{"id":54594,"date":"2025-05-15T17:35:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T16:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=54594"},"modified":"2025-05-15T17:35:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T16:35:17","slug":"from-my-diary-grays-inn-ms-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2025\/05\/15\/from-my-diary-grays-inn-ms-3\/","title":{"rendered":"From my diary: Gray’s Inn MS 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gray’s Inn<\/a> is located in central London near the law courts.\u00a0 It is one of the four “inns of court” to which all barristers and judges must belong.\u00a0 The inns of court are medieval, but I know nothing much about them.<\/p>\n

Gray’s Inn Library contains a collection of 24 medieval manuscripts.\u00a0 Horwood, the author of the catalogue from 1869, does not know where they came from, and I have been unable to locate any recent scholarship on the manuscripts. But the suggestion is that they were donated by members over the centuries.\u00a0 Some of these did come from monastic institutions.<\/p>\n

Gray’s Inn MS 3 is a collection of saints’s lives.\u00a0 From the Legendiers Latins website<\/a>, I learned that it contains a copy of Folcard’s “Life” of St Botulf (BHL 1428), on folios 136r-137r.\u00a0 This is a copy of the full text, but without either the rather nervous dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester, nor the “translatio” of Botulf’s relics from Iken to wherever.\u00a0 The Horwood catalogue from 1869 gives only a very brief entry, which tells us nothing about the origins of the manuscript.\u00a0 It suggests that the manuscript is 11th century, which seems a bit early to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday I sent an email of enquiry.\u00a0 Later the same day, I was astonished and delighted to receive a reply, containing a PDF with colour photographs of the relevant pages.\u00a0 Very efficient indeed!\u00a0 I am very grateful to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn.<\/p>\n

Here’s a bit of folio 136r.\u00a0 It shows the “explicit” from the previous text – the passiones of SS. Cyriacus and Jullita – and\u00a0 then in red the “incipit vita sancti botulfi abbatis quae celebratur xv kalend. Julii.” – “the start of the life of St. Botulf the abbot, which is celebrated on 15th day before the kalends of July.”\u00a0 That’s the 17th June in our calendar.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The images are perfectly clear and readable.\u00a0 I have started to process the manuscript into my collation of all the manuscripts, which is in a Word document.\u00a0 You can see in the image above that, as I am the proud owner of a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro – albeit in the elderly version 9 – I have added “sticky notes” to the PDFs, in order to indicate where the start of each chapter is.\u00a0 This habit assists you markedly in finding passages in the text when you are trying to compare manuscripts.\u00a0 You learn by doing.<\/p>\n

My initial impression is that the variants in this copy feel a bit unsound.\u00a0 These are later tweaks to the text.\u00a0 But we will see.<\/p>\n

One very interesting feature appears in the names of kings.\u00a0 The scribe has written them, not as “Adelmundus”, which is what every other manuscript has, but as “Aethelmundus”, complete with ligature “\u00e6” and “thorn” – \u00e6\u00feelmundus:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have never seen this in a Latin manuscript.\u00a0 Is this an antiquarian at work, perhaps?\u00a0 I really ought to dig out some paleography materials and try to work out the date of the bookhand.\u00a0 Maybe later.<\/p>\n

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Gray’s Inn is located in central London near the law courts.\u00a0 It is one of the four “inns of court” to which all barristers and judges must belong.\u00a0 The inns of court are medieval, but I know nothing much about them. Gray’s Inn Library contains a collection of 24 medieval manuscripts.\u00a0 Horwood, the author of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[332,334,1075],"class_list":["post-54594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-botolph","tag-botwulf","tag-manuscripts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}