The Lincoln Thornton Manuscript is a medieval manuscript compiled and copied by the fifteenth-century English scribe and landowner Robert Thornton, MS 91 in the library of Lincoln Cathedral. The manuscript is notable for containing single versions of important poems such as the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Perceval of Galles , and gives evidence of the variegated literary culture of fifteenth-century England. The manuscript contains three main sections: the first one contains mainly narrative poems (romances, for the most part); the second contains mainly religious poems and includes texts by Richard Rolle, giving evidence of works by that author which are now lost; and the third section contains a medical treatise, the Liber de diversis medicinis.
The Lincoln Thornton Manuscript (sometimes simply referred to as "the" Thornton manuscript) consists of seventeen quires of varying numbers of sheets. The manuscript is catalogued as Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 (formerly A.5.2 [1] ), and is held in the Lincoln Cathedral Library. It was written between 1430 and 1440 [2] in a northern dialect. [1] [3]
Most likely, Thornton prepared a number of quires and copied texts on them as they became available, and may have collected both his manuscripts out of the same collection of individual quires. [4] Some quires show evidence of having been used or read independently before being bound together. For instance, the beginning of the Alliterative Morte Arthure (AMA), which starts quire d, has rounded edges and a "faint grimy sheen," suggesting that this quire "was left unbound for some time, absorbing the dust." [5]
The texts in the manuscript fall into three main sections. The first (gatherings A-K) contains mainly romances interspersed with an occasional miscellaneous texts; the second (L-P) contains mainly religious texts; the third (Q) contains the Liber de diversis medicinis, a collection of medical lore. [6]
The beginning of the manuscript is "dominate[d]" by romances; the rest of the manuscript contains "religious and medicinal tracts in prose and verse." The organization suggests the compiler's recognition of genre. [2] The variety of genres found in the manuscript is deemed to be representative of what Edmund Spenser may have been influenced by in composing The Faerie Queene . [7] Because of the different genres represented it has been termed a "household miscellany." [8]
In the list below, short miscellaneous texts are indented. Titles are represented as given by Brewer and Owen's facsimile edition. [9]
This section contains, besides sermons, hymns, and prayer, a number of texts by Richard Rolle. [10] Noteworthy also is The Previte off the Passioune, a translation of a text by Bonaventure.
Among the best known poems of the Manuscript is a poem on death later partially quoted by John Ball:
When Adam dalfe and Eve spane, Go spire, if thou may spede, Whare was than the pride of mane, That nowe merres his mede? Of erthe and lame as was Adam, Makede to noye and nede. We er als he maked to be, Whilles we this lyfe salle ledenoye and nede. We er als he maked to be, Whilles we this lyfe salle lede
Among the archaisms of the poem "spire" means 'inquire', "lame" means loam, and "noye" to be vexed.
The third section, consisting of quire q, contains Liber de diversis medicinis, a collection of medical advice and recipes. It is described as "the usual mixture of genuine therapeutic lore and humbug" and includes a recipe "for to gare a woman say what þu askes hir." [3] The text builds on both local, vernacular texts and "the learned Latin recipe traditions." [11]
The manuscript is illustrated with initials, with a comparatively great number found in the first two texts: the Prose Alexander (PA) has one large initial and a hundred and three smaller initials and the Alliterative Morte Arthure (AMA) has eighty-two small decorated initials. The PA also has nine blank spaces, left open for large initials or illustrations. This density is additional evidence that the quires containing these texts were separate booklets. [12] While it was long assumed that Thornton had made the initials himself, Joel Fredell distinguished three distinctly different styles and argued they were made by professional artists. [13] Fredell states that the PA was prepared for the richest illustrative program in the manuscript, which Thornton for a variety of reasons (financial and political) was not able to execute; he may not have had the money or the available resources in his area to complete it. The AMA was finished professionally, assuming second place in the intended ranking of the texts; and a lesser scheme was laid out for the other texts. [14]
Robert Thornton was a member of the landed gentry in Yorkshire as well as an amateur scribe and collector. [15] There are many mistakes in the manuscript, which is written in "a fairly typical mid-fifteenth-century cursive hand." The name "Robert Thornton" is signed a few items, and the phrase R. Thornton dictus qui scripsit sit benedictus ("May the said R. Thornton who wrote this be blessed") occurs four times, and is also found in Thornton's other manuscript, the London Thornton Manuscript (London, British Library, Add. MS 31042). [1]
The manuscript was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. [16] In 1866 and 1867, the religious texts in the Thornton manuscripts were published for the Early English Text Society (EETS). The Richard Rolle material was published at the end of the nineteenth century by Carl Horstmann. The Liber de Diversis Medicinis was published in 1938 by Margaret Ogden for the EETS. A facsimile of the manuscript was published in 1975 by Derek Brewer and A.E.B. Owen, [6] who had disbound and examined it the year before. [17] The facsimile was updated and reprinted in 1977.
