About the Chronicle


The physical growth of the Chronicle in the late 12th and 13th centuries

The Chronicle of Melrose is notable for the scale of its ‘growth’ by the addition of text by many different scribes. To accommodate this text, the manuscript itself was expanded by the addition of fresh folios and gatherings.

Below is a summary of the ‘physical’ growth of the manuscript. It simply explains the addition of folios: it does not address addition of text in each of these gatherings. All of this is explained in more detail in Broun, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, chapters 6 and 8.

It has been shown that at some stages in the Chronicle’s growth, the scribes were probably ruling the new pages as they went individually rather than in bulk (see Broun, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey, p. 80).

It is argued here that the Chronicle began life as four physical units, which at some point in the late 12th or early 13th century came to be regarded as one ‘work’ (see What was the ‘original’ Chronicle?). Together, these units constituted (at least) eight gatherings in a mixture of sizes:

  • Julius B XIII Gathering I: 8 folios
  • Julius B XIII Gathering II: probably originally 10 folios (one later cut away)
  • Julius B XIII Gathering III: probably originally 10 folios (one later cut away)
  • Julius B XIII Gathering IV: 8 folios
  • Julius B XIII Gathering V: probably originally 6 folios (final one later cut away)
  • Julius B XIII Gathering VI: probably originally 8 folios (final one later cut away)
  • Faustina B IX Gathering I: 10 folios
  • Faustina B IX Gathering II: 10 folios (f. 14 was inserted later)

In this collection of gatherings, there were blanks in the following places:

  • Julius B XIII, f. 18v: a blank page at the end of Gathering II; textually this falls after the list of geographical names and before the table of popes.
  • Julius B XIII, f. 23v: a blank page in the middle bifolio of Gathering III (followed by a stub where an unused folio was presumably removed); textually this falls after the table of popes and before the tables of rulers since the time of Christ.
  • Julius B XIII, f. 40v: a blank page at the end of Gathering V (followed by a stub where an unused folio was presumably removed); textually this coincides with the end of Hugh of St Victor’s Chronicle.
  • Faustina B IX, f. 11v: the lower half of the page was left blank at the end of Gathering I; this coincides with the end of Scribal profile 37’s stint (finishing with the annal for AD 1016).
  • Faustina B IX, ff. 21r (lower half), 21v and 22r–v: blank pages at the end of Gathering II; this coincides with the end of Scribal profile 8’s stint (finishing with the annal for AD 1171, which was later added to).

The subsequent ‘physical’ growth of the manuscript was as follows:

  • Two 8-folio gatherings were added (ff. 23–39) to allow for the addition of new annals from AD 1171 to 1223.
  • A singleton was added (f. 40) when presumably not much more growth was anticipated.
  • A 6-folio gathering was added (ff. 41–46), eventually continuing the annals to AD 1243.
  • Five singletons and a bifolio were added (ff. 47–53), containing a series of annals intermixed with copies of letters.
  • A 10-folio gathering was added to continue the annals to AD 1263 (now ff. 55–60 and 63). The final three folios and the bottom half of the seventh folio were later cut away, presumably because they were blank.
  • An 8-folio gathering was added (ff. 64–71) to continue the annals to AD 1268, plus most of the ‘little work’ on Simon de Montfort.
  • Probably an 8-folio gathering was added, with the final four folios later cut away, presumably because they were blank (now ff. 72–75). This allowed for the end of the ‘little work’ on Simon de Montfort and the continuation of the annals to 1270.

A number of other folios were created contemporaneously with this growth but did not have an obvious position in the sequence and so were positioned later, perhaps by a binder:

  • f. 14: this singleton contains an account of Scottish kings descended from Máel Coluim III (d. 1093) and Margaret (d. 1093) down to the birth of Alexander II (b. 1198) (Scribal profile 43). It was possibly written on the end of a parchment roll given the way the folio tapers at the bottom. It was situated in Faustina B IX Gathering I during the 16th century at the latest as part of the Leland binding (see the Scribal profile 29 foliation ‘13’). This position makes sense as the text appears close to the annal for AD 1070 (f. 15r), when the Chronicle records Máel Coluim III and Margaret’s marriage. The folio certainly seems to have been considered part of the Chronicle in the mid-13th century due to additions on the verso attributed to Scribal profile 33.
  • f. 38: the recto of this singleton contains a copy of the first part of a letter describing the capture of Damietta in 1219 (Scribal profile 81); the verso contains a very faded text listing burials at Melrose (Scribal profile 82). Earlier in the 13th century this singleton was considered the ‘first folio’ of the Chronicle (whatever that means for a potentially unbound manuscript). This is primarily because of a reference in the work of Scribal profile 76 on f. 37v to the fall of Damietta, which is said to be ‘more fully addressed in the first folio of this volume’. (Scribal profile 76 is datable after 6 September 1222, and palaeographically in the first half of the 13th century.) The rubbed nature of the verso also suggests it was exposed for a period, potentially as the outer page of the ‘volume’. The lower margin foliation ‘55’ (Scribal profile 29) indicates that the folio was, probably during Leland’s binding in the 16th century, positioned at the end of Gathering VI. During its Cottonian rebinding, it was instead slotted into Gathering IV (repositioning the text to be close to the annal for AD 1219) and its foliation was corrected from ‘55’ to ‘37’.
  • f. 54: this singleton contains two summaries of relations between kings of Scotland and England, with items selectively copied from the Chronicle (Scribal profile 102). There is no obvious reason why it has been bound in this position, other than the fact it makes up a gathering with other singletons (ff. 47–53). It is not possible to establish its position in any earlier binding phases.
  • ff. 61–62: these two singletons contain an account of miracles at Melrose Abbey and annals for AD 1260 and 1261 (Scribal profile 114). There are already annals for those years on f. 60, so it is likely these two singletons were slotted in here, in Gathering VIII, to be close to them.