Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The English Register of Godstow Nunnery Near Oxford, Vol. 1: Written About 1450
This text, of which the first and slightly larger portion is now issued, is taken from an admirable transcript of Rawlinson ms. B 408 in the Bodleian Library, made for the Society by Mr. Thomas Austin. Reference from the tran script to the original in a number of doubtful places seemed fully to establish its fidelity. A detailed account of the ms. And its sources will be given in an Introduction, which has been completed for press and will be published when the text is finished. A short note, however, is necessary for present appreciation of these pages. The first folios of the ms. Are of somewhat earlier date than those which follow. These give an English rendering of some portions of the Breviary, and the presumption is that the writer intended to turn the whole service-book into his mother tongue. When the Register was sent to the binder, this fragment, although absolutely unrelated to it, was sent with it, probably with _a view to its preservation. In preparing this portion of the ms. For press, I have to acknowledge most hearty assistance from Canon Wordsworth, Rector of St. Peter's, Marlborough, whose helping hand will be more fully apparent in the commentary contained in the Introduction. The rest of the ms. Presents us with the Register of Estates of Godstow Abbey. This possesses the singular interest of being, in all probability, the only complete English version of a cartulary that was ever made for a monastic house. The conditions under which it was prepared are naively told in the quaint Prologue (p. This Register in a multitude of places proved extremely hard reading. It was plain that, either from fault of the scribe, or from incapacity 011 the part of the translator, the meaning of the deeds had been destroyed in many places. Recourse was, therefore, had to a slightly earlier Latin Register, now among the Exchequer mss. In the Public Records Office (king's Remembrancer, Miscellaneous Books, no. By its help, the text has been cleared up and patched in a great many places. Unfortunately, this Latin copy is a fragment only, and does not fully cover the English Register. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
