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Harley MS 4866

Record Id:

040-002050709

Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:

040-002050709

MDARK:

ark:/81055/vdc_100000000859.0x000180

LARK:

SLARK:

Format:

ISAD(G)

Reference (shelfmark):

Harley MS 4866

Title:

Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes

Scope & Content:

The manuscript includes Thomas Hoccleve's The Regiment of Princes. The poem was composed in c. 1410-1411 and addressed to Henry, Prince of Wales (the future Henry V). This manuscript is one the early copies of the text and was possibly prepared under the supervision of Hoccleve (b. c. 1367, d. 1426).

The first page was replaced and the text supplied by an early modern hand, incipit: 'Heere begynnyth the Book how / Pryncys sholden be governyd' (f. 1r). The same hand also wrote the last 5 lines of the poem on f. 95v.

f. i*v includes a modern Latin inscription relating to Heccleve and his work. The same hand included several notes in the margins (e.g., ff. 10r, 15r).

Decoration:

Miniature in colours of Chaucer clutching a rosary and pointing at the text (f. 88r). Miniature in colours of a man, reclining on the ground and holding a lariat in which a stanza is inscribed (f. 62r). 11 three-sided borders with floral sprays and initials in colours and gold (ff. 52r, 57v, 60r, 63r, 68r, 70r, 72r, 78v, 83v, 85v, 88v). Paraphs in gold with purple penwork decoration, and in blue with red penwork decoration. Rubrics in red.

Collection Area:

Western Manuscripts

Project / Collection:

Harley Collection

Hierarchy Tree:

[{ "id" : "040-002050709", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Harley MS 4866: Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]

Hierarchy Record Ids:

032-002045828
040-002050709

Is part of:

Harley MS 1-7661 : Harley Manuscripts

Harley MS 4866 : Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes

Hierarchy:

032-002045828[4865]/040-002050709

Container:

View / search within Archive / Collection: Harley MS 1-7661

Record Type (Level):

File

Extent:

Parchment codex.

Digitised Content:

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_4866 (digital images currently unavailable)

Thumbnail:

Languages:

English, Middle

Scripts:

Latin

Start Date:

1406

End Date:

1425

Date Range:

c 1411-c 1420

Era:

Access:

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User Conditions:

Letter of introduction required to view this manuscript.

Physical Characteristics:

Materials: Parchment codex.

Dimensions: 265 x 185 mm (text space: 180 x 85 mm).

Foliation: ff. 1* + 95 (+ 5 unfoliated flyleaves: 2 paper and 1 parchment at the beginning and 2 paper at the end).

Collation: i⁷⁺¹ (ff. 1-8; f. 1 is a modern replacement); ii-iv⁸ (ff. 9-32); v^8-2 (ff. 33-38); vi^8-1 (ff. 39-44); vii-xii⁸(ff. 45-93); xiii² (ff. 94-95, with folios missing at the end). Catchword and bifolium signatures starting on f. 2 as 'a ii'.

Script: Gothic.

Binding: British Museum/British Library in-house binding.

Custodial History:

Origin: England (London or Westminster).

Provenance:

The Harley Collection, formed by Robert Harley (b. 1661, d. 1724), 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician, and Edward Harley (b. 1689, d. 1741), 2nd Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts.

Edward Harley bequeathed the library to his widow, Henrietta, née Cavendish Holles (b. 1694, d. 1755) during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (b. 1715, d.1785), Duchess of Portland; the manuscripts were sold by the Countess and the Duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum; the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library.

Administrative Context:

Origin: England (London or Westminster).

Information About Copies:

Full digital coverage available for this manuscript, see Digitised Manuscripts http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/.

Publications:

A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808-1812), III (1808), no. 4866.

Frederick James Furnivall, Trial-Forwards to my 'Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer's Minor Poems' (London: Bungay for the Chaucer Society, 1871), frontispiece.

Life Records of Chaucer, Chaucer Society, 2nd Series, XIV, Part II, ed. by Frederick James Furnivall (London, 1876), frontispiece.

Walter de Gray Birch and Henry Jenner, Early Drawings and Illuminations: An Introduction to the Study of Illustrated Manuscripts (London: Bagster and Sons, 1879), p. 11.

The Palaeographic Society: Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, Second series, ed. by Edward Augustus Bond, Edward Maunde Thompson, and George Frederic Warner, (London: Cloves and Sons, 1884-1894), I, pl. 57 [bound as no. 110].

