The Yorkist claim to the English throne was based, in large part, on a hereditary argument that the children of Anne Mortimer and Richard, earl of Cambridge, were the more senior heirs to Edward III than the children of John, duke of Lancaster. Many genealogies were created to demonstrate the strength of this claim and to convince a sceptical public. One of the most enigmatic and colourful is Free Library of Philadelphia MS Lewis E201, a fifteen-foot, nine-inch long roll that has been called by various names, including the ‘Edward IV Roll’ and the ‘Edward IV Coronation Roll’. Believed to have been produced between 1460 and 1464, many scholars have written about its imagery and text, but none have attempted a full transcription or translation.
Lewis E201
unrolled. Photo by Laura Blanchard.
With funding from the American Branch of the Richard III Society and others, Lewis E201 has been digitized, transcribed, translated, and annotated in a fully interactive digital edition using the open-access software Digital Mappa.
The link to the project is www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/chronicle-world.
Professor Emily Steiner at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) served as Project Director, overseeing a team of four PhD-level students. Two of the students worked on transcribing the text, one worked on translating the text from Latin, and a fourth studied the potential sources consulted by its scribes and creators. Two anonymous peer reviewers, both widely published specialists in medieval genealogical manuscripts, checked the overall quality of the transcriptions and translations. Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Humanities at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the UPenn Libraries, was technical lead.
Volunteers from the Richard III Society were recruited to research the 54 coats of arms and many badges and mottoes contained in the roll, building on tentative insights offered by Peter Hammond and Geoffrey Wheeler more than two decades ago. Tapping into the specialized knowledge base of the Society, including its extensive libraries of primary and secondary sources, the volunteers prepared annotations summarizing the current body of knowledge about Lewis E201’s images. The current editor of The Ricardian, Dr. Joanna Laynesmith, and the Society’s Research Officer, Dr. David Grummitt, reviewed these annotations and offered helpful comments to improve them.
Users can navigate the manuscript
visually by viewing the images and clicking on specific items of interest. They
can also navigate the manuscript via a series of text files, which present the
transcriptions, translations, and annotations.
Example of
Digital Mappa interface.
Much remains to be studied and understood about Lewis E201, but the team can report several preliminary observations that may shed some light on its origins. While it was expected that the roll would follow the models established by Peter of Poitiers and Ranulf Higden, as well as the native English histories written by Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth, it was less expected that Lewis E201 would venture into more obscure sources. One of these derives from the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman prequel to Brutus’s conquest of Albion called Des Granz Geanz (c.1333-4) and its Latin translation, De origine gigantum. Middle English adaptations of this story can also be found in Castleford’s Chronicle, a fourteenth-century verse chronicle written in the north of England, and the Auchinleck Manuscript, produced in London in the 1330s and now in the National Library of Scotland. The tale is inscribed at the top of Lewis E201 next to roundels showing the Creation and Fall of Man and takes up a considerable amount of space. Relating the tale of 30 daughters of a Greek king who are exiled for plotting to kill their husbands to preserve their sovereignty as princesses, the sisters set sail and discover an uninhabited island which they name ‘Albion’ after the eldest sister, Albina. They populate the island by mating with incubi; the result is a race of giants who are conquered by Brutus when he discovers Albion centuries later. This legend came to prominence during Edward I’s mediation with the Pope on the issue of Scotland’s status as sovereign nation or vassal state to England, and resurfaced in the mid-fifteenth century when it became appended to many versions of The Brut, both in prose and verse forms, often with subtle variations on the narrative, for example, a Syrian king instead of a Greek one. However, it is a very unusual choice for a pedigree and was not often (if ever) incorporated into English royal genealogical rolls from the Wars of the Roses period.
