Thomas Hearne and Nicholas Cantilupe’s fantastic history of the University of Cambridge

Before the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge was a clash of blades on the Thames or won and lost on the playing field of Twickenham, it was fought out through recourse to history. In the fifteenth – and on into the sixteenth – century, the universities debated their origins. Oxford claimed Alfred as their kind father, a ludicrous pedigree still remembered in the coat-of-arms of Univ. But at least Alfred existed: Cambridge sought to stretch the time-frame (and credulity) further by declaring King Arthur their founder. A foundation text for this foundation myth was the mid-century Historiola by Nicholas Cantilupe. It is a work which has received some recent scholarly attention in an article by Ad Putter that appeared in Medium Ævum, but there has been no edition of the work since the early eighteenth century when it was printed by the indefatigable Thomas Hearne.

Hearne, attentive readers may recall, was also the editor of the two Lives of Henry V which I discussed in an English Historical Review article of 2008; he was a giant among English antiquaries, even if his politics and character made him as many enemies as friends. His work on Cantilupe did not necessarily raise his stock among his contemporaries – it was a Cambridge man, Thomas Baker, who commented that the Historiola was ‘one entire Fable, & the fruitfull Invention of a teeming Monkish Brain, & you do it too much honor, in giving it an Edition’. But that did not stop Hearne working on it. What we do not know – or, as we shall see, did not know until now – is on which of the ten or more manuscripts he based his edition.

I happened the other day to be looking at some manuscripts in my alma mater of Christ Church, including their copy of Cantilupe, MS. 138, which – from its fifteenth century folio numbering – is clearly an excerpt from a much larger volume. Turning its leaves, I was struck that the antiquarian note recording details of the author of the Historiola was in a familiar hand: that of Hearne himself. I went to check the edition and noted that his transcription exactly matches that of the manuscript. The question then became how Hearne came by this slim fascicule – a question to which the answer, as so often with Hearne, lies in his diaries, edited a century ago by the Oxford Historical Society.

In his entry for 9^th March 1712, he mentions that some manuscripts he had perused ‘In the Dean of Xt Church’s Study amongst Dr Aldrich’s Books (all which I have examin’d lately)’ and he goes on to say ‘I … saw there Cantilupes Historiola Cantabrigiensis, & I am promis’d the loan of it’. In other words, he was checking the collection of the recently departed Henry Aldrich, once himself Dean of Christ Church, and found there a copy of Cantilupe. Aldrich’s ownership of a manuscript comprising Cantilupe (and little else) can fortunately be corroborated, as Christ Church also holds his library catalogue in its archives and there, at fol. 9^v.

Hearne, then, did indeed gain the promised loan and, clearly, returned it to its home at which point, presumably, it entered into the collection of the foundation over which Aldrich had once presided. Indeed, what is interesting is that this new nugget of information also allows us to identify other manuscripts – Greek, Hebrew and early-modern – as having reached the institutional library from the same individual source. In short, one brief note at the top of a folio can (as so often) open a window onto a world previously thought lost.

Which was the first Latin Life of Henry V?

I am about to upset the ghosts again. I have done so before when I described Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, as a book-lover but not a book-worm (a judgement I stand by, though I would express it with more subtlety now), or when I pointed out that Paul II, sometimes considered a humanist pope, in part because of his book-collecting, actually owed much of his library to the activities of one previous collector. On this occasion, the spirit who will be shaking his gory locks is far less distinguished than a royal or papal prince; it is the humanist, Tito Livio Frulovisi.

I have just seen the final set of proofs for an article coming out in the next issue of English Historical Review on Frulovisi’s most famous work, his Vita Henrici Quinti. Frulovisi – despite his resonant forenames — was hardly a great success in his own lifetime, but his Vita is remembered as the first posthumous biography of Henry V and, at a couple of removes, a source for Shakespeare’s play. The Vita was also, it is said, the source for another biography, called the Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, which was once thought to have been by Thomas of Elmham, and is now sometimes known as Ps-Elmham. Though this latter work was, like Frulovisi’s biography, edited and published by Thomas Hearne in the eighteenth century, it has not found much favour with historians: much longer than Frulovisi’s, it is considered simply more prolix, with little extra information, and in an overblown style which compares poorly to Frulovisi’s humanist Latin. Frulovisi, as secretary of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, is thought to have been, in effect, ghost-writing the war memoirs of Henry V’s youngest brother, which the Ps-Elmham did little more than copy.

