EVIDENCE FOR THE PRESENCE OF

M-TYPE MANUSCRIPTS

OF BEDE'S HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA

IN NORTHERN ENGLAND AFTER CA. 800 *

In his 1896 edition of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum

( HE), Charles Plummer identified two main classes of manuscripts of

1
the text, which he called C-type and M-type. The surviving English

manuscripts are predominantly of the C-type (or conflate manuscripts

containing a C-type base-text with additional material inserted from

an M-type manuscript), whereas the Continental manuscripts are

nearly all of the pure M-type. Roger Mynors has even gone so far as

to state that the C-type ‘‘held a monopoly'' in England, the only

manuscript evidence for the M-type's presence in England being three

eighth-century copies: the Moore (M) manuscript (C ambridge, Univer-

sity Library , Kk. 5. 16), the St. Petersburg (L) manuscript ( National

Library of Russia , Lat. Q. v. I. 18), and a burnt copy (B) of the latter

ondon (British
2
in L Library , Cotton Tiberius A. xiv). All three of these

were copied in Northumbria, M and L in the second quarter of the

* I owe thanks to Professors M. R. McVaugh, Britt Mize, P. P. O'Neill, and R. W.

Pfaff for their comments and advice on various aspects of this paper. Of course, I

alone am responsible for the conclusions I have drawn.

1. Venerabilis Bedae opera historica, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896; repr., 2

vols. in 1, 1946); on the two classes of manuscripts see esp. § 27 in vol. 1, pp. xciv-

xcvi.

2. R. A. B. M ynors, ‘‘ Textual Introduction,'' in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the

English People, ed. and trans. Bertram C olgrave and R. A. B. M ynors (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. xxxix-lxxvi, at p. xli (the quotation) and pp. xlvi-xlvii

(on the English M-type manuscripts). To these should probably be added L ondon,
British Library , Royal 13 B. xviii, which is a fourteenth-century M-type manuscript

almost certainly of insular origins, to judge by both its contents (two metrical summa-

ries of English history; the HE; a letter of Otto, papal legate to England, Ireland, and

Wales; and a now fragmentary text of Gerald of Wales' Topographia Hibernica) and

its ownership marks. On textual grounds, however, Mynors placed it in the ‘‘German''

lummer (op.
D
branch of the Continental manuscripts. Another, noted by P cit., p. ci,

n. 1), might be the fourteenth-century C ambridge, Sidney Sussex College, . 2. 8

(James 30).
 J. A. WESTGARD 311

eighth century, and B not long thereafter. M and L later passed to the

Continent, while B seems to have remained in England, where it even-

3
tually was corrected to agree with the C-type text. There is no evi-

dence that any of these manuscripts was circulated widely or copied

in England after ca. 800. Instead, descendants of Cotton Tiberius C. ii

(Plummer's ‘‘C'') and related manuscripts became the typical insular

version of the text.

Looking at the manuscript evidence, one might easily conclude, as

Mynors seems to have done, that although it remains possible that

manuscripts of the pure M-type circulated in England after the eighth

century, they have left no marks in the surviving manuscript record.

On the other hand, as both Plummer and Dorothy Whitelock have ar-

gued, there is some evidence that M-type manuscripts were used in the

compilation of the so-called ‘‘northern recension'' (NR) of the Anglo-

4
Saxon Chronicle (ASC ). This version of the ASC, which is preserved

in the D (L ondon, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. iv), E ( Oxford,

Bodleian Library , Laud Misc. 636), and F (L ondon, British Library ,

Cotton Domitian A. viii) manuscripts of the text, was put together

somewhere in the North, perhaps at York, in the late tenth or early

5
eleventh century. For the period covered by the HE, the NR includes

a number of new, revised, and expanded annals that appear to be

based on information found in the main body of the HE, as opposed

to the chronological epitome (v.24), which had served as the basis for

6
many annals in the original compilation of the ASC. Among the new

annals found in the NR are two (for A.D. 697 and 699) found only in

HE manuscripts of the M-type (v.24, s.a. 697 and 698). Given that we

know the compiler was making frequent use of the HE throughout the

compilation of the NR, by far the simplest explanation for the pres-

3. Mynors, ‘‘ Textual Introduction,'' pp. xlvi-xlvii.

4. Charles Plummer, ed., Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel , vol. 2 (Oxford: Clar-

endon Press, 1892; repr. 1952), p. lxi, n. 2; Dorothy W hitelock made note of this

fact in her 1960 Jarrow Lecture, ‘‘After Bede,'' p. 12; repr. Bede and His World: The
Jarrow Lectures, ed. Michael Lapidge, vol. 1, pp. 35-50, at p. 46.

