Manuscript Description England, Manchester, John Rylands Library MS Eng. 113 | |
| MS Appellation: | Ma (Manly and Rickert) |
| Title: | Canterbury Tales |
| Author: | Chaucer |
| Contents: | Poem on the death of King Edward IV; poem beginning 'Musyng alone Latin articles on the Passion; Canterbury Tales (ff6-194); 'Periculum animarum a list of the deaths of English Kings from Edward I to the accession of Richard III. |
| Language: | English |
| Date Range: | 1483-1485 (Manly and Rickert) |
| Scribal Hands: | Examples of the hand. Click on the link above for full details and images of individual letter forms.                |
| Dialect: | Warwicks : (Mosser 1990) |
| Material: | Paper with a few parchment flyleaves |
| No of Folios: | 1-4 (old paper folios) +5(vellum) + 6-195 + 2 parchment flyleaves (196-197-not full size) |
| Pagination: | Modern pencil top right includes flyleaves in foliation. |
| Quiring: | v + 1-8(24) + ii |
| Signatures: | No signatures remain. |
| Catchwords: | By the scribe in ink of text with black ink underline extending up at sides to form 3-sided sleigh. Usually in lower margin to right of text box space with a few letters over-running the frame. |
| Page Size: | 302 x 207 |
| Frame: | 4 x vertical enclosing column of text and column for glosses on either side, 2 x horizontal with upper one forming top of minim line for top line of text; brown crayon and drypoint. |
| Writing Space: | 240 x 80 |
| Incipits and Explicits: | Regularly throughout first in Latin to the end of Squire's Tale, thereafter in English. |
| Marginal Headings: | Latin glosses in the margin which may or may not be in the hand of the scribe. |
| Running Titles: | On every folio in upper margin. |
| Paragraph Marks: | On f6r only; alternating red and blue rhyme markers on right edge of column |
| Flourished Initials: | One only on f6; 4-line blue lombard initial with pale red pen-work. |
| Other Names (not owners): | On f4v 'Bara(d?)oun Henricus transtulit istud opus per semet ipsum'. On f196r is the name 'John Hull' a Devon man whom Manly and Rickert suggest may have owned the manuscript in the fifteenth century. They also provide evidence of a Brode family's west country connections. Thereafter nothing is known until it was bought by the Rylands Library in 1906 at the sale of Lawrence Hodson. |
| Miscellaneous Info: | There is no other coloured ink and no intention to include any since no space is left for key letters. |
| Further Information: | Manly and Rickert I: 349-355; M. C. Seymour II: 154-158; Griffiths, Jeremy. ‘New Light on the Provenance of a Copy of The Canterbury Tales, John Rylands Library, MS Eng. 113’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 77:2 (1995): 25-30. |