catechism. (24)

It is Grosseteste, however, who can be more firmly credited with such foresight. While Gray remains a shadowy figure, Grosseteste's work as bishop of Lincoln is well documented. (25) A dedicated preacher himself, he was energetic in his efforts to combat pluralism and to expand the bishop's prerogatives against the claims of both the papacy and the clergy in the diocese and he was the first English bishop to introduce visitations, all for the sake of more zealous pastoral care. Several of his Anglo-Norman writings survive, including the version of his household ordinances that he prepared for the countess of Lincoln and the lively allegory Le Mariage des neuf filles du diable, and they were probably but a few of a much larger number. It was his Chasteau d'amour, however, that circulated most widely. (26) It offers basic religious instruction in an approachable form through two extended allegories, that of the debate between the Four Daughters of God (Truth, Justice, Peace, and Mercy), which can be resolved only by Christ's sacrifice, and that of the Castle of Love, the Virgin's pure body, into which Christ descends. Both the debate and the account of how the Devil, the World, and the Flesh besiege the castle have considerable dramatic potential and James McEvoy goes so far as to suggest the work was meant to be sung (p.153). It survives in eighteen manuscripts.

There was then, by the mid-thirteenth century, a significant lay readership and a widespread pastoral campaign to meet its spiritual needs that had generated numerous texts of basic religious instruction. There is even some evidence to suggest that ecclesiastical authorities were deliberately fostering the broad dissemination of certain key texts, notably the Chasteau d'amour and the Manuel. But how did lay people actually acquire their own copies? In some cases, just as they turned to household chaplains to compose or translate religious texts, prosperous lay people relied on members of their own household to copy them. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries provide numerous examples of what would appear to be in-house productions, among them many of the so-called 'friars' miscellanies', such as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86 (dated 1272-82) and MS Harley 2253 (c. 1340).27 These are not particularly elegant books; they have little decoration, their texts are sometimes cramped, and the hands unsure. In their discussion of MS Digby 86, for example, Judith Tschann and M. B. Parkes argue that 'the inconsistencies in some of [the major scribe's] practices indicate that, although he was an experienced scribe he was not accustomed to producing books' (p. lvi). Gisela Guddat-Figge similarly believes that whoever copied the Harley miscellany 'was probably not a professional scribe but quite capable of producing a carefully enough written volume for his own pleasure' (p. 199). Other potential owners turned to professionals. There are numerous thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman volumes, elegant, fascicular productions written in careful bookhands with more generous use of decoration, that have the appearance of commercial products. (28) A number of the texts found in these volumes, among them the Chasteau d'amour and the Manuel, might even tentatively be called 'bestsellers', implying not just that they survive in an unusually large number of manuscripts but that in their day they would have been recognized and requested and stationers would have kept them in stock.

Where did these groups of professional scriveners first coalesce? One possibility would be the London area, including Westminster, for the court and cathedral were often associated with fine painting, and the major Benedictine monastery of St Albans, only twenty miles to the northwest, home to the chronicler Matthew Paris. (29) If London and its environs offer one possible centre, the universities offer another. As the schools coalesced into universities during the twelfth century, the demand for reliable school texts led to the formation of a well organized and carefully regulated book trade. (30) In Paris and Oxford, which have been the most extensively studied, and also in Cambridge, a commercial book trade grew up in the shadow of the universities, gradually broadening its scope from school texts to Latin bibles and prayer books and eventually to a wide range of vernacular texts for both lay and religious readers. By the early fourteenth century the market in vernacular texts would expand to the point where it was subsidizing the trade in school texts, at least among the Parisian stationers. (31) Just as in London, these crowded quarters facilitated collaboration. Quite how closely the Oxford or Cambridge book trade paralleled that in Paris is a moot point, but it too began early. A charter from around 1210-20 mentions 'one binder, three illuminators, one writer and two parchmenters' on Catte Street in Oxford, and the trade was certainly well established by the 1240s, when the Catte Street scrivener William de Brailes produced one of the earliest Books of Hours for an anonymous lay woman, possibly named Susanna. (32) Over the next twenty years a number of texts appear which suggest how the industry was developing.

