[fol. 183r]

[Antiphona]

Salue Symon Montis Fortis

Totius flos militie

Duras penas passus <mortis>

<Pro statu> gentis Anglie.

Sunt de sanctis inaudita

Cunctis passis in hac uita

Quemquam passum talia,

Manus, pedes, amputari

Caput, corpus, uulnerari

Abscidi uirilia.

Sis pro nobis intercessor

Apud Deum qui defensor

In terris <extiteris>.

[Versus] Ora pro nobis beate Symon

[Responsio] Vt digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.

Salue Symon: antiphon, versicle and response (215)

London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A VI, fol. 183r

[Antiphon]

Hail, Simon de Montfort, flower of all knighthood, who suffered the harsh pains of death for the sake of the English people. [5] None of the saints who suffered inthis life knew any such suffering: to have hands and feet severed, head and body wounded and genitals cut off. [11] May you, who lived as our defender on earth, be an intercessor for us with God.

[Versicle] Pray for us, O blessed Simon

[Response] That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

On 30 October 1918, Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, Commander-in-Chief of British naval forces in the Mediterranean, concluded an armistice with representatives of the Ottoman Empire at Mudros, the island off the Dardanelles that had served as a British base since the operations in 1915. Marines and Indian troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula and occupied the fortifications that had defied the British and French in 1915 and minesweepers set to work to clear channels through the formidable minefields. Finally, on 12 November at midday, Calthorpe, flying his flag in the dreadnought Superb in company with her sister ship Temeraire, the semi-dreadnoughts Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, 5 British cruisers and 18 destroyers (3 Australian), led a British squadron through the Dardanelles. The British were followed at half-hourly intervals by a French squadron (5 battleships, 2 armoured cruisers, 6 destroyers), an Italian squadron (2 battleships, a cruiser, 3 destroyers) and a Greek squadron (armoured cruiser, 3 destroyers). The British and Indian troops occupying the forts were paraded as the allied ships passed. The Allied Fleets cruised through the Sea of Marmora during the night and anchored off Constantinople at 08.00 Local Time on 13 November. The British quickly left for the Gulf of Ismid which would be their main base for the present.

Calthorpe and the Allies were immediately faced with the problem of what lay beyond Constantinople and the Bosphorus in the Black Sea. A week after their arrival off Constantinople on Admiralty orders British and Allied warships began to fan out to ports along the Black Sea to show the flag and to take steps to expedite carrying out the naval provisions of the armistice with Turkey and Germany. The collapse of Russia and the Bolshevik seizure of power in late 1917 had led to German and Austrian forces penetrating deeply into Russian territory including the occupation of the Crimea and major naval base of Sevastopol. The fate of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, once a relatively formidable force that had enjoyed a fair measure of success in the Black Sea until the revolution and collapse, had been a matter of concern to the Allies who feared the Germans and their Allies would seize some or all of the ships and employ them in the Mediterranean.

[fol. 77v]

[Antiphona]

[Versus] Magna est gloria eius in salutari tuo.

[Collecta] Deus qui beatum Symonem martyrem tuum uirtute constancie in agone suo communisti, quique illi ad renouandum Britannie regnum milites inclitos associasti, tribue nos eius precibus adiuuari qui celebri martyrio meruit consummari. Per [Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum].

O decus militie (Cambridge MS) (220)

Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.4.20, fol. 77v

[Antiphon]

O earl of Leicester, glory of the knighthood of the English people, right hand of the oppressed, by purchase with your blood you have attained the justice of heaven. Implore the life of the blessed for our miserable selves.

[Versicle] His glory is great in thy salvation.

[Collect] O God, thou who fortified the blessed martyr Simon with the power of endurance in his agony and joined unto him renowned knights for the renewal of Britain, grant that we may be helped by the prayers of him who deservedly accomplished a famous martyrdom. Through [our Lord Jesus Christ].

ONE of the many fundamental contributions by Roger Mason to scholarship is his pioneering research on Latin histories of the kingdom as a source for insights into the nature of Scottish political culture. As a result, he has revealed patterns of political thought that bring us closer to the views and assumptions of the kingdom's elite than would be possible by focusing exclusively on more intellectual works of political theory. In the process he has shaped our understanding of the most important historical texts in Latin in ways that are likely to endure for as long as these works are read or their reception studied, from John of Fordun writing in the mid-1380s to George Buchanan two centuries later. This chapter will not attempt to discuss the substance of any of these histories. Instead, it will ask what might be learnt about the genre of medieval ‘national’ histories – as this is generally understood by historians – by looking beyond print editions to extant manuscripts.

