Longleat House MS 55: an unacknowledged brut manuscript?

Abstract

In his unsurpassed standard work on the Prose Brut chronicles Lister Matheson discusses, or at least mentions, every manuscript then known to contain an Anglo-Norman, Latin or Middle English version of the text. Since then a few manuscripts have been added to his list, e.g. by Diana Tyson, but their number is small, due to Lister’s thoroughness. Therefore it is all the more surprsing to find that a Brut chronicle is mentioned in a 1976 publication that is not in Lister’s catalogue. The text occurs in manuscript 55 (generally known as Liber rubeus Bathonie) kept in Longleat House. Its contents were described by Gisela Guddat-Figge in her extremely useful Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (München: Fink, 1976). As item 27 of the manuscript she gives “Short Brut Chronicle, f. 35b, Latin prose”. Examination of this text reveals a close connexion with Bath and surrounding area, like the rest of the manuscript, and a number of additional features which all together clearly set it apart from the other Latin and vernacular versions. A comparison of the lists of manuscripts provided by Matheson and Tyson reveals a difference in their respective definitions of what texts belong, and which do not, in a catalogue of Brut manuscripts. My paper will therefore suggest a new working definition for such texts, the essence of which is that a Brut chronicle is no longer seen as a version of a particular text, but as a genre.