[In the following excerpt from the introduction to his Latin transcription of De Nugis Curialium, James describes the physical condition of the manuscript from which he is working; discusses the errors made by an earlier transcriber (Thomas Wright); explains his own methods of transcription; speculates on the initial publication date of Map's work; and describes the contents of Map's work.]

The treatise de Nugis Curialium of Walter Map is preserved in a single manuscript¹ of the end of the fourteenth century in the Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 851. A detailed description of the contents, which I owe to the great kindness of Mr. R. L. Poole, Keeper of the Archives, will be given in due course. It may be prefaced by a few remarks upon the provenance and externals of the volume.

It comes from Ramsey Abbey. On the verso of f. 6, facing the beginning of the de Nugis, is a finely executed drawing in delicate stippled work and pale colours of which the central part consists of the word Wellis in large gothic letters formed out of ribbons or scrolls and placed on a label. The top of the W is prolonged to the left and inscribed Iste liber constat ffratri Iohanni de (Wellis), and the concluding words monacho Rameseye are written on the tops of the two l's which are similarly prolonged to L and R. On L is a rock on which sits a lion, his back turned to R, and his head, twisted round, looking to R. Round his neck is a chain which passes through the uprights of the W and is secured in the centre of the R portion of that letter. Out of a round hole in the rock a spring of water gushes up and flows to R. On R in the water stands St. Christopher bearing the Child Christ on his shoulders and looking up at Him. The Child bears an orb with cross. The saint is bare legged and has a cap on his head with broad turned-up band; he holds an eel-spear which is threaded through the convolutions of the s of Wellis and passes down into the water.

Below the picture is pencilled the name Whyttynton.

I may add that neither of the fragmentary catalogues of the Ramsey Library which are printed in the Chronicon Ramesiae (Rolls Series) is of late enough date to contain any note of our manuscript.

It belongs no doubt to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. It is in double columns of forty-two and forty-one lines. The hand is not bad, but not of the easiest. In one or two places, most notably on f. 39 b (p. 125), the ink has become seriously blurred owing to the presence of a bad spot in the vellum. There are two main volumes, the second being the Piers Plowman, in which several scripts appear. The text of the de Nugis is not certainly, though it is for the most part, in one hand. The aspect of the first few pages is different from that of the main body of the text: on f. 33 a there is a marked irregularity in the script. The rubrics are in a different style from the text. The verses on f. 5, Vernat eques, and the Comedia de Geta, are by a single scribe.

A contemporary of the scribe² has gone over the text and has inserted in the margin some omitted words and also some various readings. The latter are introduced with an al., for alias or aliter, or perhaps aliud exemplar (v. s. q.). They are most considerable in the Dissuasio Valerii ad Ruffinum (pp. 143 sqq.), which we know to have been current apart from the rest of the treatise. It is reasonable to suppose that in this case the variants came from other copies and were not mere conjectures; and the same, I am inclined to think, applies to the bulk of the others.

The scribe has on the whole not dealt badly with the rather difficult text which he had to copy. An inspection of my foot-notes will give a sufficient idea of his proneness to error.…

I see no reason to doubt that the John Welles who owned our manuscript was the rather famous John Wells, monk of Ramsey Abbey, and opponent of Wy-cliffe, who for thirteen years was 'prior studentium' at Gloucester Hall, the Benedictine College of Oxford, and died at Perugia in 1388. This man studied at Gloucester Hall and proceeded D.D. in 1377. His opposition to the Wycliffite circle is the distinguishing feature in his career. Two stanzas in a song on the Council of London in 1382 (Wright, Political Poems, i. 260, Rolls Series) give a lively description of him:

Tunc primus determinans est Johannes Wellis
Istos viros reprobans cum verbis tenellis
Multum conversatus est ventis et procellis;
Hinc in eius facie patet color fellis.
   With an O and an I, in scholis non prodest
   Imago faciei monstrat qualis hic est.

Hic promisit in scholis quod vellet probare
Wyclif et Herford simul dictis repugnare;
Sed cum hic nescierat plus argumentare,
Nichol solvens omnia iussit Bayard stare.
   With an O and an I, Wellis replicabat;
   Sed postquam Nichol solverat, tunc
     Johannes stabat.