Medieval ‘National’ Histories

Although John of Fordun was not the first to write a history of the kingdom from its origins, his Chronica Gentis Scotorum is the earliest to survive intact. It appears in Norbert Kersken's monumental study, published in 1995, of what he described as ‘works of long-term history, providing an overview of the “national” past from the very beginnings to the time of their writing’. Kersken argued that these texts – which he referred to as ‘national histories’ – began ‘almost simultaneously’ to be written across much of Europe in the first quarter of the twelfth century. He showed that, by the end of the thirteenth century, it was rare for a kingdom not to have been provided by one of its literati with an extensive written account of its past from its origins to within living memory.

Kersken's outstanding achievement in identifying and describing each of these works across most of Europe in the Middle Ages was only feasible by researching them as printed editions, rather than by trying to deal with a myriad of manuscripts. He was aware of the significance of these texts as editions, taking care to note when they were first printed, as well as basing his work on the most recent publications.

The only previous attempt to collect Kyd's writings was made by Frederick S. Boas, a well-known historian of early modern drama. Boas included three authentic works: The Spanish Tragedy, Cornelia, and The Householder's Philosophy. Boas rightly included Soliman and Perseda, urging its acceptance as genuine (pp. liv–lxi); this was just before Charles Crawford published his definitive attribution (1903). Boas was less judicious when he included the undistinguished prose pamphlet, The Murder of John Brewen (1592), which has no resemblance to Kyd. Boas accepted J. P. Collier's attribution on the basis of a signature, ‘Tho. Kydd’, in one copy: it has since been shown that this was another Collier forgery. Boas forcefully rejected The First Part of Ieronimo as spurious (pp. xxix–xliv), but then printed it not as an appendix but in the text (pp. 295–337). Boas had followed up Sidney Lee's discovery of Kyd's first Letter to Puckering, and included a facsimile and a transcript. In an appendix, he included Kyd's Verses of Praise and Joy (pp. 339–42), but unkindly dismissed them as ‘a specimen of Kyd's non-dramatic hack work’ (p. xxv). Boas briefly discussed Arden of Faversham, finding it

There are sensitive and perceptive comments in Boas's introduction, but the main weakness of his edition is its careless treatment of Kyd's text. The long critical review by W. W. Greg exposed an embarrassing number of errors.

Kyd has been much more fortunate in editions of single works, such as the ‘Revels Plays’ editions of The Spanish Tragedy by Philip Edwards (1957) and of Arden of Faversham by M. L. Wine (1973), and the comparable edition of The Spanish Tragedy by Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch (2013) for ‘Arden Early Modern Drama’. While we acknowledge what we have learned from those editions, our aims are different. The priorities of this Collected Works are to provide textually accurate modern spelling versions, freshly derived from the original quarto editions, with full commentaries.

CATCH/WORDS

This essay considers obviousness as both an expressive and hermeneutic mode, one long dismissed and yet oddly well-positioned to do humane work in the narrative-receiving and narrative-making work of the twenty-first century. This study of the obvious, though, involves parsing the relationship of obviousness to textual interpretation, a practice that often begins with terms like “literal” and “metaphorical.” Disentangling the material sense of a sentence from its symbolic or figurative rendering has long vexed the study of literature, and it has sometimes had history-inflecting effects, given the weaponization of interpretation by institutional interests and authorities. James Simpson's Burning to Read offers one such example in the case of Reformation England. Observing that “the literal sense” of a text is always already a “fairly tenuous fiction,” one shaped by “interpretive, unwritten assumptions of the interpretive community,” Simpson traces how the alluring hope of an absolute meaning, independent of its readers’ expectations and hermeneutic labors, can lead to fundamentalist approaches to texts. In Reformation England, the fantasy of a liberating literalism only entrenched the institutional powers entrusted with resolution of interpretive difference, and the result was centuries of sectarian violence among Catholic and Protestant denominations. While that case offers readers today a cautionary tale about the authoritarian creep of invoking the literal as self-evident or stable, plenty of early modern writers in their own moment perceived this danger clearly, developing language for this kind of motivated, sharp-bladed interpretation. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, writers invoked a phrase for the implicitly strategic, often cynical, always interested interpretation of words without regard to their contextual valences – that is, a term for a perverse literalism: it was “to catch at words.” For example, Richard Bancroft, in a 1588 sermon, cites authority to complain of false, scholarly prophets: “If they catch but a word … they straight insult upon it … They wring and wrest the Scriptures according as they fansie.”2 Likewise, William Burton in 1602 decried those who listen to sermons “only to watch and catch, at a word and a halfe, taking only what will serue their turne (like the diuell himselfe) ….”

Despite what are in certain respects quite similar literary careers, the attitudes towards textual production and literary authority presented by John Skelton and William Dunbar resist close association. Very rarely have the two been studied together. And yet, their position as the vernacular poets most obviously affiliated with the English and Scottish royal courts,1 as well as the broad similarities between those courts as centres of textual production, invites comparison of their diverging claims for the authority of their writings.

