Tada! It’s a video about Tiffany! I hope you like it.
Psst. Hey, hey. Would you like to know more? Okay great. So listen, I need to tell you about this poem. Come with me behind the scenes where I’ve been working on this for… I don’t even know how long. Take a seat. Get comfortable.
It all began with these articles I read saying the name Tiffany is very old, maybe medieval. What a cute and easy video, Past-Grey thought, and it could have been :: it could have been :: if I’d just left things alone, but no, I wanted to read the article sources, which turned out didn’t often contain the name Tiffany at all, but rather the ye-olden-name Theophania, or the super-old Theophanu. And like, maybe these medieval ladies called themselves Tiff, but that’s just a bit too cute, isn’t it? To me it looked like the sort of Lady Godiva story where later writers say a thing happened but there’s no evidence from the time that it did, because it’s a fairy tale. The kind history is full of once you go looking.
[whispering] Don’t go looking.
So for a while the Tiffany video teetered on the edge of getting binned, but it turned out my Lady Godiva suspicious were wrong when some medieval Tiffany’s did turn up to save the project. But the poem happened before that. And listen, I need to tell you about it, otherwise, I might just explode trying to contain all the excruciating details and number of obsessive hours poured into this f– poem. And I can’t let it all have been for nothing. Okay, ready? No? Too bad. Here’s the poem.
[clears throat] Ahem. It’s okay. That’s it. But what isn’t okay is that this poem popped up in modern writings implying it’s proof that Tiffany is maybe medieval, but never with the poem’s date or an author attached. Making it impossible to pin to a timeline. Which made the poem annoying. Doubly so because it’s supposed to be a joke. Like here it is in this 1859 history book with this weird French style humorous illustration. But, I don’t get it? Is it the name of the dog? [irately] What’s the joke?! If you get it, please leave a comment. I just… I need to know.
Anyway, when you’re reading about a topic, this the sort of thing that happens a lot. There’s some detail you keep stumbling over and over and it could be the critical clue. I’m looking for the earliest Tiffany A-N-Y. There’s a Tiffany A-N-Y right here. Maybe the very first if I could just pin the poem to its proper place, but no. I had just resolved to give up on this poem when The Tiffany’s of America arrived at my door, which I had ordered… weeks ago? To hopefully help with the main Tiffany video.
But it was just 90% a literal list of people named Tiffany in America with hilariously unclear photos. The book was written by Nelson Otis Tiffany and thanks Charles Lewis Tiffany for making the book possible with his “liberal contributions of money.” I love how explicit that is. Then, totally unrelated, there follows a description of how the Tiffany family crest is the “most beautiful thing of its kind we have ever seen.” And then two pages of the densest family flattery ever put in print.
But in between those two sections, to mock me, the poem appeared again. Without a date… but with a footnote path the follow. This is the moment I broke. And swore to the gods above and below I would find the primary source of this Brittany Tiffany poem. No matter the time. No matter the cost.
And when you give that to the gods, they of course played a joke upon Grey, making his pursuit of this poem as painful as possible. Here’s what happened. The Tiffany’s of America got the poem from Richmondshire, its Ancient Lords and Edifices, Which I ordered and when it arrived, found the full title to be I opened it and out fell an old map! Which is a thrilling moment, no matter what’s mapped on the map.
After checking for spots marked X, back to the book to find the poem, which had a pencil highlight mark and a note below. It seems whoever owned this book before me was also on their own poetic Tiffany journey. Maybe it was Nelson Otis Tiffany…I don’t know. So, Richmondshire, Its Ancient Lords and Edifices: A Concise Guide to the Localities of Interest to the Tourist and Antiquary; With Short Notices of Memorable Men lists the poem as from the author M.Thierry. Now buying old rare books gets expensive real fast, so I headed down to my local library to try and track M.Thierry down, which took a while because:
I didn’t know then but I do know now that ‘M’ is an old abbreviation for Mister and the author referenced was Mr. Augustin Thierry and his book The History of the Conquest of England by the Normans.
