MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS FROM NORWICH CATHEDRAL PRIORY

Abstract

i san introduction to a list of manuscripts surviving from the medieval /' library of Norwich Cathedral Priory I have put together evidence JL JL which may help us to discover how so many of them reached the Cambridge University Library during the sixteenth century. This approach may seem irrelevant, but it is not really so, both because there is a tradition, not yet perhaps quite discredited, that these manuscripts were part of a collection given to Cambridge by Archbishop Rotherham at the end of the Middle Ages and because a knowledge of the history of the University Library in the sixteenth century is essential in establishing the list of Norwich books. According to Thomas James the University Library possessed 259 manuscripts in the year 1600, of which thirty-seven (nos. 223-59) were kept 4 diligentissime ' and apart from the others in a chest.1 These reserved books, the gifts of Archbishop Parker, Sir Nicholas Bacon and Bishop Pilkington in the year 1574, include many of the chief treasures of the library. They are also among the few manuscripts in the pre-1600 collection concerning which we know both when and by whom they were given. The other 222 books described by Thomas James present a problem which has not yet been resolved. They are substantially the collection listed in the seventeenthcentury Donors Book,* under the heading: 'Ex dono Reverendi Patris in Christo Tho: Rotherami Episcopi Lincolniensis et Cancellarii Anglise'. Some twenty-eight out of about 250 items in this list are printed books : the rest, with a few exceptions, can be identified in James's catalogue. The old tradition is, therefore, that Rotherham gave practically everything that the library possessed in 1600 in the way of manuscripts, apart from the gifts of the year 1 574. This must be an assumption based on the fact that Rotherham was the library's greatest benefactor in the Middle Ages and, as records show, the donor of a considerable number of manuscripts and early printed books, some of which remain in the library to-day.3 It is possible, indeed, that

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