At the upper end of the spectrum comes a volume such as Princeton University Library, Taylor Medieval MS I (formerly MS Phillipps 2223), which has been described in detail by Adelaide Bennett. (33) Dated on internal evidence between 1280 and 1298, it is largely given over to the Manuel des peches, which occupies the first 150 folios, and is then followed by a sermon in verse known as the Roman des romans, a prose prayer to the Virgin, a prose exposition of the Pater Noster, and Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour. Both the Manuel and the Chasteau are introduced by historiated initials. In the first, an elegantly dressed woman gives instructions to a scribe; in the second the same elegantly dressed woman addresses a bishop, presumably Grosseteste. The woman wears the same heraldic garments in each case, and these identify her as Joan Tateshal, wife of Robert Tateshal, first Baron of Tattershall, Lincolnshire, and one of the group of lay people from Lincoln who recommended Grosseteste for canonization in 1286/87 (p. 167). The text appears to be the work of one scribe, who writes a careful bookhand, and instructions for the scribe in Anglo-Norman have been added in a cursive hand. The artist, who co-ordinated the various illustrations with the text with considerable skill, works in a style that Bennett is inclined to locate in the 'East Midlands or even upper East Anglia' (p. 173), which raises the possibility that the scribes and artists might have been associated with the book trade in Cambridge.

The presence of the two portraits shows that the Taylor manuscript was designed for Joan personally. Some of its more singular features, such as the illustration of a proud lady being tormented in hell, or the prominence given Joan in the illuminated initial, where she stands as tall as Grosseteste, and perhaps also the elaborate diagrams, may even reflect her personal involvement. There is no question, at any rate, that the Taylor manuscript was bespoke. But by the thirteenth century a reader might also have been able to assemble an elegant collection of fashionable and varied material by making a personal selection of pre-copied fascicles. Such, at any rate, would appear to be the case with the anonymous Berkshire lawyer who gathered together the fascicles that are now bound separately as Bodleian MSS Douce 132 and 137. The first three fascicles contained Latin texts on law and accountancy, including legal formulas, notes on various assizes, writs, and grants; sections from Walter of Henley's treatises on estate management; and the well-known legal treatise of Ranulph Glanville. The fourth contained the Anglo-Norman Horn, Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour, and the Fables of Marie de France; and the fifth the Bestiare divin of Guillaume le Clerc. The collection has been examined carefully by Pamela Robinson, who notes that the decorative flourishes in the first four booklets are in a common style and one that is associated with Oxford scriveners. (34)

A collection of this kind could have been assembled in a number of ways, with the patron playing a greater or less role at early or later stages. The diversity of the texts is striking, and might suggest that this book was intended to cover the full range of the man's interests, professional, cultural, and devotional. But even if MSS Douce 132 and 137 represent his personal selection, it would have been a selection made from texts that were well known and easy to sell. Apart from Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour, the Douce manuscript includes Walter of Henley's treatise on estate management, often cited as an example of the rise in pragmatic literacy, which survives in thirty-five manuscripts, and Marie's Fables, which survive in twenty-three, several of which may be products of professional Oxford scriveners. (35) If an enterprising stationer had prepared fascicles of these works as a speculation, perhaps while he had the exemplars to hand, he could surely have hoped to sell them.

One possible example of an ambitious commercial product is British Library MS Harley 978, a miscellaneous collection of Latin and Anglo-Norman material, including Goliardic poetry, the Song of Lewes, which praises Simon de Montfort's victory at that battle, and the Lais and Fables of Marie de France. The volume belonged to William of Winchester, a rather disreputable monk of Reading, and was assembled around 1265. (36) While there are several puzzles about exactly how this volume was compiled, it bears many signs of commercial copying. It is certainly elegant enough, and the decorative work is not unlike that in the Douce collection. More importantly, it too consists of a series of independent units or fascicles, each one devoted to a well defined type of material. One of these fascicles, that devoted to the Lais of Marie de France, unites two highly professional and rather similar hands, one copying the first two folios (116 and 117), the second the remainder (118-60). This second hand also copies Marie's Fables (fols 40-67). Such a pattern could be explained in several ways, but given the popularity of Marie's works surely one possibility is that professional scriveners copied fascicles of her work and then kept them in stock from which a customer like William could make his selection. (37)

It is religious texts, however, that would have formed the bulk of any such market. A representative volume might be one like MS Bodley 399, which dates from about 1300 and contains Pierre d'Abernon's Lumere as lais, the Art de Kalender of Rauf de Linham, and the Chasteau d'amour. (38) Although Legge dismissed the Lumere as 'a dull work written with no sense of style', this monumental scholastic expansion of the twelfth-century Elucidarium of Honorius of Autun was popular in its day and survives in at least twenty manuscripts. (39) D'Abernon drew ever more heavily on the Sentences of Peter Lombard as he advanced and eventually produced a scholastic encyclopedia. His Lumere offered instruction on the key topics such as the Sacraments and the Seven Deadly Sins emphasized by the post-Lateran constitutions, but it grouped them into elaborate sub-divisions and treated them in the light of the four Aristotelian causes. (40) The second work, the Kalender, is a translation of a Latin computus. Little is known about its author, except that he wrote the work for a layman, but even it survives in three manuscripts. Here we have a collection that combines two of the most popular Anglo-Norman works of the thirteenth century, the Lumere and the Chasteau, with a handy guide to calculating dates of religious feasts, all copied by two contemporary scribes into a handsome and substantial volume.

