http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc1.asp?DOCID=1G1%3A70396368&refid=ip_encyclopedia_hf
Medium Aevum; 9/22/2000; HANNA, RALPH here is the beginning:
So far as I know, there are only two extensive published discussions of Bodleian MS Lat. misc. c.66, one of them historical, In 1950, Rossell Hope Robbins, the most indefatigable searcher for fifteenth-century Chauceriana since Eleanor Prescott Hammond, published the love lyrics he had found in the volume while researching The Index of Middle English Verse.(1) These poems, which Robbins could ascribe to an up-country gentleman, a Humphrey Newton of Pownall (Ches.), 1466-1536, demonstrated, he argued, the penetration of Chaucerian lyric style into the hinterlands.
HN is very much linked to Pownall Hall:
http://www.pownallhall.info/history.aspThe Pownall site has a long history, going back to at least the thirteenth century. One of the earliest mentions of the estate is the appearance of "Pounale" in a charter from Edward I?s reign, dated 1297. It is uncertain whether that family took its name from the estate or vice versa, but the name was well established in medieval times. The house and estate passed by marriage to a branch of the Fitton family and then to the Newtons in 1496, when Ellen Fitton married Humphrey Newton. He was a well-known sixteenth century lawyer until his death in 1536, and lived to reach seventy, a considerable achievement in those days.
He was under scrutiny by the Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters:
http://www.mgh.de/da/rezensionen/band54.2/0442.htmlDeborah Marsh, ?I See by Sizt of Evidence?: Information Gathering in Late Medieval Cheshire (S. 71?92), stellt anhand erhaltener Urkunden und Familienunterlagen ein Mitglied der dortigen Gentry, Humphrey Newton of Newton and Pownall, vor, in dem sie den ersten Antiquar dieser Gegend zu erkennen meint. ?
He wrote poems, which were discussed and some of them are still kept in UK:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/minotint.htmIn 1515, Henry Legh was owner of Baguley Hall (near Manchester) and it is likely that he, one of his four younger brothers or his son was the author of Scotish Feilde (Baird, p. vii). Other fifteenth-century gentlemen-poets in the Cheshire-Lincolnshire area include Sir Humphrey Brereton of Malpas and Sir Humphrey Newton of Pownall. In Yorkshire, Robert Thornton seems to have been a member of the minor Yorkshire gentry (Thompson, p. 3). Sir Henry Hudson, rector of Spofford, was called on by the York city council to write verses honoring Richard III in l483 and again in 1486 to have the "making and directing of the shew" for Henry VII's entry into the city (Johnston, REED: York, Vol. I, p. 138). All these men are well-versed in the alliterative mode, and Sir Humphrey Newton in particular writes much rhymed alliterative verse in a style the earliest exemplars of which survive from Stanlow Abbey, Cheshire, from the 1270's (Pickering, p. 157). It is clear Newton !
had read
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well (Robbins, "Gawain Epigone," p. 361). The poetry of these fifteenth-century gentlemen and others, such as John Quixley (another Yorkshire man), Gilbert Banester, and Peter Idley, might suggest that in the fourteenth century "the country squire or town gentleman" (Robbins, "Poems of Humphrey Newton," p. 123) might also have composed lyrics of similar style and interest (Pearsall, Old English and Middle English, p. 226). Perhaps Minot should be thought of, at least in his youth, as a versifying esquire like the knight's son in Chaucer, who "koude songes make and wel endite" (CT 1[A]95).
Pickering, O. S. "Newly Discovered Secular Lyrics from Later Thirteenth-Century Cheshire." The Review of English Studies 43 (1992), 157-80.
Robbins, Rossell Hope. "A Gawain Epigone." Modern Language Notes 58 (1943), 361-66.
---. "The Poems of Humphrey Newton Esq., 1466-1536." PMLA 65 (1950), 249- 81.
Robbins, Rossell Hope. "XIII. Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions." In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500. Gen. ed. Albert E. Hartung. Vol. 5. New Haven: The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1975. Pp. 1412-16; 1657-61.
And BTW this MS was already mentionned in the list in 2002 by Luis, who considered it as worth a study:
http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2002/10/msg00021.html
On a wholly different train of thought, at the Bodleian online, worth checking is the Commonplace book of Humphrey Newton (1466-1536), of Pownall, Cheshire:
Yours,
Jean