My library pre-dates the Dewey Decimal System, which makes every book search an adventure through 17th century organizational idiosyncrasity. Which is delightful when you’re browsing, but infuriating when you’re in the wrong section about England and can’t find the book you’re looking for, because you should be in the England only section - but not here, behind the little book elevator.
Anyway, Thierry’s book was on the shelf. I grabbed it, sat down with it, and flipped through the pages to find the poem. And that History of the Conquest of England by the Normans isn’t the primary source either, pointing to [with difficulty] Hearne, Praefatio ad Johan.de Fordun, Scotichronicon. [with a sigh]
Okay, what’s the Scotichronicon? According to Wikipedia, it’s a history book of Scotland started in the 1300s by a priest in Aberdeen and continued after his death by an abbot in Inchcolm. These historians worked to cover the history of Scotland from their present day back to the literal genesis - a rather epic undertaking deserving the epic name the Scotchinomicron [sic]. Fun fact! This book is one of the earliest references to Robin Hood. Though the authors take a rather…hmmm more dim view of The Hood and his hoi polloi fans than most modern interpretations.
According to them, Interesting. But I didn’t come to the library to track down the earliest reference to Robin Hood.:: It’s the Piers Plowman poem by the way.:: I here to find the Scotchichromicon [sic] in the Scotland history section, which is in the dark. Sure glad my phone has a flashlight. There it is…the Scotcheranomicon [sic]. Oh, look all these hand written notes. Last time this was checked out was 1995. Alas there was no poem on page 172 But maybe that page number was for a different edition, so there was nothing to do but start flipping and skimming, flipping and skimming, over and over, and over and over and over and over, through every single crinkly page to find the Brittany Tiffany poem - nowhere.
Maybe the poem was among those pages and I just missed it. I mean…the book is in Latin. It turned out…not. I didn’t know it at the time but I did have the wrong edition, but in an unexpected way. This one printed in MDCCLIX. But if you were to search further, say at the largest library in the world with 200 million volumes, you could find an earlier edition printed in MDCCXXII. Which was both much smaller and with hilariously large font - like the author was trying to puff up the book.
But in this one, on page 170, there she was! Brittany Tiffany A-N-Y. I was thrilled to have found truly medieval evidence of Tiffany. I had the primary source! I could pin the poem to the 1400s! Or so I thought. Until I remembered that that these guys wrote in Latin, and this poem is in modernish English. How could that be? Well, it’s because this poem isn’t in the Scotichronicon at all. It’s a footnote added by the editor of this 1722 edition. And it’s also not the primary source, the editor adding, Charily? That’s an old word that means “cautious or warily.” That’s weird. And ancient.
How ancient? Fast forward past much time spent searching Coningsby family records, without luck. Though, of course, now that I’m talking about this I know some long descendant of the Coningsby clan will show up at my door with a reliquary box and the poem inside, which I’ll need to send off for some radiocarbon dating. I also know that every example of an old Tiffany A-N-Y will be sent to my door forever more, but that’s Future-Grey’s problem. For Current-Grey - well, Past-Grey at the time of writing and research - the one path the gods had directed before me, I wish I had not followed through.
Who is Theo Hearnius, the editor? Well, to find out, step one is to find his non-Latinized name. Thomas Hearne. Thomas Hearne was… ehh… well we’ll get to that. But he worked at the Bodleian Library at Oxford in the early 1700s and published lots of editions of medieval texts, Scottochromicon among them.
Now trying to find more information about why someone wrote a footnote 300 years ago seemed hopeless, but Google, against all odds, turned up the collected letters of Alexander Pope. A contemporary of Hearne’s in England, who wrote a 35-page letter about Hearne that begins, which at first sounds like, “Wow, what a fan!” And this 35-page letter by Alexander Pope happens to mention the Brittany Tiffany poem, though in a context that seems, off? Saying Hearne had so many not just historical documents, but poems in particular, that it would waste your time to tell you about all of them. Pope then says Hearne wanted to be useful by saving them all, but then lists several clearly-useful-to-no-one-ever poems, including Brittany Tiffany.