Although collation is now difficult, it seems that the Lumere (ending on fol. 95) constituted one unit and the remaining works (ending on fol. 116) a second, but that both were done at much the same time. The manuscript is the work of two scribes; the first copies up to line 4498 of the nearly fourteen thousand lines of the Lumere as lais (fol. [31.sup.v]) while the second completes the Lumere and then copies the entire second unit. Glynn Hesketh notes a number of features that suggest how closely the two scribes collaborated. The ruling is consistent throughout the entire manuscript, as are the decorated capitals, the versals that begin most chapters, and the decorative pen-work. Both scribes supplied rubricated chapter numbers, but the first did this according to the chapter's place within the six books, while the second did it according to the chapter's place in the distinctions. The first scribe then corrected many of the numbers in the section copied by the second. As Hesketh points out, these corrections 'show irrefutably that the two scribes must have worked on the MS, if not together, then at least at roughly the same time' (III, 23).

Another possible example of this early commercial copying might be MS Harley 3860, which consists of three large booklets, all copied in about 1300 or early in the fourteenth century, although by different scribes. (41) The first booklet (fols 1-22) contains a chronicle of England up to the year 1272, genealogies of the English and Scottish kings up to Edward I and John Baliol, and chronicles of Edward I's Scottish campaigns. The second (fols 23-47), written in a cursive hand, contains further accounts of the Scottish wars and Les Sept sages de Rome, a prose version of the legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus. (42) The third (fols 48-82) contains the Chasteau d'amour, the Manuel des peches, and Walter of Henley's treatise. The opening folio has another author portrait of Grosseteste (fol. [48.sup.r]), although this time he is seated.

The recurring connection between Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour and Waddington's Manuel, which appear together in at least four other manuscripts, bears further consideration. It is not just that the two are often found in the same volume; the Manuel is actually attributed to Grosseteste in two copies of Robert Mannyng's Middle English translation, Handlyng Synne. The attribution is not at all plausible, but it may be based on more than just pure fancy. Hope Emily Allen went so far as to suggest that 'a work like the Manuel, which follows fairly closely the subjects laid down for the instruction of the people in [Grosseteste's] ordinances, might easily owe its connection with him to its having become part of a campaign which he had furthered' (p. 448). Alternatively, Grosseteste may have become a symbolic authority that served to license the vernacular text. Whether it was Grosseteste, actively encouraging the dissemination of his works, who turned to the scriveners as part of the pastoral machinery at his disposal, or the scriveners, anxious to give their enterprise moral patronage, who turned to Grosseteste, his name had certainly become closely linked with vernacular pastoralia. (43)

Oschinsky suggested that these three booklets in MS Harley 3860 were 'kept separate for some time', until they were finally brought together at Durham Cathedral priory, but the evidence seems to me inconclusive (pp. 14-15, n. 1). Admittedly folio [47.sup.v] is somewhat soiled and folio [48.sup.r] is thumbed, but much of the manuscript has been quite heavily handled. What is perhaps more telling is that the decorative work in the second and third booklets appears to be by the same hand. The similarity is most apparent in the treatment of what Sonia Patterson terms 'the small wave flourish', where the descending line of the decorative flourish ends in a series of small loops that look rather like a cursive 'me'. (44) Here again it is the repetition in the decorative pen-work that suggests this volume was produced by a team.

One final example of the possible commercial copying of works by Grosseteste is MS Bodley 652. This manuscript consists of three booklets, all copied in the late thirteenth century. The first contains the Middle English work Joseph, dated 1250-1300. This booklet might have been added at almost any time, and need not concern us here. (45) The second contains the Lucidarius, another version of Honorius of Autun's Elucidarium. (46) It also has a copy of the famous letter allegedly sent from Prester John to Frederick Barbarossa. (47) The third contains the Chasteau d'amour. Although, like many collections of romances, MS Bodley 652 uses cheap parchment, the texts are quite elegantly copied. (48) All three booklets are codicologically independent, and the dimensions of the ruling are slightly different, but the decorative work in booklets two and three seems to be by the same hand. This is most apparent in the large initials on folios [11.sup.r], [46.sup.v], and [52.sup.r] that follow a common pattern, with a gilded letter on a rectangular ground filled out in pink and blue-grey, spotted with white.

