Elizabeth Elstob made a facsimile of Textus Roffensis (c.1123), in two parts. Here, Dr Christopher Monk explores her handwritten copies of the three Old English Kentish law codes, unique to Textus, and her copy of the foundation charter of Rochester Cathedral with its marvellous decorated initial.

Elizabeth Elstob (b. 1683, d. 1756) was undoubtedly a pioneering scholar, a woman working in the emerging field of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) studies, one dominated by men. Among her publications was the first grammar of Old English published in modern English, rather than Latin, which ‘clearly pointed to the future’ of the field, as Mechthild Gretsch observes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Gretsch continues: ‘Though small in size and only partly available in print Elizabeth Elstob’s scholarly œuvre is on a par with the best work produced in Anglo-Saxon studies at the beginning of the eighteenth century.’¹

Reverend Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff has written an excellent piece on the history of this remarkable woman, which I encourage you to read.

Here, I will take a look at the pages of her facsimile that now carries the British Library shelf-mark of Harley MS 1866, and contains the laws of the Kentish kings Æthelberht, Hlothere and Eadric, and Wihtræd,² and also the foundation charter of Rochester Cathedral. Along with another facsimile, Elstob was paid five guineas for this manuscript on 7 October 1719 by Humfrey Wanley,³ the library-keeper of the Harleian collection, and who greatly respected her scholarship.

Let us start with the foundation charter.

Rochester Cathedral’s foundation charter

Elsewhere on the Textus Roffensis pages (link below) I have discussed the foundation charter of Rochester Cathedral, with its remarkable historiated initial ‘R’ – a historiated initial provides a story or narrative, often relevant to the text it accompanies.

To offer a brief historical summary of the charter, I must point out that it is actually a copy of a fraudulent document that was drawn up before Textus Roffensis was compiled. The intent must have been to persuade any to whom it was shown that the cathedral church of Rochester received its land from King Æthelberht of Kent (died c.616).

The account of Æthelberht by Bede (died 735) does support the position that this king gifted land for the founding of Rochester Cathedral,⁴ but there is no surviving, authentic royal diploma documenting this, most probably because in Æthelberht’s time diplomas were not being written.⁵ Hence, one was fabricated – a retrospective document, if you will.

My previous interpretation of the historiated initial focused on the identity of its human figure, which I argued was Christ, though the view that he represents St Andrew should also be considered. Here, however, I would like to address the identity of one of the beasts that forms part of the ‘R’, something that we are better equipped to do because of Elstob’s facsimile.

For more on the charter, including my transcription and translation, see Rochester Cathedral Foundation Charter, 604.

For more on Æthelberht, see Textus Roffensis origins.

Is it a manticore?

British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 9r. Detail showing a beast’s human head in Elstob’s copy of the Rochester Cathedral foundation charter.

Elstob’s copy of the historiated initial ‘R’ gives us something we cannot currently see fully in the original, namely, the head of the green beast whose neck passes behind the domed tower, top left of the ‘R’.

Evidently, when Elstob examined Textus Roffensis, it was not as tightly bound as it is now, and the head of the monster seems to have been fully visible to her, though we should accept the possibility that she was reconstructing it based on what she could partially see.

Presently, the head hides almost completely in the gutter of the Textus manuscript, though back in 2014 I was able to take a photograph that partially revealed it. Elstob recreates it in its entirety, and reveals that it is the head of a human man in profile. He has a long beard, and red highlights are used for his face and top of his head – what might pass as his hair. It does seem to complete what is suggested from my photograph.

What kind of beast is this? I think to answer the question it makes sense first to consider what bestiaries – medieval books of beasts – might reveal about fantastical beasts with human heads.

There are a few human-headed, or human-faced beasts, found among bestiaries. These include the harpy, which has, unfortunately for us, a body of a bird (see images of harpy on David Badke’s wonderful online resource The Medieval Bestiary), and the mammonetus, the body of which is, alas, monkey-like (see images of mammonetus).

The Rochester Bestiary, London, British Library, Royal MS 12 F XIII, folio 24v. Detail showing the manticore.

