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The First Readers of Lyndwood's Provinciale (2021) Ecc LJ page 1 of 12 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical Law Society. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0956618X21000570 The First Readers of Lyndwood’s Provinciale 1 P AUL C AVILL Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History, University of Cambridge The Provinciale (1430) is among the most significant and long-lived works of English ecclesiastical law. It edited and commented upon the legislation of the Province of Canterbury. This article explores the work’s initial dissemination and early readership. It is based on an examination of the surviving manuscripts. The first owners of these manuscripts were almost all secular and religious clergy. Differences in content between the copies show how Lyndwood’s work was modified. In particular, his edition became detached from his commentary. The manuscripts also reveal readers’ responses to the work. Marginal annotations indicate the individual, collective and academic ways in which early users engaged. Manuscripts were kept up to date through the addition of new laws, but not consistently or for very long. They continued to be consulted alongside the first printed editions of the work. Study of these manuscripts establishes the wide reception and influence of the Provinciale in pre-Reformation England. Keywords: Archbishop of Canterbury, constitutions, convocation, decretals, Province of Canterbury, provincial council, provincial legislation, tithes One of the most important works of English ecclesiastical law, William Lyndwood’s Provinciale (1430) comprised an edition of and commentary upon the laws made in the provincial councils of Canterbury from 1222 to 1416.2 The Provinciale quickly became an authoritative piece of jurisprudence. The failure to implement the proposed revision of canon law following the break with Rome meant that the work long remained relevant. That the Provinciale is a mine of information about the lore of the English Church has been generally recognised. The work has less often been viewed as a physical book. We know the Provinciale as a printed volume. The full work was printed six times: first in 1483 and last in 1679, on both occasions at Oxford. The edition of 1679 is 1 I am grateful to the Marquis of Bath and to the institutional owners of the manuscripts for permis- sion to consult and cite them. Since Lyndwood was the founding donor to the loan-chest of Pembroke College, Cambridge, I am particularly pleased to acknowledge the college’s support through its fellows’ research fund. 2 This journal has published two accounts: J Baker, ‘Famous English canon lawyers: IV. William Lyndwood, LL.D. (†1446), Bishop of St David’s’, (1992) 2 Ecc LJ 268–272; B Ferme, ‘William Lyndwood and the Provinciale: canon law in an undivided Western Church’, (1997) 4 Ecc LJ 615–628. A more recent account is R Helmholz, ‘William Lyndwood’, in M Hill and R Helmholz (eds), Great Christian Jurists in English History (Cambridge, 2017), pp 45–67. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 04:24:32, subject to the Cambridge 1Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956618X21000570 2 ECCLESIASTICAL LAW JOURNAL thus the received text.3 It has been the standard version for centuries; it is also the only edition to have been reproduced in facsimile in modern times (in 1968). The preface explained how the edition was based on the collation of three prior printings and of three manuscripts.4 Yet many more manuscript copies have survived: in a seminal piece (first published in 1961 and updated in 1973), Christopher Cheney identified 57.5 These manuscripts have been little studied since and they deserve a deeper and more expert examination than can be offered here. Nevertheless, my survey does shed light on how the Provinciale was received in the decades immediately after its composition. Interest in provincial legislation had revived in the later fourteenth century. The production of manuscript copies peaked in the final phase of Thomas Arundel’s archiepiscopate (1396–1414) and at the beginning of Henry Chichele’s(1414– 1443).6 The Provinciale represented the culmination of this development. Lyndwood had begun work before 1422, completed the main text in 1430 and fin- ished the index four years later. He dedicated the work to Chichele, at whose behest it had supposedly between written. The preface emphasised the trouble that Lyndwood had taken to compile the constitutions: he had had to gather, correct and date a corrupt, muddled and scattered set of texts.7 He had consulted the registers of previous archbishops and studied collections of their laws in old books.8 Like a modern editor, he re-dated certain constitutions, included others whose