This is but a cursory survey, but it does suggest some probable patterns in thirteenth-century book production. Large teams of the size of those that copied the Auchinleck MS are not in evidence. Instead we find numerous manuscripts where two or three scribes have collaborated or where a single artist has worked on two adjoining booklets. A certain number of texts are highly popular and survive in numerous copies, often taking the form of small booklets or fascicles. These fascicles could have circulated independently for some time, but when the decoration is the same, as is the case with MSS Harley 3860 and Bodley 652, or when the same hand copies several fascicles, as is the case with MSS Douce 132/137 and Harley 978, it seems far more likely that they were all purchased at roughly the same time. In no single case can it be established with absolute certainty how or where these booklets were copied, but the most likely source of many of them would be a scriveners' alley. All this suggests that the 'lay establishment specialising in the copying and illustration of secular Anglo-Norman literature in the second quarter of the thirteenth century' described by David Ross was not that uncommon. If this shop was like many of the others, however, it would have also extended its trade to include religious literature in Anglo-Norman, which seems to have been the hard core of the nascent market.

The great appeal of a commercial book trade was that it could provide a wide choice, meeting the diverse needs of a diverse readership. The thirteenth-century copyists were not yet in a position to undertake the massive miscellanies, sometimes dubbed single-volume libraries, that were to become common a century later. Instead they offered their customers a selection of smaller and cheaper units that could be combined to meet a particular individual's interests. If we were to seek a term for the kind of loose collection that was produced in this way, one possibility would be 'manual'. Previously reserved chiefly for Latin breviaries, in the thirteenth century the term begins to be applied to a much broader range of portable works. The Manuel des peches, for one, explains that 'Le manuel est apele | Car en mein deit estre porte' (it is called a manual because it is to be held in the hand). (49) The term captures the appeal of the content, basic instruction, whether in husbandry, household management, or devotional practice, but it also captures the form, a work that was small enough to be portable. The terms 'manual' and 'miscellany' are in no sense precise codicological categories (the most interesting 'manuals' contain a miscellaneous selection of items, and there is no reason not to call the smaller miscellanies 'manuals'). But the two do capture an important shift from the smaller Oxford booklets of Anglo-Norman romances in the mid thirteenth century to the often much larger (but often less elegant) volumes of Middle English romances emanating from London in the 1330s.

Unfortunately, one of the key pieces of evidence for the transition from commercial copying of Anglo-Norman to commercial copying of Middle English was almost entirely destroyed in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731. This is MS Cotton Vitellius D. iii, or what remains of it, the fragments from twenty-six leaves. The 1696 catalogue provides a basic description, however, and from this it is possible to deduce that the manuscript once contained texts in Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English, including the Latin history of the abbey of Fescamps in Normandy, Anglo-Norman verses on the Old and New Testaments, the life of the Virgin, the Passion, an Anglo-Norman rhymed computus, a Latin commentary on Macrobius, and the prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen. (50) The manuscript was the work of at least three scribes who maintained a common layout of double columns of about forty lines to the page with off-set letters splashed in red. Gisela Guddat-Figge dates it on paleographical grounds to about 1275. What makes the manuscript unique, however, as Guddat-Figge notes, is that it combines both Anglo-Norman and English romances: 'With due caution--after all, various MSS. may have been bound together--I would like to draw attention to one fact: flanked by Bible stories and pious meditations appear Florence and Blauncheflur (in English) and Amis and Amiloun (French). This is the only case I know of where a French and an English romance occur in one and the same MS.' (p. 180).

It is not only in its juxtaposing of French and English romances that the Cotton manuscript marks a transitional moment. Originally 213 leaves, it is far larger than most of the Anglo-Norman collections I have considered and as large as many of the miscellanies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although still a hundred folios less than the Auchinleck MS. On the other hand, it preserves some of the elegant features of the earlier works, including fully detached initial letters. The texts of the romances are also transitional. Florence and Blauncheflur is a word-for-word or first-generation translation from Anglo-Norman, and is found along with Horn and the Anglo-Norman Assumpcion de nostre dame in one of the earliest surviving romance manuscripts, Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 4.27.2, dated roughly 1300, while the Anglo-Norman Amis e Amiloun would soon become popular in Middle English translation. (51) The two stories also turn up in the same manuscripts. The English version of Amis and Amiloun would find its way into the Auchinleck MS along with the Middle English Florence and Blauncheflur, and both reappear at the end of the fourteenth century in the Sutherland MS, British Library MS Egerton 2862, a substantial collection of seven romances. With these two morally elevating, popular tales the scribes of MS Cotton Vitellius D. iii included what were to become familiar items in the commercial book trade. In the singed and twisted fragments of their work we may have the last surviving evidence of the transition from Anglo-Norman to Middle English grubstreet.