Walter William Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894-97), I: Romaunt of the Rose, Minor Poems (1894), lix-lx, frontispiece.

Hoccleve’s Works: The Regement of Princes, A.D. 1411-12, from the Harleian MS. 4866, and fourteen of Hoccleve’s minor poems from the Egerton MS. 615, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Early English Text Society, 1897).

Marion Harry Spielmann, The Portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer: An Essay Written on the Occasion of the Quincentenary of the Poet's Death (London: Chaucer Society, 1900), pp. 6-8, pl. I.

English Literature: An Illustrated Record, ed. by Richard Garnett, 4 vols (London: Heinemann, 1903), I, pl. facing p. 140.

Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion 1357-1900, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), I, pp. 21-23 and frontispiece.

Eric. G. Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Paris: Van Oest, 1928), no. 293.

Reginald Call, 'The Plimpton Chaucer and other problems of Chaucerian portraiture', Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies, 22 (1947), 135-44 (pp. 135, 136, 140 n. 42, 141, 143).

Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1954), p. 185, pl. 169B.

Roger Sherman Loomis, A Mirror of Chaucer's World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), fig. 2.

Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1965), 248 n. 87.

Aage Brudsendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 14, 16, 18.

Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), pp. 110-12.

Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1969), p. 47, pl. 83.

Beverly Boyd, Chaucer and the Medieval Book (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1973), pp. 38, 43.

Michael Charles Seymour, 'The Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes', Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 4 (1974), 255-97 (pp. 256, 258, 259, 263, 269).

Amanda Tomlinson, The Mediaeval Face (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1974), pl. 37 [exhibition catalogue].

James McGregor, 'The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve's De Regimine Principum and in the Troilus Frontispiece', Chaucer Review, 11 (1977), 338-50 (p. 344).

R.F. Green, 'Notes on Some Manuscripts of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes', British Library Journal, 4 (1978), 37-41 (pp. 37, 39).

Michael Charles Seymour, Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), pp. 114, 124, 127.

Michael Charles Seymour, 'Manuscript Portraits of Chaucer and Hocceleve', Burlington Magazine, 124 (1982), 618-23 (pp. 618, 621, 622, fig. 41).

Kate Harris, 'The Patron of British Library MS Arundel 38', Notes and Queries, 31 (1984), 462-63 (p. 463).

Hilton Kelliher and Sally Brown, English Literary Manuscripts (London: British Library, 1986), p. 10, and front cover.

The Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagent England 1200-1400, ed. by Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), no. 721 [exhibition catalogue].

Kathleen L. Scott, ‘Design, Decoration and Illustration’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 31-64 (p. 59 n. 52).

Sylvia Wright, 'The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve', British Library Journal, 18 (1992), 190-202 (p. 199).

Julian Brown, A Palaeographer’s View: The Selected Writings of Julian Brown, ed. by Janet Bately, Michelle P. Brown, and Jane Roberts (London: Harvey Miller, 1993), fig. 30.

Anthony S. G. Edwards, The Chaucer Portraits in the Harley and Rosenbach Manuscripts', English Manuscript Studies, 4 (1993), pp. 268-71.

Derek Pearsall, 'Hoccleve's Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation', Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies, 69 (1994), 386-410 (p. 403).

Dhira B. Mahoney, 'Courtly Presentation and Authorial Self-fashioning: Frontispiece Miniatures in Late Medieval French and English Manuscripts', Medievalia: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies Worldwide, 21 (1996), 97-142.

Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390-1490, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 6, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), no. 51.

Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 114, 117-21, 151-57, 171-72, 180, 188.

Chris Fletcher, Roger Evans, and Sally Brown, 1000 Years of English Literature: A Treasury of Literary Manuscripts (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), p. 32.

Matthew Boyd Goldie, Middle English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 142.

Maidie Hilmo, Medieval Images, Icons, and IIlustrated English Literary Texts: From the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 163.

Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (London: British Library, 2005), p. 164, no. 48.

Treasures of the British Library, ed. by Nicolas Barker and others (London: British Library, 2005), p. 57.

Peter Brown, A Companion to Medeival English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-c. 1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 312-15.

Exhibitions:

The Middle Ages, (online), 26 March 2015-

Material Type:

Archives and Manuscripts

Legal Status:

Not Public Record(s)

Names: