Christ Church MS. 179

Provenance and Acquisition

The context of the production of the manuscript is provided by Colson, ‘Alien Communities’, 121–24 and by Frońska at Royal Manuscripts, 177. In one important detail, however, these need to be revised: they share the assumption held by Kitchin (55) that our volume’s creation can be dated to 1503, the year of the petition to Henry VII and ordinances of the Confraternity (item 1 and 2), with item 3 added later. However, as one scribe worked through this manuscript, with no sign of the work being done at separate sessions, the last date in the manuscript must be the terminus ante quem non for its production. As that final item is a list by year, it strongly suggests that the last entry, 1517, is the year in which he was writing. This hypothesis may be supported by the illumination: as Frońska notes, the depiction of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York in prayer is ‘an ideal and atemporal adoration’ because the Queen herself and three of the seven children were already dead by the time of composition of item 2. The fictive or memorial nature of the miniature is enhanced further if we recognise that the king also was dead at the time of painting, the illumination an act of pious remembering of the moment of foundation. The supposition of its date is reinforced by the similarity between our manuscript and Wells MS 6 (noted above).

The manuscript is not mentioned by Janet Backhouse, ‘Illuminated Manuscripts associated with Henry VII and Members of his Immediate Family’ in Benjamin Thompson ed., The Reign of Henry VII (Stamford, 1995), 175–87, but Scott, 2:366 includes this in her list of those manuscripts which ‘can be added to his evident ownership or suggested as possibly owned by [Henry VII]’. The re-dating of the manuscript disposes of this possibility which was already unlikely since, as Frońska emphasises, it was clearly available for use by the Confraternity in 1517. The half-legible note at bottom right of fol. 7, seemingly adding further names to the list, also militates against the possibility that it was ever in royal hands and supports the suggestion that this was owned by the Confraternity. The only other intervention in the manuscript is a note by someone with merely pretensions to being literatus ; it begins above the image of the Virgin at fol. 1^v and continuing on the opposite recto: ‘marius[sic] | in manibus tuus[sic] commendo sperito meo o domino [sic]’ (within the top bounding lines, s. xvi).

It has been suggested that this manuscript was bequeathed to Christ Church by William Wake (Colson, ‘Alien Communities’, 123). Though there is a pencil note recording the location ‘Wake Archives Supra’ (inside the front cover, s. xx), this cannot be taken as proof that it came by that route. This volume does not appear in Wake’s schedule of manuscripts given to ChCh, MS 352/8, though that in itself is not conclusive evidence. More decisive is the internal evidence which demonstrates its presence before Wake’s bequest was incorporated into the collection. At very top right of fol. 1, there is the Old Archives number ‘A.2.12’, deleted; this section of the Old Archives Catalogue was an addition to the original arrangement, made during the Librarianship of Richard Hind, 1748–53; this suggests that the volume arrived in the Old Library in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and perhaps close to the middle of the century (see Appendix II). Just below that shelfmark at fol. 1 is its replacement, written by Edward Smallwell: the New Library number of ‘E.7’, which also appears at top left of the front pastedown (see Appendix IV). It will be remembered that Wake manuscripts were not included in Smallwell’s sequence of shelfmarks. The later pencil note reflects the subsequent move of our manuscript within the New Library: Wake Archives Supra is the room where now all the manuscripts are held.