Ms. Roll 1066

Introduction

In July, 2021, under the aegis of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS), we started the process of moving Ms. Codex 1066: Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England to Edward IV, circa 1461 from the old system into Digital Mappa (DM). This project is a complete transcription linked to digital images of UPenn Ms. Roll 1066, from the collection of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

The original project was launched in 2012, and nine years is a long time when it comes to computer hardware and software. We had known for several years that we would have to either make a move or take the project down, but when DM v.2 was released in early 2020, we knew that it would be a perfect new home for the project. DM, developed by Martin Foys at the University of Wisconsin with cooperation from SIMS since 2013, with its focus on annotating images, was similar to the existing version of the project but included additional functionality that we knew would be a benefit.

In 2021 we were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had been working remotely since March 2020, and it was a constant challenge to figure out how to do meaningful work without having access to the library’s physical collections. So the revision of Ms. Codex 1066, a digital project that we could do entirely remotely, was a perfect choice. Dot Porter, Curator for Digital Research Services in the Kislak Center, gathered the team in mid-July, and we started planning immediately.

With no way to automatically port the old project into DM, we needed a team that would be able to take the time and effort to carefully and systematically move everything by hand. Two members of the original team returned for the revision: Marie Turner, now living in Cambridge, England, and Amey Hutchins, who is still at Penn Libraries as the Manuscripts Cataloging Librarian. They were joined by Dot and Lucy Hall, a Master’s Student in Library Science at Drexel University, who worked on Ms. Codex 1066 as her capstone project. 

It’s now January 2022, ten years since the launch of the original project, and we are very pleased to make available Ms. Codex 1066: Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England to Edward IV, circa 1461 in DM v.2.

Acknowledgements

2021-2022: Digital Mappa Migration

• Marie Turner, Manuscripts Cataloger
  • Text transcription, editing, DM annotations
• Amey Hutchins, Manuscripts Cataloging Librarian, University of Pennsylvania
  • Editing, DM annotations
• Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Research Services, University of Pennsylvania
  • DM layout and implementation, website implementation, DM annotations
• Lucy Hall, MLIS Student (awarded 2022), Drexel Universtiy
  • DM annotations

Special thanks to Martin Foys and Digital Mappa, and The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.

2012: Original Project

Thanks to the following members of the Penn community for their work on Ms. Roll. 1066 and its website:

• Marie Turner, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English (awarded 2014)
  • Editing, research and historical context
• Emily Steiner, Associate Professor, Department of English
  • Faculty advisor, research and grant writing
• Amey Hutchins, Manuscripts Cataloger, Rare Book & Manuscript Library
  • Transcription, proofreading, and editing
• Dennis Mullen, Digitization Specialist, Schoenberg Institute for Electronic Text & Image
  • Website design and construction
• Claudia Scala Schlessman, Manuscripts Cataloger, Rare Book & Manuscript Library
  • Website image mapping
• Nancy M. Shawcross, Curator of Manuscripts, Rare Book & Manuscript Library
  • Project coordination, website presentation and grant writing

Thanks also to the Lawrence J. Schoenberg & Barbara Brizdle Manuscript Initiative, the B. H. Breslauer Foundation, and the Walter J. Miller Trust for financial support of the acquisition of Ms. Roll 1066; and to the American Branch of the Richard III Society for financial support of the website project.

About the Roll

Likely produced in London in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England, to Edward IV, known as UPenn Ms. Roll 1066, is a compilational tour de force of the greatest hits of medieval historians, assimilating the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, and Ranulf Higden, among others. The roll is an imposing physical presence: a staggering thirty-seven feet and thirteen membranes long, it chronicles the lineage of Yorkist king Edward IV beginning with Adam and Eve and ending with Edward IV (1461). This Chronicle also has a complex illustrative schema containing 174 bust-length portraits in color, five mandorlas with tinted full-length portraits, and eighty roundels containing crowns as well as several classic chronicle type-scenes including the Temptation of Adam, Noah after the Flood, and the city of Jerusalem. The Latin text is written in a standard late-medieval anglicana hand.

