A Gillyatt Sumner Manuscript at the Bodleian

'G. Sumner, Woodmansey, 1856'

Although I had first taken an interest in Gillyatt Sumner and his medieval manuscripts in 2018 (see previous blogpost), my interest lay dormant until a few years later when, during the Covid pandemic, I was employed for a period of lockdown to catalogue (at home, from digitized images) a number of Bodleian manuscripts, including Dep. c. 630, a copy of Johannes Herolt, Sermones discipuli, which had belonged to Sumner. (The resulting description and the digitisation can be found here, from which the image above is taken).

The Medieval Manuscripts of Gillyatt Sumner

In 2018 Mitch Fraas contacted me with a query, explaining that,

"I found myself down a rabbit hole looking for more on an English collector named Gillyatt Sumner (d. 1877). I wonder if you've run across him before? De Ricci gives him (as G. Sumner) as the provenance of two mss. one at Houghton (Ms. Lat 27) and another at LC (Ms. Ac. 271 - De Ricci vol. 1, p184, no.17). Likewise, Ker gives him in the provenance of about a dozen entries [recorded in the Schoenberg Database]"

I could not remember having seen the name before, but a bit of Googling produced a startling hit:

CHARGE OF SODOMY. – Gillyatt Sumner, an old man with white hair, who has resided at Woodmancy, near Beverley, and a young man named Crabtree, from Bradford, were charged with committing sodomy. The charge was made by a boilermaker in the employ of Messrs Samuelsons, named Jones. Holgate, who with prisoners and some others, had occupied beds on Wednesday night in a room at the Regatta Tavern, High-street, with several witnesses were examined, and the case was adjourned until to-morrow (Friday). 
(The Hull Packet and East Riding Times; issue 3989.) [1]

'Mirmellus Arnandi'

Among the bibles broken up by Otto Ege and/or Philip Duschnes is one often called the bible of 'Mirmellus Arnandi' (of which an example is shown above), produced in Paris c. 1300. Leaves were no. 14 in the famous Ege portfolio of Fifty Original Leaves.

The bible derives its name from the description of a cache of 210 of leaves sold at Sotheby's, 11 December 1984, lot 39: some of the leaves have erased inscriptions in formal gothic script the lower margin, and from those that remain partially legible, Christopher de Hamel concluded that the bible was 'Bequeathed to a Dominican Convent in 1450 by Mirmellus Arnandi, lawyer and judge', e.g. 'Ego mirmelus [sic] arnandi legum doctor et [...] Judex' on the leaf with the beginning of the book of Nahum.