Corpus Christi College : Chronicles

Corpus Christi College

In late medieval England, there existed two alternate but not mutually exclusive narrative structures for the writing of history. The first related the history of the world from Creation all the way through biblical history to the present day. This long-established mode is often described nowadays as 'universal history', and theological concepts informed the structuring and organisation of these works. For example, St Augustine (354-430) proposed that history was divided into six ages, mirroring the first six days of Creation, because God ordered the events of human history just as he had ordered the world in which they took place. Since God rested on the seventh day of Creation, the sixth age was to be the final age of human history: beginning with the birth of Christ, it would end with the Day of Judgment. These ideas were applied by Orosius (d. after 418), one of Augustine's contemporaries and collaborators, in his Historia adversos paganos. Orosius began with a geographical description of the world, before embarking on its history, establishing that his approach to history was characterised by its temporal and spatial universality: covering the entire world, across all time. This involved reconciling the histories of different nations, and the many ways that time had been counted - another feature of universal history - and built on a revised version of an earlier work, the Chronicon of Eusebius-Jerome. The ideas behind universal history came to dominate historical writing in the Christian west, with examples being composed by Isidore of Seville, Bede, Gregory of Tours, Vincent of Beauvaius, Martin of Troppau and Ranulph Higden, among others. The second approach, inspired more by classical history, traced the history of Britain from events following the fall of Troy: the flight of Aeneas to Italy following the Trojan War, the birth to Aeneas or one of his sons or grandsons of 'Brutus', and Brutus's conquest of the islands of Britain, which thereafter bore his name and were peopled by his descendants. An early version of this genealogical origin myth appears in the 9th-century Historia Brittonum, which was shortly emended by a Welsh monk known as Nennius. However, it owes its wide circulation and popularity in the later medieval period to the Historia regum Britanniae, written in the early 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth. This in turn gave rise to the so-called 'Brut' chronicle, which existed in numerous, evolving versions, first in Anglo-Norman, then later Latin and Middle English. The focus of the contents of Corpus MS 374 is emphatically British history, yet these two conceptualisations of history lie behind them in the sources from which they are drawn. The first part of the manuscript contains a regnal chronicle from Brutus to Henry VI (concluding in 1429). This particular text is not known to exist in another copy, however it is notable that the opening passage - beginning 'Considerans historie' - is comparable to that used in chronicle rolls (see, in particular, Eton, Eton College, MS 191 and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_1943'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. Rolls 6</a>). The second part contains an extract on British geography from the Manipulus chronicorum of Ralph Marham (d. after 1389), an Augustinian friar. The Manipulus exists in only one complete copy: <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc63814q'>Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 4928</a> (which matching dicta probatoria confirm was the copy recorded at Cambridge University Library in 1473: see <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-UA-COLLECT-ADMIN-00004/20'>UA, Collect. Admin. 4, f. 5v</a>). There the text is divided into five books, each subdivided into six, seven or eight 'distinctions'. The first book is an expansive description of the world; Books Two to Four cover history from Adam to the Birth of Christ; the fifth was left incomplete. Evidently, Marham was influenced by his namesake Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, which he is known to have used as a source. The opening words of the Paris manuscript contain an acrostic that give his name - 'Frater Ranvlfus de Marham' - a similar device having been used in the Polychronicon (and other of Higden's works). The Manipulus is also accompanied by an alphabetical index, whose headwords run from Aaron to Zorobabel, thus imitating the indexes in the Polychronicon (which run from 'Aaron' to 'Uter' in the first, 'short' recension; or 'Abraham' to 'Zorobabel' in the later, 'intermediate' and 'long' recensions). The manuscript's two principal parts are evidently of separate, if more or less contemporary production: palaeographical evidence points to both having been made in England in the late 15th century. Until recently, nothing definitive was known about its ownership before it came into the possession of Matthew Parker in the 16th century. However, in 2024, Clarck Drieshen shed the first light on the book's 15th-century provenance through the identification of the motto 'Al may god amend' written on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(146);return false;'>69v</a>. This is the same motto used by John Rudyng (d. 1481), archdeacon of Bedford and prebendary of Buckingham. In the absence of other, corroborative evidence, such a slender connection would have had to remain uncertain, except for the fact that it was written by the same hand as the motto found in another manuscript identified as Rudyng's in 2013: London, British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra D.iv (see f. 16r in that manuscript). This latter manuscript also contains the motto and a coat of arms - gules a crescent in the fesse-point between (or in an orle or bordue of) six scallops - that are found together in a bible Rudyng donated to the parish church of St Peter and St Paul, Buckingham (where it remains), and in an unusually elaborate memorial brass, of which fragments are still to be found in the parish church of St Andrew, Biggleswade, Bedfordshire.Rudyng's will survives and among the numerous and generous gifts there are recorded several other books. Most of these, perhaps unsurprisingly, are liturgical, and were distributed between institutions and individuals. Besides the bible (which, curiously, is not mentioned), he left his psalter and processional to Buckingham; his 'best missal' for the use of the priests in the chapel of St Anne at Lincoln Cathedral; and processionals to Pershore parish church and the chapel of 'Stulston' (presumably nearby Stoulton). A portiphorium (a kind of portable breviary) went to his kinsman, Henry Rudyng, and another, 'small' one went to his chaplain, William Aleyn; both were also named as executors. All of the aforementioned will have been written in Latin, but one other is explicitly described as vernacular: a 'librum de vita beate Marie in Anglicis', which he left to John Rudyng, presumably another family member, who is mentioned elsewhere as a member of the Franciscan convent at Oxford. Unfortunately, that manuscript is not recorded among the books known to have survived from that house, but there is always the possibility that the manuscript is extant but its connection to Oxford, or Rudyng, is not known. Readers are invited to remain vigilant for the tell-tale motto. That Corpus MS 374 would not be out of place among Rudyng's books is confirmed by the contents of Cotton MS Cleopatra D.iv - an adaptation of Book Seven of the Polychronicon of Ranulph Higden - and other items in his will. It records a book of chronicles ('librum de cronicis') in a binding of red deer-skin (which could be the Cotton or Corpus manuscript) and a 'large roll with chronicles' (perhaps a genealogical roll of some sort). Rudyng gave both of these to Magister William Whitewey of Buckingham (on whom, see Emden, BRUO, p. 2042), having himself been entrusted with them by Magister John Cressy, former canon of St Stephen's at Westminster. Rudyng's motto is written in only one place in Corpus MS 374, on the last leaf of Part 1 of the manuscript. Given the cumulative evidence of Rudyng's historical interests, it would be reasonable to conclude that Rudyng owned the manuscript as a whole - but since his motto is found only in Part 1, and in the absence of evidence of when the two Parts were bound together, this must for the moment remain a speculation. Dr James Freeman Medieval Manuscripts Specialist Cambridge University LibraryBibliography<ul><li>John Rudyng's will: Lincolnshire Archives, DIOC/REG/22, ff. 59v-60r</li><li>James Freeman, The manuscript dissemination and readership of the 'Polychronicon' of Ranulph Higden, c. 1330-c. 1500 (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013)</li></ul>