Robert Cotton:—"Contenta Novi Testamenti scenice expressa et actitata olim per monachos sive fratres mendicantes: vulgo dicitur hic liber Ludus Coventriæ, sive Ludus Corporis Christi: scribitur metris Anglicanis." The MS. was previously in the possession of Robert Hegge of Christ Church, Oxford, who died in 1629,[1] and was, most probably, purchased by James about that time for Cotton, as it appears from a letter in the same library[2] that James was engaged about that period at Oxford in procuring manuscripts for his patron.
James, in his MS. collections in the Bodleian, does not notice the MS. of the Ludus Coventriæ, and I have been unsuccessful in endeavouring to trace either the destination of Hegge's library, or the authority for James's assertion that this volume was commonly (vulgo dicitur) known under the above title.[3] That it was so, there cannot, I imagine, be the slightest doubt, for what object could James—a man who was, most probably, uninterested about the subject of the manuscript, and
- ↑ Wood's Athenæ, by Bliss, vol. ii., p. 458. Hegge does not allude to the MS. in any of his writings.
- ↑ MS. Cotton. Julius, C. iii., fol. 193. James was then resident at Oxford.
- ↑ In the old catalogue of the Cottonian library, commenced in the year 1621, in MS. Harl. 6018, there is no notice of the present MS. I find, however, in a list of books "lent out of my study befor this 23 Aprill, 1621," an entry which may be interesting to the reader: "Ælfricus Grammar Saxon to Ben: Jonson." This was doubtlessly "the most ancient grammar written in the Saxon tongue and character," which Kynaston saw in his hands. See Gifford's Jonson, vol. ix., p. 254.
