ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE.

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VERY early in the sixteenth century appeared a volume which seems to have perplexed our literary historians by its mutable and undefinable character. It is a book without a title, and miscalled by the deceptive one of "Arnolde's Chronicle, or the Customs of London ;" but "the Customs" are not the manners of the people, but rather "the Customs" of the Custom-House, and it in no shape resembles, or pretends to be a chronicle." This erroneous title seems to have been injudiciously annexed to it by Hearne the antiquary, and should never have been retained. This anomalous work, of which there are three ancient editions, had the odd fate of all three being sent forth without a title and without a date; and our bibliographers cannot with any certainty ascertain the order or precedence of these editions. One edition was issued from the press a Flemish printer at Antwerp, and possibly may be the earliest. The first printer, whether English or Flemish, was evidently at a loss to christen this monstrous miscellaneous babe, and ridiculously took up the title and subjects of the first articles which offered themselves, to designate more than a hundred of the most discrepant variety. The ancient editions appeared as "The names of the Baylyfs, Custos, Mayres, and Sherefs of the Cyte of London, with the Chartour and Lybartyes of the same Cyte, &c., &c., with other dyvers matters good and necessary for every Cytezen to understand and know;". an humble title equally fallacious with the higher one of a "Chronicle," for it has described many objects of considerable curiosity, more interesting than "mayors and sheriffs," and even "the charter and liberties" of "the cyte."

*

In conveying a notion of a jumble, though the things themselves are sufficiently grave, we cannot avoid a ludicrous association; yet this should not lessen the value of its information.

A considerable portion of this medley wholly relates to the municipal interests of the citizens of London charters and grants, with a vast variety of forms or models of public and private instruments, chiefly of a commercial description. Parish ordinances mix with acts of Parliament; and when we have conned the oath of the Beadle of the Ward, we are startled by Pope Nicholas' Bull. We have the craft of grafting trees and altering of fruits, as well in color as in taste, close to an oration of the messenger of "the Soudan of Babylon" to the Pope in 1488. Indeed, we have many more useful crafts, beside the altering of the flavor of fruits, and the oration of the Mahometan to the representative of St. Peter; for here are culinary receipts, to keep sturgeon, to make vinegar" shortly," "percely to grow in an hour's space," and to make ypocras, straining the wine through a bag of spices-it was nothing more than our mulled wine; and further, are receipts to make ink, and compound gunpowder, to make soap, and to brew beer. Whether we may derive any fresh hints from our ancestor of the year 1500, exceeds my judgment; but to this eager transcriber posterity owes one of the most passionate poems in our language; for betwixt "the composition between the merchants of England and the town of Antwerp," and "the reckoning to buy wares in Flanders," first broke into light " A Ballade of the Notbrowne Mayde." Thus, when an indiscriminating collector is at work, one cannot foresee what good fortune may not chance to be his lot.

Warton has truly characterized this work as "the most heterogeneous and multifarious miscellany that ever existed;" but he seems to me to have mistaken both the de

* In Oldys' "British Librarian" there is an accurate analysis of the work, in which every single article is enumerated.

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sign of the collector, and the nature of the collection. Some supposed that the collector, Richard Arnold, intended the volume to be an antiquarian repertory; but as the materials were recent, that idea cannot be admitted; and Warton censures the compiler, who, to make up a volume, printed together whatever he could amass of notices and papers of every sort and subject. The modern editor of " Arnolde's Chronicle" was perplexed at the contents of what he calls 66 a strange book."

The critical decision of Warton is much too searching for a volume in which the compiler never wrote a single line, and probably never entertained the remotest idea of the printer's press. This book without a name is, in fact, nothing more than a simple collection made by an English merchant engaged in the Flemish trade. Nor was such a work peculiar to this artless collector; for in a time of publications, such men seemed to have formed for themselves a sort of library, of matters they deemed worthy of recollection, to which they could have easy recourse.* By the internal evidence, Arnold was no stranger at Antwerp, nor at Dordrecht. Antwerp was then a favorite residence of the English merchants; there the typographic art flourished, and the printers often printed English books; and as this collection was printed at Antwerp by Doesborowe, a Flemish printer, we might incline with Douce, to infer that the Flemish was the first edition; for it seems not probable that a foreign printer would have selected an English volume of little interest to foreigners, to reprint ; although we can imagine that from personal consideration, or by the accident of obtaining the manuscript, he might have been induced to be the first publisher. Whoever was the first printer, the collector himself seems to have been little concerned in the publication, by the suppression of his name, by the omission of a title, by not prefixing a pre

* A similar volume to Arnolde's may be found in the Harl. MSS., No. 2252.

face, nor arranging in any way this curious medley of useful things, which he would familiarly turn to as his occasions needed, and - if we may compare a grave volume with the lightest was of that class which ladies call their scrap-books," and assuredly not, according to its fallacious title, a chronicle.

THE FIRST PRINTED CHRONICLE.

THE first chronicle in our vernacular prose, designed for the English people, was the earnest labor of one of themselves, a citizen and alderman, and sometime sheriff of London, Robert Fabyan. Here, for the first time, the spectacle of English affairs, accompanied by what he has called "A Concordance of Stories," which included separate notices of French history contemporaneous with the periods he records, was opened for "the unlettered who understand no Laten." Our chronicler, in the accustomed mode, fixes the periods of history, by dates from Adam or from Brute. He opens with a superfluous abridgment of Geoffry of Monmouth- the "Polychronicon" is one of his favorite sources, but his authorities are multifarious. His French history is a small stream from "La Mer des Chroniques," and other chronicles of his contemporary Gaguin, a royal historiographer who wandered in the same taste, but who, Fabyan had the sagacity to discover, carefully darkened all matters unpleasant to Frenchmen, but never "leaving anything out of his book that may sound to the advancement of the French nacyon."

It was a rare occurrence in a layman, and moreover a merchant, to have cultivated the French and the Latin languages. Fabyan was not a learned man, for the age of men of learning had not yet arrived, though it was soon to come. At that early day of typography, when our native annalists lay scattered in their manuscript seclusion, it was no ordinary delving which struck into the dispersed veins of the dim and dark mine of our history. So little in that day was the critical knowledge of our writers, that Fabyan has "quoted the same work under different appellations," and some of our historical writers he seems not to have met with in his researches, for the chronicles of Robert of