5. A convenient summary of the relationships of these manuscripts can be found in

the introduction to Dorothy Whitelock's English Historical Documents, c. 500-1042,

2d ed. (London: Eyre Methuen; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 113-

16.

6. See Susan Irvine, ‘‘ The Sources of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS E,'' 2002,

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register , http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/, ac-

cessed March 2005; and Janet M. B ately, ‘‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,'' in Medieval Eng-
land: An Encyclopedia, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel

T. Rosenthal (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 44-48, at

p. 45.
 ´ ´
312 REVUE BENEDICTINE

ence of these two annals is that the HE manuscript the compiler used

was of the M-type, and yet the fact remains that there has, to date,

been virtually no evidence of such a manuscript in England beyond

7
the year 800. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that there is in

fact some manuscript evidence pointing to a manuscript of the M-type

being present in the North of England, perhaps as late as the early

twelfth century.

In HE iv.24, Bede included a Latin paraphrase of the Old English

poem known as Cædmon's Hymn . Several distinct vernacular versions

of this poem were subsequently copied into manuscripts of the HE ,

most often alongside Bede's paraphrase (in manuscripts of the original

Latin), or as translations of it (in manuscripts of the Old English

Bede). The three Latin HE manuscripts containing the later Northum-

brian version of the poem are relevant to this discussion: Dijon, Bi-
bliothe` que municipale 574; Paris, Bibliothe` que nationale de France , lat.

5237; and Brussels, Bibliothe` que royale 8245-57 (3116). As has been

demonstrated by Daniel O'Donnell, and further elaborated by Paul

Cavill, these three manuscripts preserve a unique version of the poem

in Northumbrian dialect that was probably written down in the tenth

8
century. Though the surviving manuscripts in this group are all of

Continental origins, the common archetype of their texts of Cædmon's

Hymn , which is known as *Y, must have been written in Northumbria

(or by a scribe with knowledge of Northumbrian), and there is some

evidence that the hypothetical MS that contained *Y only migrated

to the Continent at a relatively late date, perhaps as late as the first

half of the twelfth century. Hereafter, I will distinguish between *Y

7. Besides the two annals, additional evidence pointing toward the use of an M-

Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval

type MS was assembled by Dorothy Whitelock, and cited by Janet Bately, ‘‘Bede

Culture in Honor of Charles W. Jones

and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,'' in

, ed. Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens

(Collegeville, Minn.: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, 1979), 233-254, at 249-50,

n. 40. As Bately points out elsewhere in the same article (p. 240), we cannot be abso-

lutely certain that the compiler of the NR did not take these two annals from some

other source, perhaps a lost set of northern annals. Roger Mynors, notably, expressed

some skepticism about the evidence for the use of an M-type MS, but he makes no

argument concerning the annals for A.D. 697 and 699; see ‘‘Textual Introduction,''

p. xli, n. 2.

eordu
8. O'Donnell first established the relationships of these three manuscripts in ‘‘A

Beda Venera-
Northumbrian Version of ‘Cædmon's Hymn' ( -recension) in Brussels, Bibliothèque
2 1

bilis: Historian, Monk, & Northumbrian

Royale MS 8245-57 ff. 62r -v : Identification, Edition and Filiation,'' in

, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDo-

nald (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1996), 139-65; the dating estimate is Cavill's, and

Hymn
refers to the date of the writing of the lost archetype of these three MSS, not neces-

Anglia
sarily to the dialect of the poem itself; see ‘‘The Manuscripts of Cædmon's ,''

118 (2000): 499-530, esp. 519-22.