I would like to thank Evelyn Mackie and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne for their generous response to numerous queries and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, without whose support I would not have been able to consult the manuscripts.

(1) 'Distresses of a Hired Writer' (1761), in New Essays by Oliver Goldsmith, ed. by Ronald S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), p. 135, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp. 59-60.

(2) Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham, The Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland Advocates' MS 19. 2. 1 (London: Scolar, 1979), p. vii.

(3) Laura H. Loomis, 'The Tale of Sir Thopas', in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. by W. F. Bryan and G. Dempster (1941; repr. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1958), 486-559. Chaucer mentions all three heroes together at lines 898-99. On the basis of the conjunction of these three romances in the Auchinleck MS and other parallels, Loomis argues that Chaucer actually had the manuscript in hand. Pearsall terms the hypothesis 'natural, probable, and pleasing, and [...] irresistibly romantic' (p. xi), but it seems to grossly underestimate the number of copies of these romances that must have been in circulation to support the industry in the first place.

(4) 'The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330-1340', PMLA, 57 (1942), 595-627.

(5) 'The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century', in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. by M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar, 1978), pp. 163-210 (p. 200).

(6) C. Paul Christianson, 'Evidence for the Study of London's Late Medieval Manuscript-Book Trade', in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 87-108 (p. 96).

(7) Pamela R. Robinson, 'A Study of Some Aspects of the Transmission of English Verse Texts in Late Medieval Manuscripts' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1972), pp. 128-31, and Timothy A. Shonk, 'A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript: Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth Century', Speculum, 60 (1985), 71-91.

(8) Auchinleck Manuscript, p. xvi, n. 5. Here Cunningham respects what was, and probably still is, the professional consensus. See, for example, the statement by Ralph Hanna III that in England prior to 1450 'all books are probably "bespoke," the product of special orders', 'Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England', in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 37-51 (p. 37). See, however, Hanna's remarks in 'Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations', Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986), 100-11, where Hanna notes that booklet production 'involves a rather minimal commitment of resources while allowing ongoing book-production' (p. 102) and that 'the codicological form of the resulting book may never be fixed during production', in which case 'the booklet will be sold as a single booklet, and it will thus reflect the producer's interest in marketing' (p. 103).

(9) I echo P. R. Coss, who first suggested that we turn to Anglo-Norman booklets for antecedents of the Auchinleck manuscript in 'Aspects of Cultural Diffusion in Medieval England: The Early Romances, Local Society and Robin Hood', Past and Present, 108 (1985), 35-79 (pp. 60-61). I have also benefited from the survey of John Frankis, 'The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts', in Thirteenth Century England: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1985, ed. by P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 175-84.

(10) 'A Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman Workshop Illustrating Secular Literary Manuscripts?', in Melanges offerts a Rita LeJeune, professeur a' l'Universite de Liege, ed. by Fred Dethier, 2 vols (Gembloux: Duculot, 1969), 1, 689-94 (pp. 693, 694).

(11) A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, ed. by J. J. G. Alexander and others, 6 vols (London: Miller and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982-88), IV: Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190-1250, ed. by Nigel Morgan, Part I, nos 61, 81, 82; Part II, nos 95, 123.

(12) Such work will be greatly aided by the survey made by Ruth J. Dean with the collaboration of Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, ANTS, Occasional Publications Series 3 (London, 1999).

(13) From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). In the introduction to the second edition Clanchy reflects on his original thesis that 'lay literacy grew out of bureaucracy' but acknowledges that this 'can obscure a parallel development [...] whereby clerical habits and values were absorbed into lay households, not so much through knights and burgesses responding to tax demands and royal writs, as through their ladies acquiring prayer books' (p. 19). Thirteenth-century lay women do indeed seem to have been more prominent than lay men as literary patrons for devotional texts, but we must also allow for the possibility that devotional reading was perceived as a suitable activity for women and was therefore more often attributed to them. Simon de Montfort provides one well documented case of a pious male lay reader. See J. R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 88-89, 94-96.

(14) See Linda Marshal and W. Rothwell, 'The Miroir of Robert of Gretham', Medium AEvum, 39 (1970), 320; K. V. Sinclair, 'The Anglo-Norman Patrons of Robert the Chaplain and Robert of Greatham', Forum for Modern Language Studies, 28 (1992), 193-208; and Sinclair's edition, Corset by Rober le Chapelain, A Rhymed Commentary on the Seven Sacraments, ANTS 52 (London, 1995), where, despite his cautious title, he still upholds the view that Robert the Chaplain and Robert Greatham are the same man (p. 21).

