Series 3 > Letters of James the Fourth, 1505-1513

XXIV
LETTERS OF JAMES IV
benefices and other matters of little concern to England
or to the world at large.’
The letters for the period from April 1509 to December
1914 contained in N.L. and B.M., including many that are
not printed in Ruddiman’s Epistolae, are calendared in R. H.
Brodie’s revision (3 Vols., London, 1920) of J. S. Brewer’s
Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. Hannay admired, but
did not completely approve of, the fashion in which Brodie
had carried out his enormously difficult task. It seemed to
him that in some cases the abstracts were so brief as to be
almost useless, if not misleading, that matters relating to
Scotland got too little attention, and that Brodie had
occasionally gone astray in his attempts to date the
numerous undated letters.
The task, in brief, to which Hannay addressed himself
was the preparation, not of verbatim translations, but
of very full abstracts, retaining the substance and some¬
thing of the character of the originals, of all the letters
written between April 1505 and September 1513 con¬
tained in N.L., and in Ruddiman and Gairdner. Those
that were undated he essayed to date, at least approxi¬
mately, from the record of the movements of ambassadors
and heralds in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer
and the Register of the Privy Seal.
He made little use, it would appear, of B.M., preferring
instead the more accessible Register House MS. For the
correspondence with the Danish court he preferred to the
copies in N.L. the original letters as printed in Wegener.
From his notes it is clear that he meant to include in the
Calendar the very important letters in another British
Museum MS.—Caligula, B. vi—as well as the letters
relating to Andrew Forman’s ambassadorial activities
printed in Godefroy’s Lettres du Roy Louis XII (Brussels,
1704).
When ill-health forced Hannay to abandon his task,
he had all but completed the calendaring of the letters
written between 1505 and 1510. After 1510 the gaps in
his manuscript become more frequent, and the ten fateful
months before Flodden he left a complete blank.