The Lincoln Thornton MS and the London Thornton MS are of great value since they are the sole witnesses for much of their content; according to Michael Johnston, "his two compilations can be counted among the most important textual witnesses to Middle English romance." [18]
Derek Brewer calculated that there must have been at least six now-lost manuscripts that provided the source material for the Thornton MS, which evidences a wide "spread of manuscripts now lost." Sir Percyvelle, for instance, was originally composed in the fourteenth century in a north-east Midland dialect, and one version would have traveled north to be copied by Thornton while another traveled south to be referenced by Geoffrey Chaucer in Sir Thopas . [19]
The manuscript is also seen as evidence of a change in religiosity taking place during the fifteenth century, when a broader dispersion of religious material began to make "priestly mediation" unnecessary. Its inclusion of a sermon by the Benedictine monk John Gaytryge is considered "evidence of lay people taking responsibility for teaching themselves their 'catechism'....The laity were increasingly able to instruct themselves." [8]
Le Morte d'Arthur is a 15th-century Middle English prose reworking by Sir Thomas Malory of tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table, along with their respective folklore. In order to tell a "complete" story of Arthur from his conception to his death, Malory compiled, rearranged, interpreted and modified material from various French and English sources. Today, this is one of the best-known works of Arthurian literature. Many authors since the 19th-century revival of the legend have used Malory as their principal source.
Constantine was a 6th-century king of Dumnonia in sub-Roman Britain, who was remembered in later British tradition as a legendary King of Britain. The only contemporary information about him comes from Gildas, who castigated him for various sins, including the murder of two "royal youths" inside a church. The historical Constantine is also known from the genealogies of the Dumnonian kings, and possibly inspired the tradition of Saint Constantine, a king-turned-monk venerated in Southwest Britain and elsewhere.
St Erkenwald is a fourteenth-century alliterative poem in Middle English, perhaps composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s. It has sometimes been attributed, owing to the Cheshire/Shropshire/Staffordshire Dialect in which it is written, to the Pearl poet who probably wrote the poems Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Huchoun, Huchown or Huchowne "of the Awle Ryale" is a poet conjectured to have been writing sometime in the 14th century. Some academics, following the Scottish antiquarian George Neilson (1858–1923), have identified him with a Scottish knight, Hugh of Eglinton, and advanced his authorship of several significant pieces of alliterative verse. Current opinion is that there is little evidence to support this.
The Alliterative Morte Arthure is a 4346-line Middle English alliterative poem, retelling the latter part of the legend of King Arthur. Dating from about 1400, it is preserved in a single copy in the 15th-century Lincoln Thornton Manuscript, now in Lincoln Cathedral Library.
The Lincoln Cathedral Library is a library of Lincoln Cathedral in Lincolnshire, England. It is housed in a building designed by Christopher Wren.
Robert Thornton was a Yorkshire landowner, a member of the landed gentry. His efforts as an amateur scribe and manuscript compiler resulted in the preservation of many valuable works of Middle English literature, and have given him an important place in its history.
The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne is an Arthurian romance of 702 lines written in Middle English alliterative verse. Despite its title, it centres on the deeds of Sir Gawain. The poem, thought to have been composed in Cumberland in the late 14th or early 15th century, survives in four different manuscripts from widely separated areas of England.
The Alliterative Revival is a term adopted by literary historians to refer to the resurgence of poetry using the alliterative verse form in Middle English between c. 1350 and 1500. Alliterative verse was the traditional verse form of Old English poetry; the last known alliterative poem prior to the Revival was Layamon's Brut, which dates from around 1190.
