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THE
ELLESMERE CHAUCER
The
Ellesmere Chaucer is not only the most beautiful manuscript of Chaucer's
best known work, the
Cantebury Tales, but the most famous literary
manuscript in English.
This
large beautiful and innovative manuscript was probably produced soon after
1400. It contains 240
parchment leaves, 232 of which are the text of
the Cantebury Tales. The remaining eight leaves were
originally
blank, lined pages that now contain miscellaneous verses, notes and
scribbles by various persons
during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. The text of the Ellesmere Chaucer was written by one
scribe
in an English style cursive script.
This
manuscript was most probably made and bound in London. It is large,
about 16 by 11 inches, and
elegantly decorated. Seventy-one pages
contain floriated borders on the top, left and bottom sides. On
most
pages there are designs using gold leaf. There are numerous initial
letters, three to six lines in height,
which are floriated and include
gold leaf, as well as many smaller capitals and paragraph markers, painted
or with gold leaf, found throughout the manuscript.
There are numerous marginal notes, running headlines, beginnings,
continuances and ends, occasional
epigraphs, and the portraits of the
storytellers which provide a physical and organizational structure that
allows the reader to more easily follow the text. But the best known
decorative feature of the Ellesmere
manuscript is a set of twenty-three
equestrian portraits of the storytellers (including Chaucer) who tell
their tales during a sixty-mile pilgrimage from London to the shrine of
St. Thomas à Becket in Cantebury
Cathedral. Because of the familiarity of
these widely reproduced Ellesmere portraits, they have shaped
the
response of many modern readers who have never seen the manuscript.
The
chief purpose of the Ellesmere pilgrim portraits
is to facilitate reading
by making explicit and visible
the
manuscript's arrangement that classifies the tales
according to the speakers. As visual
"titles"
their function is to introduce and represent the
twenty-three tale tellers
and only secondarily to illustrate
the General Prologue
descriptions. Indeed, only about a third of
the miniatures
can be considered
faithful to the text of the
General Prologue. The
other pilgrim portraits are more
visually artistic in
conception. This is necessarily so when some pilgrims, such as the Canon's Yeoman, are
not
mentioned
in the General Prologue, and others, such as the Second Nun,
are mentioned only in passing.
There are probably three artists, distinguished on stylistic grounds,
who painted the miniatures. The
first, responsible
for the first
sixteen pilgrims and the Parson, painted
relatively small figures.
The
second and third artists paint
larger figures and place the horses on
grassy plots. Artist
2 paints the
best miniatures, including
Chaucer, while the
third illustrator is a possible apprentice.
Portraying the
tale-tellers on horseback was an important design
decision.
This social marker levels the status of the
pilgrims,
though the horses do visually distinguish the portraits from
one
another. The artists seem
to have relished the opportunity
to
represent a variety of horses, even linking them to the
personality
of
their riders.
Although it is not certain who
commissioned the
manuscript, possibly the author's son, Thomas Chaucer,
was
responsible. Some time after completion it passed
into the hands of Thomas de Vere, twelfth Earl
of Oxford. There followed a series of owners until 1568, when Sir Giles Alington gave the
manuscript to his
neighbor, Roger, Lord North. With Lord North's
death in
1600, the manuscript passed to Sir Thomas Egerton, a fellow
knight of the Bath, and a prior keeper of the
Great Seal. Under James I, Egerton became Chancellor
and Baron Ellesmere.
In
1802, the manuscript was sent to the Egerton's
London residence,
Bridgewater House, to be rebound.
With Francis Granville Egerton,
who became first Earl
of Ellesmere in 1846, the Chaucer manuscript
was made
available to scholars. Finally, when the American railroad tycoon, Henry
E. Huntington
purchased
the Bridgewater library in 1917, and the Ellesmere
Chaucer was
recognized as the jewel of the collection.
The
Ellesmere Chaucer deserves its eminence as a
landmark in the history of
the literary book. The
well-conceived design and artistic excellence
of this
manuscript undeniably supplement the text.
To the
student of
the book and its special ways of presenting
structured meanings, the
Ellesmere
Chaucer will be an exciting discovery.
Conrad
H. Schoeffling
Special
Collections Librarian
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