Page:Somerset Historical Essays.djvu/35

 I have left this observation to the last: but the contrast is so marked that I feel no hesitation in adducing it in corroboration of a conclusion reached on other grounds.

.—I have spoken throughout of 'the third edition' of the Gesta Regum. Bishop Stubbs followed earlier scholars in recognising three classes of the MSS, and he designated them as A, B, and C. The A MSS represent the original form of the work. In the B and C MSS there are certain changes which show a tendency to soften some of the harsher judgements of the earlier text. Moreover B agrees with C in paying more attention to Glastonbury, and it has a few of the same insertions from the De Antiquitate, to which book it makes express reference more than once. The whole of the first insertion, with which we have been concerned above, is absent from the B MSS; but at the point at which this insertion comes in C there is a slight deviation in B from the A text; and such deviations occur, as Bishop Stubbs points out, wherever an insertion comes in C and not in B. I must refer to Bishop Stubbs's Introduction to the Gesta Regum (I, lviii ff.) for a statement of the main differences between B and C. With evident unwillingness he decides to follow his predecessors in making B the second and C the third edition. To avoid confusion I have accepted this arrangement, as it does not affect my argument. But I should wish to record the impression which a study of the various readings in his apparatus criticus has left on my mind. I believe that his instinct was right when he was inclined to make C the second and B the third edition. I should add, however, that the B recension was not due to the historian himself, but was the work of a later editor who had no special interest in Glastonbury, and perhaps even disliked the exceptional prominence given to it. I would invite future students of the problem to observe how frequently throughout the Gesta Regum the changes made in the B edition are tiresome verbal emendations, quite unlikely to have proceeded from the pen of the author himself. I give this only as an impression, but I would point out that this solution would relieve us from the difficulty of supposing that William of Malmesbury having made these Glastonbury insertions in C should afterwards have produced a new edition (B) in which he struck nearly all of them out: for it assigns to him two editions only (A and C), and refers B to a later editor.