The centrality of the role of the scribe in studies of later medieval English literature has developed inexorably over the past four decades. During this time scholarly interest has shifted from literary texts themselves to the manuscripts in which they survive. It has also broadened from an exclusive focus on the authors whose wit, imagination and learning generated works of literature to a more inclusive consideration of the whole process of writing, and one that acknowledges the craftsmanship of those who physically committed the authors’ words to parchment and paper. Any graduate student embarking on the study of medieval literature in the third decade of the twenty-first century can expect to encounter questions of scribal culture and book production sooner rather than later in their studies, and will find that deeper acquaintance of those major medieval authors and texts that have featured on the syllabus at undergraduate level will be freighted with a searching appreciation of their cultural and historical milieux. Even though graduate students may not actually be expected to read medieval texts from manuscript to any great extent as part of their assessed work they will usually be provided with training in at least the rudiments of palaeography, codicology and textual criticism as part of any taught Masters programme, in anticipation that knowledge of these skills will be necessary for successful further doctoral study as well as for parallel careers in the archival and library sectors. Such training has, of course, been available in the past, especially at locations such as Toronto and York and St Andrews where there have traditionally been significant concentrations of medieval scholars, and at those universities which own or have convenient access to extensive collections of medieval manuscripts. The key difference is the now universal and routine expectation that students of medieval English literature will need such skills; previously training in palaeography and diplomatics was assumed to be essential only for students of medieval history, since their research was always expected to require archival work and the examination of original medieval documents. This change in approach in the subject of medieval English literature is due to a combination of factors, not all of which are academically driven.

The majority of Linne Mooney's research has been concerned with textual production in England in the mid fifteenth century. Although her interest has increasingly been drawn to scribes and the environments in which they copied texts (most recently the networks centred on the London Guildhall), many of her earlier research ventures focussed more squarely on texts themselves. These were often the kinds of texts that had received little attention from literary scholars. One genre of late medieval literature that she has helped to define is that of didactic writing, a capacious and still under-studied area that encompasses not just works of science and information as categorised by George Keiser but also persuasive and instructional texts from across many fields. Linne Mooney's contributions to this broad area have been of various kinds, beginning with her 1981 thesis and including published editions of texts such as The Seven Liberal Arts and John Somer's Kalendarium. Another edition, of a text that belongs to the subgenre of literary propaganda, appeared as an appendix to an important article ‘Lydgate's “Kings of England” and Another Verse Chronicle of the Kings’ published in 1989. In this assessment of the two works Linne Mooney established that the anonymous poem was entirely separate from Lydgate's poem and recorded the then known copies of both texts. In the present essay I will extend that account of witnesses to include one more copy of Lydgate's poem and several more recently discovered copies of the Anonymous ‘Kings of England’. I will also argue that the augmented list of witnesses for the anonymous poem, and the material form of those witnesses, reinforce conclusions about the work's reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and deepen understanding of the circumstances of its production.

Prior to Linne Mooney's 1989 article these two Middle English poems were largely available to scholars through MacCracken's edition of John Lydgate's shorter poems. MacCracken presented both poems together under a single heading: ‘The Kings of England Sithen William Conqueror (with a Popular Redaction)’. Thus described the poem sits amongst other ‘Didactic Poems’ along with others such as ‘A Dietary’ and Stans puer ad mensam.

The fifteenth-century scribe John Shirley (c.1366–1456) presents the following poem as a moral balade written by John Gower:

Shirley furnished the poem with the title “Balade moral of gode counseyle,” and a running header which repeats the same information: “Balade of moralite,” in both instances then concluding with the clear attribution of authorship: “made by Gower.” He copied the poem into the latest of his three extant manuscript anthologies, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59, where it sits amidst a cluster of items that are otherwise all by Lydgate: three extracts from the Fall of Princes precede it, and five short poems follow, two of which are verse prayers. Most of this material has a moralizing intent and “Passe forþe þou pilgryme,” with its counsel against hasty or unguarded speech, fits easily into a selection of short admonitory items which Shirley describes, slightly opaquely, as “þe abstracte brevyayre” (fol. 13r). In this context, were the poem not so clearly labelled as Gower’s it could pass for one of Lydgate’s. Its sentiments are in tune with those expressed in Lydgate’s proverbial pieces such as “A wikked tong wol alway deme amis” (NIMEV 653), and it accords with the advisory nature of much of his work. Another selection from the Fall of Princes that occurs later in this same manuscript is given the almost identical title “Balade of Good Counseyl.” In Shirley’s earlier anthology, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20, a copy of Lydgate’s “Thoroughfare of Woe” (NIMEV 1872) is also introduced as “a balade of goode counseyle” (p. 25), and equivalent titles, in French not English, are attached to other short poems: “Balade de bone counseyle” is used as the title of two poems, one English, one French, and another French poem is entitled “Balade moral et de bone conseylle.” Chaucer’s poem “Truth” is also sometimes titled “Balade de bon conseyl” (and with the equivalent terms in English and Latin), though not by Shirley, who copied it twice in the Trinity manuscript. Similarly, in Bodley Ashmole 59, Shirley introduces Henry Scogan’s poem, “My noble sones and eke my lordis dere,” as “A moral balade.”

THE BOOK THAT A LATE-MEDIEVAL or early-Tudor reader was most likely to possess was a book of hours. By the end of the fifteenth century this type of volume was widely available in England in a variety of forms designed to appeal to all tastes and pockets, ranging from de luxe manuscripts with fabulously illuminated borders and full-page miniatures to small printed horae with woodcut illustrations. Book of hours were used in private daily devotions and thus became very personal, highly valued possessions that their owners were likely to bequeath to near relatives or close friends; with other spiritual books they are the types of volumes most likely to be mentioned in wills of this period. The ownership and donation inscriptions that such exchanges generated, the memorialization of family members through the entry of their obits in the prefatory calendars, and the tendency to fill up blank leaves with records of the births of children, combine to make books of hours valuable sources of information about personal social networks. They are thus particularly rich resources of biographical detail about late-medieval and early modern readers and reading communities, yet tend to be treated rather reductively as sources of evidence about reading itself. They are assumed to be books that were only used in the practice of devotion, at home or in church, for the saying of daily prayers in imitation of monastic brethren, for the correct observance of fast days and festivals, for venerating local or personally favoured saints – in short, for fulfilling all manner of religious obligations. All of this activity, much of it literate, is somehow not factored as indicative of reading habits and practices. Books of hours are more typically cited merely as evidence of an owner's piety and wealth; in literary terms they tend to be regarded as ‘just’ books of hours and not something more interesting.

In fact, the contents of books of hours are more varied and copious than might be imagined. Certain differences in original content, such as in prescribed use (in England normally of Sarum or York), or in the provision of prayers to particular saints, may reveal information about the circumstances of the book's production and intended market, but these aspects, which are usually well-documented in catalogue entries for books of hours, are not the features that concern me here.