The date of the roll's production may be ascertained with some certainty. Although the latest events in the text chronicle the marriage of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou in 1445 and the appointment of Edward's father, Richard, duke of York, as regent in France, an illustration of a young crowned Edward IV suggests that the roll was produced no earlier than 1461. Furthermore, while many similar rolls from the early years of Edward's reign depict his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, by his side, Penn's does not, allowing us to further pinpoint the date of production to the years between 1461 and Edward's marriage in 1464. In terms of provenance, little is known about the roll's life before it came to the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2007. The manuscript was previously sold by Philip Duchnes in New York and came into the hands of collector Cornelius J. Hauck. Hauck gave his collection to the Cincinnati Historical Society in 1966, and the roll was subsequently sold at auction at Christie's, New York, as part of the Hauck Collection in 2006. One year later, the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book & Manuscript Library purchased the roll from Sam Fogg.

Penn's Chronicle can be added to the so-called Temporum group of fifteenth-century genealogical chronicles, named for their distinctive opening phrase, "Temporum summam lineamque descendentem" (taken from Roger of Wendover's Flores Historiarum, another frequent source). The previously identified members of the group are held by the Huntington Library (HM 264), Harvard University (bMS Typ 40), and Trinity College, Cambridge (MS R.4.52) respectively. Of these four, only the Penn and Harvard rolls share something approaching an identical text. The Huntington roll covers the same historical material but is either missing text in the middle or has severely compressed the history recorded in Ms. Roll 1066, and the Trinity version is greatly foreshortened, ending in the middle of British history.

Penn's roll is special in that it is really two genealogies in one: on the verso (back) of the manuscript, and ending on membrane 5 is a copy of the Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi attributed to Peter of Poitiers—a twelfth-century universal history told through the life of Christ. It is illustrated with several drawings and followed by a diagram of Roman emperors, popes, and several genealogies of Frankish kings. There is some evidence that the two texts were intended to be read together; the scribe (likely the same for both the recto and verso texts) deliberately matched up the Adam and Eve images on both sides of the roll, and the Chronicle's Christ medallion lines up perfectly with the Nativity image on the verso.

Historical Contexts

Late fifteenth-century English politics was marked by the so-called Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1485), a series of dynastic battles fought for control of the throne between the two rival houses of Lancaster and York. UPenn Ms. Roll 1066 is a cultural artifact of this struggle: the fifteenth century sees a revival of genealogical literature (once popular in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries) as pedigree and lineage were increasingly relied upon by the royal houses to stake their claims to the crown. When the house of Lancaster was replaced by that of York in 1461, the production of genealogical chronicles kicked into overdrive, the Yorkists churning out documents that present Edward IV as the rightful king, despite contemporaneous Lancastrian histories positioning him as usurper. Such propaganda was crucial at a time of such political uncertainty: Henry VI, Edward IV, and their heirs would play a game of musical thrones for more than a decade before a relative unknown named Henry Tudor arrived on the scene to claim the crown from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field (22 August 1485), effectively ending the Wars of the Roses and the Plantagenet Dynasty.

In contrast to twelfth-century Latin chronicles, thirteenth-century encyclopedias, and fourteenth-century universal histories, fifteenth-century genealogical chronicles are often seen as derivative, crude, and aesthetically impoverished. The factionalism of late fifteenth-century Britain leads scholars to be interested in these kinds of chronicles mainly for their perceived propagandistic value, the ways in which they bolster claims to the throne or to ancient lineage. During the War of the Roses—which was as much a propaganda war between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions as it was a series of bloody battles—it was nearly impossible for a historian to maintain the fiction of neutrality. Penn's roll presents a challenge to some of these modern scholarly assumptions.

While certainly pro-Edward IV, Ms. Roll 1066 often fails to draw the rigid claims to power we expect from the Yorkist propaganda machine. For example, though the scribe and artist clearly outline Edward IV's claim to the throne—it shows, parallel to the central line of royal descent, a Yorkist genealogy descending from Lionel of Antwerp, 3rd son of Edward III—it also lays out the competing claim of the Lancastrian line, descending from Edward III's 4th son, John of Gaunt. In other words, we see how a single document may argue for right rule at the same time that it accommodates different versions of history.

- Dr Marie Turner, PhD, University of Pennsylvania