Robert Thornton was a Yorkshire

Yorkshire

Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...

 landowner, a member of the landed gentry

Landed gentry

Landed gentry is a traditional British social class, consisting of land owners who could live entirely off rental income. Often they worked only in an administrative capacity looking after the management of their own lands....

. His efforts as an amateur scribe

Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...

 and manuscript compiler resulted in the preservation of many valuable works of Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

 literature, and have given him an important place in its history.

Biography

Thornton's name is associated with two 15th century manuscripts now held in different collections; Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91, the "Lincoln Thornton" manuscript, and British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

 MS Additional 31042, the "London Thornton" manuscript. A number of candidates had been suggested for the scribe's identity, but he is now firmly identified as Robert Thornton, a relatively prosperous provincial landowner of the manor of East Newton, Stonegrave

Stonegrave

Stonegrave is a village and civil parish in the Ryedale district of North Yorkshire, England. It is situated in the Howardian Hills and 4 miles south east of Helmsley.-External links:...

, in the North Riding of Yorkshire

North Riding of Yorkshire

The North Riding of Yorkshire was one of the three historic subdivisions of the English county of Yorkshire, alongside the East and West Ridings. From the Restoration it was used as a Lieutenancy area. The three ridings were treated as three counties for many purposes, such as having separate...

. The Thornton family had possessed East Newton Hall since the time of Edward I

Edward I of England

Edward I , also known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. The first son of Henry III, Edward was involved early in the political intrigues of his father's reign, which included an outright rebellion by the English barons...

; Robert's parents are commemorated in the church at Stonegrave.
Thornton appears to have started to compile a collection of works for his own and his family's pleasure and instruction; he was essentially a gentleman-amateur in a field usually dominated by professional scrivener

Scrivener

A scrivener was traditionally a person who could read and write. This usually indicated secretarial and administrative duties such as dictation and keeping business, judicial, and history records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities...

s and ecclesiastical scribes. Rather than copying works at random, he made some attempt to edit romances, religious works and works on medicine or herblore into different "booklets" within the manuscript. He wrote in a practised but rather untidy hand, adding a few simple decorative flourishes such as grotesque drolleries

Drolleries

Drolleries , often called a "grotesque", are decorative thumbnail images in the margins of Illuminated manuscripts, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, although found earlier and later...

 or ornamental scrollwork.

Thornton's tastes were fairly wide-ranging; the Lincoln manuscript reveals a liking for Arthurian romances, and he seems to have particularly appreciated alliterative verse

Alliterative verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of many Germanic...

, resulting in the preservation of some of the finest examples of the genre (notably The Alliterative Morte Arthure

Alliterative Morte Arthure

The Alliterative Morte Arthure is a 4346-line Middle English alliterative poem, retelling the latter part of the legend of King Arthur. It is preserved in a single copy, in the early fifteenth-century Lincoln Thornton Manuscript.-History:...

and Wynnere and Wastoure

Wynnere and Wastoure

Wynnere and Wastoure is a fragmentary Middle English poem written in alliterative verse sometime around the middle of the 14th century.-Manuscript:The poem occurs in a single manuscript, British Library Additional MS. 31042...

). The texts enable us to gain some insight into the way such manuscripts were used, perhaps with members of a family using it on one night to refer to a recipe, and on another to read a romance or even to take part in a dramatic performance.

After Thornton's death, the manuscripts remained in the hands of his descendants for many years; the name of Thornton's son William appears on folio 49.v of the Lincoln manuscript, in addition to the names of other family members elsewhere. However, by 1700 (when it was seen there by the antiquary Bishop Thomas Tanner

Thomas Tanner (bishop)

Thomas Tanner was an English antiquary and prelate.-Life:He was born at Market Lavington in Wiltshire, and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford, taking holy orders in 1694...

) it had reached the library of Lincoln Cathedral

Lincoln Cathedral

Lincoln Cathedral is a historic Anglican cathedral in Lincoln in England and seat of the Bishop of Lincoln in the Church of England. It was reputedly the tallest building in the world for 249 years . The central spire collapsed in 1549 and was not rebuilt...

, probably having been obtained by the cathedral's Dean Michael Honywood between 1660 and 1681.

As many libraries of manuscripts were lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries

Dissolution of the Monasteries

The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, priories, convents and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland; appropriated their...

, Thornton's private anthology became an extremely rare survival.

Works preserved by Thornton

• Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91

• British Library MS Additional 31042