THORPE'S "TESTAMENT": A CONJECTURAL EMENDATION

Abstract

The Testament of William Thorpe, the Lollard preacher, was published as an appendix to his longer Examination in an edition which appeared clandestinely at Antwerp around 1530.' The editor, according to Thomas More writing in 1532, was George Constantine, but according to John Bale writing in 1544, was William Tyndale.2 The recent critical edition of the Examination, by Anne Hudson, which is based on the only surviving English manuscript, also includes the Testament, although this latter text survives only in the Antwerp edition.3 The Testament was presumably presented as an appendix in the manuscript of the Examination used for the Antwerp edition, for the two pieces come one after the other, without a break, while the third item in that book - an account of Sir John Oldcastle's appearance before Archbishop Arundel - starts on a new page and gives every indication of being an entirely separate item.The oddest feature of the conjunction of Thorpe's Examination with his Testament is the wide discrepancy in date between them. The text of the Examination itself is undated, but Thorpe tells us in the course of that work that his first appearance before Archbishop Arundel was On the sondaye next after the feste of seynt Peter / that we call lammesse in the yeare of our lorde a. M.CCCC. and .vij.' (i.e. Sunday, 7 August 14Oy).4 The Testament, however, is dated 'the friday after the rode daye and the twentye daye of September / In the yeare of our lorde a thousand foure hundred and sixtie'.5 Ruling out the improbable contingency that a heretic who was clearly not in the mood for recanting in 1407, and who had already held his opinions 'this thirty winter and more',6 could have survived to draft an unrepentant restatement of his opinions on his deathbed at the age of at least 90, we might be left with the conclusion that the Testament is either a work of fiction or a spurious attribution.7The date of 1460 would moreover make the Testament a remarkably late composition. It is not otherwise certain that any surviving Lollard texts were originally composed this late, and few enough were even copied after about 1425/ If the Lollard movement was still capable of producing such a sophisticated text so late, then it must have had greater intellectual vitality than some recent historians have been inclined to admit.9However, a simple conjectural emendation resolves the problem posed by the late date of the Testament, enabling us to dispense with the idea that Thorpe was prodigiously long-lived or the conclusion that a new Lollard text was written at such an implausibly late date.The solution comes from emending 1460 to 1409. This seems arbitrary enough at first sight. But if the numbers are reduced to Roman numerals MCCCCLX and MCCCCIX - then it becomes easy to see how the dates might have been confused through scribal or editorial error. This requires us to presume that the text from which the Antwerp editor worked gave the date of the Testament in Roman numerals rather than Arabic numerals or words.1 But this is no bold presumption, for Roman numerals predominated over Arabic in fifteenth-century English documents, and years were more commonly recorded in numerical than verbal form. Moreover, it is obvious from the Antwerp edition that the editor has not simply transcribed the date of the Testament from his source. Instead, he has integrated it into a final paragraph of his own devising, which refers to William Thorpe in the third person and then draws the reader's attention to the apparent interval of fifty-three years between the two documents (although without questioning its plausibility).11The emendation of 1460 to 1409 receives powerful support from consideration of another element in the date given for the Testament, which specifies the day in question as 'the friday after the rode daye'. The 'rode daye' is of course the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September). But while in 1460 the Friday after that feast fell on 19 September, in 1409 it did indeed fall on 20 September. …