Shakespeare's Richard II, first published almost 200 years after Richard's death in 1400, opens with Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham and duke of Norfolk (c. 1367–99) challenging Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Hereford (1367–1413), to a duel. This key event in Richard's downfall, which took place between two of his most powerful nobles, happened in 1398. Bolingbroke would depose his cousin Richard the next year to become King Henry IV. While Shakespeare was writing a play loosely based on historical events, his vivid opening of the play with Mowbray throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Bolingbroke to a duel captures the tension and importance of such an event in the later Middle Ages.

And, as discussed in Chapter 1, the ‘Victorious and Vanquished’ was ideally placed to predict the outcome of a duel or battle since it pitted two values against each other. As in the case of Eleanor Cobham, discussed Chapter 6, onomancies could be used to predict when someone might die in a general sense, years in the future, rather than a sick person on their deathbed. These reasons for prediction are far more sinister than medical use by a physician in a critical situation, and far outside the realm of medical practice. But for these reasons, among others, a wide array of prognostics, including onomantic devices, were owned by and appealed to the higher ranks of medieval society – the gentry and nobility – who jostled for power and influence – and royalty.

This chapter will first examine the manuscript evidence for the ownership of onomantic devices in gentry circles. It will then move on to deal with the manuscript evidence for onomancy as an item for the aristocracy – to predict the outcome of a duel – looking at a particular version of the ‘Sphere’ that circulated in the later part of the fifteenth century.

Under Sir William Scott, arguably the greatest Judge of its long history, the High Court of Admiralty was during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars one of the most influential legal bodies in the land. It dealt not only with the technicalities of seizures in prize, but with the numerous related issues of nationality, neutrality, sovereignty and jurisdiction at a time when all those matters were frequently fluid and their application uncertain.

The law that the Court sought to administer was not the common law of England, but international law, or the law of nations as it was then (perhaps more accurately) called. The procedures of the Court, situated at Doctors’ Commons, were in contested cases adversarial rather than investigative, thus following British legal tradition, but most of the evidence was documentary and witnesses were seldom called in person. Scott himself was at pains to point out the principles on which he was working; early in his incumbency he said:

In consequence, Scott's judgments often had much to say on the law of nations as then understood, and many of the principles he enunciated have survived, in customary or codified form, to this day. That is not to say that he took no account of English interpretations of the law, where differences existed; on such matters as the Rule of the War of 1756 or the 1753 Opinion of the Law Officers on the Silesian Loan, he followed English practice rather than making concessions to continental contentions based upon the principle of ‘free ships free goods’.

Fortunately, all Scott's major judgments survive, as reported by three authorities: Christopher Robinson, Thomas Edwards and John Dodson. The reporters were clearly aided by Scott's habit of writing down his judgments in full. He was, by some accounts, not a fluent extempore speaker and this has been a benefit to history. While the judgments which follow are, technically, already published work, they are available only in specialised libraries and it is believed that they fall therefore within the criteria of the Navy Records Society.

They are, moreover, supplemented here by much previously unpublished material, nearly all from the National Archive.

Scholars of the Hebrew Bible have had considerably more to say about sagas than scholars of the sagas have had to say about the Hebrew Bible. There is a long tradition in biblical scholarship of comparing the stories in the Hebrew Bible to sagas, which stretches from Gunkel’s landmark commentary on Genesis, published in 1901, to John Barton’s History of the Bible from 2019. The scholarly understanding of what a saga is changed significantly over this period, and this is reflected in biblical scholarship, which starts out by viewing ‘sagas’ as oral narratives, but moves towards a fuller appreciation of their literary and pre-novelistic features. Likewise, biblical scholars display differing levels of knowledge about the sagas, reflecting the availability of translated texts: Gunkel knows about them only through intermediaries, such as Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf, while scholars like Sternberg and van Seters are familiar with Njáls saga – which they frequently cite – and Damrosch with Snorra Edda. When comparing biblical stories and sagas, most scholars point to the shared focus on family and genealogy, the close connection to place-names, and the shifting relationship between orality and literacy. Some also note the similarity between biblical style and saga style, which will be the focus of this chapter: recent work in both areas has emphasised how biblical and saga narrative alike are characterised by ‘narrative economy’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘indirection’. In this chapter, I will outline some of the important stages in the work of biblical scholars on the Icelandic sagas. I will then look at two biblical stories – the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) and Jacob’s wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32) – and compare them with passages from the sagas of Icelanders. Although the medieval Icelanders received the Hebrew Bible primarily through the Latin Vulgate, I argue that they recognised in these biblical stories a storytelling tradition that was kindred to their own.