Wycliffe is quoted (in Fasciculi Zizaniorum, p. 239) as styling him 'a certain black dog of the order of St. Benedict'. On p. 117 of the same volume he is found subscribing the sentence of William Berton, Chancellor of Oxford, condemning the Wycliffite doctrine of the Eucharist.

In July, 1387, he was sent as procurator by the presidents of the English Benedictines to Urban VI to plead for the release of the learned Norwich monk, Cardinal Adam Easton. His commission is printed in Raine's Letters from Northern Registers (p. 423, Rolls Series). He was unsuccessful in his mission and died, as has been said, at Perugia in 1388. He was buried in the church of St. Sabina there, according to a note printed by Tanner from the Cotton MS. Otho. D. VIII. The portion of the manuscript in which this note occurs contains a chronicle of Ramsey Abbey.…

Traces of acquaintance with the de Nugis Curialium in contemporary or later mediaeval writers are exceedingly scanty. Giraldus Cambrensis tells several of the same anecdotes as Map, but his language shows no sign of being borrowed. Peter of Blois treats some of the same themes. In Ep. 14 he dwells on the miseries of the courtiers who accompanied Henry II on his progresses. He calls them milites Herlewini, a striking coincidence with Map (pp. 13, 186), but not necessarily more than a coincidence. In Ep. 95 he speaks, as Map does (p. 6), of the excesses of the Iusticiarii errantes vel itinerantes, the forestarii and vicecomites: again a topic quite likely to occur to two authors independently of each other. In Ep. 79, it is true, he borrows copiously from the Dissuasio Valerii ad Ruffinum (taking from it the instances of Phoroneus, Marius and Metellus, Lucilia and Livia, Deianira, Valentinian, Canius, Pacuvius), but we know that the Dissuasio was current before and apart from the de Nugis. A perusal of Peter's letters leaves me with the impression that he had never seen the whole treatise.

It would be absurd to generalize from so very fragmentary a knowledge of English mediaeval literature as I possess. All I can say is that I can adduce no single instance of use of the treatise before the seventeenth century. Higden in the Polychronicon no doubt includes Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, in his list of authorities, but there is nothing from the de Nugis in his text. Possibly he regarded Map as the author of the versified Itinerarium Cambriae, which he quotes almost in extenso.

No English mediaeval library catalogue contains an entry identifiable with the de Nugis. Neither Leland nor Bale had ever seen it. In short, its appearance in 1601 in the Bodleian Library seems to have been practically its first introduction to anything that could be called a public. It must soon have attracted some attention. Richard James made extracts from it and a transcript of it, now contained in Bodley MSS. James 14, 31, 39.³ Camden makes a few quotations from it in the Britannia, e.g. ed. Gough, 1806, i. 166, 267, 382: the last is borrowed from him by Burton (Anatomy, Part III, Sec. 2, Mem. 3, Subs. 4). Archbishop Ussher printed, in his book de christianarum ecclesiarum successione et statu (Opp. ii, p. 244), a portion of Dist. I. xxxi (pp. 60, 61) on the Waldenses. Several notes in the same work show that he had read a good deal of the manuscript. The interesting letters of Sir Roger Twysden in 1666 and 1669, mentioned first in Notes and Queries (1849, i. 76), and subsequently printed by Wright in his Preface, show that some scholars were alive to the interest of the text: 'they say there is many stories of good worth, fit to bee made publick, in it.'

I have no doubt that between Twysden's date and the publication of Wright's edition in 1850, a number of references to the de Nugis would be discoverable: I have as a matter of fact found none, even in the works of Thomas Hearne.

In 1850, as has been said, the editio princeps [of De Nugis Curialium] was produced for the Camden Society by Thomas Wright. It will, I think, be worth while to quote from his Preface what little he says about the manuscript and about the preparation of his edition.

The manuscript is written in a very crabbed hand, and is filled with unusual contractions, which are often by no means easy to understand. In producing the present edition, I have had to contend with many disadvantages; the practice of the Bodleian Library, which does not allow its manuscripts to be lent out on any conditions, has rendered it impossible for me to collate the text myself with the original, and it has not always been in my power to consult, in cases of difficulty, scholars on the spot in whose opinion I could confide. In the latter portion of the work I have been more fortunate, and I have to acknowledge the kind attention and service in this respect which I have received from the Rev. H. 0. Coxe, one of the librarians of the Bodleian Library, and the Rev. W. D. Macray, of New College. The difficulty I found previously in obtaining a satisfactory collation, combined with some other circumstances, has been the cause of a very considerable delay in the publication of the present volume, which was commenced several years ago.

