A PRECIOUS MANUSCRIPT

Evening Star, Issue 21641, 9 February 1934, Page 12

A PRECIOUS MANUSCRIPT

Professor A. F. Pollard, who filled the chair of constitutional history, at London University for many years, contributes to * The Times ’ an article on _ the Great Chronicle of London, which was believed by historians of a former generation to have been lost, but was discovered thirty years ago, and was recently purchased by Lord Wakefield of Hythe. This valuable chronicle of the history of London, which in some degree covers the history of England, has never been published, and up to the present only a few extracts from it have appeared in print. “ The original manuscript is incomparably the finest manuscript of any English city chronicle known to he extant,” writes Professor Pollard. It belonged to Robert Fabyan, alderman of -London and sheriff in 1493. who resigned his aldermanship in 1502 to escape the expense of a mayoralty, and is credited in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography ’ with having been “ the first of the citizen chroniclers of London who conceived the design of expanding his diary into a general history.” The long neglect of the ‘ Great Chronicle ’ was _ indeed largely due to the erroneous belief that Fabyan was not merely its owner, but its author, and that it was identical with the familiar ‘ Fabyan’* Chronicle.’ first printed in 1516 by Pynson. '. . . The interest of the manuscript is enhanced and its contents enriched by numerous corrections and insertions, sometimes half a page long, in the neat and unmistakable hand writing of London’s most famous antiquary, John Stow. How it came into his possession is not known, nor how it passed from his hands into the hands of the Bromley family (in whose possession it remained for over 200 years). Apart from Stow’s substantial additions, the writing _ changes twice at least; the part which ends in 1485 was written sometime before 1496. This part contains 246 folios; another 105, with a fresh pagination, brings the chronicle down to the second year of Henry VIII. (1510-11), then follow four unnumbered folios, including accounts of the parliamentary session of Fehruary-Marcli, 1512, of the despatch of an army in April ‘to what countre or coast noo certaynte of yt was told,’ - and of tho great fight on 10th August between the Regent and the great carrack of Brest; it concludes abruptly with a note on the price of wheat after the harvest of that year. Its authorship remains a problem, soluble only, if at all, _by minute comparison with the original manuscripts of other London chronicles.”