Early English Meals and Manners

Part Ii of _jacob’s Well_, Edited by Dr. Brandeis; the Alliterative

Siege of Jerusalem, edited by the late Prof. Dr. E. Kölbing and Prof. Dr. Kaluza; an Introduction and Glossary to the Minor Poems of the Vernon MS. by H. Hartley, M.A.; Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue, edited from the unique MS. Univ. Coll. Oxford MS. No. 85, by Mr. J. W. H. Atkins of Owen’s College; a Northern Verse Chronicle of England to 1327 A.D., in 42,000 lines, about 1420 A.D., edited by M. L. Perrin, B.A.; Prof. Bruce’s Introduction to The English Conquest of Ireland,

Part Ii; and Dr. Furnivall’s Edition of the _lichfield Gilds_, Which Is

all printed, and waits only for the Introduction, that Prof. E. C. K. Gonner has kindly undertaken to write for the book. Canon Wordsworth of Marlborough has given the Society a copy of the Leofric Canonical Rule, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, Parker MS. 191, C.C.C. Cambridge, and Prof. Napier will edit it, with a fragment of the englisht Capitula of Bp. Theodulf. The Coventry Leet Book is being copied for the Society by Miss M. Dormer Harris--helpt by a contribution from the Common Council of the City,--and will be publisht by the Society (Miss Harris editing), as its contribution to our knowledge of the provincial city life of the 15th century.

Dr. Brie of Berlin has undertaken to edit the prose Brut or Chronicle of Britain attributed to Sir John Mandeville, and printed by Caxton. He has already examined more than 100 English MSS. and several French ones, to get the best text, and find out its source.

The Extra-Series Texts for 1904 will be chosen from Lydgate’s DeGuilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Part III, edited by Miss Locock; Dr. M. Konrath’s re-edition of William of Shorcham’s Poems, Part II; Dr. E. A. Kock’s edition of Lovelich’s Merlin from the unique MS. in Corpus Christi Coll., Cambridge; the Macro Plays, edited from Mr. Gurney’s MS. by Dr. Furnivall and A. W. Pollard, M.A.; Prof. Erdmann’s re-edition of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (issued also by the Chaucer Society); Miss Rickert’s re-edition of the Romance of Emare; Prof. I. Gollanez’s re-edition of two Alliterative Poems, Winner and Waster, &c, ab. 1360, lately issued for the Roxburghe Club; Dr. Norman Moore’s re-edition of The Book of the Foundation of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, from the unique MS. ab. 1425, which gives an account of the Founder, Rahere, and the miraculous cures wrought at the Hospital; The Craft of Nombrynge, with other of the earliest englisht Treatises on Arithmetic, edited by R. Steele, B.A.; and Miss Warren’s two-text edition of The Dance of Death from the Ellesmere and other MSS.

These Extra-Series Texts ought to be completed by their Editors: the Second Part of the prose Romance of Melusine--Introduction, with ten facsimiles of the best woodblocks of the old foreign black-letter editions, Glossary, &c, by A. K. Donald, B.A. (now in India); and a new edition of the famous Early-English Dictionary (English and Latin), Promptorium Parvulorum, from the Winchester MS., ab. 1440 A.D.: in this, the Editor, the Rev. A. L. Mayhew, M.A., will follow and print his MS. not only in its arrangement of nouns first, and verbs second, under every letter of the Alphabet, but also in its giving of the flexions of the words. The Society’s edition will thus be the first modern one that really represents its original, a point on which Mr. Mayhew’s insistence will meet with the sympathy of all our Members.

The Texts for the Extra Series in 1906 and 1907 will be chosen from The Three Kings’ Sons, Part II, the Introduction &c. by Prof. Dr. Leon Kellner; Part II of The Chester Plays, re-edited from the MSS., with a full collation of the formerly missing Devonshire MS., by Mr. G. England and Dr. Matthews; the Parallel-Text of the only two MSS. of the Owl and Nightingale, edited by Mr. G. F. H. Sykes (at press); Prof. Jespersen’s editions of John Hart’s Orthographie (MS. 1551 A.D.; blackletter 1569), and Method to teach Reading, 1570; Deguilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Sowle, in English prose, edited by Prof. Dr. L. Kellner. (For the three prose versions of The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man--two English, one French--an Editor is wanted.) Members are askt to realise the fact that the Society has now 50 years’ work on its Lists,--at its present rate of production,--and that there is from 100 to 200 more years’ work to come after that. The year 2000 will not see finisht all the Texts that the Society ought to print. The need of more Members and money is pressing. Offers of help from willing Editors have continually to be declined because the Society has no funds to print their Texts.

