Volume Gowther is undoubtedly the older of the two volumes. Its youngest literary composition, The Floure and the Leafe, is known to have been composed in the fifteenth century, probably no more than a few years either side of 1470 and comfortably within the range indicated by the watermark. Most of the other pieces are of the mid-to-late fourteenth century, although four of the stories can trace a direct ancestry back to the twelfth century.
The work was initially bound into four volumes. The second of the two that we now possess, Volume Ragnelle, comprises three original manuscripts that were incorporated somewhat haphazardly into one volume perhaps when the whole work was rebound in the nineteenth century. Parts of Volume Ragnelle could not have been copied before the close of the first decade of the sixteenth century, since the first publication of one of its tales, 'A Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain', dates to the year 1508. Production of the handwritten text that now comprises these two manuscripts seems, therefore, to have spanned between thirty and forty years of someone's life.
And we can say this because we know that the handwriting of both manuscripts is that of a single copyist. Volume Gowther contains 174 pages of text with two flyleaves at the beginning and one at the end. Volume Ragnelle has 204 pages of text with four flyleaves at the beginning and a torn flyleaf at the end. None of the significant text in either volume has been lost.
On the first flyleaf of Volume Gowther is written the name Hannah Scot. Records once kept in the archives of the library of Durham Cathedral show that a Hannah Bokenam was burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1509, and there is strong evidence to believe that she is the Hannah Scot who married Henry Bokenam in St Mungo's church at Simonburn, six miles north of Hexham in the North Tyne valley, on 6th April 1480.
Both volumes measure about twenty-seven centimetres by nineteen, or a little under eleven inches by eight, of paper. The binding, surprisingly, is early-Victorian; a red leather on oak with the mark of a Harrogate bookbinder. Perhaps this helped to conceal the true age of the work until they were discovered very recently in a private collection and gifted to a university library in the east of England.
The text of both manuscripts is written within an area of the page approximating twenty-two centimetres by fifteen, a space which utilises more of the page than many Medieval texts and gives a first indication that the work is from the pen of an amateur scribe. Horizontal line ruling is always visible but on many pages a box enclosing the text is absent. Only where the writing exists in two columns to a page, most notably in the tale of Ipomadon, are vertical guidelines always present. There is no ornamentation.
The spelling in these handwritten manuscripts betrays a northern dialect, and the name 'Hannah Scot' on the flyleaf of Volume Gowther is written in an identical hand to the main body of the work. This all lends support to the conclusion that the manuscripts were copied by Hannah herself. The contents of both volumes, which total twenty-four Medieval poems, tales and romances, are all known from other manuscripts. But Volume Gowther is unique in claiming that its stories reveal a body of concealed knowledge. Four lines written in red ink at the end of the volume, just after Geoffrey Chaucer's story of the House of Fame, repeat an identical quotation in an identical red ink that can be seen on the second flyleaf at the front of the volume. The words appear to be of fourteenth century origin and may have been copied by Hannah from an earlier collection of tales lying in her father's library, or perhaps she composed them herself.
- The menskful wight swich tales kepe
- ful dernly and ful yerne,
- shal wite the lay of Briton clerkys
- and ancien sothe shal leren.
(The noble person who preserves these tales, with love and with discretion, will come to know the teaching of the ancient druids.)
The Hannah Scot Manuscripts are unusual in that they do not contain the normal Medieval mixture of romance, homily and pious verse. They were not intended to provide 'something for everybody'. They were clearly, however, intended to provide something for Hannah. Volume Gowther contains two stories from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer, a life of Saint Brendan, some rip-roaring romances, an Arthurian epic and five Breton lays, one of which, The Story of Guigemar, is the only version of this tale known in Middle English, although a number of manuscripts preserve it in its original Old French. Volume Ragnelle continues in the same vein, recasting exciting, bizarre and for the most part undeniably ancient tales into a contemporary, late-Medieval framework.
Hannah Bokenam, neé Scot, died on 21st November 1509, at the age of fifty, so the records tell us, having suffered torture before being burned at the stake. Her husband, whom she had married at the age of twenty-two, was no longer there to protect her; he had succumbed to a fever the year before. None of her sons had survived into adulthood and a daughter, Susannah, was married and living in London at this time. The step-daughter of a Hexham landowner, Hannah had spent her teenage years in educated surroundings. There is evidence that Hannah may have copied the eleven tales which make up Volume Gowther in her late-teens and early twenties, perhaps from manuscripts in her step-father's library. There is even a small hint in her confession that she may, in her teenage years, have been personally acquainted with the author of the poem The Floure and the Leafe. And the presence of a manuscript that has as its final inclusion The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain testifies to the fact that Hannah continued to copy, record and retell the stories she loved right up to, perhaps, the final months of her life.
These manuscripts have been translated here into modern prose English. The tales are all known from other sources whose texts are widely available, one in Old French and the others all in Middle English, having been transcribed from their manuscript copies by able scholars and published in modern printed editions or made available over the internet. The Middle English text of A Good Tale of Ipomadon, for example, has recently been published by Oxford University Press in collaboration with the Early English Text Society. But not all of us are comfortable reading Middle English and these stories deserve a wider audience. The present author has translated these stories into modern prose English to the best of his ability so that those who follow a normal life and do not spend their days in libraries can, nonetheless, share in the weird and perplexing world conjured into existence by these adventures. The reader will accompany King Arthur on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, will follow the King as he tries desperately to find out what it is that women most desire, will witness fights with giants and dragons, the rescue of damsels in distress, the fall of wealthy and successful men into penury and despair; they will see some curious events following a man's lengthy sojourn in a forest, will witness the unfolding of an equally bizarre journey from Rome into Sicily, the outcome of an even stranger journey from France across the Mediterranean Sea, an unbelievable journey from Italy to the Aegean Sea and an absolutely crazy journey taken by Geoffrey Chaucer up into the sky in the claws of a giant eagle!
And if these tales that Hannah recorded were composed and copied, down the ages, in a candlelit bedroom, a draughty castle, amidst the suits of armour in a corner of a manorial hall, in the library of a magnificent abbey or a well-furnished study in Chaucer's London, there is something strange about them. Why were they written like this? What is it that helps to make them all so compellingly WEIRD?
The tales and romances that Hannah transcribed and retold with such an eager understanding are presented here in a Modern English prose translation - and they are tales that led Hannah ultimately to the stake.
