INTRODUCTION
In a paper in volume 97 of The Antiquaries Journal that looked at the dating of the Confessor’s shrine at Westminster Abbey, the authors discussed the possibility of a scribal error in the recording of the original inscription by the fifteenth-century monk Richard Sporley.Footnote 1 Such an error, the authors argued, could plausibly be explained by Sporley’s use, as source material, of the manuscript of the Flores Historiarum, the main abbey copy of which is now held at the Chetham Library in Manchester.Footnote 2 In this manuscript, the same disputed line that opens Sporley’s version of the shrine’s inscription appears precisely one folio after the discussion of the translation of the Confessor in 1269, which manuscript, the authors suggest, Sporley is likely to have consulted when adding his details about the translation and the shrine to his own work. In this instance, that same line is used on another inscription, that of Henry of Almain in Viterbo in 1270. On that inscription, the dating line makes perfect sense: it gives the expected date of 1270. As used by Sporley for the shrine inscription, it leads (in conjunction with the lines that follow) to the surprising date of 1279 for the construction (or, at least, completion) of the shrine, a decade after the translation of the Confessor’s body, and the formal dedication of the new building by Henry iii. This discrepancy in dating has led to some scholarly debate.
At the end of the authors’ earlier paper,Footnote 3 they suggested an alternative version of the inscription that might represent the original wording on the Confessor’s shrine. This version retained the internal rhyme, but shifted the date to the expected 1269. However, in response to the authors’ earlier paper, it has been pointed out to the authors that this specific alternative version cannot be what originally appeared on the shrine as the wording does not work metrically. This is, of course, quite correct, and the authors agree that they should have given more consideration to the question of metre. In the light of which, their suggested reading must be withdrawn.
ALTERNATIVE READING
The verses themselves are leonine hexameters – that is, traditional Classical hexameters with an additional internal rhyme between the end of the first half and the end of the whole line. It was a form very popular throughout the medieval period. As the name indicates, such verses comprised six feet, and these are made up of spondees (two long syllables) and dactyls (long, followed by two short syllables). The positioning of these spondees and dactyls was free in the first four feet of the line, but the sixth foot was required to be a spondee. In addition, the fifth foot was usually filled with a dactyl (although this rule was not firm, and there are good examples of spondees in this position).
The withdrawal of the authors’ suggested version of the original line need not affect their main argument, as there is, in fact, a simple alteration of words that returns the line to metrical accuracy (allowing for a fifth foot spondee), while altering the date to the expected one of 1269. This would be the substitution of the word sexageno for the septuageno that Sporley offers. This is the version of the line silently adopted by several early authorities, since Richard Widmore in the eighteenth century.Footnote 4 If this solution is adopted, the problem (metrically speaking) dissolves, and the dating returns to the expected 1269.
It could be argued that this reading of the opening line is metrically stronger than that originally offered by Sporley, since his line does not actually conform to the required metre either. In fact, technically the use of septuageno precludes metrical accuracy. Although the word appears to be formed of a straightforward dactyl/spondee (which would, of course, end the line perfectly well), the ‘a’ in septuageno is actually long, thus leaving the metre of this word long/short/long/long/long – a pattern that cannot correctly be fitted into any part of a hexameter line.Footnote 5 The difficulty here is that it is known that the word was used in such a position, and on more than one occasion. The most immediate example, of course, comes in the lines around Henry of Almain’s tomb, which were earlier brought to the reader’s attention. Here, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the line, which provides the correct date, but which uses septuageno in precisely the way that Sporley does (and which is, after all, the authors’ point). In addition, there are other examples of the word being used in the same position: the poet and theologian Alexander of Ashby in his late twelfth-century Liber Festivalis includes the lines Lugent in penis annis hii septuagenis, / Sub merore iacent, cantica leta tacent; the extension to the Gesta Normannorum Ducum by Robert of Torigni, also written in the late twelfth century, includes the similar dating lines Annus millenus centenus septuagenus / Primus erat, primas quo ruit ense Tomas, the first line of which is very similar to one penned by Walter Map in his De Nugis Curialium of about the same date (actis milleno centeno septuageno).Footnote 6 And there are other examples. Its continued use presumably reflects the need to use a word for ‘seventieth’ in verse dating clauses. There simply were no alternatives, so the choice came down to elaborate rewriting or (even more) contorted phraseology, or slight mis-scansion. It appears many chose the slight mis-scansion. As such, the word cannot really be used as additional evidence against Sporley’s version of the inscription.
Nonetheless, the availability of a ready alternative reading to Sporley’s, if not the one the authors posited in their original paper,Footnote 7 means that the authors’ underlying argument remains unaffected. Sporley’s version of the inscription appears to be compromised by possible scribal error in his use of the Flores Historiarum, leading to a date that is entirely at odds with the known translation of the Confessor’s body. Although there is a single reference in the Annales Londiniensis to part of the shrine being ‘nondum tamen completo parato’ at the time of this translation, this clearly refers to the casket, rather than the shrine base.Footnote 8 As stated in the authors’ previous article,Footnote 9 given the relatively short length of time that would have been required to assemble the various parts of the shrine, which must have come into the abbey as panels with the mosaic already infilled, the suggestion of an unfinished shrine base that the craftsmen needed to return to in order to complete ten years later lacks conviction.
Why Sporley might have made such an error is difficult to judge. If it was any more than an unchecked scribal mistake, it may be that he misunderstood the wording as he himself set it out, taking the words ‘cum completo quasi deno’ to mean something like ‘with the decade almost complete’, and so interpreting his miswritten text to mean late 1269. The idea that there was an alternative reading of the original inscription would, of course, be strong evidence that the words themselves were not visible to Sporley at the time he was writing, two centuries after the shrine’s construction.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Dr David Howlett FSA, Peter Pickering FSA, Professor David Carpenter and Dr Daniel Hadas for their most helpful comments and suggestions on this subject.
ABBREVIATIONS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations
- WAM
Westminster Abbey Muniments
Manuscript sources
Manchester, Chetham Library MS 6712
Westminster Abbey Muniments WAM Book II (Westminster Abbey Domesday)
Westminster Abbey Muniments, WAM 9465