 J. A. WESTGARD 313

(the archetype of this version of the poem) and the HE manuscript

that first contained it by referring to the latter as HE (*Y). It is impor-

tant to remember that the dates of writing of *Y and HE (*Y) may be

different, since it is possible that *Y was originally a marginal addition

to HE (*Y), and was only incorporated into the main text in later copies.

The Northumbrian dialect of this version of the poem connects it to

the North of England, and, as argued by Cavill, its orthography tends

to point toward a relatively late date in the Northern context. The

scribe of *Y made consistent use of the runic character wynn to repre-

sent the /w/-sounds in the poem, sometimes together with a following

‘u' (e.g., l. 1: ‘‘ ý ueard''), and sometimes without (e.g., l. 7: ‘‘ ý eard'').

9

While wynn was used from an early date in the South, and became the

standard OE spelling by the ninth century, its use here stands in stark

contrast with the orthography of the earlier Northumbrian version of

CH found in the M and L manuscripts of the HE , which use ‘u(u)'.

Orthographic modernization is also evident in other parts of HE (*Y),

in certain proper names: in v.24, s.a. 698, M reads ‘‘berctred,'' where,

10
judging from its descendants, HE (*Y) probably had ‘‘berchtred.'' The

use of ‘‘ch'' instead of ‘‘c'' to represent the / j /-sound before /t/ in Eng-

lish names would only have been introduced by a scribe who knew

English. Since the scribe of HE (*Y) was probably Northumbrian

(which seems likely given the dialect of Cædmon's Hymn , though not

certain), it would follow from this orthographic evidence that HE (*Y)

was copied in the ninth century or later, or at the very least that it

was in Northumbria at that date, where the poem was added to it.

Furthermore, the contents of the earliest surviving manuscript de-

scended from HE (*Y), the Dijon MS, are suggestive of a relatively late

11
migration to the Continent. The Dijon MS was almost certainly cop-

9. Ibid., 521-22.

10. Furthermore, in v.24, s.a. 711, HE(*Y) probably had ‘‘berechtfrid,'' but this is

one of the few cases where M has an ‘h' rather than a ‘c' to represent this sound, and

hence reads ‘‘berhtfrid.'' Given the lateness of the witnesses for HE(*Y), and the fact

that they are Continental copies, it is often difficult to distinguish apparent modern-

ization from corruption, but nevertheless I would argue that there is some tendency

toward ‘‘later'' spellings in HE(*Y). A systematic examination of all the proper names

in the three surviving witnesses might shed more light on this point. My reconstruc-

tion of probable readings in HE(*Y) has been based on examination of microfilm of

two of the three MSS descended from it (those in Brussels and Paris). The Old English

material from five of the earliest manuscripts of the HE (K, M, L, C, and B) has been

edited and analyzed by T. J. M. Van Els, The Kassel Manuscript of Bede's ‘Historia

Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ' and Its Old English Material (Assen: Van Gorcum,

1972).

11. The fullest description of the manuscript is in Paul W uest, ‘‘Zwei Neue Hand-

schriften von Caedmons Hymnus,'' Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Lite-
 ´ ´
314 REVUE BENEDICTINE

ied at Cíˆ teaux in the twelfth century. In addition to (1) the HE , this

MS also contains (2) Bede's prose Life of Cuthbert , (3) a collection of

miracles connected to Cuthbert, and (4) some brief later additions re-

12
lating to Thomas Becket. This last item, which Paul Wuest argued

had an aura of having been copied near the time of Becket's martyr-

dom in 1170, was used by him to provide an approximate terminus ante

13
quem for the copying of items 1-3. In addition, one of the miracle

stories in (3) is said to have taken place at the time of Cuthbert's

translation in 1104, and thus provides not only a terminus post quem

for the writing of the Dijon MS, but also a terminus ante quem non for

the migration to the Continent of the manuscript from which the mi-

racula were copied into the Dijon MS. This cannot be taken as conclu-

sive evidence of the date of HE (*Y)'s migration, however, since the

other two descendants of HE (*Y) do not contain the Cuthbert materi-

al, and the HE and Cuthbert materials in the Dijon MS may have been

copied out of different manuscripts. Nevertheless, this does demon-

strate that manuscripts were in fact traveling from Northumbria to

Cíˆteaux in the twelfth century, and therefore it is certainly possible

14
that HE (*Y) was among these.

