Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Blaðsíða 96

88
lairds, descended from the last Orcadian earl by his second marriage,
were (as already remarked above, p. 68) the owners of the Haye
manuscript. Signatures of four successive lairds appear at various
places in this book and attest that it was in the continuous ownership
of the Roslin Sinclairs throughout the sixteenth century.96
The earliest Sinclair signature in the Haye manuscript is that of the
first laird, Oliver Sinclair, appearing on ff. lv and 133r. Norton-Smith
conjectures that the book was a copy made for Oliver Sinclair from an
exemplar in the library of Henry Lord Sinclair, shortly after Henry
acceded to the estates and title of the senior branch of the family, i.e.
not later than c. 1490.97 It is certainly possible that the Haye manu-
script was a duplicate copy of the original translations by Sir Gilbert of
the Haye inherited by Henry Lord Sinclair from his grandfather,
under whose auspices Sir Gilbert had worked a generation earlier;
such an heirloom would doubtless have been the object of mild rivalry
between the two sides of the family after the death of Earl William,
and the gift of a transcript to the Roslin Sinclairs would have been an
obvious solution to the problem. Analogously, the Dalhousie manu-
script may well be a compilation made at least in part from materials
inherited by Henry Lord Sinclair. That the scribe was an employee of
the senior rather than the junior branch of the Sinclair family is a
natural inference not only from his execution of the greater part of the
Selden manuscript, but also from the absence in the Dalhousie manu-
script of Roslin family signatures of the kind seen in abundance in the
volume of Haye’s translations. As to the date at which the three
manuscripts were copied, the chronological limitation of the Selden
manuscript to the reign of James IV (cf. above) is in agreement with
what can be deduced from the occurrence of Sir Oliver Sinclair as the
first documented owner of the Haye manuscript: Oliver’s tenure of the
R'oslin title coincided very closely with the reign of James.98 Finally, an
96 Cf. H. J. Lawlor, “Notes on the Library of the Sinclairs of Rosslyn,” Proceedings of
the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 32 (1897-98), 90-120, at 104-05; Stevenson (as n.
45), I, xxxviii-xliii.
97 Cf. reference in n. 81 above. As pointed out by Norton-Smith, the dating of the
Haye manuscript by Stevenson (I, xiii-xix) is due to a misunderstanding of the verba
translatoris at the beginning. The watermarks reproduced by Stevenson would in Nor-
ton-Smith’s opinion support a date c. 1485-90.
98 Cf. Stevenson, I, xxxviii-xxxix.