Someone Dead Ruined My Life… Again.

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 suspicions were wrong when some medieval Tiffanys 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 1) 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.

And 2) my library pre-dates the Dewey Decimal System, which makes every book search an adventure through 17th century organizational idiosyncrasy. Which is delightful when you're browsing. But infuriating when you're in the wrong section about England and you 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 Scotchichronicon [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 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 Scotchichronicon [sic] 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.

And 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 now 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 [sic] 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 [sic] 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 dudes' schoolboy-level squabbles that are tangentially related to Tiffany is zero.

But then there was hope. I can't even remember how I found it now, but I came across another Hearne Burn via historian John Horace Round in his Complaining about Hearne's lack of document date questioning, ignoring of internal evidence, and superficial examinations, leading to publishing more wrong dates polluting the timeline for everyone. Oh! And Hearne also got the poem's surname spelling wrong... twice.

Which is why nothing turned up for 'Cognisby family records' earlier. Oooph! At this point, Hearne having cost me so much time and feeling so thoroughly alone in the world, I was excited to find in John Horace Round a friend to phone and complain with over coffee. As it happens, he even translated part of the Domesday Book, which was the very first source I checked when starting the Tiffany project so long ago. We were going to have loads to talk about!

While searching for his digits, I realized in my excitement, I had missed the original publication date of his work. Round had died a hundred years ago. And I was back to being Grey "No Mates"... as usual. Okay so look, this side path I've been carving out to even be able to talk about the Brittany Tiffany poem is only a tiny tiny part of all of the explorations that had to happen to make the main Tiffany video.

I've been here, alone for... oh gods! [dazedly] Half a year as the only one alive who cares about any of this. This script is so long now. Will anyone make it this far? [with emotion] Is anyone here? [sighs] Okay, snap out of it.

Now in my journeys, I had learned two things about Hearne. First, his contemporaries referred to him as an 'antiquarian,' which in my head translated as old-timey for 'historian' but was actually old-timey code for 'hoarder.' Hearne loved collecting every historic document he could find, but was not very good at sorting them out.

The second thing was that Hearne's edition of the Scottronomicon [sic] from which all sources pointed back to as the providence of the poem is worse than useless. As not only are his contributions of dubious value, but he also took it upon himself to cut out a lot, which explains why his edition was printed in giant font.

This is not considered canonical. And this should have been the end of it, but there was still something left to try pin to the timeline. Was this Tiffany A-N-Y a real person and when did she live? Okay, I know. In retrospect, it seems obvious I should have started here. Painfully obvious. But you only know at the end what is the fastest way from the beginning.

Now surely, I thought, at least tracking down genealogical records of the family the poem mentioned everything would check out. Right? Wrong. So as a reminder, the poem starts with William from Brittany, 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 did go to Brittany, with the Black Prince (who was alive at the time) to battle. And Thomas, while fighting, became a prisoner of war. However, his captor agreed to let Thomas go if he would marry his daughter, Tiffany. Which he did. And it was Thomas who came out of Brittany with his wife Tiffany.

Except not, because if you look up her paperwork, [shouting] her name is actually Theophania! She's only called Tiffany hundreds of years later! [shouting continues] So the poem isn't right about anything! [voice breaking] GOD DAMN YOU, HEARNE! Everything is wrong! [wildly] And the poem is evidence of nothing useful at all.

[sigh] I'm sorry. It's just... it's been a lot. So here's the final working theory. Hearne knew the Coningsby family who either told him of the poem, or perhaps he spotted it himself, expressed an outsized interest in their collection of old papers, as he was wont to do, but either way, when editing his edition of the Scotichronicon, and it mentioned the family, that triggered his memory, and he added in his footnote, wrong as he saw it or wrong as he remembered it.

That note in his non-canonical edition, through pure bad luck, got swept up in the paper-writing footnote copy-paste game where no one checks the original and the context that the name 'Tiffany' is not actually in the original book got lost. At least now the timeline is complete, but all this work has shown is that in the 1700s the name Tiffany A-N-Y existed, which was not in question at all at the beginning.

For the gods' capricious tormenting pleasure alone, this path went absolutely nowhere, provided nothing of value, and drained many hours of my sadly finite life. Uhh... thanks for listening? I guess I just really needed to get out all of this frustration to tell you the story of tracking down a poem that didn't even make it into the main video.

[deflatedly] The end. Hello. Thank you for making it to not just the end of the video, but after the end of the video. Welcome. Well, that ended up being quite a journey over the past half a year. Sometimes in making a video, the path through the Forest of All Knowledge is clearly marked out. Other times, you have something much more difficult to try to get through.

[chuckling] Oh, don't step on the... whoa! And occasionally, there's almost nothing, and you're in danger of getting quite lost. But this is the job. To turn something that is unmarked, into something that's slightly marked. Perhaps something that's been completed with trusses to get you over the dangerous and difficult parts.

Some of the videos I make take unreasonably long amounts of time and unreasonably large amounts of effort. Things that are frankly not very good business sense from a YouTube algorithm sort of way but, I know that, as a viewer, I love it when people make those sorts of videos. And, I imagine if you're still watching, you're one of the people who likes those kinds of videos as well.

I've resisted for years coming up with a name for the people who support the channel. I've never really liked that stuff but I've changed my thoughts on that because I realize that they really are part of the team now. And, I know how this is going to sound, but I really mean it. The past six months I have definitely felt very alone at times working on this, but one of the things that has helped me push on with a crazy project like this is knowing that there are a lot of people who really care about these videos.

The capricious winds of the YouTube gods cannot be relied upon. But people willing to back projects directly that they really like, it means so much. These videos aren't for everyone. They're for you. So if you would like to become a Bonnie Bee and help support the creation of future videos, which will also get you access to some of the behind the scenes of how the videos are made, I just have one requirement first.

You must be financially self-supporting, so, no students in particular. I want people to work on themselves and work on their own lives before they try to help me out. I will be fine. Make sure you're good first. And, I plan on doing this for a long time. I have been doing this for a long time. I'll be here later.

So, as long as you're set there. If you would like to join, you can click here. And, thank you so much. I'll see you in the next video.