15) R. Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 170 and 173. On twelfth-century literary patronage by lay women, see Susan Crane, 'Anglo-Norman Cultures in England, 1066-1460', in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 35-60 (pp. 45-46).

(16) M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 270.

(17) Dorothea Oschinsky, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 387-415.

(18) One of the first to map this field was Leonard Boyle, many of whose key essays on the subject are gathered together in Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200-1400 (London: Variorum, 1981). E. J. Arnould traces the development of Anglo-Norman pastoralia in the first chapter of Le Manuel des peches (see n. 22). W. A. Pantin does the same for Middle English pastoralia in 'Manuals of Instruction for Parish Priests', Chapter 9 in The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; repr. Toronto, 1980). See further Judith Shaw, 'The Influence of Canonical and Episcopal Reform on Popular Books of Instructions', in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 44-60, and Joseph Goering, 'The Literature of Pastoral Care', in William de Montibus (c. 1140-1213): The Schools and the Literature of Pastoral Care (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992), pp. 58-83.

(19) D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols (London, 1737), I, 627. Marion Gibbs and Jane Lang survey the promulgation and administration of these decrees in Bishops and Reform, 1215-1272, With Special Reference to the Lateran Council of 1215 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934).

(20) 'Prout Deus eis inspiraverit, parachianos suos instruant et eis [catholic fidei] expositionem frequenter domestico idiomate sane inculcant' (Wilkins, Concilia, 572 and discussion in Arnould, Manuel, pp. 11-12).

(21) Gray's career has received little attention from modern historians. Some sense of his activities can be gained from the The Register, or Rolls, of Walter Gray, Lord Archbishop of York, ed. by James Raine, Surtees Society, 56 (Durham, 1872).

(22) Hope Emily Allen, 'The Manuel des Pechiez and Its Scholastic Prologue', Romanic Review, 8 (1917), 434-62, raises doubts about Waddington's authorship that are echoed by E. J. Arnould, Le Manuel des peches: etude de la litterature religieuse anglo-normande (XIII siecle) (Paris: Droz, 1940), pp. 244-49. Matthew Sullivan, 'The Author of the Manuel des peches', Notes & Queries, 236 (1991), 155-57, provides a much more detailed biography of the archbishop's seneschal. He does not provide any further direct evidence that this is the same William of Waddington as the one whose name appears in the Manuel, although this seems probable.

(23) 'Readers of the Manuel des peches', Romania, 113 (1992-95), 233-42 (pp. 241-42). See also his 'A Brief Textual History of the Manuel des peches', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 93 (1992), 337-46. There is still no satisfactory modern edition of the Manuel. F. J. Furnivall reproduces a transcription of the complete text in Robert of Brunne's Handlyng Synne (London: Roxburghe Club, 1862) and some sections of it in his edition of the same work for the Early English Text Society (OS 109 and 123, 1901 and 1903). Arnould provides a textual discussion and edits the prologue and epilogue in Manuel des peches.

(24) See R. N. Swanson, 'The Origins of The Lay Folk's Catechism', Medium AEvum, 60 (1991), 92-100; Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988); and discussion by Nicholas Watson in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 335-36.

(25) James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 140-46.

(26) See Evelyn Mackie, 'Robert Grosseteste's Chasteu d'amur: A Text in Context' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2001), replacing J. Murray, Le Chateau d'Amour de Robert Grosseteste, eveque de Lincoln (Paris: Champion, 1918). The most recent list of manuscripts prior to Mackie's is that of Kari Sajavaara in The Middle English Translations of Robert Grosseteste's Chateau d'Amour (Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique, 1967). Mackie has come across references to thirty-one manuscripts all told, including the eighteen extant and one that survived in Metz until World War II. Grosseteste's authorship is persuasively argued by S. Harrison Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 152. One of the few recent critical studies I am aware of is Christiana Whitehead, 'A Fortress and a Shield: The Representation of the Virgin in the Chateau d'Amour of Robert Grosseteste', in Writing Religious Women: Female Spirituality and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. by Denis Renevey and Christiana Whitehead (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 109-32.

