The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts by M.R. James

A digression is allowable here as to English books that have passed to the Continent. According to Bale and Dee, there was a great expatriation of them at the Dissolution. In Archbishop Parker's correspondence there is talk of the negotiations of a German scholar, Flacius Illyricus, who wanted to buy Bale's MSS. after his death. At an earlier time Poggio visited England in the hope of unearthing classical authors, but writes as if he had been unsuccessful. Then, again, Sigismund Gelenius in 1550 edits at Basel treatises of Tertullian from a MS. belonging to the Abbey of "Masbury" (which I take to be Malmesbury), lent to him by Leland. More instances could no doubt be collected, but not, I think, very many more. When we come to enquire what English books are to be found now in Continental libraries, the results are not very impressive. I exclude the very early exportations, some of which have been mentioned, and confine myself to the books which were taken over at and after the Dissolution. There is a Bury Psalter with drawings at the Vatican, a St. Albans Psalter at Hildesheim, a fine Book of Hours at Nuremberg, a Winchester Pontifical at Rouen, a Sherborne Book at Paris, a Ramsey Psalter at an Austrian abbey, another English Psalter at the Escurial. The Canterbury _Codex Aureus_ is at Stockholm. The famous Utrecht Psalter, written, perhaps, in the Rheims district, strayed from the Cotton collection to its present home in Holland, we do not know how. All these, and some other remarkable illuminated books that could be named (I ought not to omit a Peterborough Psalter at Brussels), are not library books, but rather properties of great ecclesiastics or nobles. The largest collections have never yet been thoroughly searched. I myself have made many enquiries and some examinations with small result.

One case there is, however, brought to light by the late Rev. H. M. Bannister, which gives hope of better things when a systematic search is carried out. He found that in the Vatican Library there are quite a large number of MSS. from the libraries of the Friars at Cambridge. They are late and not very important books, but no matter for that: the point is that they are there. Other instances known to me are -- one at least of Sir Kenelm Digby's MSS. and one of Lord Burleigh's (a fourteenth-century volume of English historians) at Paris; the Greek Demosthenes already noticed at Leyden, and a MS. from Pembroke College (Seneca), also there. The Vossian collection at the same place has other books which I suspect were once in England; most notable is its Suidas, which is said by M. Bidez to be the parent of the English copies I mentioned, and which I think must be Grosseteste's own copy. This, however, is a Greek MS. A volume containing poems of Milo of St. Amand is most likely a Canterbury book. But the early books in Irish script, of which there are several, were probably written on the Continent.