Oral Sagas

One of the earliest scholars to identify the stories in Genesis as ‘sagas’ was Gunkel, who understood it not as a literary genre per se but primarily as an alternative to ‘history’. Although German ‘Sage’ in this context is probably better translated as ‘tale’, I include it here because of Gunkel’s influence on later scholarship.

Duckworth arrived back at Plymouth [232] in time for his ship to become peripherally involved in the mutinies of 1797. He first set about persuad-ing the Admiralty to disgorge his pay and expenses due from his ser-vice in Jamaica [233–235], and for two weeks his correspondence shows no apprehension of trouble or knowledge of events at Portsmouth. The mutiny began at Spithead on 17 April, and a week later Sir John Orde, commanding at Plymouth, claimed that it was all over [237, 238]; cer-tainly the issues at the heart of the Portsmouth strike were on the way to resolution, through the moderation of the men's demands, the forbear-ance of Earl Spencer, and the good sense of Lord Howe and some other admirals. But the wider issue was not actually resolved yet, and there continued to be other outbreaks for several months.

At Plymouth the mutiny came late in May. On Leviathan Duck-worth was put off the ship, with most of his officers, only Lieuten-ant William Buchanan staying on board [241–243]. The men produced a well-written document of their grievances (someone on board was well-educated and produced better English prose than most of the offi-cers), but by exaggerating and inventing items which could not be true, they spoiled their case [239]. Duckworth was outraged at his treatment [244], but returned to the ship and saw that the crew was ‘turned over’. Even so collective demands still came [253, 307], but the crew knew that Duckworth was reluctant to impose punishments and were count-ing on this.

By August the ship was at sea once again, off Ushant enforcing the blockade of Brest [256–267]. Then after only two months he was sent on to south-west Ireland [270, 271]. The revolutionary rhetoric which had inspired black slaves in the West Indies, and white naval seamen (whose condition was close to slavery), also inspired the sub-jugated Irish population, where French military intervention could be decisive. Duckworth was sent to Bantry Bay so suddenly that he had no idea at first what he was to do, a sense of confusion aggravated by the difficulty of communicating with the local commander-in-chief, Admiral Robert Kingsmill [273–282]. But he soon settled to patrol-ling around the dangerous, rock-bound, mountainous coast from Cork to the Shannon estuary.

In fact, he was present on patrol along the Irish coast in the period between two French invasions.

The central theme of this chapter is the 1909 naval scare, sometimes known as the acceleration crisis. At the very moment at which Captain Herbert Heath arrived in Berlin, news began to break that the German Navy was secretly ordering its capital ships ahead of the published schedule [66, 67]. The strong suspicion this created was that the Reich leadership was undertaking a covert attempt to match or even overtake the Royal Navy in the number of its Dreadnought battleships. Heath reported extensively on this apparent ‘acceleration’, incurring in the process the wrath of Admiral Tirpitz, who blamed him for what he considered ‘false’ statements made by British ministers in Parliament on the German shipbuilding programme. In consequence, Heath was gradually ostracized by the German naval authorities, a process that he much resented [90]. However, far from cowing the attaché, Tirpitz's actions made Heath even more certain that his deductions about German shipbuilding were correct and he continued to report in this vein. In the end relations between Heath and the German government became so strained that virtually all facilities were denied to him. Heath left his post for a sea-going command in 1910, a mere two years into his (nominally three-year) appointment.

