In quest of Pictish manuscripts

Abstract

In 1698 Humfrey Wanley examined a manuscript at Gresham College, which had been described as a history of Pictland in the Pictish language. The book (now British Library, MS Arundel 333) contains titles to this effect added in the late sixteenth century, but, as Wanley realised, its texts are Irish medical translations from Latin, made at the beginning of the sixteenth century. A longer note about Pictish provinces, added by the same hand, and the identity of the writer are investigated; the hand is that of the owner of the book, Lord William Howard, rather than the historian William Camden as was thought in the past. Wanley's correction appears in William Nicolson's Scottish Historical Library in 1702 and in correspondence between himself and Edward Lhuyd in the same year. In 1702 Lhuyd discovered the englynion in the Cambridge copy of Juvencus, exchanging views with Wanley and others on this and further manuscripts containing early Brittonic words. Between 1702 and 1707 Lhuyd developed a theory that the Juvencus manuscript was written in the land of the Picts and that its Welsh verses, the oldest monuments of Hen Brythoneg, were in the Pictish language. He saw himself as uncovering both linguistic and manuscript evidence for British writing across the full range of British territory from south to north, Brittany to Caledonia. Lhuyd's idea that Pictish was similar to British was followed by Innes, but modern Pictish scholarship has not recognised that the idea goes back so early.