To the delay just alluded to must be attributed any slight difference in the system of editing the text which may chance to be discovered between the earlier and latter parts of this volume. My principle has been to correct all those accidental corruptions of Latin orthography which arose merely from the ignorance or carelessness of monkish transcribers, but to retain most of those which were strictly mediaeval forms; and I think that perhaps in the latter part I have carried this process of purifying a little further than at first was intended. The business of an editor is to present his text, while he preserves its correctness, in a form as intelligible as possible to the general reader. With this principle in view, I have not hesitated to correct the corruptions of the manuscript, when that correction appeared evident, and I have added a few notes for the purpose of making the text somewhat more intelligible to those who may not have the advantage of an extensive acquaintance with the Latin literature of the middle ages. These notes might perhaps have been made more numerous; but for this deficiency, and for any errors of the text which may have escaped me, I must throw myself upon the indulgence of the reader.
THOMAS WRIGHT,
Brompton, Nov. 1850.

It is certainly the case that Wright's text is perceptibly more correct towards the end of the Work. The earlier portion is disfigured by a number of what seem easily avoidable blunders. Yet I think that, considering the conditions under which he worked, he deserves praise and not blame for the sum of his achievement. It would be ridiculous for me to pretend that I do not think my own text is better than his; but if I had had to depend upon even the best of transcripts, I am certain that many errors and faults—of which I hope there are now but few—would have survived in my pages.

As a matter of fact I have had the very great advantage of using a complete 'rotograph' of the treatise which has been procured for me by the kindness of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press; and by its help, coupled of course with personal consultation of the manuscript, I have been able to eliminate a great many errors from the old text. I believe that the student now has before him a record, complete in all essentials, of what the manuscript presents. I say, in all essentials, because T have not, except in the fewest possible cases, recorded the abbreviations. These are copious, as is usual in manuscripts of the date of this one. To have indicated the expansion of them by any typographical device would have entailed producing a quite unreadable page, and would have been a piece of pedantry in which, I hope, no scholar would have acquiesced.

In the matter of spelling I have implicitly followed the manuscript, with its tricky use of u and v, its disregard of diphthongs, and all the other features which it is reasonable to expect in a fourteenth-century copy of a twelfth-century text. I believe it will be found that I have not been quite perfectly consistent in my expansions of abbreviations, in that I have sometimes written quod and sometimes quia; I have also sometimes expanded mⁱ as mihi (not michi), and have possibly treated nichil in a similar fashion. I hope confession of these shortcomings (the only ones of the kind of which I am conscious) will be taken as sufficient to condone them.

The punctuation, on the other hand, is my own. The manuscript has a system, and a very elaborate one, which may be best indicated by a transcript of a few lines:

(p. 202) Domine / nos rei ueritatem scimus / Sed tu nobis tam austerus es / et tam hispidum nobis dans supercilium / ut que vera scimus' pre timore tuo dissimulare oporteat / Mansio tua / et biblis quam hic queris / est rauenne / Si vobis non displicet / eamus ut illic inuenias / quod te credis hic uidisse /

I do not suppose that any one who wishes to make a study of the text would have welcomed the preservation of these highly confusing marks.

I have not hesitated to emend, or to introduce my emendations into the body of the text, when I felt confident of their correctness.…

The range of Map's reading, as attested by his quotations, is not inconsiderable. He is, to begin with, saturated with the language of the Latin Bible. The borrowed phrases are noted in my margins so far as I have been able to detect them; but it is certain that I must have missed some. Biblical turns of language are employed by him on the most unexpected occasions, and sometimes display his impish humour in a rather shocking fashion.

On two occasions he quotes Office Hymns. Of older church writers he cites by name Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory; and makes tacit use of Jerome's treatise against Jovinian. The writers nearer his own time may be laid under contribution more copiously than I have seen. Those to whom there are plain allusions are Hildebert, Bernard, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Peter Comestor (the Historia Scholastica), the History of Pseudo-Turpin, not to mention the unidentified romances and sagas from which many of his longer stories are supposed to be derived.