An urgent appeal is hereby made to Members to increase the list of Subscribers to the E. E. Text Society. It is nothing less than a scandal that the Hellenic Society should have nearly 1000 members, while the Early English Text Society has not 300!

Before his death in 1895, Mr. G. N. Currie was preparing an edition of the 15th and 16th century Prose Versions of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, with the French prose version by Jean Gallopes, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., he having generously promist to pay the extra cost of printing the French text, and engraving one or two of the illuminations in his MS. But Mr. Currie, when on his deathbed, charged a friend to burn all his MSS. which lay in a corner of his room, and unluckily all the E. E. T. S.’s copies of the Deguilleville prose versions were with them, and were burnt with them, so that the Society will be put to the cost of fresh copies, Mr. Currie having died in debt.

Guillaume de Deguilleville, monk of the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis, in the diocese of Senlis, wrote his first verse Pèlerinaige de l’Homme in 1330-1 when he was 36. Twenty-five (or six) years after, in 1355, he revised his poem, and issued a second version of it, a revision of which was printed ab. 1500. Of the prose representative of the first version, 1330-1, a prose Englishing, about 1430 A.D., was edited by Mr. Aldis Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1869, from MS. Ff. 5. 30 in the Cambridge University Library. Other copies of this prose English are in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Q. 2. 25; Sion College, London; and the Laud Collection in the Bodleian, no. 740. A copy in the Northern dialect is MS. G. 21, in St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, and this is the MS. which will be edited for the E. E. Text Society. The Laud MS. 740 was somewhat condenst and modernised, in the 17th century, into MS. Ff. 6. 30, in the Cambridge University Library: “The Pilgrime or the Pilgrimage of Man in this World,” copied by Will. Baspoole, whose copy “was verbatim written by Walter Parker, 1645, and from thence transcribed by G. G. 1649; and from thence by W. A. 1655.” This last copy may have been read by, or its story reported to, Bunyan, and may have been the groundwork of his Pilgrim’s Progress. It will be edited for the E. E. T. Soc., its text running under the earlier English, as in Mr. Herrtage’s edition of the Gesta Romanorum for the Society. In February 1464, Jean Gallopes--a clerk of Angers, afterwards chaplain to John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France--turned Deguilleville’s first verse Pèlerinaige into a prose Pèlerinage de la vie humaine. By the kindness of Lord Aldenham, as above mentiond, Gallopes’s French text will be printed opposite the early prose northern Englishing in the Society’s edition.

The Second Version of Deguilleville’s Pèlerinaige de l’Homme, A.D. 1355 or -6, was englisht in verse by Lydgate in 1426. Of Lydgate’s poem, the larger part is in the Cotton MS. Vitellius C. xiii (leaves 2-308). This MS. leaves out Chaucer’s englishing of Deguilleville’s ABC or Prayer to the Virgin, of which the successive stanzas start with A, B, C, and run all thro’ the alphabet; and it has 2 main gaps, besides many small ones from the tops of leaves being burnt in the Cotton fire. All these gaps (save the A B C) have been fild up from the Stowe MS. 952 (which old John Stowe completed) and from the end of the other imperfect MS. Cotton, Tiberius A vii. Thanks to the diligence of the old Elizabethan tailor and manuscript-lover, a complete text of Lydgate’s poem can be given, though that of an inserted theological prose treatise is incomplete. The British Museum French MSS. (Harleian 4399, and Additional 22,937 and 25,594) are all of the First Version.

Besides his first Pèlerinaige de l’homme in its two versions, Deguilleville wrote a second, “de l’ame separee du corps,” and a third, “de nostre seigneur Iesus.” Of the second, a prose Englishing of 1413, The Pilgrimage of the Sowle (with poems by Hoccleve, already printed for the Society with that author’s Regement of Princes), exists in the Egerton MS. 615, at Hatfield, Cambridge (Univ. Kk. 1. 7, and Caius), Oxford (Univ. Coll. and Corpus), and in Caxton’s edition of 1483. This version has ‘somewhat of addicions’ as Caxton says, and some shortenings too, as the maker of both, the first translater, tells us in the MSS. Caxton leaves out the earlier englisher’s interesting Epilog in the Egerton MS. This prose englishing of the Sowle will be edited for the Society by Prof. Dr. Leon Kellner after that of the Man is finisht, and will have Gallopes’s French opposite it, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., as his gift to the Society. Of the Pilgrimage of Jesus, no englishing is known.

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