Dyed Cloth in the London Thornton Manuscript

Abstract

It has been well documented that between c. 1420 and 1460 Robert Thornton, a member of the gentry of Yorkshire’s North Riding, copied and compiled the contents of two large manuscripts for his family’s personal use: Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 (‘Thornton’) and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042 (‘London Thornton’).1 Their contents vary so widely that they resemble miscellanies. Yet codicological evidence and other internal and external features of both books evince Thornton’s purposeful organization of the texts that he acquired and copied, not only within each of his two manuscripts but between them.2 So explicit are the physical and generic associations that Thornton made between two particular texts—not otherwise obviously affiliated by circulation or subject matter—that they comprise their own booklet in London Thornton.3 These texts are the Middle English poems now known as Richard Coeur de Lion (hereafter RCL) and the Apocryphal History of the Infancy (hereafter Infancy).4 Most likely copied from separate exemplars,5 RCL and Infancy appear consecutively in the manuscript, occupying fols. 125ra–163va and fols. 163va–168vb, respectively.6 RCL fills quire ‘g’ and part of quire ‘h’; Infancy begins below RCL on fol. 163va and concludes on the final extant leaf of quire ‘h’ with room to spare.7 Thornton not only made the two texts physically proximate; he also linked them by labeling both ‘romance’—a characterization somewhat standard in extant copies of RCL but unique to Thornton’s copy of Infancy and almost certainly his own addition.8 The two-line explicit of RCL reads: ‘The Romance/Of Kyng Richerd þe Conqueroure’ (Add 31042, fol. 163va, ll. 22–23). Directly below, Infancy’s incipit proclaims, ‘Here Bigynnys the Romance/of þe childhode of Iheu Criste þat/clerkes callys Ipokrephum’ (Add 31042, fol. 163va, ll. 25–27). Other romance flourishes are unique to London Thornton’s copy of Infancy including, for instance, the knightly designation ‘Sir’ before characters’ names.9