More general interest attaches to his use of ancient secular authors. Of the poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid are the favourites. He has also read Terence, Juvenal, Persius, Martial, Lucan, Pseudo-Cato, Claudian, and perhaps Statius. There are traces of the use of works of Cicero, of Caesar, Pliny, Solinus, Quintilian, Gellius, Apuleius, Martianus Capella, and express quotations from Boethius, Porphyry, Macrobius. An allusion to Tacitus (p. 45) is likely to be delusive: one to Livy (p. 204) is shadowy.

In addition to verbal citations account must be taken of the facts and names with which Map shows an acquaintance. He is familiar with a great deal of mythology, largely, no doubt, through the medium of Ovid's Metamorphoses: he has read of Alexander the Great, of Numa, perhaps in the Fasti, of Scipio, of Catiline, of the death of Julius Caesar, and of Nero and Vitellius. It is possible that for this knowledge he may depend upon Sallust, upon Suetonius, and upon some general history like that of Orosius.

It is natural to suppose that he was familiar with at least the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, since he has borrowed the second title of that work as the sole title of his own. I have not been able to find that he has done more. The habit of classical allusion is common to both writers: one, at least, the story of Cicero and Terentia (p. 150), is told by both, but I cannot see that Walter has copied it from John.…

As to the plan and date of the de Nugis, nothing can be clearer than that there is no plan, and that the work was jotted down at various times, as the fancy struck the author. He himself says (140²⁶) 'Hunc in curia regis Henrici libellum raptim annotaui scedulis'. He undertook it, he says, at the instance of one Galfridus (13¹), who had asked him (18¹²) to put down in writing sayings and doings hitherto unrecorded, or anything conspicuously remarkable that had come to his knowledge. Wright (p. x) will have it that Galfridus had asked him to write a poem, but I think the 'poetari' of 17³² and the 'philosophari' of 13⁴ are synonymous, and merely signify literary composition. At any rate Map, on p. 18, assumes that he is doing in this work what he had been requested to do.…

[The] earliest personal reminiscence recorded by Map seems to be the conversation with Thomas Becket as Chancellor, an office which Becket resigned in 1162.⁴ The latest incident is the murder of the Marquis of Montferrat in 1192. Parts of Dist. I date from before 1185 (cap. xii): in or just after 1187 (cap. xv); before 1189 (cap. xxvii). Of Dist. II we can only say that it was written after 1181. In Dist. III there appears no indication of date. Dist. IV was in part written in 1183 (cap. i), and in part in 1181 (cap. xi). It also contains the Epistle of Valerius, which we know to have been an earlier work of Map's. This distinction, then, has some claim to be regarded as prior to the others in date. Dist. V was written partly before Henry II's death (capp. v, vii), and partly in or after 1192. When I say 'written', I mean 'put into its present form'. Allowance must be made for revision and for insertions of incidents later than the main body of the text. The remarks about Richard I on pp. 241, 243 (and probably those about Geoffrey Plantagenet on p. 238), have some appearance of being insertions of this kind; for we see that part of the chapter in which they occur is of earlier date than the events which they record.

The date of compilation, then, may be placed in the years 1181 to 1192 or 1193.

The plan, as I have said, is to seek. Beginning with an invective, as it may be called, against court life, Map groups round that the stories of Herla and of the king of Portugal. The idea of 'making a good end' by retiring from the court to live in peace, suggests the stories of monks who left the cloister. Then comes a break.