58. Herbert Heath, Germany N.A. Report 38/08

Berlin, 13 August 1908

Visit to Danzig

I have the honour to submit the following report of my visit to Danzig on Tuesday last.

I called on Rear Adml Schimmelman [sic] in command of the Imperial Dockyard at 10 A.M. The Admiral was very cordial in his welcome but the interview was short and the Flag Captain then took me over the dockyard. The average number of workmen employed is [2000?], the work consisting of repairs and completion of vessels up to 3rd class cruisers, there are also older vessels of a larger class in reserve.

The Ersatz Pfeil was alongside but lying very light in the water; she is due for completion by the end of this year.

My guide informed me that he was not allowed to speak about German submarines.

After lunch I went down the river in a ‘penny steamer’ accompanied by a local Englishman, but an inspection of the yards from this position did not reveal anything of importance except that Schichau appear to have completed a new large ship.

The archbishop’s mandate

Willelmus, permissione divina archiepiscopus Eboracensis, [Angliae primas et apostolicae sedis legatus,] venerabili fratri nostro Laurentio, Dei gratia Dunelmensi episcopo, suffraganeo nostro, seu eius vicario in spiritualibus generali, salutem et fraternam in Domino caritatem. Breve regium sub magno sigillo domini regis nobis transmissum nuper recepimus sub eo qui sequitur tenore verborum:

Quocirca, reverende pater, tenore praesentium peremptorie vos citamus ac priorem ecclesiae vestrae cathedralis Dunelmensis et capitulum eiusdem universosque abbates [et] priores alios etiam electivos, exemptos et non exemptos, archidiaconos, decanos, capitula, conventus et collegia, clerumque vestrarum civitatis et dioecesis per vos citari in virtute oboedientiae volumus et mandamus quod vos reverende frater dictique abbates, priores, archidiaconi et decani personaliter, conventus vero capitula et collegia huiusmodi per procuratores suos singulos, clerusque per duos procuratores sufficientes et idoneos ab ipsis conventibus, capitulis, collegiis et clero legitime deputatos, in ecclesia nostra cathedrali Beati Petri Eboracensi, primo die mensis Septembris proximo futuro [1 September 1462] cum continuatione et prorogatione dierum subsequentium et locorum, quatenus opus fiierit, coram nobis seu locumtenentibus commissa[338r]riis seu commissario in ea parte deputatis seu deputato compareatis et compareant quilibet eorundem super his quae regem et regnum, statumque et libertatem nostrarum ecclesiae, dioecesis et provinciae Eboracensium ibidem exponi contigerit una nobiscum vel cum nostris locumtenentibus commissariis aut commissario huiusmodi aliisque praelatis dictae nostrae provinciae tractaturi, vestrum ac suum consilium sanum super praemissis et ea concernentibus impensuri, his etiam quae ibidem concorditer ordinari contigerit,

One of the many medieval accounts of the apocryphal Veronica legend, the late fourteenth-century romance Titus and Vespasian tells of how the Virgin Mary supported St Veronica in approaching Christ at the Crucifixion. Taking a cloth from the saint, the romance relates that the Virgin wiped her son's face to produce a miraculous imprint. ‘þe ymage of his face’ described is the relic venerated as the Veronica in Western Christianity. For the modern reader, this account of the relic's generation is unusual: St Veronica is commonly understood today as the woman who wiped Christ's face on the road to Calvary, miraculously taking its imprint on cloth. Her image as such is ubiquitous; one of the most frequently depicted women in Catholic culture, she is celebrated holding her cloth to Christ's face in churches across the world in the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross). As the romance variation suggests,however, this was not her original role. The history of St Veronica and her relic is one of complex flux and change, and it is an evolution punctuated and driven by the symbolic significance of cloth. Saint and cloth are integral to the story of textile hermeneutics in medieval English devotional culture, an important episode in the progression of a devotional tradition which looked to fabric as a means of contemplating and understanding Christ's presence and Incarnation.

Veronica's sacred cloth interacted with and garnered significance as a corporeal vestige of Christ's presence from a wide and various tradition of imago Christi, both painted and miraculously imprinted, which proliferated throughout both Eastern and Western Christian cultures from the Late Antique period and throughout the Middle Ages.