(27) The term 'friar's miscellany' was applied by Rossell Hope Robbins to MSS Harley 913, Harley 2253, Digby 86, Oxford, Jesus College 29, Cotton Caligula A. ix, and Cambridge, Trinity College 323 in Secular Lyrics of the XIV and XV Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. xvii-xviii. Derek Pearsall discusses the category and its relation to the friars' preaching mission in considerable detail in Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 94-102. Doubts have been raised about the attribution of some of these manuscripts. See Brian D. H. Miller, 'The Early History of Bodleian MS Digby 86', Annuale Medievale, 4 (1963), 23-56 (p. 44 and n. 3); Judith Tschann and M. B. Parkes, Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, EETS SS 16 (Oxford, 1996), who suggest the scribe, possibly Grimhull, was probably a layman (pp. lviii-lix, n. 6); and Carter Revard, 'Gilote et Johane: An Interlude in B. L. MS. Harley 2253', Studies in Philology, 79 (1982), 122-46 (n. 32) and 'Scribe and Provenance of Harley 2253', in Studies in Harley 2253, ed. by Susan Fein (Kalamazoo, Michigan: TEAMS, 2000), 21-110. A possible Anglo-Norman analogy is Lambeth Palace MS 522, which contains Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour, the Mirour de Seinte Eglyse, and a version of the Gospel of Nicodemus, and has illustrations of Benedictine monks and of friars, both Dominicans and Franciscans, preaching. See Frankis, 'Social Context of Vernacular Writing', p. 177.

(28) This distinction between professional and in-house copying cannot be maintained too rigorously. As Graham Pollard observed long ago, some scholars could write as elegantly as any professional and some would have supplemented their income by copying. See 'The Pecia System in the Medieval Universities', in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries, p. 156.

(29) Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, ii, p. 96. Morgan doubts that there was actually a scriptorium in Westminster and suggests that London or Winchester might be more likely locations for those who worked in the Westminster style. He is also sharply critical of the theory, once much favoured, that Matthew Paris led a school of scribes and artists at St Albans, but does allow that he copied and probably illustrated texts in the 1240s (ii, 95-96).

(30) R. H. and M. A. Rouse, 'The Book Trade at the University of Paris, ca. 1250-ca.1350', in La Production du livre universitaire au moyen age: exemplar et pecia, ed. by L. J. Bataillon, B. G. Guyot, and R. H. Rouse (Paris: CNRS, 1988), pp. 41-114, repr. in R. H. and M. A. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 259-338, and M. B. Parkes, 'The Provision of Books', in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. by J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 407-84 (pp. 462-68).

(31) R. H. and M. A. Rouse, 'The Commercial Production of Manuscript Books in Late-Thirteenth-Century and Early-Fourteenth-Century Paris', in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, Proceedings of the Second Conference in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1988, ed. by Linda Brownrigg (Los Altos Hill, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), pp. 103-15, and Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200-1500 (Turnhout: Miller, 2000), pp. 25-33 and 99. Paris was not necessarily the first centre for such copying, however. The Saville manuscript of La Chevalerie Vivien and Aliscans provides an even earlier example of a commercial trade in romances. It is the work of three main scribes who often trade o. within the same quire and even the same line, and were thus presumably working in the same place. See Ian Short, 'An Early French Epic Manuscript: Oxford, Bodleian Library, French e. 32', in The Medieval Alexander Legend and Romance Epic: Essays in Honour of David F. A. Ross, ed. by Peter Noble, Lucie Polak, and Claire Isoz (Milwood, NY: Kraus, 1982), pp. 173-91, and Duncan McMillan, 'Un manuscrit hors serie: Le cas du manuscrit S de la Chevalerie Vivien-Aliscans (Bodleienne, French e. 32)', in Symposium in honorem prof. M. de Riquer, 5 vols (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1984), v, 161-207. Short dates the manuscript to 'the closing years of the twelfth century' (p. 182) and suggests it came from eastern or north-eastern France (p. 182), but McMillan finds the dialectal variation between the three main scribes prevents it from being easily localized.

(32) Talbot, 'The Universities and the Medieval Library', p. 81, n. 25; Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 157, n. 13.

(33) 'A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: An Illustrated Manuel des Peches of the Thirteenth Century', in Medieval Book Production, pp. 163-81.

(34) 'The "Booklet": A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts', Codicologica, 3 (1980), 46-69 (pp. 64-67).

(35) Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 83.

(36) See Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

(37) I discuss my difficulties in resolving whether Harley 978 was copied by professionals (as the general appearance of the manuscript might suggest) or by Reading monks (as the presence of an obit for one of the brothers in what appears to be one of the major hands might suggest) in Textual Situations, pp. 98-99. For an alternative theory as to how the manuscript was assembled, see Alan Coates, English Medieval Books: The Reading Abbey Collections from Foundation to Dispersal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 75.

(38) La Lumere as Lais by Pierre d'Abernon, ed. by Glynn Hesketh, 3 vols, ANTS 54-55, 56-57, and 58 (London, 1996-2000); Rauf de Linham, Kalender, ed. by Tony Hunt, ANTS, Plain Text Series 1 (London, 1983).

(39) Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, p. 215; Hesketh, Lumere, III, 19. Yves Lefe'vre o.ers a general survey of the dissemination of the work and its numerous translations and adaptations in L'Elucidarium et les lucidaires (Paris: Boccard, 1954).

