A Scribal and Illuminated Rebus?

Among the digitized manuscripts at Villanova University, PA, is a very small (approx.100×70mm) 14th-century English copy of some of Augustine's works, with a single illuminated page at the beginning:

[This and other images: Digital Library@Villanova University; Source]

The thing that strikes me as most unusual about this first page is the lower border, with foliage sprouting from what looks like a hole in the side of a wooden barrel:

George Dunn (1864-1912) of Woolley Hall and his price code(s)

"EXHUMATION" is in the process of preparing a much expanded second edition of his excellent The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade: A Preliminary Guide (2010) (cf. here). I have contributed a few new codes, but one has so far eluded us, so I present some of the evidence here in the hope that a reader might be able to solve the puzzle before the second edition goes to press.

George Dunn's books are usually easy to recognise: they typically contain a book-label as follows:

On the facing flyleaf there are sometimes bibliographical comments, and almost always an acquisition-note consisting of a price-code, his initials "G.D.", and the date:

λρη | G.D. | Oct. 1907

The price-codes usually consist of two or three minuscule letters of the Greek alphabet, but the numerals that they represent has never, to my knowledge, been decoded.

The Duprat Bible [Part II]

The previous post left the Duprat Bible in the 1724 catalogue of the Château d'Anet.

Whoever bought the Bible divided each volume into two and rebound them in the present 18th-century bindings, for an unidentified owner, with a gilt “P L” (? or "L P" ?) monogram stamp in each corner:

"BRYANSTOLE": Henry Yates Thompson's Price-Code

I was recently made aware of a digitized manuscript at Princeton from the collection of Henry Yates Thompson, which has his characteristic "Ex Musæo" label inscribed with his manuscript number, price in code, source and date of acquisition:

[Source]

As I have been discussing price-codes in recent posts, I thought it might be worth correcting an error that has appeared in print at least four times.[1]

The Brölemann Catalogues

Manuscripts collected by Henry-Auguste Brölemann between 1824 and his death in 1854, which descended to his grandson Arthur Brölemann, and were eventually sold by his great-granddaughter, Mme. Etienne Mallet in 1926, are scattered around the world.

They are easily recognised by Arthur's bookplate, and a blue-edged octagonal label in the lower left corner of the front pastedown, apparently applied by Henry-Auguste, of at least four similar but slightly different designs:

The Price-Code "CUMBERLAND"

This week I gave a presentation about "Price-Codes and Provenance" at a conference in London; one of my slides is above. I have posted before about how price-codes work.

"BRAUNSCHWEIG", The Ashburnham Price-Code

One price-code missing from the excellent The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade: A Preliminary Guide, by "Exhumation" [i.e. Ian Jackson] (Berkeley, 2010),

and thus apparently unrecorded, is that of the man who, besides Sir Thomas Phillipps, formed the largest and most important private collection of medieval manuscripts in 19th-century England, namely, Bertram, 4th Earl of Ashburnham (1797–1878).

Robert Ormes Dougan Leaves at Occidental College

Most of the medieval manuscript leaves in the Library's Special Collections at Occidental College were given by Robert Ormes Dougan (1904-1999), and have his bookplate on the mount:

The curious legend "London - Perth - Dublin - San Marino" is explained by his obituaries in The Independent [of London] and the LA Times: of Scots origins (the landscape on the bookplate is presumably Scottish), he attended university in London; after WWII he was the city Librarian of Perth (Scotland); in the early 1950s he became deputy Librarian of Trinity College, Dublin; and in the late 1950s he moved to the US and spent the last part of his career at the Huntington Library, San Marino.

The leaves he gave to Occidental each have a typescript description which ends with a price-code, usually typed, but in one case added in ink:

Description with price-code "mxd" added in blue ink in the lower right corner

Description with price-code "uma" in the lower right corner

Is it possible to crack the code?

"What Counts as Provenance Evidence?"

There is a detailed analysis of a variety of marks found in a single book here:
https://msuprovenance.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/problems-in-provenance-research/
under the title "What Counts as Provenance Evidence?", on the blog of the Special Collections Department of Michigan State University. It's worth a read. The following is an extract:

[...]