The news of the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin leads him to a lament on the vices of the age. Is there a hope that all the religious activities of the monastic orders, old and new, can avail to palliate these? Forthwith he is launched upon a disquisition on the origin and decline of all the orders of his day, including the military. He devotes most of his space to his bêtes noires, the Cistercians, and has begun to recapitulate, when, at 56⁴, there is a marked and sudden break. After a single sentence about the Carthusians, he says in effect: 'After all, all the pumerous ways of following the simple life in externals seem ineffective. King Henry dresses splendidly but is humble of heart.' This mention of Henry II suggests the topic of that king's zeal against heretics. Heretics are the topic of the next few pages. The story of three remarkable hermits, dragged in rather awkwardly, leads over into Distinction II, whereof the first seven chapters deal with good men of his own time. The next real break begins, I think, with cap.viii. The Welsh are quite suddenly introduced, and a Welsh folk-tale brings with it several other stories of the same kind. The tales of Gado and of the Byzantine emperors, which come next, seem quite detached; but that of Gillescop (cap. xix) affords a natural means of return to the topic of the Welsh, and this to a second series of folk, stories. The tale of the Three Counsels (unfortunately imperfect) is not led up to by any transition from the previous chapter, but the note which follows it does serve to introduce Distinction III, which consists simply of a short preface and four romantic stories. Distinction IV, as we have seen, has some claim to be regarded as the earliest portion of the work. It may have been intended at one time to stand first in order. The prologue is compatible with this idea: and twice (140²⁹, 142¹⁰) the work is spoken of as a 'libellus'. The salient feature, too, is the Epistola Valerii, now first, perhaps, emphatically claimed by Map as his work; a piece which has very much the appearance of a rhetorical exercise in which a young writer has striven to concentrate evidence of his wide knowledge and reading. There is a very forced transition from it to the tale of Eudo; and the connexions which are managed between the succeeding stories, though sometimes ingenious, are not more natural. Three of the stories (vii, viii, x) are also told in Distinctions I and II; possibly one ought to say, told over again. The last in the Distinction, that of Sceva and Ollo, is quite detached. It has the air of being the plot of a comedy or narrative poem.

It is the professed object of Distinction V to show that modern times have produced heroes as remarkable as those of antiquity. Accordingly, after some stories taken from the older English history, Map settles down into personal reminiscences of 'kings he has met'. The end of these reminiscences is singularly abrupt, but there is no reason to suppose that they are imperfect.

The conclusion of the whole, a recapitulation in a condensed form of chapters i-ix of Distinction I, is curious and rather pointless. The few allusions to contemporary events which it contains show it to have been written before the death of Henry II.

By way of elucidating the text I have added a few notes. But I have not attempted to reproduce in them the matter of Wright's foot-notes, many of which identify and assign dates to the persons mentioned. My notes give some additional references to sources, and some corrections of the text. They also mention literature bearing on the subject, attempt to explain difficult passages, and call attention to unexplained puzzles. The index of noteworthy words serves to a modest extent as a glossary, in that I have added the English equivalents of the more obscure words. In that of proper names I have attached dates to a good many of the names, thus preserving part of the information contained in Wright's notes.

I have, however, from the first renounced all efforts to compile a full commentary upon the text. I am not equipped with sufficient knowledge of mediaeval Latin, of history, or of romance and folk-lore to be able to contemplate such an undertaking. I only aspire to put a valuable document into such a condition that experts may be able to use it with ease and confidence.

The epistle of Valerius to Ruffinus against marriage which forms Dist. IV. iii-v, was, as Map tells us (p. 158⁸), circulated separately before its incorporation into the complete work. It was current anonymously, or rather, most people failed to recognize that by Valerius Walterus was meant, and accordingly the credit of authorship was denied to Map. Of this first edition—if it may be so called—of the epistle many copies exist, both separate and accompanied with commentaries. Only one of the separate copies which I have seen (B. M. Add. 37749) assigns the writing to its true author. This is a small book bearing a Waltham Abbey pressmark (LXIII. al. ca.) and formerly in the Phillipps collection (no. 1056). In it the epistle is entitled 'Epistola magistri Walteri Map ad quemdam socium suum ut dicitur uxorari uolentem.' This portion of the MS. is of the thirteenth century. The earliest copy (Bodl. Digby 67) may have been written in the last years of the twelfth century; another, one of the Gale MSS. at Trinity College, Cambridge (O. 7. 7), which appears to have belonged to the Scottish Abbey of Deer in Buchan and contains the best text of the Ibis of Ovid, is of the early part of the thirteenth century. Another early copy is B. M. Arundel 14 (used by Wright). It is of late twelfth or early thirteenth century. The epistle follows the Topographia Hiberniae of Giraldus Cambrensis. The provenance is not clear; like other Arundel MSS. It beloned to Lord William Howard (in 1613).

From the separate copies, of course, was derived the text which was printed among the spuria of St. Jerome (e.g. Martianay, v. 337; Migne, P. L. xxx. 254). I have not attempted to trace the history of this text, nor do I think that any light would be thrown on the de Nugis by such an investigation. It may, however, be worth while to say a few words about the mediaeval commentaries upon the epistle, which, we should naturally hope, would help to explain some of the very obscure allusions contained in it. I may say at once that they do nothing of the kind.