A second unusual source for Lewis E201 appears to be the Livre des bouillons, extant in a single fifteenth-century register from Bordeaux (Bordeaux AA 1, fos 121v-2). Lewis E201 quotes, almost verbatim, several legends from this text which relates miracles pertaining to the dukes of Aquitaine, whose line as shown in E201 culminates in the father of Henry II’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. E201 tells the story of the legendary crusader king Senebrinus, who, with the intercession of the Virgin Mary, converts a Saracen princess named Fenix to Christianity. Another tells the legend of the third-century saint Valerie of Limoges, descended from the kings of Bordeaux and heir to the count of Limoges, who, having spurned marriage to her cousin Stephen, is beheaded at his order. St. Martial miraculously places her decapitated head back on her neck, a feat which inspires Stephen to convert to Christianity along with the entire kingdom of Bordeaux and the surrounding Aquitaine lands. It is still unclear from where the Lewis E201’s compiler sourced these legends, but their remarkable similarity to the Livre des bouillons suggests multiple pathways for future research.
A third notable source for the Lewis E201 is the Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey, which records the ancient lineage of the abbey’s patrons, the Mortimer family, Welsh Marcher lords. The Mortimer claim to the throne would become inextricable with that of York. A presumptive heir to the throne, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, married Philippa, the only child of Lionel, the second surviving son of Edward III; Lewis E201 asserts that their son, Roger, ‘was next in line to the kingdoms of England and France. Then he was declared heir throughout all of England.’ Roger’s daughter, Anne, would marry another Richard, the second son of the Duke of York, who was the grandson of Edward III and son of Edmund, Duke of York, and Isabelle, princess of Castile and Leon. Lewis E201 confidently proclaims this Richard to be ‘the true heir of the kingdoms of England, France, Castile, and Leon and the Lord of Ireland.’ For the early history of the Mortimer family, the compiler of Lewis E201 text was clearly drawing from a source related to the Fundatorum historia, now University of Chicago Library, Codex MS 224, which features a Mortimer family tree, probably copied from a roll, as well as from other records, including a list of British kings extracted from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Lewis E201 repeats information from the Fundatorum historia otherwise disputed, claiming for example, that Hugh of Mortimer (d.1181) married Matilda, the daughter of William Longsword, a descendant of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Although this information could have been extracted from any number of different sources, it appears that an extra effort was made to incorporate it into Lewis E201.
Finally, Lewis E201’s compilers consulted the Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden, part of which appears at the foot of the roll in a large scroll flanked by the royal arms of England, France, and Spain. The text appearing in the roll comes from Book Four, Chapter 3 of the Revelations, and concerns itself with usurpation and legitimate succession. It has been translated as follows:
And because nothing should be acquired with injustice; and because the kingdom of England, to which is owed succession by hereditary right, was estranged from the older brother, the true heir, through an arbitrary election carried out through fear and violence, and given and granted unjustly to the younger brother, not the heir; for this reason the kingdom of England has suffered this affliction and its desolation, as is well and clearly declared in the Revelations of Saint Bridget in the book of the heavenly Emperor to the kings, beginning in the third chapter. The bride [speaks] to Christ at the end of this chapter in the following manner. ‘Again the bride said to the Lord, “O Lord, do not be offended if I ask one more thing. The current king has two sons and two kingdoms. In one kingdom, the king is chosen by hereditary right; in the other, he is elected according to the will of the people. Now, however, the opposite has been done. For the younger son holds the hereditary kingdom while the older holds the kingdom that is granted through election.” God responded, “in their electors there were three faults, and a fourth that surpassed these: unlawful love, feigned prudence, flattery of fools, and lack of faith in God and in the common people of the kingdom. For this reason, their election was against justice, against God, against the good of the commonwealth and the welfare of the common people and the kingdom. Therefore, for the provision of peace and the welfare of the common people and the kingdom, it is necessary that the older son regain the hereditary kingdom and that the younger son come to the election (sc. the elective kingdom). Otherwise, unless the earlier actions are repealed, the kingdom will suffer loss, the kingdom’s people will be afflicted, discord will arise, the days of its sons will be spent in bitterness, and their kingdoms will no longer be kingdoms, but it will be as it is written: ‘the powerful will move from their seats, and those who walked on the earth will be elevated.’ Mark this example of two kingdoms. In one there is election; in the other, hereditary succession. The first, where there is election, was destroyed and afflicted because the true heir was not elected. And this was caused by the election and the greed of the one who sought to rule. Therefore, because God does not strike down the son because of the sins of the father, and because he is not eternally angry but acts as a just protector both on earth and in heaven, for that reason this kingdom will not come to its earlier glory and happy condition until there appears the true heir, either from the paternal or the maternal line.
