Abraham Fleming: - Early Music Online - Royal Holloway, University ...

Mabel et al in which Fleming dictated his witness statements and then signed them. 60 His
hand is fluid yet neat and confirms that he was confident with and used to handling a quill;
this is most apparent when compared to some of the other less competent signatures on the
deposition. Like most clerics or writers, Fleming probably had his own quill and penknife to
hand. Bearing in mind that the same person’s handwriting might vary according to how worn
down the quill was or the quality of the paper used, the letters of these two signatures are
consistent. Fleming spelled his surname with two ms but only wrote one, using an
abbreviation stroke over the middle of the name to indicate that the second m was missing. 61
This also confirms that he was fluid and competent with written conventions, as one would
expect from an editor. No other known examples of his actual signature survive although
there are thousands of examples of his editor’s marks and handwritten comments in the
Melton copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles. 62 The church registers from St Pancras, Soper Lane
for the years 1593 until 1607 (now kept in the London Guildhall archive) were most likely to
have been handwritten by Fleming as well.
That Fleming wrote or contributed to at least 52 printed texts, some of which were very
large, is not in question and that 47 of these texts were produced over a period of just thirteen
years is equally certain. Fleming was a driven man who had a genuine interest in three
‘genres’ of book: scholarly texts, religious handbooks and ‘occasional’ books that described
specific events or occasions (the latter two were often linked as strange events were viewed
by pre-enlightened society as portents from God).
Fleming’s first years as a writer reveal a predominance of scholarly texts that he translated
from Latin into English. This is likely to reflect the fact that he was still at Cambridge and
immersed in studying such books. His understanding of these texts would have made him a
good translator and punctilious editor of them. The known texts are as follows: Virgil’s
60 PRO C24/221, ‘Gryffen v. Mable et al, 34 Eliz. Regnum’.
61 His name has been written variously as Flemming, Flemmyng and occasionally Flemyng but more
usually as Fleming, the spelling used in this thesis.
62 This is the copy in the Huntington Library in California, shelfmark HL 478000.
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