<i>Page</i> and <i>Pagina</i> in the 15th Century

The word page ‘one side of a leaf of paper’ is of late appearance in English. The first citation in OED, s.v. page n.2, there dated c1485, is from The Cely Papers, edited by Henry Elliot Malden (1900), in which an excerpt from a set of accounts, giving a subtotal for one page of a multi-page reckoning, is transcribed ‘Summa page … xxxiiijs vd’. The second citation in OED, from Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armory, is dated 1562: chronologically intermediate instances were doubtless available to the editors who revised the entry for its online publication in 2005, but the instances of c1485 and 1562 were enough to imply a tradition of usage since the earlier date. Other ways of referring to one side of a leaf in late Middle English have recently been discussed by Daniel Wakelin; at the beginning of his account, he states that ‘The word page to refer to one side of writing is caught by lexicographers first in the 1480s’, cites the evidence from the Cely Papers as presented in OED, and remarks that it ‘echoes a long-attested use of the Latin word pagina in the common phrase summa pagine’.1 One might indeed expect the first instance of a given word in OED to show the date by which it was current in English, even though it may have been preceded by earlier instances which have not been caught by lexicographers. In this case, however, the lexicographers have caught the wrong word. Three documents, as transcribed in Malden’s Cely Papers, use the formula ‘Summa page’. All of them are, naturally, sets of accounts: ‘The Rekenyng of the Margett Cely’, for voyages of 1486–7, in which the formula appears ten times, one of these being OED’s citation; the expenses of an excursion to Boulogne in August 1478, in which it appears once; and payments for freight, dated 1478, in which it appears three times.2 The manuscripts are in the National Archives: they are, respectively, TNA, C47/37/13 (fos. 2r–6v); C 47/37/16 (fo. 19r); and C47/37/11 (fos. 22r–23r). The formula is clearly written in these manuscripts. But it seems oddly expressed: why is ‘summa’ followed by ‘page’ rather than ‘of the page’? All of OED’s quotations for summa in this sense (summa, n.1, sense 2) use the form ‘summa of’. This is a puzzle, and Wakelin suggests the solution by citing Latin summa pagine/paginae. This is what ‘summa page’ stands for: page is not an English word, but an abbreviation for Latin pagine. Malden would surely have caught this if the e of page had been superscript. At C47/37/13, fo. 6v, for instance, the manuscript contrasts ‘Su[mma] page’ with ‘Su[mma] to[ta]ll[is]’, and the last word is written toll, so that it is clearly not an instance of English toll. But not all abbreviations are regularly superscript in these manuscripts. And indeed, the regular contrast of ‘Su[mma] page’ with ‘Su[mma] to[ta]ll[is]’ might suggest that both phrases are parallel: an abbreviation for summa followed by an abbreviation for a second Latin word.3 The possibility that page is indeed an abbreviation for pagine in these manuscripts is confirmed by multiple occurrences of the formula ‘Su[mma] pag’, as at C47/37/11, fo. 8r, ‘Su[mma] pag—xlvs vjd’: pag is surely short for paginae, rather than a variant of page.4 The same formula, ‘Su[mma] pag’, also occurs with an upward curl after the g, indicating curtailment.5 The accounting documents in which this formula occurs happen not to have been transcribed by Malden. Although the English word page is not reliably attested in the manuscripts of the Cely family, and OED’s first citation must therefore be rejected, the word can certainly be found well before 1562, the date of OED’s second instance. The first four examples which I have located are as follows. (i) Thomas Paynell, translation of Regimen sanitatis Salerni (Berthelet, 1528), sig. A3v, explaining a table of contents which gives signature references: ‘To vnderstande this table/wytteth that euery lettre of the alphabete i[n] the boke hath iiii. leaues and euery lefe is .ii. pages or sydes. The nombre that sta[n]deth at the lynes ende/shewethe what page or syde of the queire the thyng is in that ye wolde knowe’. (ii) William Marshall, translation of Lorenzo Valla, Treatise of the Donation … by Constantyne (Godfray, 1534), title page, ‘certayne great lerned men/whose names on the other page of this leafe done appere’. (iii) Nicholas Wyse, A Consolacyon for Chrysten People (Waylande, 1538), sig. A8r, an errata paragraph, ‘In the fyrst page of B … In the first page of E … In the .iiii. page of F … And in the last page of the same’. (iv) Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helthe (Berthelet, 1539), sig. A4r, explaining an index which gives folio references: ‘the number in the Table, dothe sygnify the leaf, and the letter A, doth sygnifie the fyrst page or syde, the letter B, the seconde page or syde’. These are all from printed books, and so it is not surprising that they all use page in the context of the navigation of printed books. Manuscript attestations might tell a different story, if they could be found; but The Cely Papers does not seem to be the right place in which to look for them.

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