Skelton, in The Bowge of Courte, transforms satire of the court into a satire of the poet. His depiction of his textual double, Drede, seems an unlikely strategy for authorial self-promotion; yet it is not too great a leap from self-scrutiny to self-regard, and the Bowge shares with Skelton's Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell an interest in the nature of poetry and the function of the poet expressed through the dream vision. The outcome of the Bowge is apparently to deny the ability of poetry to convey pre-existing truths; however, Skelton's decision to make the poet himself into an object of scrutiny demonstrates his willingness to break down in order to rebuild the concept of authorship, in particular, his authorship, which is given permanent inscription in the Garlande's Skelton Poeta. Dunbar, though working in superficially similar circumstances and – in The Goldyn Targe at least – the same ‘Chaucerian Tradition’, has a quite different use for the dream vision. Dunbar, unlike Skelton, seems less concerned with his personal status as a Scottish author than in his place among a brotherhood of Scots makaris. His allegorical narratives evoke a lively, literary court culture, of which Dunbar is but one valuable exponent, rather than, as will be seen in Skelton and the Garlande, a biographically specific, self-justifying authorship dissociated from any single, external source of poetic legitimation.

Neither poet's strategy was entirely successful in promoting their name and writings: Dunbar's transmission relies on continued interest in the court culture that he represents, whilst Skelton's somewhat convoluted authorship did not long outlive its conception.

While investigating a tranche of captains in the mid-eighteenth century in The National Archives, a unique cache of documents was found in the letters to the Admiralty in Captain Archibald Kennedy's file. The importance of these documents is that they reveal the events in New York and the eastern seaboard of North America during the Stamp Act crisis which occupied the last three months of 1765, as they impinged on a naval captain – not a politician, colonial official or merchant. This perspective is different from that usually described in histories and is worthy of a wider audience.

Captain Kennedy was senior naval officer at New York from 1763, and most of his correspondence with the Admiralty had to do with the difficulties of impressing men from the merchant vessels trading in and out of New York. Trade was booming in the years after what was known in America as the French and Indian War and in Britain as the Seven Years’ War. Merchant vessel owners could afford to pay their crews more than the navy offered, which made manning his vessels difficult. Kennedy reported to his Commander-in-Chief Lord Colvill, stationed in Halifax, and copied his letters to the Admiralty when it seemed likely that ships would reach England more quickly than ice-bound Halifax. He deployed the three sloops he had at his disposal as best he could to meet the many conflicting demands of the local colonial officials.

In 1764 everything changed. The Grenville administration had long planned to recoup from the colonists themselves some of the costs of protecting the American colonies from the French. Leading lawyers from the colonies, such as John Tabor Kempe, the young Attorney General in New York, had discussed this in London. Politicians in Britain anticipated no difficulty in levying taxes in America. If they had realised that the cost of collecting customs dues charged on American trade was three times the amount that officials raised in money they might have thought again. It is easy with hindsight to see that politicians in London should have paid more attention to the warnings of colonial administrators in America who were unable to persuade the colonial assemblies to vote them any income. Trading with the enemy was not confined to the American colonies: the Irish supplied beef to the French army despite being much more closely governed than the colonies were.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 354, produced at the very end of the sixteenth century, was written by the London-based astrologer-physician Simon Forman (1552–1611). Thanks to the book-collecting tendencies of Elias Ashmole (1617–92), many of Forman's autograph manuscripts survive in what is now the Ashmole collection. This particular volume contains treatises on divination and astronomy, and opens with Forman's own treatise on geomancy – De arte geomantica. After this opening text there is another predictive treatise in Forman's hand, beginning with the verse above on fol. 174r, with a corresponding figure on fol. 174v. This is a procedure to predict the outcome of a variety of life events: from choosing friends or a spouse, finding out the winner or loser in combat, and avoiding danger, by using the letters of someone's name; it is called onomancy.

To anyone familiar with Forman's character, it won't be a surprise that he wasn't being completely truthful about the origin of this art. ‘This is a ruele of my devise’ is a falsehood, at least concerning the art of onomancy as a whole. While he may have come up with elements of the specific version copied into his book, onomancy – divination by converting the letters of personal names into numbers – can be documented as far back as fourth-century CE Greece, although it is almost definitely a much older practice. Onomancy was present in a host of ancient and early medieval cultures and languages outside of the Latin West, including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Ethiopic. That this was so isn't surprising. One of the most unifying themes in human experience is anxiety over big, unanswerable life questions, such as Will I get married? Will I have children? Will that friend betray me? How will I do in business?