'WE WANTED þE TREWE COPY þEREOF': JOHN PAGE'S "THE SIEGE OF ROUEN", TEXT AND TRANSMISSION

Abstract

Introduction: in search of 'pe trewe copy'London, British Library, Eger ton MS 650 is a manuscript of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle, the work descended from Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Anglo-Norman prose Brut that recorded British history from its Trojan origins and its mythical past up to its medieval present in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The prose Brut was hugely popular: it survives in almost two hundred manuscripts (second in number among Middle English works only to the Wycliffite Bible), and over twenty versions and continuations, as successive generations of historians brought its accretive narrative up to date.1Eger ton 650, however, is a unique copy of the Brut. Its text is one of the standard early fifteenth-century continuations, until it reaches the account of Henry V's siege of the city of Rouen in 1418. At this point the scribe broke off, and instead of finishing the account of the siege, he wrote in red ink and a decorated script, as though it were a capitulum rubric:Here is no more of the sege of Rone and joat is be cause we wanted j^e trewe copy hereof bot who so euer ow[n]ys jois boke may wryte it oute in he henderend of his boke or in he forh end of it whene he gettes he trew copy Where it is wryttyn wryte in heis iii voyde lyne where it may be foundyn.2This is a remarkable intervention, not only for the direct address it makes to imagined future owners and readers, but also for the specific codicological instructions issued to them (rivalled only, perhaps, by the famous marginal note to the Roman d'Alexandre in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 264, fol. 67')d Many things about it merit comment: the tantalizing insight it offers into the workings of the community of readers, book-owners, and copyists of the chronicle, which it clearly envisaged; the lack of a dividing line between readers and writers, addressed together and indiscriminately as 'who so euer ow[n]ys his boke'; and the tension implied between the neat visual presentation of the rubric (suggesting that its scribe was concerned with the cosmetic appearance of his book as a finished product) and the implication of its content that he explicitly did not envisage his chronicle as a finished product, but anticipated a recopying that would attend the future discovery of a 'trewe copy', and would occupy the flyleaves and margins. All of this is peculiar to the context of the Brut, a work that was unusual in being authored not individually but collectively and serially; and in being deliberately and permanendy unfinished, imagining (and in this case soliciting) its own continuation.Most pertinent to the purposes of this article, however, is the idea of a 'trewe copy', the implications and complexities of which the following argument will seek to unravel. For whatever reason, the scribe regarded his exemplar for the account of the siege of Rouen as defective. On a practical level, the ubiquity and availability of the Brut in many different versions presumably made the chances of a later reader finding a 'trewe copy' fairly high; although the rubricator seems to take for granted that the anticipated continuator would agree with him on what exacdy what would constitute such a 'trewe copy'. But on an ideological level, the concept of a 'trewe copy' was far from straightforward in the textual culture of the Middle Ages (as if we needed persuading of this, Chaucer's exasperated 'wordes unto Adam' to 'wryte more trewe' come to mind).4 This article suggests that the reason the rubric appears where it does, and the motivating factor underpinning its concern over the absence of a 'trewe copy', is that behind the Bruts account of the siege of Rouen stood another work, John Page's The Siege of Rouen, whose manner of preservation and incorporation in the chronicle was the particular source for this rubricator's unease. It then ponders what exacdy that phrase might mean in relation to that text, whose own trajectory of transmission and variation fundamentally challenges the assumptions on which the idea, and the possibility, of a 'trewe copy' hinges. …