Following the example of Henry V, Edward IV subscribed to this saint's cult and supported the Bridgettine order at Syon Abbey, west of London. The abbey saw Edward IV as a founder, singing masses for him, his queen, and Henry V on August 31 every year. Syon also sang masses for Edward IV’s parents – suggesting the duke and duchess were patrons before 1461. Edward IV’s mother, Duchess Cecily, owned a copy of the Revelations of Saint Bridget, leaving it to her granddaughter (Anne de la Pole, prioress at Syon) in her last will. These connections indicate that Lewis E201 was commissioned by someone operating at the very heart of the Yorkist establishment, perhaps even someone at court, but more work needs to be done to determine who E201’s original patron was, where it was originally produced, and how this genealogy would have been used as a political, social, and material object.
We hope that this project will inspire scholars to look further at this fascinating and enigmatic manuscript and bring it into dialogue with other genealogical materials of its day.
Susan Troxell
Chair, Richard III Society-American
Branch
Acknowledgements: For the potential role of the Livre des Boullions and Wigmore Abbey Chronicle in shaping Lewis E201, I am quoting from the Director’s Introduction by Professor Emily Steiner, and Annotator’s Introduction by Eleanor Webb, PhD candidate and Doctoral Fellow at Wolf Humanities Center at UPenn. The translation of E201’s incorporation of the Revelations of St Bridget is by Emma Dyson, PhD-candidate in UPenn’s Department of Classics. I thank them for allowing me to use them here.
Funding: In addition to the American Branch, funding was provided from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and from Sean Quimby, Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Primary Sources :
Archives municipales de Bordeaux: Livre de Bouillons (Bordeaux: Imprimerie de G. Gounouilhou, 1867).
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (London: Penguin Books, 1995).
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin Books, 1966) (English)
The revelations of Saint Birgitta of Sweden, translated by Denis Searby, with introductions and notes by Bridget Morris, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2006–2015)
Paul Remfry, The Wigmore Chronicle, 1066 to 1377: A Translation of John Rylands
Manuscript 215, ff. 1-8 and Trinity College, Dublin, MS.488, ff. 295-9 (Ceidio,
2013).
Secondary Sources:
A. Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda: Pedigree, prophecy, and the “British history” in the Reign of Edward IV’ in Patronage, Pedigree and Power, ed. C. Ross, Gloucester 1979, pp. 171-192.
A. Allan, ‘Political Propaganda Employed by the House of York in England in the Mid-Fifteenth Century’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Swansea, 1981).
L. Blanchard and S. Troxell, ‘“This was done by the Lord”: The Transcription, Translation, and Online Presentation of an Edward IV Genealogy’, The Ricardian XXXIV (2024), pp. 3-16.
J.P. Carley and J. Crick, ‘Constructing Albion’s Past: An Annotated Edition of De Origine Gigantum’, in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. J.P. Carley, Woodbridge, 2001, pp. 347-418.
L. Coote, ‘Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse,” in Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Medieval Britain and France, ed. R.L. Radulescu and E.D. Kennedy, Turnhout 2008, pp. 28-44.
C. Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c. 1250-1450’ in Harlaxton Medieval Studies, IX: Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England, Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. R. Eales and S. Tyas, Donnington 2003, pp. 67-86.
C. Heffernan, ‘The Revelations of St Bridget of Sweden in Fifteenth-Century England’ in Neophilologus 101 (2017).
J. Hughes, Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV, Stroud
2002.