Octavian is a 14th-century Middle English verse translation and abridgement of a mid-13th century Old French romance of the same name. This Middle English version exists in three manuscript copies and in two separate compositions, one of which may have been written by the 14th-century poet Thomas Chestre who also composed Libeaus Desconus and Sir Launfal. The other two copies are not by Chestre and preserve a version of the poem in regular twelve-line tail rhyme stanzas, a verse structure that was popular in the 14th century in England. Both poetic compositions condense the Old French romance to about 1800 lines, a third of its original length, and relate “incidents and motifs common in legend, romance and chanson de geste.” The story describes a trauma that unfolds in the household of Octavian, later the Roman Emperor Augustus, whose own mother deceives him into sending his wife and his two newborn sons into exile and likely death. After many adventures, the family are at last reunited and the guilty mother is appropriately punished.
Sir Eglamour of Artois is a Middle English verse romance that was written sometime around 1350. It is a narrative poem of about 1300 lines, a tail-rhyme romance that was quite popular in its day, judging from the number of copies that have survived – four manuscripts from the 15th century or earlier and a manuscript and five printed editions from the 16th century. The poem tells a story that is constructed from a large number of elements found in other medieval romances. Modern scholarly opinion has been critical of it because of this, describing it as unimaginative and of poor quality. Medieval romance as a genre, however, concerns the reworking of "the archetypal images of romance" and if this poem is viewed from a 15th-century perspective as well as from a modern standpoint – and it was obviously once very popular, even being adapted into a play in 1444 – one might find a "romance [that] is carefully structured, the action highly unified, the narration lively."
The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain is a Middle Scots Arthurian romance written in alliterative verse of 1362 lines, known solely from a printed edition of 1508 in the possession of the National Library of Scotland. No manuscript copy of this lively and exciting tale has survived.
The Erl of Toulouse is a Middle English chivalric romance centered on an innocent persecuted wife. It claims to be a translation of a French lai, but the original lai is lost. It is thought to date from the late 14th century, and survives in four manuscripts of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Erl of Toulouse is written in a north-east Midlands dialect of Middle English.
Sir Degrevant is a Middle English romance from the early fifteenth century. Generally classified as a "composite romance," that is, a romance that does not fit easily into the standard classification of romances, it is praised for its realism and plot. The poem is preserved in two manuscripts along with a variety of secular and courtly texts, one of which was compiled by the fifteenth-century scribe Robert Thornton. It is notable for its blending of literary material and social reality.
The Prose Life of Alexander is a Middle English prose romance extant in a single copy, found in the mid-fifteenth century Lincoln Thornton Manuscript. It was edited by J. S. Westlake for the Early English Text Society.
The London Thornton Manuscript is a medieval manuscript compiled and copied by the fifteenth-century English scribe and landowner Robert Thornton. The manuscript was long considered a miscellany, but is more properly called a collection of spiritual texts.
The Harley Lyrics is the usual name for a collection of lyrics in Middle English, Anglo Norman, and Latin found in Harley MS 2253, a manuscript dated ca. 1340 in the British Library's Harleian Collection. The lyrics contain "both religious and secular material, in prose and verse and in a wide variety of genres." The manuscript is written in three recognisable hands: scribe A, scribe B or the Ludlow scribe, and scribe C.
The StanzaicMorte Arthur is an anonymous 14th-century Middle English poem in 3,969 lines, about the adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, and Lancelot's tragic dissension with King Arthur. The poem is usually called the Stanzaic Morte Arthur or Stanzaic Morte to distinguish it from another Middle English poem, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. It exercised enough influence on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur to have, in the words of one recent scholar, "played a decisive though largely unacknowledged role in the way succeeding generations have read the Arthurian legend".
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
The Pearl Manuscript, also known as the Gawain manuscript, is an illuminated manuscript produced somewhere in northern England in the late 14th century or the beginning of the 15th century. It is one of the best-known Middle English manuscripts, the only one containing alliterative verse solely, and the oldest surviving English manuscript to have full-page illustrations. It contains the only surviving copies of four of the masterpieces of medieval English literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. It has been described as "one of the greatest manuscript treasures for medieval literature", and "the most famous of all romance manuscripts".