That Exeter is the 'locality' of the MS. is made clear by the undoubted fact that this is the volume described as "i. englisc christes boc" in the catalogue of Bishop Leofric's gifts to the church of St. Peter the Apostle in Exeter. "In 1566 it was given by Gregory Dodde, dean of Exeter, with the consent of his brethren, to Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, who afterwards gave it to the University of Cambridge in 1574."[1] This copy represents with much consistency the normal Late West-Saxon forms of the language, with, however, an excessive use of y for i; but it also has, on the other hand, traces of the more local peculiarities of the original.
L. — The Lakelands Fragment of the Gospel of St. John, now in the Bodleian Library. This was rediscovered by Professor A. S. Napier in a volume of MSS., chiefly charters and deeds, which the Curators of the Bodleian Library had purchased at the sale of the books of W. H. Crawford, of Lakelands, county Cork, March 14, 1891.[2] Professor Napier at once reported and published this Fragment in Herrig's Archiv lxxxvii, 255-261. It consists of four leaves, bearing a note that they had once been "us'd as the Cover to a Court Book at Flixton Hall in Suffolk, A° 1722"; the leaves are therefore slightly damaged at the edges, the damage extending somewhat into the writing. The eight pages of text thus recovered contain the following portion of the Version:
- ↑ Skeat, Preface to St. Mark p. vii. See also Strype. op. cit. 11, 506; B. Thorpe, Diplomatarium Anglicum Ævi Saxonici (London, Macmillan & Co., 1865), p. 430; F. E. Warren, The Leofric Missal (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1883), pp. xxi-xxiv; John Earle, A Hand-Book to the Land-Charters and other Saxonic Documents (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888), pp. 249-252; Max Förster, Herrig's Archiv cvii, 312; W. H. Hulme, Modern Philology 1, 583 f.
- ↑ For a description of this volume and for what is known of its history, see the Preface to Anecdota Oxoniensia, Mediaeval and Modern Series, Part vii, edited by A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1895)