There appear to be five commentaries. Three, including the earliest, are anonymous. The third and fifth are respectively by John Ridewas or Ridevall (who also wrote on the Metamorphoses of Ovid), and Nicholas Trivet the annalist and commentator on Boethius and Augustine de civitate Dei. None of them have, so far as I can ascertain, appeared in print.…

I have nothing to add to the facts or speculations concerning the life and writings of Walter Map which are collected in Mr. C. L. Kingsford's article in the Dictionary of National Biography, in Hardy's Catalogue of Materials (ii. 485), and in a paper by Mr. W. T. Ritchie in the Transactions of the Royal Philological Society of Glasgow (1909-10). I have indeed come upon one more line of poetry definitely attributed to him. In a twelfth-century manuscript in the library of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford (O. 3. 8) which may have belonged to the Friars Minors of Hereford, and contains Latin versions of works by Chrysostom, there is this entry among a number of verses, some by Martial, on the last leaf of the volume.

      'Sigillum Walteri Map
Munera si uitas, transcendes archileuitas.'

which, considering that he was an archdeacon himself, is creditable to his modesty. I think also that it is permissible to draw attention once more to the curious set of verses preserved in a manuscript at Clare College and entitled:

'Versus golie super picturam Machabeorum.'

I have printed them in my catalogue of the Clare manuscripts and also in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society (Vol. X). In the latter place I was guilty of a false statement. In advocating the probability (which I still feel) that the verses are by Walter Map, I urged that the manuscript was a Worcester book, and that Map having held the benefice of Westbury on Trym which belonged to Worcester, it was natural that he should write verses for the Worcester monks. But I have since realized that the Westbury of which Map was parson was not Westbury on Trym, but Westbury on Severn, in Gloucestershire. This supposed link, therefore, disappears. There remains, however, the question, which is of some little literary importance, whether we can find another person so likely as Map to have written these verses, and to have been called Golias in that part of England at the end of the twelfth century. After the researches of Haureau it is, no doubt, dangerous to assign Goliardic poems to Map: yet here, I think, is a little piece of evidence, though not unequivocal, which deserves to be taken into account by students of that corner of literature.

Notes

¹ Wright, in his earlier volume (Poems of W. Mapes, p. ix, note), speaks of another MS. of the de Nugis as being at Merton College. I think there is a confusion here with a copy of the Policraticus.

² I think the corrector was the scribe of f. 74.

³ MS. James 14 contains the extracts, on ff. 81-136. They begin with Dolendum nobis est (3⁷)… multiplicatus (4¹¹), continuing with Hos Hugo (5¹⁹) … non deleuit (5²⁸). Non dico quin (6³) … aciem (6⁶). Mittit etiam (6¹⁵) … tenere nequeo (8²³). James sometimes epitomizes in a very few words the portions he omits: very occasionally he gives an illustration, e.g. on 'French of Marlborough (246³⁰) he writes in the margin 'And french she spoke moste fetously / After the scoole of Stratford at Bow. Chaucer in descriptione priorissae'. His last extract ends p. 136 et insaniorem partem (254²). It is followed by extracts from the Apocalypsis Goliae and other Goliardic poems.

MS. James 39 contains the first part of a full transcript of the text, prefaced by the note of ownership of John de Wellis and a brief description of the pictorial device accompanying it. This volume goes as far as Dist. IV. i (140⁵) linx penetrans.

MS. James 31 contains the remainder of the text, beginning: omnia exicio propriae gentis, down to the end. It is followed by the capitula. Then follow: Improperium cuiusdam in monachos ex MS. Bibl. Bodl. Turstano … Ebor. Archiep. T. Stampensis—et vivat de communi quod deus est. and: Fragmentum narrationum ex MS. Bibi. C.C.C. Oxon., namely the stories in MS. C.C.C. Oxon. 130, of which two are printed in this volume, p. 261. Hardy (Materials, ii. 485) mentions another manuscript, 'Olim Clarendon 78,' but this is a mistake. From Cat. MSS. Angl. et Hib. (iii. 14) we see that the book only contained a Mapesian poem.

⁴ Unless we insist on the words (237¹⁸) 'Vidimus inicia regni sui', which may take us back to 1154.