Yet the two parts are closer in spirit and form than they might seem. Both are scholars’ books, largely unadorned and affordable texts, and they belong to the same cultural milieu. The first part, the Timaeus, was probably copied by a northern French scribe, probably from the schools, and was intended for the use of a scholar. In the hands of this scholar, or one of his colleagues, the book made its way to England, where roughly a century later we find it in the hands of the prebendary, Master Henry Langley, who donated it to the Augustinian canons living on the outskirts of Oxford, who had regular dealings with students, renting them housing and possibly hearing their confessions.127 The second part, the Roland, was copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe, who might well have received his training in the French schools. Its format is simpler than that of the Digby Timaeus, its script less elegant, its parchment of poorer quality. It too may have been intended for a scholar, however—in its rough script and simple format it resembles cheap copies of Boethius, Cicero, Seneca, and Juvenal, as well as other copies of the Timaeus. It is hardly surprising then to find that a century later this book is in the hands of the Augustinian canons of Oxford. The Timaens and the Roland might seem to belong to different worlds, but the Norman and Anglo-Norman scribes who copied them lived in the same one.
The Digby scribe appears to have had at best a limited knowledge of epic material, judging by his misspellings of famous names, but many clerics were steeped in it, or so ran the complaint. John Mirk, the prior of an Augustinian house in about 1400, claims that “the bad old priest is garrulous, wrathful, full of proverbs and given to fables; sitting among his boon companions, he recites the wars of princes [bella principum], and instils into the ears of his juniors anecdotes of his early life, which he ought to weep for rather than repeat.”128 The sharp-tongued Guibert de Nogent condemns the chancellor of Henry I, Gaudry, who became bishop of Laon, as “more of a soldier than a clerk … In word and manner he was remarkably unstable, remarkably lightweight. He took delight in talk about military affairs, dogs, and hawks, as he had learned to do among the English.”129 Not everyone disapproved of this interest, however. According to his biographer, Abbot Suger kept his monks awake by telling them “stories, sometimes into the middle of the night, about the deeds of strong men (gesta virorum fortium), that he had either seen or learned about.”130 Medieval preachers often referred to the epic heroes and their gesta to stir up their audience or drive home a point—thus providing one of the major sources of evidence for the circulation of these stories.131 Orderic Vitalis may have been shocked by the frivolities of jongleurs, but his work is filled with allusions to Charlemagne, Roland, and the legends of Troy and Thebes. Library catalogues suggest that monks often kept private volumes, including romances, which the monastery library would have inherited when they died. One of the best-documented cases is the early fifteenth-century Benedictine Thomas Arnold, of St. Augustine’s Canterbury, whose collection of French romances passed into the abbey library, but there are many others.132 One of their brothers also owned a copy of the chanson de geste Aspremont.133 Most tellingly of all, the Benedictines of Peterborough owned a book “de bello Vallis Runcie cum aliis in gallice” (of the Battle of Roncevaux and other matters, in French).134 The Augustinian canons were not the only English religious with some version of the Roland in their library.
But we can come a little closer still to the world of Digby 23 in the work of Thomas Wykes, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Oseney Abbey and a staunch royalist. Wykes thrills to the deeds of Prince Edward at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, which he celebrates both in the chronicle and in bellicose verses:
Concurrunt partes, quatiuntur tela, vigore
Militis Eduuardi madidantur rura cruore.
Occidt ense Comes, procerees mucrone necantur;
Sic vincunt victi, victores exsuperantur.135
The parties meet; weapons are clashed; the fields are moistened with blood by the vigor of the soldier Edward. The earl is slain by the sword; the barons are put to death by the sword’s edge. Thus the vanquished conquer and the conquerors are overcome.
No doubt the canons did occasionally have books dumped upon them or accept them as pledges or out of pure courtesy.136 But if they could write like this, surely they would also have enjoyed a chanson de geste.
Any effort to reconstruct medieval reading practice must be highly tentative, of course, but Digby 23 does suggest a coherent and plausible story of how the Roland might have been delivered. It suggests that the poem was never far from clerical hands, and it seems that by the end of the thirteenth century those were the hands of the Augustinian canons at Oseney. The book may have had something of the status of a saint’s life, serving as an inspirational moral poem to read aloud, or possibly even to chant, to the canons and their guests in the refectory. If, with Paul Zumthor, we hear the poem sung to a lost tune, the tune should be not a minstrel’s battle cry but a canon’s chanting. The Roland could, for example, have been sung after the fashion of a saint’s life, although quite how saints’ lives were sung is itself a tricky question.137 Jacques Chailley found evidence for such singing in the formula “Tu Autem,” which occurs, with its melody, in a French strophe in the St. Martial MS, a major liturgical collection made in Limoges at the very end of the twelfth century, now Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 1139. Chailley suggested that the “Tu Autem” might provide the last strophe for a sung saint’s life or for a romance because the formula also occurs at the end of the long Anglo-Norman epic Horn.138 Joseph Duggan provides one example of what this might have sounded like in his performance of the Roland, delivering each line slowly and to the same basic tune, producing a hypnotic effect that to modern ears sounds more liturgical than jongleuresque.139 Chailley also suggests that saints’ lives might have been sung after the manner of troped epistles, in which short passages, often two lines, from a vernacular life were inserted into the chanted Latin epistle. If this were the model, the story might follow a more complex musical structure.140 In either case, liturgical chant provides the basic musical technique for the oral delivery of vernacular narrative. John Stevens takes us back once more into the world of the Augustinian canons when he notes that “the Tu autem formula was used at the end of mealtime readings in religious houses” and that “a very likely occasion for the recitation or chanting of a saint’s life would be when the monks were gathered in the refectory—in silence, be it remembered—for meals.”141
On the other hand, Digby 23 could equally well have been read by a solitary canon in his leisure hours. The canon might have borrowed it from the abbey library, or he might have regarded it as his own. The personal memorandum and the pen tests, the scraps of poetry, and the single sermon all tend to suggest that during its years at Oseney Digby 23 was frequently treated as a private book, both before and after it was officially noted in the abbey’s holdings. When Stengel examined Digby 23(2) in the 1870s, he even thought he saw grease stains in it, which suggests the book was being used familiarly, and its faded and rubbed quality tends to confirm this.142 We might then imagine Henry Langley’s friend retiring to his cell and dividing some of his leisure time between perusing first his copy of the Timaeus, then his copy of the Roland, and occasionally a copy of Juvenal.
As an Augustinian canon, this man would have been expected to negotiate between the life of the cloister and more public duties and would have participated in a community that valued both spirituality and intellectual accomplishment. The canons, while not monks in the strictest