Some markings are relatively straightforward and easy to understand, while others are more mysterious. How many different marks do you see?  Let’s be literal at this stage and refrain from judgment about which particular inscriptions are important for determining provenance.  I count at least 15 different potential provenance markers on these two pages alone.  I’ll highlight those below:

Click to enlarge

[...]

The Post-Medieval Provenance of the Taymouth Hours (BL, Yates Thompson MS. 13)

I have recently read and reviewed Kathryn A. Smith, The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of Self in Late Medieval England (The British Library: London, 2012).

I have often argued that the post-medieval and even modern provenance of medieval manuscripts can provide valuable clues to their medieval origins and owners, and the Taymouth Hours may be a case in point. I will consider the manuscript's provenance in two parts: here considering its post-medieval homes, working backwards from the present, and then its origin patron in a subsequent post.

The manuscript was bequeathed to the British Museum by the widow of Henry Yates Thompson in 1941. It had escaped being sold in the three Yates Thompson auctions of 1919-1921 because Yates Thompson had given it to her a few years earlier: in 1917 he inscribed its flyleaf as follows:

"This volume, one of the
choicest of my English MS.S.
I gave to my dear wife on her
birthday Jan[uar]y 10th 1917 to
mitigate her grief at the
news that I intended to sell
my collection of 100 illumi-
nated MSS.
                 [signed:] HYT."

The first flyleaf has Yates Thompson's bookplate annotated, as usual, with the acquisition details:

"57": the number of the MS in Thompson's collection,

"nee.e.e": the price he paid, using his price-code "bryanstole", i.e. "£500 0s. 0d."

"Earl of Ashburnham May 1897": the source and date of acquisition.

A Fragment formerly owned by Guilford and Phillipps, part II

[Continued from this post]

Looking at the original Phillipps auction catalogues from 1903 and 1911 it was possible to locate the following entries:

"858  Novum Testamentum. Pars Expositionis Bedæ in Actus Apostolorum, manuscript of the tenth century, written in double columns, on vellum, with the book-plate of Lord Guilford, half morocco                     folio X Cent"

and

"71  Bedæ Expositionis in Actus Apostolorum Fragmentum, manuscript of the eleventh century, written in double columns, on vellum, with the book-plate of Lord Guilford                                                         folio XI Cent"

In the 1903 sale it was bought by "Brewer" (or perhaps Bremer?) for £1, and in 1911 by J[acques] Rosenthal for £4 5s. Presumably Brewer/Bremer failed to pay for the item, or returned it for re-sale.

This tells us that the manuscript was a bound volume until at least 1911, although incomplete, and that there was definitive proof of having come from the Guilford library, as suggested by the Phillipps catalogue at no. 10614.  This description does not mention that the manuscript was a fragment, so the "fragm." of the first description indicated that it was an incomplete codex. The Schoenberg database does not include single leaves, however old or interesting, but it does include incomplete codices, and the present item can be found there by searching with "Bede" as author and "Guilford" in the Provenance field (I prefer to use the old interface, which is much more user-friendly than the "improved" one).

As usual, the results of searching the Schoenberg database are very hit-and-miss (hits often turn out to be misses), but two are correct:

Payne & Foss, Catalogue of Manuscripts, Books Printed on Vellum ..., February 1830, item 1053:

"1053  Bedae, (Venerabilis,) Expositio in Actum Apostolorum. A very ancient Manuscript of the Twelfth Century upon vellum, in double columns, from Lord Guilford's Collection, 3l. 3s     --     --    --     folio"

R.H. Evans, Valuable and extensive library of the late Earl of Guilford, Part the Third, 28 February, 1829, lot 410:

"410  Venerabilis Bedæ Expositionis in Actum Apostolorum, A VERY ANTIENT MANUSCRIPT, ON VELLUM"

A marginal note in ink in the catalogue "α/o/o" indicates that there was a reserve of £1 on the lot; it was bought by Thorpe for £1 3s.

Thus we have confirmed that the manuscript comes from the collection of Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford (1766-1827) part of whose library was sold in auctions from 1828 to 1835.

Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford. © National Portrait Gallery, London