Roman de Yder
England, 1250–1300

University Library, MS Ee.4.26, f. 46v
England, second half of the thirteenth century
Vellum, 256 x 184 mm (190 x 134 mm), IX + 54 + IX ff.

The Roman de Yder is part of the ‘post-Chrétien’ Arthurian material, which adopts the fictional worlds and characters of the twelfth-century romances and reinvents them. Caricature and parody are among the most interesting ingredients of this narrative, as shown here by a very jealous Arthur’s attempts to kill the eponymous hero who has so impressed Guinevere.

This manuscript was once owned by Thomas Knyvett (1545/6–1622), Keeper of the Palace of Whitehall and Captain of the guard which found Guy Fawkes under Parliament in 1605, thus foiling the Gunpowder Plot. Though its appearance is modest, it is among the most precious French manuscripts of the University Library, as it is the only known witness of Yder.

While the scribe was generally very careful in his writing, we can see from these folios that, like most scribes, he occasionally suffered from ‘eye-skip’: while he was reading his model line by line, it appears that he inadvertently overlooked one line. Later, the scribe found the mistake, five lines up on the second column. He used two small diagonal lines to mark the place, and then at the foot of the page wrote out the missing words ‘li ainez fiz au rei de Irlande’ (‘the eldest son of the king of Ireland’). This MS was part of the Library of the Bishop of Ely, given to Cambridge University Library by King George I in 1715.