It’s just sort of weird, and I would have left it at that, should have left it at that, but then this passage caught my eye. That’s a very “I don’t love drama” sentence from Pope, isn’t it? Pope then goes on to fill his 35-page letter with nothing but corrections for every mistake Hearne ever made in all of his work in this infuriating kind of way. Some observations on his writing indeed. Hearne gets a date wrong, and Pope says, “You say this man in 1274 studied at Canterbury College and he wrote about it. But I’m afraid to tell you the college was not built until 1363. Therefore, this man must have either lived 89 years before he was born or written of a place many years before it was built.” Mee-yow!
Alexander Pope, it turns out, is the human who coined the phrase, “Of course, only after reading the entire letter, did I realize I could have skipped it had I first seen Pope hanging out on the bottom of Hearne’s Wikipedia page calling Hearne’s life work unappealing and monkish. Hearne complained into his diary that Alexander Pope, one of the most quoted authors in the English language, just below Shakespeare and the Bible, lacked scholarship. Alexander Pope, in turn created a character for one of his plays based on Hearne named Wormius, a know-nothing know-it-all pedant. Hearne shot back saying Pope’s play was “This delicious beef was the only highlight of my readings, so I needed to know more.”
But putting plus Hearne plus Wormius into Google returned exactly one result, the Wikipedia page itself, which is super sus. I mean, does information even exist if it’s not on the Internet? Oh right, of course. So I had to check the listed footnote, which wasn’t at the library. So I ordered the book. It arrived, I opened it, I read it, and the Hearne-Wormius thing checks out. Amazing!
But even after that, Alexander Pope just couldn’t let it go for some reason, and after Hearne’s death, he wrote, “Alex…geez!” Uhh so as you can see, we’ve traveled down many paths here. And at this point I really needed a friend to talk to about this in my life. The number of people willing to listen for months on end to updates about not even the very broad topic of the origin of the name Tiffany, Remember? That’s where we started. Not even of the exact original source of one poem that mentions the name Tiffany A-N-Y, but of two dead dude’s schoolboy-level squabbles that are tangentially related to Tiffany is zero. But then there was hope. I came across another Hearne Burn via historian John Horace Round, who was critical of Hearne’s lack of document dating, internal evidence questioning, and superficial examinations, which resulted in wrong dates being published. Hearne even got the poem’s surname spelling wrong…twice. This is why nothing turned up for ‘Cognisby family records’ earlier. Upon finding John Horace Round, I was excited to have a friend to talk to about the Tiffany project I had been working on for so long. However, I realized in my excitement that I had missed the original publication date of his work–Round had died a hundred years ago.
I had learned two things about Hearne: first, his contemporaries referred to him as an ‘antiquarian’, which actually meant ‘hoarder’; and second, his edition of the Scotichronicon was worse than useless, as he cut out a lot of content, which is why it was printed in giant font.
I had to try to pin the timeline to the poem, which started with William from Britany, wife Tiffany. William Coningsby was a real person in the 1300s in England, not Brittany, and his wife was Beatrice, not Tiffany. They had a son, Thomas Coningsby, who went to Brittany with the Black Prince, and married his captor’s daughter, Tiffany–except her name was actually Theophania and she was only called Tiffany hundreds of years later. This meant the poem was evidence of nothing useful at all.
My final working theory was that Hearne knew the Coningsby family, and when editing his edition of the Scotichronicon, he added in a footnote, wrong as he remembered it. After a half year of hard work and frustration, it has been revealed that the name Tiffany was not actually in the original book, and that all of the effort put in to finding it was for nothing. It has been a long and difficult journey, but I am grateful for all of the people who have supported me along the way.
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