Amongst the recently catalogued manuscripts from the Admiralty Library collection are a series of ten personal journals kept by Vice Admiral George Augustus Bedford (1809–78) for the years between 1830 and 1860. Setting aside one break in the 1830s, these provide a continuous and remarkable record of nearly 30 years of Naval surveying. Bedford was a successful specialist officer who commanded surveying vessels for 20 years, was eventually appointed Assistant Hydrographer in 1863 and became Marine Advisor to the Board of Trade shortly afterwards. His career took place about as far from the quarter-deck of a flag-ship as was possible in the mid-nineteenth-century Navy; the last two decades of his sea-going service were spent in the cutter Sylvia surveying the west and northwest coasts of Ireland.

Bedford was serving in a Navy that was small in historic terms (it mustered just under 26,000 men when he took his first command), but it was a Navy which, under John Barrow, as Secretary to the Admiralty, and Frances Beaufort as Hydrographer, put real resources into exploration, surveying and associated scientific research. Beaufort's period as Hydrographer (1829–55) has been described as the ‘high noon’ of the Hydrographic Office, and it was one of remarkable achievement. Although office resources for chart production were initially small, Beaufort managed to increase these and to secure more vessels for the surveying service – including in 1841 the use of six paddle steam vessels, which helped revolutionise practice. These resources allowed comprehensive surveys to be made overseas and in home waters. These surveys produced real benefits; the number of new charts produced annually increased from 19 in 1830 to 130 in 1855, and details of revisions to existing printed charts were published from 1832 in ‘The Nautical magazine’, and from 1834 as ‘Notices to Mariners’. In 1823 charts had first been made available commercially to the rest of world, and in the year when Beaufort left office 140,000 copies from a series of 2,000 charts were sold or distributed to the fleet. Bedford never had a starring role, never took part in the high-profile exploration of the Arctic, but his methodical surveying is typical of the work which contributed to this expansion.

It is clear that as a young man Bedford was aware of the personal risk of specialising which tended to divert officers from conventional Naval practice.

The miracles

The Evesham abbey miracle book (1–197). London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A VI, fols 162r–183r. The present copy of the miracle book survives within a booklet of six texts (fols 134–83). The booklet was copied by a single scribe in the last quarter of the fourteenth century or the first quarter of the fifteenth. It is not luxurious but neither is it careless, and it is of a size suitable for private reading. All six of its items concern conversations between living people and inhabitants of the other-world: Spiritus Guidonis (The Ghost of Gui) by Jean Gobi the younger; H[enry] of Sawtry's Purgatorium sancti Patricii (St Patrick's Purgatory); Pene inferni (The Pains of Hell); Passio sancte Iuliane (The Passion of St Julian); Vita sancti Alexii (The Life of St Alexius); and finally the Evesham abbey miracle book. It was evidently included because it was relevant to the theme of the collection, not from a special regard for Earl Simon. Each entry in the miracle book has a red display initial. After the last miracle entry the scribe has copied two short liturgical items from Evesham abbey (214–15). They may have descended to his exemplar from additions made in the original book. There are sixteenth-century pen-trials on the last page of the booklet (fol. 183v), which is also the last page of the parent volume; they mention a John Kempt of ‘Cliffton’, a Roger Causefeylde esquire and a Robert Smyth.

A prologue (1) was added to the miracle book at some time before the present copy was made. It is an account of events immediately before and after the battle of Evesham, and seems to descend from a separate narrative composed at Evesham (and used again in a chronicle compiled there in or after 1392); that narrative in turn was derived from one composed at Evesham in French within months of the battle. The prologue was probably not part of the original miracle book; it lacks effusions of praise for Simon de Montfort or of horror at his death, and it makes no mention of miracles. In the present manuscript the beginning and greater part of the prologue fills an unattached leaf inserted between two gatherings.

