Description |
Bound volume, stamped on the spine with the word 'Orcades', and having the bookplate of the Earl of Panmure on the inside front cover. On the title page it is signed by Robert Norie, Minister at Dundee. The volume contains separate items: 1. [c 1490]: A printed book, entitled 'Fasciculus temporum omnes antiquorum cronicas complectens', in an edition apparently belonging to a family of editions printed in Strasbourg, c. 1490. 2. [c 1500]: A manuscript copy of Historia Norvegiae, thought to have been copied by a professional scribe around 1500 and bound with the printed book around 1700. (starts at manuscript portion of the volume (preceded by a lengthy ownership inscription), folio 1r, ends folio 12r) 3. Manuscript: Genealogy of the Orkney Earls ('Diploma Orcadense') (starts folio 12v [NB folio numbering ceases at this point], ends folio 17v) 4. Manuscript: lists of the kings of Norway, reaching Erik of Pomerania (reigned 1396-1439) (starts folio 18r, ends folio 18v) 5. Manuscript: various Scottish chronicles and documents in Scots and Latin (starts folio 18v, ends folio 35v) |
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history |
The only manuscript to have preserved the text of Historia Norvegiae [HN] is not Norwegian but Scottish. The binding of the manuscript, also enclosing a late fifteenth-century printed book of continental provenance, was made c. 1700 or later. It is of brown leather with the title "Orcades" stamped on the spine. The volume was examined by me in 1974 at The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen, and exhaustively described and analysed in my article "The Dalhousie Manuscript of the Historia Norvegiae," Opuscula VIII, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana 38, Copenhagen 1985 (pr. 1986), pp. 54-95 [hereafter: Chesnutt 1986]. *1 The manuscript now contains 35 paper leaves, with a lacuna of uncertain extent between ff. 23/24. HN is written at the beginning on ff. 1-12; it ends on f. 12r with the rubric "Explicit" followed by a few blank lines at the bottom of the page, and the following article begins at the top of f. 12v. There are therefore no grounds for thinking that the text of the chronicle was not already defective in the exemplar from which the Dalhousie manuscript was copied. From the position of the catchwords, watermarks and binding threads it can be determined that HN fills the whole of a first quire of 10 leaves plus the first three pages of a second quire of 12 leaves. The second quire continues with a Genealogy of the Orkney Earls (ff. 12v-17v) and a list of the kings of Norway (f. 18r-v), both in Latin. In the middle of f. 18v there is an abrupt transition to Scottish subject-matter and the Scots vernacular. The rest of the manuscript is of exclusively Scottish interest, though the language reverts to Latin from the beginning of the third quire. The discovery of the manuscript of HN is usually attributed to the Norwegian historian P. A. Munch, but his attention was in fact drawn to it by the Scotsman David Laing during Munch's visit to Edinburgh in 1849. Laing was at that time preparing an edition of selections from the Scottish material in the manuscript; this edition eventually appeared in 1855, while Munch's edition of the Norwegian and Orcadian material appeared already in 1850 (Chesnutt 1986: 61, 63). On the other hand, the Genealogy of the Orkney Earls had been edited long before by James Wallace, Jr. in his Account of the Islands of Orkney (London 1700), where it is stated that the manuscript belonged at that date to a Scottish Nonjurant clergyman, the Rev. Robert Norie of Dundee, whose signature indeed appears twice in the printed book with which the HN manuscript is bound, and once at the end of the manuscript itself. On the back page of the printed book there is also an inscription recounting how it was presented by Bishop Robert Reid of Orkney to his chamberlain Thomas Tulloch in the year 1554. But this is not, as Munch incorrectly asserted, evidence that the manuscript was written in the Orkneys; on the contrary, the recurrence of its scribe's hand as identified by me in two important Scottish literary manuscripts would indicate that it was produced at a cultural centre in the Scottish Lowlands. *2 One of the two manuscripts in question is Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B. 24, containing among other items Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in Scots dialect transcription and the unique extant copy of the Scottish Chaucerian Kingis Quair. Here the Dalhousie scribe is one of two hands responsible for the original portion of the book, which was owned by - and doubtless written for - the Scottish nobleman Henry Lord Sinclair of Dysart (d. 1513). This owner was head of the senior branch of a family descended from William Sinclair, Lord Chancellor of Scotland in the mid-fifteenth century, who had been Earl of Orkney until 1470, the year in which he gave up his northern earldom to the Scottish crown. In 1456 Chancellor Sinclair had commissioned a set of translations of French courtly texts into Scots prose, and a copy of these is to be found in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS T.D. 209, the second literary manuscript in which the hand of the Dalhousie scribe can be recognised. It belonged throughout the sixteenth century to the lairds of Rosslyn (Roslin) near Edinburgh, who were the junior branch of the Sinclair family. Later it was in the library of Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford. In my study published 15 years ago I drew the conclusion that the Dalhousie scribe was a professional copyist employed by the Sinclairs, and I gave reasons why he was probably retained by the senior branch of the family. Internal evidence fixes the scribe's career in the reign of King James IV of Scotland; the three identified examples of his work belong to the period c. 1490-1510, with the manuscript of HN at the end of that period rather than the beginning. My proposed dating is supported by the style of writing, a so-called "pre-Secretary" hand that was popular in Scotland in the late fifteenth century but went out of fashion after 1500 (Chesnutt 1986: 88-89). An idiosyncracy of HN as compared with other articles copied in the Dalhousie manuscript is the regular use of coloured chapter initials and of display script for proper names. Display script is also used in the second article (the Genealogy of the Orkney Earls) to mark the beginning of important subdivisions in the text. Here the Dalhousie scribe was possibly imitating the layout of the exemplars from which he copied these documents of northern interest. It is likely that the exemplars were Sinclair family heirlooms brought to the mainland when William Sinclair relinquished the earldom of Orkney, and in that case Orkney in the third quarter of the fifteenth century would be the bridge across which HN passed from Norway to Scotland. It was, however, a mistake on the part of Munch (and all subsequent Scandinavian historians who have accepted his authority) to think that Orkney at this date was the actual environment in which the surviving copy of the chronicle was produced. *1 In Norwegian historical literature the manuscript of HN is usually referred to as the "Panmure" manuscript, reflecting the fact that it first came into public view 10 years before the owner's family name was changed from Panmure to Dalhousie (Chesnutt 1986: 55, 64). - A complete photographic record of the manuscript is available for study at The Arnamagnæan Institute and is the source of the illustrations included in the present edition. *2 For Robert Norie see further Chesnutt 1986: 58-60. The proximity of Norie's home to Brechin probably explains how the volume comprising both printed book and manuscript came to be in the ownership of the Panmure-Dalhousie family nearly a century and a half later; whether the manuscript as such was ever in the Orkneys must remain a matter of speculation, cf. Chesnutt 1986: 89-90.
by Michael Chesnutt [The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen, 23 November 2001] |