Perhaps a better candidate for the Textus beast is the manticore. However, as we see from the example of the Rochester Bestiary, the manticore is typically drawn with a lion’s body (see more images of the manticore). Our red-faced, bearded human head is attached to a body that could hardly be described as leonine – it’s more like a long-necked worm that has had a big dinner!

We are left, then, with the strong possibility that our beast is not meant to represent any ‘known’ beast we find in bestiaries. Rather, perhaps, it was conceived as nothing more than a decorative element to the top part of the letter ‘R’ – a product of a vivid monastic imagination, all the same.

What is very interesting is that our man-headed beast appears to anticipate the later artwork of some psalters, such as the Ormesby Psalter (Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 366). As well as the magnificent double-human-headed letter ‘S’ (below), incorporating the story of Jonah and the Whale, there are numerous human-headed hybrids throughout, used as space fillers within the text.

Thanks, then – at least in part – must go to Elstob’s facsimile of the foundation charter, for we can now feel inspired to spend hours searching for human-headed hybrids!

Above, the Ormesby Psalter. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 366, folio 89r (early 14th-century). Detail of the letter ‘S’ formed from a dragon’s body which terminates both ends in a man’s head.

Below, MS. Douce 366, folio 81v. Detail of textual space filler depicting a human-beast hybrid reminiscent of the Textus Roffensis beast.

Link to the digitised facsimile of the Ormesby Psalter.

Æthelberht’s law code

When we compare the opening page of the set of laws by King Æthelberht in Elstob’s facsimile with that in Textus Roffensis, it is very clear Elstob knew what she was doing. She rules the page as a medieval scribe would, to provide guidelines for the writing. She perfectly copies every letter and word – there are no mistakes – and faithfully imitates the script, reproducing what we now refer to as a protogothic, or transitional gothic, script. She, of course, has her own hand – the characteristic way one forms letters – which is neat and even and is perhaps, on this particular page, slightly more even than the hand of the medieval scribe.

If you’d like to know more how medieval scribes prepared manuscript pages, check out this British Library video.

Three things that strike me about this page are:

1) Elstob’s correct use of scribal marks – they look like diagonal hyphens – to indicate where a word is completed on the following line. We can see them at the end of lines 3, 6, 13, 20, and 21. This is something the Textus scribe does, too, but today his marks on this opening page are barely visible. This may seem like a minor observation, but it shows Elstob grasped this scribal technique.

2) Elstob’s pencil drawing to signify where there was a hole in the Textus folio. We can see this on line 16, between ‘ofslehð’ and ‘[med]uman’. The hole would not have been there originally when the scribe was writing the text – had it been so, he would have written ‘med-’ after the hole – so it developed from a weak spot in the vellum, perhaps created by an insect bite. It is interesting that in her day Elstob could still see the first minim stroke of the ‘m’ – now essentially not visible – and also probably saw more of the ‘d’ than is now visible. It would seem, then, that over the last three hundred years the hole has expanded slightly.

3) Elstob’s decision not to copy the inscription at the bottom of the page (Textus de ecclesia Roffensis per Ernulfum episcopum, ‘Textus of Rochester Church through bishop Ernulf’). This was written about two centuries after Æthelberht’s laws were copied.⁶ (Richards, p. 22). It suggests to me that she only wanted to reproduce the law-code itself; after all, she was helping her brother on a planned new edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws, so she likely saw the inscription as not directly relevant to that project.

British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 2r. Detail showing Elstob’s scribal marks for ‘CI-ricean’ and ‘Clero-ces’.

British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 2r. Detail showing Elstob’s drawing of the position of the hole on the Textus Roffensis folio.

The laws of Hlothere and Eadric

Elstob opens the second of the Kentish law-codes, that of Hlothere (king of Kent 673-685) and Eadric (king of Kent 685-686), with her well-executed rendition of the elegant purple ‘h’ (for ‘Hlothere’) of the original. Note how in the accompanying rubric (the red ink heading), she also replicates the stretched ‘N’ of the final word ‘asetton’ (‘set down’), and likewise at the end of ‘geworhton’ (‘had made’) two lines later.

