Three Medieval sermons and their Victorian printer: Charles Clark and the dismembering of John Rylands MS English 109

Like most other medieval English collections of sermons (the Festial is the exception) the Middle English Mirror was never printed. The fourteenth-century work survives in six manuscripts, five of which preserve the complete (or almost complete) cycle of sixty sermons based on the Sunday gospels, according to the Use of Sarum. The sixth manuscript, John Rylands MS English 109, is physically imperfect, with over a third of its sermons either partially or wholly missing, and many of its paper leaves have sustained other damage. Neil Ker identified some missing leaves from Rylands preserved as a fragment in Norwich (Norwich Cathedral MS 5, now kept at Norfolk Record Office); these eight leaves contain two complete sermons and parts of four others. This essay will show that the poor physical state of Rylands MS English 109 may be at least partly attributed to its nineteenth-century owner, Charles Clark. Clark (1806-80) was an Essex farmer and bibliophile. His extensive correspondence with the London bookseller John Russell Smith, preserved at the Essex Record Office, documents a two-way traffic in books (including manuscripts and early printed books) which Clark bought, borrowed, and sold. The letters also reveal that Clark mutilated - and occasionally repaired - his books, and this essay will present evidence demonstrating that he treated Rylands MS English 109 in this fashion. Clark was also an amateur printer: he built his own printing press at Totham Hall and as the 'Bard of Totham' issued a stream of doggerel verse, booklets and broadsides. He also printed three sermons from the Mirror in two separate publications of 1837 and 1839. These are of significant interest both bibliographically and textually. The Style of Preaching (1837) offered the sermon for the first Sunday after Trinity from the Mirror with some other material, including additional texts on the Creed and Pater Noster (taken from parts of Rylands that also survive in Norwich), and snippets of other religious texts that Clark had transcribed from other manuscripts and printed books, including BL Lansdowne MS 454 and Caxton's print of The Shepheardes Calendar. Pulpit Oratory (1839) comprises two sermons from the Mirror, for the fifth Sunday after Epiphany and for Septuagesima. The former is of particular textual interest because the relevant section of Rylands MS English 109 has not been recovered. Clark's nineeenth-century print is therefore a late witness for the text of that sermon. His claim that he to printed his texts 'verbatim' may be upheld by comparing the other two sermons with their source in Rylands/Norwich; this shows that he was an accurate editor, even if, in other respects, he was destructive of his books.