Privately-Owned English Urban Manuscripts, 1300-1476 (Urban Manuscript Project)
Claire Jones, 2008.
Data copyright © Prof Felicity Riddy unless otherwise stated
This work is licensed under the ADS Terms of Use and Access.
Primary contact
Prof
Felicity
Riddy
Deputy Vice-Chancellor
University of York
Heslington Hall
Heslington
York
YO1 5DD
England
Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 780
Overview
Data selection
Period
The database initially included only those manuscripts produced between 1300, by which time urban books can be identified in reasonable numbers, and the introduction of printing into England in 1476. On the whole, these dates have been maintained. However, in some cases manuscripts have been included if they were produced earlier, if they could then be shown to have circulated in an urban environment. For example, Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 146, a manuscript produced in the thirteenth century, was later owned by one William Wade of Bristol and consequently merits inclusion in the database. In other cases, manuscripts have been included that date from the later fifteenth century. The rationale behind this was that, first; it is often difficult to date manuscripts or owners' inscriptions with precision within a twenty-five year bracket. This makes it problematic to confidently assign a manuscript or inscription a date in the 1470s rather than the 1480s, for example; secondly, redefining the period under consideration had the advantage of enabling users of the database to consider the circulation of manuscripts alongside early print in urban environments and further demonstrates the continued vitality of manuscript production after the introduction of print.
Books and manuscripts
Manuscripts have been treated as urban if they were owned by someone living in a town, and/or produced in a town, and/or contain material which is unambiguously urban in character, such as town chronicles, or lists of streets or individuals from a town. We use the term manuscript in a modern sense, to refer to objects as they are found in collections today; one manuscript may well contain 'books' owned by people in both urban and non-urban, private and institutional, settings, and we have attempted to make these distinctions as clear as possible in the database.
Towns and cities
The cities and towns included in the project were initially drawn from Alan Dyer's Decline and Growth in English Towns 1400-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 56-7, 62-3. The classification of a location as a city or a town here was based on economic and demographic evidence.
Subsequent discussion with historians at York led us to modify the list a little, in order to include important centres such as Durham, Carlisle and Scarborough, and the list was left open to an extent, so that if manuscripts were found frequently occurring in towns which had not been on the original lists, this could be reassessed. In practice, manuscripts were found to survive in a far smaller number of towns than were on any of the lists, and so much of the debate was academic. Within this urban context, manuscripts were initially selected by fulfilling one or more of three main criteria.
- Production
- Ownership
- Content
Production criteria include: scribe or artist known to have worked in an urban area; binding from a town-based binder; dialect of English localised to an urban area; compiler based in a town.
Ownership was based on private, rather than institutional, ownership, so that a book with the pressmark of an abbey, for example, could not be entered without other evidence that the book had been privately owned at some point within our period. Distinguishing between public and private ownership provided a useful principle of selection. It enabled us to separate the myriad rentals, custumals, court records, accounts and so on, which were all part of the business of urban record-keeping, from material overlapping with the public record which occurs in manuscripts held in private hands. Such material includes, for example, urban chronicles, calendars, lists of mayors and information about guilds and parishes which individual citizens kept for their personal or household use. At the same time, the distinction between home and official use also separates the manuscripts that formed the contents of institutional or parochial libraries (which have been intensively studied) from the private collections of urban clerics, as well as from the books of hours and psalters that were used in the domestic devotions of laypeople. Other books which were also kept in the home contained more miscellaneous kinds of reading matter, including narratives, courtesy texts, medical recipes, lyrics and various memorabilia.
Various types of ownership evidence have been accepted as warranting inclusion in the database. Ownership inscriptions in hands demonstrably of the period are accepted as sufficient evidence, and taken at face value - an inscription stating that X, a monk of Y abbey, owns this book, in a book with a pressmark of the abbey, is accepted as genuine ownership, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Names alone, without statements of ownership, are not sufficient without further evidence, whereas a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century inscription such as 'Iste liber constat Willelmo Bolton canonico ecclesie sancti Bartholomei in West Smytfelde London' (as found in British Library MS Harley 631) enables us to be reasonably confident that the manuscript was privately owned in a town.
Where a book noted in a will can be identified as a surviving manuscript, as in many of the entries in Susan Cavanaugh's study of book ownership in later medieval England, this is also accepted as sufficient evidence. Identification in this case may be made by name in the manuscript, as long as other evidence, such as the texts and other history of the manuscript, is consistent.
Content includes specifically urban works, such as chronicles or town constitutions. Other added texts, such as lists of mayors, aldermen, merchants or street names, are also sufficient for inclusion in the database.
Data collection
Manuscript data for the database is gathered in three ways:
- a. Original manuscripts, using template
- b. Published sources
- c. Unpublished sources
a. Original Manuscripts
Most of the data (around two-thirds) has been gathered from original manuscripts, using a template designed for the project. The template was created using Microsoft Word, and a new copy made for every manuscript to be entered. The data was entered directly into the template using a laptop computer in the library where the manuscript is housed. The 'text' section was copied and pasted as many times as there were texts in the document, and details for each text entered individually, in the order in which they appear in the manuscript. In the database, the source for this data is noted by the initials of the researcher.
b. Published sources
Some of the manuscript data has been taken from published manuscript catalogues or other published manuscript descriptions (e.g. articles). Data has only been taken from published sources where the information given matches or exceeds that required by the manuscript template. Examples of such catalogues are: Ker, N. R. (Neil Ripley) Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969-.) McKitterick, R., and R. Beadle, comps. Manuscripts: Medieval. Vol. 5.1 of Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College Cambridge. Gen. ed. Robert Latham. (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992) Watson, Andrew G. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of All Souls College, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Where data has been taken from these sources, citations have been added in short form to the relevant individual manuscript records in the database (e.g. MMBL IV: 122-3). These short forms have been linked to a detailed list of abbreviations with full bibliographical detail, in order to fulfil copyright requirements.
c. Unpublished sources
Data may not be added to the database from unpublished sources without the owner's permission. Where this permission has been granted, reference is made in the database either to the owner's initials followed by PC, if, for example, the data comes as a personal communication, or by an appropriate reference to an unpublished or forthcoming document. These short forms have been linked to a detailed list of abbreviations with full bibliographical detail, in order to fulfil copyright requirements.
In all cases where some data comes from a source outside the project, this is cited in the database with the relevant manuscript record, so each record may have more than one data source.