British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 4v. Detail showing the opening of the laws of Hlothere and Eadric.

On lines 10 and 11 of the second page of this law-code, we see that Elstob does not follow the Textus scribe. Did she make a mistake? Well, actually, she is correcting a mistake by the scribe!

A comparison, above, of British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 5r, lines 10 and 11 with, below, Textus Roffensis, folio 4r, lines 10 and 11.

The Textus scribe has ‘gono’ at the end of line 10, followed by a separate word ‘hage’ at the beginning of line 11. Elstob corrects this to ‘gonoh age’, choosing to create a line break at ‘go-‘, rather than bring the ‘h’ up a line. As the Textus scribe has it, it does not make proper sense.⁷ Elstob saw the mistake and rectified it, giving us the clause, ‘gelde swa he gonoh age’, translating literally as, ‘should pay as he enough owns’, and more pleasingly as, ‘he should compensate according to what he has’.

For my full translation, see The Laws of Hlothere and Eadric.

The laws of Wihtræd

Above, Elstob’s copy of the opening to the laws of Wihtræd, British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 6r, detail.

Below, detail from the same folio showing ‘eac þan hrofesceastre bisceop se ilca gybmund (‘likewise the bishop of Rochester, which same was called Gebmund’).

We all make mistakes when copying text from a book or other work, even if these days it tends to be typos rather than handwritten mistakes. So, for the final Kentish law – that of Wihtræd (r. 690-725), the last king of a united Kent – we will take a look at one that Elstob made – but which she spotted and corrected.

Eight lines down from where the introduction begins with the large red Ð – interestingly, the introduction mentions that Gebmund, bishop of Rochester, was present at the king’s council – we see Elstob miss out the letter ‘d’ from the word ‘andward’ (‘present’). She spots her error and inserts a ‘d’ above the line, with a small mark below the line indicating where it should go.

British Library, Harley MS 1866, folio 6r. Detail showing Elstob’s correction of ‘andward’.

For me, as a scholar who specialises in Old English texts and manuscripts, and has been known to ‘have a go’ at replicating the work of medieval scribes – a painful exercise I would call it – it is a genuine pleasure to see Elizabeth Elstob’s work in more detail. There is undoubtedly more to learn from examining both this volume and her other facsimile of Textus Roffensis material. I look forward to bringing more of this to readers’ attention in the future.

Dr Christopher Monk
The Medieval Monk

Footnotes

1 See Mechthild Gretsch, ‘Elizabeth Elstob: A Scholar’s Fight for Anglo-Saxon Studies I-II’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 117, nos. 2 and 4 (1999), pp. 163-200, and 481-524.

2 Elstob’s other facsimile of Textus Roffensis material is found in the British Library manuscript Harley MS 6523, folios 1-56.

3 The National Archives’ currency converter estimates that in 1710 five guineas (£5 and 5 shillings) was equivalent to 58 days of wages for a skilled tradesman; so it was a significant sum paid to Elstob.

4 Bede states in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (book 2, chapter 3) that ‘a church in honour of Saint Andrew the Apostle was built here [i.e. in Rochester] by King Ethelbert’; translation from Leo Sherley Price (trans.), Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin, revised edition 1990), p. 108.

5 See Ben Snook, ‘Who Introduced Charters into England? The Case for Theodore and Hadrian’, in Textus Roffensis: Law, Language, and Libraries in Early Medieval England, ed. Bruce O’ Brien and Barbara Bombi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 257–289.

6 See Mary P. Richards, ‘The Textus Roffensis: Keystone of the Medieval Library at Rochester’, in Textus Roffensis: Law, Language, and Libraries in Early Medieval England, ed. Bruce O’Brien and Barbara Bombi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 19-48, at p. 22.

7 See Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 128, note c. Elstob also decides, perhaps less legitimately, to diverge from the original on several other lines on this page, choosing to separate more clearly ‘man’ from the preceding ‘him’ on lines 12/13; and not to split ‘ge-felle’ (lines 13/14) and ‘an þin-ge’ (lines 19/20).

Rochester Cathedral Research