Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Blaðsíða 98
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tive William Lord Sinclair (whose wife Elizabeth, as we have seen,
was probably a signatory of the Selden manuscript) and lent it to
Bishop Reid of Orkney because of its obvious relevance to the history
of Reid’s diocese. We know that Sinclair had official dealings with
Reid when the latter was President of the Court of Session in the
1550s, and it has been suggested that the two men were acquainted at
an earlier period when Reid, as abbot of Kinloss, presided over a
Humanist study-circle led by Giovanni Ferrerio.104 Reid donated the
Fasciculus temporum to Thomas Tulloch in 1554, the year of the
decease of its former owner, Malcolm Halcrow, who had held eccle-
siastical appointments in Shetland and Orkney since 1529;105 Tulloch
may conceivably have taken the manuscript into his custody in 1558,
when Reid suddenly died and was thus prevented from returning it to
its rightful owner, Dean Sinclair of Glasgow. None of this explains the
deleted inscription on sig. Air of the Fasciculus which Laing supposed
to contain a reference to Henry Lord Sinclair. It is, however, most
improbable that the Dalhousie Fasciculus ever belonged to this noble-
man, and the association of printed book and manuscript may for want
of better evidence be ascribed to their accidental presence in the
episcopal residence in Kirkwall in the year of Reid’s death. Tulloch
told the truth about his ownership of the printed book, but his possible
discretion about the history of the manuscript reduces us to a con-
jectural reconstruction of its history in the sixteenth century.
APPENDIX I
The text of this previously unpublished fragment appears on f. 23 of
the Dalhousie manuscript (for the beginning see plate III). The ortho-
graphy of the original has been retained here with the exception of the
letter-form j in initial position, which is printed as i. Punctuation and
capitalization have been normalized and essential emendations intro-
104 John Lesley, The History of Scotland, from the Death of King James I in the Year
M.CCCC.XXXVI to the Year M.D.LXI, Bannatyne Club 38 (Edinburgh, 1830), p. 252;
Cherry (n. 100), p. 16.
105 Watt, Fasti (n. 17), pp. 255, 262, 264.