Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Side 94

86
V
The hånd in the Selden manuscript which concerns us here has
supplied at f. 119v a memorandum of the date and place of birth ‘of
our prince James IV’ (principis nostri Iacobi quarti), written contem-
poraneously with the main text of the manuscript and apparently indi-
cating that the latter was copied in the reign of this monarch. Some
scholars have inferred from the use of the allegedly unusual term
princeps for a reigning sovereign that the scribe was working in or
shortly after the year of the king’s accession (1488),86 while others
have contented themselves with the year of his death on the battlefield
of Flodden (1513) as a lower limit.87 A more precise attempt to locate
the manuscript in a social and cultural milieu was made in 1899 by
George Neilson, who thought that he could identify the first Selden
hånd with that of the priest and notary public James Graye. Graye
served Archbishop William Scheves of St Andrews and was later
secretary to Archbishop James Stewart, Duke of Ross and younger
brother of James IV. He compiled a small commonplace-book, now
preserved as National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 34.7.3, and here
Neilson found “in a single leaf” all the palæographical evidence he
considered necessary in order to attribute the greater part of the Sel-
den manuscript to Graye.88 His idea was immediately embroidered
upon by A. H. Millar, who envisaged that the unique Selden text of
The Kingis Quair was transcribed from an exemplar entrusted to
Graye by the royal family.89 More recently, Norton-Smith has con-
fidently maintained that the first Selden hånd is the same as that
appearing in the copy of Robert Henryson’s Annunciation at ff. 71-72
(formerly 70-71) of Graye’s commonplace-book, a passage which he
treats as the work of the book’s owner;90 while McDiarmid, uncri-
86 Skeat, The Kingis Quair, p. xxxvii; Norton-Smith, The Kingis Quair, pp. xxx, xxxii;
Norton-Smith and Pravda, The Quare ofJelusy, p. 11.
87 Lawson, The Kingis Quair, p. lxxvii; Root, The Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Troilus,
p. 43.
88 “The Scribe of the ‘Kingis Quair’,” The Athenæum 1899, II, 835-36, at 835.
89 “The Scribe of ‘The Kingis Quair’,” ibid. 898.
90 See Norton-Smith, The Kingis Quair, p. xxxii, where the identification is “almost
certain”; in The Times Literary Supplement (n. 81 above) the Selden hånd “is now firmly
identified” with that of Graye.