What I argue – what I hope I demonstrate – in my article is that the Vita et Gesta is actually the earlier of the two works, and provides Frulovisi’s main source. There are several reasons to reverse the usual chronology — to return, indeed, to the chronology which many pre-twentieth-century scholars considered to be the case — and they include matters of both structure and style. I do not intend to repeat the arguments in detail here, but the stylistic argument is that Frulovisi was converting the florid Latin into humanist diction, but not always being successful. I give in the article two extracts to show how this worked; examples could be drawn from most pages of the works. I will give you another brief example which I do not mention in English Historical Review. It comes from early on in the biographies, and relates to the revolt of Owen Glendower:

Ps-Elmham, Vita et Gesta, p. 10	Frulovisi, Vita, p. 4
quousque totam Wallie rebellionem sua virtute penitus exstirpavit et ipsam patriam, cum universis incolis suis, eidem patri suo subjectam restituit	cum reliqua Wallia in deditionem patris reducta
excepto ipso Owanno, capitali rebelli, pre timore in loca deserta et latebrosas caveas, absque pugnancium fortitudine fugiente ibidemque vitam inhonorifice finiente	preter Owanum quendam Wallicorum caput, qui propter metum et conscientiam facinoris in deserta loca et antra sine comitibus fugatus vitam inhoneste finivit
eius filius et heres isti principi Henrico post in regem coronato serviens ei familiaris extitit domestico famulatu.	eius Owani Henrico postea regi famulatus est filius.
De hiis Wallie guerris, per multa annorum continuatis curricula, de obsidionibus, conflictibus, frequenti strage, discriminosis incomodis, fortuna et infortuniis, aliisque infinitis in eisdem contingentibus, idem expavescens calamus pauca ponit, quia ad veram et certam singulorum noticiam non pervenit.	Et hoc de Wallicis bellis satis, quorum ad certam quoque singulorum notitiam non devenerunt.

Frulovisi’s phrasing is, as ever, more succinct but it retains many of the terms used in the Vita et Gesta, even when they are of dubious usage (see the repetition of famulatus, which the Vita et Gesta uses as a noun in the non-classical sense of ‘household’ while Frulovisi attempts to make it more classical by turning it into a past participle, but the verb from which it comes is of rare occurence in classical Latin). At other times, though, he strains to be different from that in the Vita et Gesta. Notice, for instance, that Ps-Elmham talks of Glendower hiding in gloomy caves — caveas — but Frulovisi, wanting to be different, uses antra, a term which is only to be found in poetry, not prose. My point is not that Frulovisi was a poor Latinist — humanist phrasing was in the making and mistakes were unavoidable — but that the verbal resonances are one sign that Frulovisi copied from the Vita et Gesta, rather than vice versa. The Vita et Gesta pays scant attention to the rules of classical phrasing — using guerra rather than bellum, say — and if it was following Frulovisi, it would have achieved the remarkable feat of stripping out all the humanist usages, and keeping those which were non-humanist. It makes more sense, I would contend, to see Frulovisi trying, and sometimes failing, to render the Vita et Gesta into ‘better’ Latin.

The best way to demonstrate the range of reasons why we should take Frulovisi’s work to be derivative of the much-derided Ps-Elmham would be to have a modern edition made of the work (there has not been one since the efforts of the redoutable Thomas Hearne in the early eighteenth century). If my article spurs renewed interest in the Vita et Gesta, that would be an achievement. But, you might ask, does it matter? Does the relative dating have any significance? The answer is yes, because, as I point out briefly in my article, it changes our view of the connexions between the different chronicles of the fifteenth century, and can also give us pause to reflect on the nature of political culture in the 1430s, when both these texts were written. It also raises a question mark over the usual perception of Humfrey as an engaged patron, supposedly directing ‘his’ scholars — an attitude which belittles those scholars’ own efforts, however unoriginal their works might have been. That is an issue which I will certainly be discussing again.

UPDATE: the article is now published and if you go to the page listing my publications, there is a free link to it on the Oxford University Press website.