<Preliminary introduction.>

The HOLLIS cataloguing may be found here. That cataloguing is fuller than most, and part of it is worth quoting here to the extent that it does not repeat Baker’s cataloguing:

“Provenance: It has been argued that this manuscript is part of a manuscript given by Philippa of Hainaut to King Edward III (see M.A. Michael in ‘Burlington Magazine’, CXXVII, 585); John Aslakby, [former owner], practiced law in Durham, 1418–1435.

“Summary: The first folio is a table of contents. Text begins: ‘Edward p la grace de die[u] Roy dengleterre ... as Arcevesques, Evesques, Abbes, etc. Salus’, and ends with ‘Ici Cmence lassise du Pain & du Servoyse’. [That is not, in fact, the explicit, which is ‘en bulter allewer j d. ob. &c’, apparently a translation into French of S.R. 1:200 (2d para.).]

“Notes: Illuminated initials and miniatures with strap floreate continuations in the margins, and some grotesques.”

The cataloguing in Baker’s English Legal Manuscripts, 1, no. 42 reads as follows:

“STATUTA VETERA
“MS. 12.

“Early C.xiv, 36 ff., illum. initials and miniatures. On fo. 33v is a drawing of the homage ceremony. One of the figures in the miniature on fo. 2 has the arms, Per pale or and vert a lion rampant gules [MARSHAL, earl of Pembroke].

“‘Iste liber est Johannis Aslakby’ (C.xv; so read by Miss B[ertha] H[aven] Putnam, using acid, but now illegible; given in Census as ‘Johannis de Wakefield’); ‘ASLAKBY [io]’ in openwork lettering; ‘Liber Mi: Dalton Lincolniensis Hospicii’, i.e. Michael Dalton (d. c. 1648) of Cambridgeshire; belonged to William Bragge of Sheffield, Yorkshire; his sale S. on 9 June 1876, no. 290, acquired by Henry White; his sale, S. 28 April 1902, no. 1409, to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (d. 1962) for George Dunn; his sale S. 11 Feb. 1913, no. 1409; bought privately by HLS.

“Census, I, 1024, no. 12.”

The manuscript is folio-sized, with a page size of approximately 333 by 235 mm. It was rebound in white pigskin in 1991 by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, a replacement of an undistinguished 19th-century binding that was not in good condition. The binding scraps, which include some notes by prior owners, are found in seq. 1–17.

There is a complete modern pencilled foliation omitting the freestanding end papers that were added in the recent rebinding. There are no quire signatures. There are carryovers on fols. 3v, 15v, and 27v, that may mark quire breaks. The opening and closing blank bifolia were added in the recent rebinding. A quire map made when the manuscript was rebound corrects the collation suggested by Michael A. Michael to what follows:¹

Collation: 1² (unfoliated blanks), 2² (f. 1–3, f. 3 tipped in), 3–4¹² (f. 4–27), 5² (f. 28–29), 6² (f. 30, lacks 1 after f. 30), 7⁶ (f. 31–36), 8² (unfoliated blanks).

It is unusual to find a manuscript, particularly one the folios of which are as large as these are, quired in sexternions, but that is what it is.

The script of the manuscript is a book hand that is more English than French. The rubricator, moreover, who is probably the main scribe, revealed his origin by misreading ‘Exon’ as ‘Oxon’ and then spelling it out in English ‘oxseneford’.

The manuscript is laid out in metalpoint, double columns, each column containing 45 lines of text. It contains thirty-one items, all of which are in S.R.

The focus of the collection is on the work of Edward I. Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest are given in the versions he promulgated in 1297. There are only two statutes that must be attributed to Henry III (Merton, Marlborough). The only statute of Edward II (Stamford [1309]) recites statutes of Edward I. The thirteen items that cannot be attributed to any parliament were all probably in existence by the end of his reign (1307).

The art-work is quite distinguished. ‘Illuminated initials and miniatures with strap floreate continuations in the margins, and some grotesques’ describes it quite nicely. There are red and blue paragraph marks throughout. There are a few line drawings, of which the image of a man doing homage that appears in the banner heading of this page is perhaps the most distinctive. The illustrations have been fully described by Michael A. Michael, and our digital color images should be compared with the black-and-white ones that appear in the online version of Michael’s article, because at least one of them (the line drawing in the left margin of fol. 5r) lost a bit in the rebinding.²

There are thirty-three decorated capitals, one at the beginning of every item, one at the beginning of the table of contents (f. 1r), and one at the beginning of the second part of the Statute of Exeter (f. 29v). Five of them are decorated in red and blue with fine scrollwork issuing from them into the margins (f. 1r, 3v, 5r (bis), 6v). The remainder are illuminated, eleven of them ‘historiated’, the rest with more abstract designs. All of the illuminated capitals, except for Magna Carta’s, have strap floreated continuations, four of which end in grotesques (f. 15v, 31v, 33v, 34v). The fact that the capitals that are simply decorated rather than illuminated are clustered at the beginning of the manuscript suggests that a decision was taken to do something more ambitious after the first few capitals were done.

No two of the capitals that are illuminated but not ‘historiated’ are exactly alike, and the designs – floral, geometric, and mixed – show considerable imagination. Most of the ‘historiated’ capitals are closely related to the topic of the statute: Magna Carta (two kings, almost certainly Henry III issuing the 1225 charter and Edward I confirming it in 1297), Westminster I (a king instructing his son), Gloucester (a man entering a house and paying damages for doing so [the first chapter of the statute concerns damages for novel disseisin]), Statute of Merchants (sale of a horse), ‘Exchequer’ (a man pouring coins out of a bag onto the Exchequer table), De religiosis (probably a Benedictine and a Cistercian appealing to the king), Armorum (a melee in a tournament [the statute concerns tournaments not arms in general]), De homagio et fidelitate (arms of England), De moneta (three coins), Bread and Ale (loaves of bread and a tankard).

Baker identifies the arms on the surcoat of the magnate in the images that accompany both Magna Carta and Westminster I as those of Marshal, earl of Pembroke; they are not, as Michael suggested, “fictitious.”³ The Marshals were not earls of Pembroke after 1245, but the same arms were adopted by Roger Bigod, fifth earl of Norfolk (1270–1306), in his capacity as hereditary earl marshal of England. He could well have been present in both 1275 and 1297.⁴ More problematical is the young man with the surcoat of England whom the king is instructing in the Westminster I image. Edward I had only one living son in 1275, Alfonso, who was two-years old. The illuminator seems to have taken some liberties with history to pursue the theme of mirrors of princes.

There are five line drawings, all but the last of which seem to be done in silverpoint: Forest Charter (boar and stag), Forest Ordinance (man hunting with bow and arrow), Merton (a widow [illustrating the first chapter, which concerns dower]), De homagio et fidelitate (a man doing homage), Bread and Ale (?tankard). The last is probably not by the main illuminnator.

Michael may be stretching a point when he sees a ‘princely diadem’ over the man doing homage on f. 33v, which he then connects with Edward’s act of homage to Charles IV for Aquitaine in 1325–6.⁵ The ‘diadem’ looks more like a contemporary male hair style; the homage-taker sports it as well, as does the earl marshal (f. 9r). A royal connection is suggested by the capital above the drawing, which contains the arms of England, but this is over the head of the homage-taker, not the homage-giver, and may not be connected with the drawing at all.

The condition of the manuscript is generally good, although it bears evidence of use, and there is some damage to some of the illuminations. It was not used exclusively as a display manuscript over the course of its life. The headers and most of the marginalia were added in a hand that seems identical with that which notes the ownership of Michael Dalton in the seventeenth century (f. 36r). There are also some marginalia in a different hand of approximately the same date, e.g. f. 5r.

Openwork lettering, ‘ASLAKBY io’, and a now-illegible note, read in an earlier time with acid, attribute ownership of the manuscript to one John Aslakby (f. 36v). HOLLIS identifies John Aslakby with a Durham lawyer of that name who practiced from 1418–1435. A man of that name represented the bishop of Durham in the court of the palatinate in 1418, was paid 40s for his service as attorney general of palatinate in 1424 and 1427, and also served a JP in the palatinate in the latter year.⁶ He is probably not to be identified with the man of the same name who appears as an attorney in the Common Pleas in 1466, but they may be related.⁷ Either John could be the John of our manuscript, probably the earlier rather than the later one. The openwork lettering seems much more likely to be of the fifteenth century than the fourteenth, and hence it is unlikely that John Aslakby is to be identified with the king’s clerk of that name in the mid-fourteenth century.⁸

Michael claims that HLS MS 12 was a part of Paris, Bibliothèque National, MS Français 571, which was given by Philippa of Hainault to the future Edward III as a marriage gift. We are agnostic. That Fr. 571 was a gift from Philippa of Hainault to Edward III (or vice versa) is widely accepted, and this is not the place to question it.⁹ An inventory made in 1396 shows that items had already been removed from Fr. 571, and HLS MS 12 could have been one of the erased items in the table of contents of Fr. 571.¹⁰

The layout of the two manuscripts is similar without being quite the same. For example, Fr. 571 has 47 lines to the column; HLS 12 has 45.¹¹ The quiring of the two manuscripts is quite different, and there is nothing in the quiring of HLS MS 12 that suggests that it was taken out of a larger manuscript. The ‘Anglo-Norman’ hand, one of two hands at work at work in Fr. 571, is similar to, but need not be the same as, that of our manuscript. There is heraldry in HLS 12, but nothing that firmly connects it with Edward III, much less Philippa.¹² That the text of HLS 12 is entirely in French, including items such as Westminster II that are normally given in Latin, lends some support to the notion that it was part of a manuscript that is entirely in French, perhaps even that it was a gift from a young woman to a young man for whom French was the language they had in common. Michael also makes a strong argument that the illuminators of both Fr. 571 and HLS 12 were the same. If they were not the same, they were two skilled artists who were working very much in the same style.

An argument that Michael did not consider gives plausibility to a connection between HLS MS 12 and the betrothal of Philippa of Hainault and Edward III. The only statute of Edward II that the manuscript contains is the statute of Stamford of 1309. Normally, this fact would lead us to conclude that this collection was made shortly after that date. If, however, there are independent reasons for connecting this collection with the marriage of Philippa and Edward, as there are, then the fact that chronologically the last statute is the statute of Stamford gives that connection added plausibility. The statute of Stamford is a recitation of statutes of Edward I. Nothing in the book is the work of Edward II independent of his father; it does not even include Edward II’s best-known staute, the statute of York of 1318. The total absence in the book of anything that was the work of Edward II is just what we would expect from a group that was about to overthrow him.

Whether we connect HLS MS 12 with the marriage of Philippa and Edward is, to some extent, a question of how much risk we are willing to take with circumstantial evidence that is likely to remain quite incomplete. What we cannot deny, however, is that a manuscript like this was made for someone at the very highest level of fourteenth-century society. How it ultimately ended up in the hands of of men like John Aslakby in the fifteenth century we do not know, but that it did may tell us something about the penetration of the common law into late medieval English society.

This manuscript appeared in the exhibit ‘Beyond Words’ at the McMullen Museum (Boston College) from 12 September to 11 December 2016. It is noted in the catalogue Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Lisa Fagin Davis,‎ Anne-Marie Eze, and Nancy Netzer, ed. ([Chestnut Hill, MA]: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, [2016]).