attribution was doubtful, and collated variant phrasings.9 Rather than pre- senting the constitutions in chronological order, Lyndwood reorganised them in accordance with the decretals of Pope Gregory IX (the Liber Extra).10 He adopted the decretals’ five-book structure and distributed the constitutions between 75 of their 185 titles.11 To achieve his rearrangement, Lyndwood omitted unnecessary sec- tions of a constitution (such as its preamble) and inserted the same constitution 3 W Lyndwood, Provinciale,(seu constitutiones Angliae) (Oxford, 1679). All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated. An alphabetical letter after a page number identifies a gloss. Second occur- rences of the same letter on a single page are indicated by repeating the letter. 4 One manuscript was identified as being at Eton College, where it is now MS 98. 5 C Cheney, Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford, 1973), pp 182–184. Cheney’s categories were refined in B Ferme, Canon Law in Late Medieval England: a study of William Lyndwood’s Provinciale with particu- lar reference to testamentary law (Rome, 1996), pp 51–52, 147–148. 6 I Forrest, ‘English provincial constitutions and inquisition into Lollardy’, in M Flannery and K Walter (eds), The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2013), pp 45–59. 7 Lyndwood, Provinciale, sig *2v. Modern scholarship has established that Lyndwood made some mis- takes of dating and attribution: see Cheney, Medieval Texts, pp 113, 131–137, 165–173. 8 Lyndwood, Provinciale, pp 28h, 32d, 101y, 140b, 167n, 171m, 191–192x, 319s. 9 Ibid, pp 19e, 22h, 32p, 97l, 111e, 142p, 163f, 197k, 198z, 214u, 232d, 267cc, 339h, 347c. A group of con- stitutions attributed to Stratford whose authenticity Lyndwood doubted (ibid, pp 90h, 98r, 133n, 140a, 143–144z, 222c, 313q, 323m) were designated extravagantes in a chronological table: British Library, London (BL), Royal MS 11 E I, fo 280r–v. 10 Thus one manuscript began ‘Incipiunt constituciones prouinciales secundum formam decretalium’: Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), MS 479, fo 1r. 11 The constitutions are here cited by book, title and chapter number in the form 1.2.3 (Huius autem concilii). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 04:24:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956618X21000570 ECCLESIASTICAL LAW JOURNAL 3 more than once if different parts related to discrete titles. The extensiveness of his editorial intervention needs emphasising. As we shall see, it helps to explain the considerable variation between the different manuscripts. To his selection Lyndwood added a vast commentary. He did so, he explained, with the aim of making the constitutions easier to understand.12 Lyndwood may have been inspired by the commentary that John of Ayton had composed a century earlier on the constitutions promulgated by the two papal legates to England in the thirteenth century, Otto and Ottobuono. Although the commentary showcased Lyndwood’s formidable erudition, his purpose was practical. Were someone enjoined bread and water as a penance, one gloss explained, then he or she must eat and drink accordingly rather than fast entirely.13 The Provinciale contained much guidance of this kind, which would have assisted someone exer- cising cure of souls. The longest title (5.16) covered the penitential process. The Provinciale thus reinforced the pastoral approach to canon law of popular manuals for the parochial clergy, such as the Oculus sacerdotis (1320s) and the Pupilla oculi (1380s), with which readers of the Provinciale would have been famil- iar.14 Lyndwood stated that he was writing not primarily for the well educated but rather for those ‘simply learned and understanding little’. In his own mind, at least, this meant the average parish priest and also those administering lower- level jurisdictions (such as rural deaneries).15 Nevertheless, the language and com- plexity of his work did limit its audience. A law graduate was moved to write a ver- nacular instruction manual for priests when he read Lyndwood’s ‘golden and famous glose’ on Archbishop Peckham’s Ignorantia sacerdotum and himself found it (so he said) ‘diffuse, intricat with lawe, and hard of intellecte’.16 Lyndwood intended that the Provinciale should circulate. His will (made in 1443 and proved in 1446) stipulated that one manuscript be chained up in St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster (where he was to be buried) as the base text against which copies could be checked, and that another be given to its scribe, who could recoup his labour by lending it out for copying.17 Manuscripts prolif- erated in individual and institutional libraries in the later fifteenth century. An 12 Lyndwood, Provinciale, p 95c.
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