Gonville and Caius College : Vetus liber archidiaconi eliensis

Gonville and Caius College

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 204/110 (hereafter MS 204/110) is a composite manuscript with the complexities of its production and use visible through every page of the small volume. MS 204/110 is now better known as the <i>Vetus liber archidiaconi eliensis</i> (The Old Book of the Archdeacons of Ely) and consists of various records and administrative notes of the archdeacons of Ely and members of their administrative office from the 13th to the 16th centuries, with the majority of the volume originating in the 13th century and being continually added to by subsequent scribes. Although the volume is now bound in an <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(1);return false;'>attractive binding</a> probably added in the 17th century, the frequently stained and damaged leaves and the small format of the quires are testament to the former administrative use of the gatherings within.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>MS 204/110 was given to Gonville and Caius as part of the bequest of William Moore a manuscript collector and former fellow of Gonville and Caius College (c. 1615-1647). Moore resigned or was ejected from his fellowship in 1647, but by 1653 he had been appointed University Librarian and he remained in that position until his death in 1659, at which time, his personal book collection passed to his former College. Unfortunately, little is known about where Moore obtained the majority of his manuscripts and so their provenance can only be inferred through indirect evidence (see Pouzet 2017). In the case of MS 204/110, the book was presumably the property of the archdeacons from its creation in the 13th century, but whether it passed to Moore as a direct purchase from the diocese of Ely, or whether it passed through private ownership in the late 16th and early 17th centuries before finding its way into Moore's collection is unclear. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>MS 204/110 is full of the names of individuals who are otherwise unknown to the historical record, but one former user of the book may have been Rowland Taylor who was executed as a Protestant martyr in Aldham Common, near Hadleigh in Suffolk in 1555. There is a signature on p. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(7);return false;'>1</a>, 'Rolandus Tayler officialis' in ink in a hastily written 16th century hand - Feltoe and Minns in their generally masterful edition of MS 204/110 noted the Rowland Taylor annotation, but did not consider the Rowland Taylor who was martyred in 1555 to be a credible candidate for identification with this annotation as they dated the hand to the 15th century, and apparently did not know of Taylor's role in the diocese of Ely. J. S. Craig wrote about Taylor's life and career and brought to light Taylor's appointment as an official of the archdeacon of Ely from c. 1539, but did not know of MS 204/110. Taken together, the signature on p. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(7);return false;'>1</a> and Craig's work that independently shows Taylor's role within the diocese, it is strongly probable that the signature on p. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(7);return false;'>1</a> is that of Rowland Taylor, the Protestant reformer and preacher who was executed in 1555. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Much of the content of MS 204/110 is administrative in nature and one of the largest sequences of records, from pp. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(61);return false;'>55-125</a> concerns the inventories of churches and chapels within the Ely deaneries, their rents owed, and whether they were to be appropriated from other jurisdictions. The core of the inventories was begun by the earliest group of scribes who worked on the volume (the 'A Group' as assigned by Feltoe and Minns) who worked c. 1277-1278 to c. 1284, and then these inventories and parish records were constantly updated by members of the office of the archdeacon as new surveys were done and new administrative arrangements were applied to the parishes. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>In addition to all of the administrative records, there is a medical recipe on p. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(48);return false;'>42</a>, containing a version of the recipe for eye problems supposedly created for King Edward I by Nicholas de Tyngewick. There is another version of the recipe in another Curious Cures manuscript,  <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-SJC-E-00006/223'>Cambridge, St John's College, MS E.6, 'Thomas Betson's Notebook', f. 107r, ln. 9 <i>seq</i></a>, although in the St John's manuscript, the recipe is incorrectly stated to have been developed for King Edward III by de Tyngewick. Master Nicholas de Tyngewick is a relatively well-attested figure, who is known to have taken care of King Edward I when he became sick while staying at Lanercost Priory in 1306. Other than the discrepancy over which King Edward the recipe was developed for, the versions in MS 204/110 and Cambridge, St John's College MS E.6 are remarkably similar, and list the majority of their plants and the processing methods in the same order, which shows that there was good stability in the transmission of even ephemeral medical recipes (i.e., not ones that belonged to the big Salernitan receptaria) in late medieval England, as the MS 204/110 version of the recipe was probably copied in the late 14th century, and the St John's College version dates from the early 16th century. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'><b>References:</b><div style='list-style-type: disc;'><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Venn/ACAD MR606W2 </div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Venn/ACAD TLR529R</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>ODNB DOI: 10.1093/ref:odnb/19152</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>ODNB DOI: 10.1093/ref:odnb/27079</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Cambridgeshire Record Office, archdeaconry of Ely will register, I, I 529-44, ff. 58v, 69v</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>C. L. Feltoe, and E. H. Minns, eds., <i>Vetus Liber Archidiaconi Eliensis</i>, Cambridge Antiquarian Society XLVIII(Cambridge, 1917), esp. pp. xxxii-xxxvi, 1-2 and 208-209</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>C. H. Talbot, and E. A. Hammond, <i>The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England : A Biographical Register</i> (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965)</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>J. S. Craig, 'Reformers, conflict, and revisionism: the Reformation in sixteenth-century Hadleigh', <i>The Historical Journal</i> 42.1 (1999), pp. 1-23 and esp., n. 48 on the Ely Will Register, demonstrating Taylor's official connection with Ely.</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>J.-P. Pouzet, ‘Towards Reconstructing Manuscript-Collecting in 17th-c. Cambridge: Observations on William Moore’s Catalogue and Some Manuscripts’, Bulletin des Anglicistes Médiévistes / Etudes Médiévales Anglaises, 91.1 (2017), 55–70, DOI: 10.3406/bamed.2017.1189</div></div><br /></p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Sarah Gilbert<br /> Project Cataloguer<br /> Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries</p>