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Christopher Collard, An Epitaph Attributable to John Skelton?, Notes and Queries, Volume 59, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 30–32, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr231
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Extract
I
IN the Library of The Queen’s College Oxford, when looking through Joshua Barnes’s The History of that most victorious Monarch Edward IIId etc. (Cambridge, 1688), I came across the text of an epitaph upon Edward’s Queen, Philippa of Hainault, the College’s founding patron.2 Her tomb is next to his in the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey (she died in 1369, he in 1377); the epitaph, in both Latin and English versions, hung by her tomb, but disappeared after probable physical decay and deliberate removal in the early eighteenth century.
There appears to have been no text or even plain record of the epitaph in the histories of the College or in its archive; yet its Library possesses five of the seven or eight volumes in which it was printed between its first transcription in 1600 and its apparently last reproduction in 1823.3
II
The earliest transcribers vary slightly in orthography, and some claim greater accuracy. All until Dart (?1723: n. 2) may well have copied the epitaph at first hand, but Barnes almost certainly did not, for he alone describes it as having ‘the Latine running round the verge of (Philippa’s) Monument’ when all others state that the tomb itself bore no inscription at all.