(40) Hesketh, Lumere, III, 10-11, 18.

(41) Brief descriptions are offered by H. D. L. Ward and J. A. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols (London: 1883-1910; repr. 1962), II, 199-206 and III, 296-97; Arnould, Manuel des peches, pp. 385-86; Oschinsky, Walter of Henley, pp. 14-15; A. G. Rigg, A Book of British Kings, 1200 BC-1399 AD, Edited from British Library MSS Harley 3860, Cotton Claudius D. vii, and Harley 1808 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000), pp. 18-19.

(42) Les Sept Sages de Rome: Roman en prose du XIII siecle d'apre's le manuscrit no 2137 de la B. N., Centre de Recherches et d'Applications Linquistiques, Universite de Nancy II, Travaux 2 (1981). Other versions are listed in Brian S. Merrilees, 'La Vie des sept dormants en ancien francais', Romania, 95 (1974), 362-80.

(43) I explore this question further in 'Was Grosseteste the Father of English Literature?', forthcoming in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 47 (2003).

(44) See Sonia Patterson, 'Paris and Oxford University Manuscripts in the Thirteenth Century' (unpublished B.Litt. thesis, Oxford, 1969), p. 85. There is some variation in the treatment. The small wave, as it appears in booklet 2 on the bottom of both the recto and verso of fols 23 and 24 is very like the wave in booklet 3 on fols [49.sup.v], [51.sup.v], and [54.sup.v], but not quite the same as the wave on fols [41.sup.v] or [48.sup.r].

(45) The poem is edited by Arthur Sampson Napier, Iacob and Ioseph: A Middle-English Poem of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916).

(46) The Bodleian Summary Catalogue (2306) attributes this Lucidarius to Geoffrey of Waterford (Jofroi de Waterford), a Dominican who was part of the Anglo-Norman community in Ireland and translated Dares the Phrygian's history of Troy, Eutropius's history of Rome, and the Secreta secretorum, but the attribution seems doubtful. One Lucidarius is found in Bibliothe'que Nationale, MS fonds francais 1822, fols [226.sup.r]-[248.sup.v], which contains other texts by Jofroi, but the MS Bodley 652 Lucidarius is yet another version of this much translated and adapted work. On Jofroi's career and works see Jacques Monfrin, 'Le 'Secret des secrets': recherches sur les traductions francaises suivies du texte de Jofroi de Waterford et Servais Copale' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Paris, E cole Nationale des Chartres, 1947), a summary of which is printed as Positions des the'ses soutenues par les ele'ves de la promotion de 1947 pour obtenir le diplome d'archiviste paleographe; C. Pinchbeck, 'A Medival Self-Educator', Medium vum, 17 (1948), 1-14; Albert Henry, 'Un Text nologique de Jofroi de Waterford et Servais Copale', Romania, 107 (1986), 1-37; and Keith V. Sinclair, 'Anglo-Norman at Waterford: The Mute Testimony of MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 405', in Medieval French Textual Studies in Memory of T. B. W. Reid, ed. by Ian Short, ANTS Occasional Publications Series 1 (London, 1984), pp. 219-38. On the Old French Lucidarius see Henning Duwell, Eine altfranzosische Ubersetzung des Elucidarium, Edition des Elucidaire der Handschrift Lambeth Palace 431 (Munich: Fink, 1974), p. cx.

(47) La lettre du pretre Jean: Les versions en ancien francais et en ancien occitan, ed. by Martin Gosman (Groningen: Bouma, 1982), pp. 71-72.

(48) Sandra Hindman draws attention to this phenomenon in Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chretien de Troyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 3 and 8. She finds that many of the Chretien manuscripts, mostly dating from 1275-1325, despite their illustrations are on cheap parchment which has then been heavily worn, and suggests their shabby condition reflects their extensive public use.

(49) Princeton University Library, Taylor Medieval MS 1, fol. iv, ll. 9-10, cited in Bennett, 'A Book Designed for a Noblewoman', p. 166.

(50) See Gisela Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (Munich: Fink, 1976), pp. 180-82. Guddat-Figge quotes from the relevant section of the catalogue, which is now available in reprint as Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library, 1696 (Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Cottoniae), Thomas Smith, Reprinted from Sir Robert Harley's Copy, Annotated by Humfrey Wanley, Together with Documents Relating to the Fire of 1731, ed. by C. G. C. Tite (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984).

(51) Lillian Herlands Hornstein, 'Miscellaneous Romances', in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500, Vol. I, Romances, ed. by J. Burke Severs (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), pp. 145-46. On the differences between the Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions of Amis and Amiloun, see Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 117-28.