To understand the significance of this possibility, one must look

again at the transmission of the two recensions of the HE . We can be

fairly certain that the late-tenth or early-eleventh-century compiler of

ratur 48 (1906): 205-26, at 206-12; cf. also Bertram C olgrave, Two Lives of St. Cuth-

bert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede's Prose Life (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 34.

12. This miracle collection consists of HE, iv.31-32; the so-called Capitula de mira-

culis et translationibus sancti Cuthberti (ed. Thomas A rnold, Symeonis Monachi Opera

Omnia, Rolls Series 75 [London: Longmans, 1882-1885], vol. I, pp. 229-61, and II,

pp. 333-62); and (according to Colgrave) part of the so-called Brevis relatio (B.H.L.

2031).

13. W uest (op. cit., p. 210) argues that some of the verses on Becket ‘‘sehen so aus,

als ob sie unter dem lebhaften Eindruck der Ermordung . . . geschrieben seien.'' Since

these verses are a later addition to the manuscript, then it follows that items 1-3 must

have been written before Becket's murder.

14. Two English abbots of Cíˆteaux, Stephen Harding (d. 1134) and Gilbert

(d. 1167), have been put forth as possible links in the transmission of these materials

to the Continent. Cf. Elliott Van Kirk D obbie, The Manuscripts of Cædmon's Hymn

and Bede's Death Song (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), p. 18. From its

medieval library catalogue of 1190-1200, moreover, we know that the Cistercian Ab-

bey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire did possess copies of both the HE and Bede's prose Vita

Cuthberti, as well as a third MS containing materials relating to Cuthbert and to Tho-

mas Becket (though these latter materials were evidently not the same as the texts

contained in the Dijon MS). See David N. B ell, ed., The Libraries of the Cistercians,

Gilbertines, and Premonstratensians , Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 3

(London: The British Library in association with the British Academy, 1992), s.n.

Z19.104, 109, and 180.

 J. A. WESTGARD 315

the northern recension of the ASC made use of an M-type manuscript.

If we look closely at HE (*Y)'s descendants, it immediately becomes

clear that HE (*Y) was such a manuscript. It contained the key annals

for 697 and 698 (in the NR, 697 and 699). In addition, of the six char-

acteristic readings used by Mynors to distinguish manuscript types,

HE (*Y) conformed to the M-type in all but one.

15
In iv.30, instead of

the characteristic M-type reading, ‘‘quaedam quae,'' HE (*Y) must

have followed the C-type reading ‘‘unum quod.'' Since these words are

followed by two miracle stories, the latter (singular) reading is clearly

inferior, and therefore is unlikely to be the result of contamination

from a manuscript of the other type, or of correction by a careful read-

er. Though it is not one of Mynors' major tests for distinguishing C-

type and M-type, HE (*Y) also followed the C-type in having ‘‘In can-

tica canticorum libros sex'' (instead of the M-type's ‘‘VII'') in Bede's

list of his own works (v.24). Since this is the superior reading, however,

we must reckon with the possibility that an alert reader who knew

Bede's commentary on the Song of Songs could have made this correc-

tion. Nevertheless, together these two C-type readings in an otherwise

M-type manuscript are interesting in that they seem to indicate that

HE (*Y) stood somewhere between the two recensions.

To sum up, in the three manuscripts descended from HE (*Y) a ver-

sion of the HE is preserved which is essentially (though not perfectly)

of the M-type, and which almost certainly was available in northern

England as late as the tenth century, and perhaps into the twelfth.

These manuscripts, which, due to their lateness, might otherwise ap-

pear to be of little interest, may yet prove to be useful to scholars

undertaking close source-studies of the use of the HE , particularly by

Northern authors after ca. 800. It is possible that a manuscript like the

reconstructed HE (*Y) was the one used by the compiler of the north-

ern recension of the ASC .

Chapel Hill Joshua A. Westgard

University of North Carolina

15. ‘‘ Textual Introduction,'' p. xli.