In a judgment which has been much admired and widely endorsed C. S. Lewis wrote of John Skelton: ‘He has no real predecessors and no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an unmistakable individual’ (Lewis 1954: 134). His writings are highly distinctive and individualistic, but most of what is known factually about Skelton as an individual comes from official records. These tell what universities he attended and what degrees he received, what positions he held in the Church and at court, what he was paid, where he lived for some of the time, what legal cases, both ecclesiastical and civil, he was involved in, when he died and where he was buried (Edwards 1949: 287–304). We know that some of his contemporaries admired him and that he quarrelled with others. We also know who owned some of the manuscripts in which some of his works were copied and who printed others (Kinsman and Yonge 1967: 1–80). There is a collection of fifteen amusing stories about him – the so-called Merie Tales of Master Skelton (1567) – but these, for the most part, were not current in his lifetime and have not been found to be entirely reliable, though they do indicate how he was perceived by some, and provide hints about his lifestyle (Dyce 1844: I, pp. lxxi–xci, nos. i–xv). In fact, the most valuable information about Skelton's attitudes, his likes and dislikes, his political preferences and how, generally, he reacted to the world in which he lived is provided by his writings themselves. So it is possible to trace the contours of Skelton's peripatetic, somewhat erratic and very controversial career with a fair degree of confidence (Edwards 1949; Gray 2012: 3–99; Nelson 1939; Pollet 1971; Scattergood 2004; Scattergood 2014).

John Skelton is usually thought to have been born around 1460 or a little later, probably of a northern, possibly a Yorkshire, family (Pollet 1971: 6–9; Scattergood 2014: 53–4), though Greg Waite has argued, on the basis of some dialectal features of Skelton's language, that ‘both his origins and schooling’ may have been in ‘East Anglia or the Central to NE Midlands’ (Waite 2008: 128).

Though John Skelton is commonly regarded as a quintessentially English poet, one of his earliest appearances in the literary record (in 1490) involves him with traditions of classical writing and with the act of translation – both narrowly, in the sense of rendering classical texts into English, and more generally, with the ‘carrying over’ of classical culture into England. These associations are significant, and in one way or another would stay with him, in terms mainly of Latin literature, for the rest of his life (Carlson 2016).

William Caxton, who had been translating and printing since about 1473/4, expresses some perplexity as to what linguistic register to choose for his English version of the Aeneid, based on a French translation that he had among his papers. What attracted him to the French version were ‘the fayr and honest termes and wordes in Frenshe, whyche I never sawe tofore lyke ne none so playsaunt ne so wel ordred’ (Caxton 1973: 78–81). He thought that a translation would appeal to ‘noble men … as wel for the eloquence as the hystoryes’, but when he looked over the first few pages of his version he became aware that he had adopted some of the ornate vocabulary from the French – he calls them ‘fayr and straunge termes’ – and realised that this gave him a problem with his potential readers: ‘I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen whiche late blamed me saying that in my translacyons I had over-curyous termes whiche coude not be understand of comyn peple and desired me to use olde and homely termes in my translacyons.’ Caxton, dutifully, looked at older documents but ‘the Englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wel understand it’. It was ‘more lyke to Dutche [German] than Englysshe’.

In about 1505, Skelton, through the persona of Jane Scrope, expresses something of the same disquiet about English: ‘Our natural tong is rude’, she says, and she uses adjectives such as ‘rusty’, ‘cankered’ and ‘dull’ to describe it. She says that if she were to attempt to write ‘ornatly’ she would not know where to find ‘termes to serve my mynd’ – because she has no knowledge of classical writing: ‘These poetes of auncynte …

We must begin with names. ‘Tony Edwards’ is the person to whom this volume is dedicated, but it is not a name that everyone will immediately recognize, particularly those who know him only from his published work, for he has made himself known in public, from the first, as A. S. G. Edwards. When he began his career, this was the manner in which most scholars, most men at least, named themselves. Fashions have changed, and given names, one, two, or more, are now almost universal. But Tony has held on tenaciously to his initials, perhaps because he has three of them. We do not believe that he did so in any spirit of emulation of or desire to align himself with ‘Edwards A. S. G.’, the Edwards Active Strain Gauge well known to Google, an advanced form of technical engineering equipment which guarantees the vacuum conditions needed for the manufacture of certain precision instruments, such as aircraft engine turbine blades. It seems strangely apt as an analogous form of ‘A. S. G.’, whether one thinks of the ‘active strain’ involved as what he exerts upon himself or upon other people. The analogy fails, of course, when one comes to the creation of vacuum, where it works back to front, for Tony's work has essentially been to fill the vacuum that once existed in the study of manuscript history.

It is possible to deduce more about Trinity College Dublin MS 516 than about most miscellanies. Its owner and compiler enters his name and place of residence frequently in the book and also dates some of his entries. This is a highly personal compilation, and there is no evidence of anyone else intervening in the book until after the death of the original compiler. Like the compilers of many miscellanies, this man had antiquarian interests, but historical and political concerns appear to have determined in large part his choice of texts. And, because he was primarily interested in historical events and political issues, especially issues concerning the church, dates can frequently be assigned to the individual items he collected, and to when they were copied. It is therefore possible to get closer to the compiler of this miscellany than is usually the case, and to make informed judgments about his personal concerns – some of which appear, in retrospect, to be unusual.

The manuscript consists of 224 folios of parchment and paper, measuring approximately 22 × 15 cm, but there is a bit of unevenness in the size of some of the pages and the paper leaves show a variety of watermarks, as if small stocks of paper were purchased as needed.