Rate Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61)

Abstract

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61 is often referred to as the Rate manuscript after the codex’s scribe, who signs the name nineteen times throughout the volume of 162 paper folia and often adds drawings of fish and roses at the ends of texts. The codex measures about 418 mm by 140 mm. It likely was produced for urban household use, given its strong interest in domestic life, including practical material for household maintenance such as recipes and accounting advice along with poems for lay devotion and popular entertainment. Watermark evidence suggests production dates between 1479 and 1610, but the scribe’s hand precludes a date after the first decade of the 16th century, so scholars typically use c. 1500 to date the manuscript. Dialect places Rate in Leicestershire. Little otherwise is known about Rate, but his careless copying and idiosyncratic editing combined with the codex’s unusual format suggest he was an amateur scribe producing the volume for his own or his household’s use. The manuscript compiles forty-one works, although some numbers include multiple or incomplete texts. Its eclectic contents, primarily in Middle English excluding macaronic works and three Latin epigrams, range from short didactic poems and prayers to long devotional treatises like The Northern Passion. It includes literature from a wide range of times and places. Among the earlier are the late-13th-century Saint Eustace and The King and His Four Daughters, which translates part of Robert Grosseteste’s Anglo-Norman Le Château d’Amour, but a majority date to the 15th century. Some are extant only in the Rate manuscript; for example, The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools and The Feasts of All Saints and All Souls are unique. Other texts, however, circulated widely in later medieval England (e.g., A Prayer to the Virgin Mary, preserved in forty other manuscripts and itself excerpted from the immensely popular Speculum Christiani). Ashmole 61 is noteworthy for its five popular romances: four are signature Middle English tail-rhyme romances—Sir Isumbras, The Erle of Tolous, Lybeaus Desconus, and Sir Cleges—and the fifth is Sir Orfeo. It also includes two comic poems in tail-rhyme stanzas, Sir Corneus and King Edward and the Hermit. The manuscript as a whole compiles works concerning good manners, correct conduct, and the claims of the afterlife, issues of great interest to 15th-century readers. It is often compared to other 15th-century miscellanies, such as Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38; Edinburgh National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1; Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C. 83; and the Lincoln Thornton MS.