The main sets of Declared Accounts are in E 351 (Exchequer, Declared Accounts in Rolls); they are handsomely written and on parchment. This list shows how accounts printed in this volume stand in the series and in relation to the one appearing in ENA. A fuller listing there extends the range to the end of Elizabeth's reign, and includes other sets of accounts.

This chapter commences with an illustration of the tensions that were beginning to bedevil Anglo-German relations. The farewell audience of the out-going naval attaché, Captain Reginald Allenby, was used by the Kaiser as a platform for expounding his manifold complaints about British policy [1]. It was into this chill that Commander (later Captain) Philip Dumas arrived as the new representative of the Royal Navy. The chapter follows his experiences, drawing especially upon his growing perception of an intense German Anglophobia [4, 14, 15, 31]. It also heralds an issue that will be of some prominence later, namely the invasion question [22]. However, Dumas's main concern upon his arrival was to investigate Germany's ability to build major warships. To this end he conducted an extensive tour of the German coasts, visiting and reporting upon various ship yards and harbours in the process [8, 9, 12, 18]. He also went to see several armaments manufacturers, including Krupp's of Essen [17]. The result of all these inspections was an important despatch outlining in great detail Germany's ability to construct large numbers of naval vessels of all types with considerable rapidity [19]. Following this, in early 1907, came a long memorandum in which Dumas examined the question of the best strategy to adopt in the event of an Anglo-German war. The attaché proposed as the most effective course a rigorous assault on German commerce through a distant blockade that would prevent both German and neutral vessels reaching the Reich [24]. Such a course, it may be noted, would be adopted in the First World War.

1. Reginald Allenby, Germany N.A. Report 2/06

Berlin, 16 January 1906

Anglo-German Relations

I had the honour of being this day received in farewell audience by His Majesty the Emperor. I beg to submit the following account of the conversation which ensued.

His Majesty's manner was extremely cordial, although he was just recovering from a severe attack of influenza. He gave me the impression of being much in earnest when referring to the question of the relations between England and Germany, and appeared to keenly feel and resent the imputations in the press and elsewhere under which he suffered. His manner was very forcible when denying the right of England to interfere between Germany and France, and he inferred that his motives were of the most pacific nature.

Editorial principles

Latin and Anglo-Norman texts are given an English translation. Expansions are indicated with italics, unknown expansions with an apostrophe. Line breaks are denoted with double slash marks, split words with a hyphen. A new folio mid-text is indicated in square brackets. Obvious errors are indicated with [sic]. Unreadable or erased text is shown with ellipses. Spelling is unaltered from the original. The modern ‘I’ and ‘J’, ‘V’ and ‘U’ have been used. Punctuation and capitalisation have been modernised where deemed necessary. Singular ‘they/them/theirs’ is used instead of gendered pronouns.

In the working edition (26: London, Society of Antiquaries Library, MS 306 fol. 29v (N), London, British Library, MS Sloane 1620, fol. 71r (L) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 340, fol. 107r (O) ), each sentence has a footnote in which textual variations between the three versions are indicated.

1: London, British Library, MS Royal 7 D XXV, fol. 76r (s. xiiex)

Ratio spere Phitagorice quam Apuleius descripsit de quacumque re volueris scire vel probare utpote // de egris qua die ebdomada evenerit quota luna fuerit scire debes addas nomen ipsius per litteras // circum scriptas et sic in unum collige et partire per 30 et quod remanserit in spera respicies // et sic invenies. [The instructions for the Sphere of Pythagoras which Apuleius described, for whatever thing you want to know or prove, for example, for a sick person you must know the day of the week on which they first fell sick and the number of the moon, add up their name by the letters written around the circle, make into a total and divide by 30. Look for the remainder in the sphere, and thus find your answer.]

2: London, Wellcome Library, MS 21, fol. 7v (s. xii)

Disce diem lune in qua quisque discubuit. Item nomen discumbentis natale. Numero super positum et collige // numerum utriusque quantus fuerit. Tum super addas regulares XX et hanc summa // divide per XXX et que remanet require in figura tetragona. Si inveneris // illud ipergeia in catheo medio eger cito peribit.