Ne vile velis: the Printed and Manuscript Witnesses to the Neville Motto Pun

Topic: Ne vile velis — the motto pun and its witnesses

The Neville family motto is ne vile velis, "wish nothing base." Between 1603 and 1619 at least four separate texts pun on it against the name Ne-vile, in Latin and in English, in print and in manuscript circulation. This packet gathers them in one place because they have previously been scattered across the Convivium, Coryate, EEBO-sweep and name-reference materials, and because the pun has a bearing on Sonnet 121 that has not been packeted.

Governing rule, stated first. The pun attaches to both branches of the family. It cannot identify a Neville on its own. Each witness below carries its own identity determination.

1. Verified Sourced Facts

A. John Owen, Epigrammata II.66 — Latin, to the Abergavenny cousin

Heading and text, from the Birmingham bilingual edition:

IN D. HENRICI NEVILLE EQUITIS EIUSDEM GENERI DICTUM. NE VILE VELIS

Nil vanum nec vile velis, generose Neville,

Nil prope cum valeant vilea, vana nihil.

The modern English rendering on the same site: "Neville, thy will ne-vile, or vain brings forth: / Sith vile things little, vain are Nothing worth."

• The motto is not merely alluded to. It is the epigram's printed title and is

embedded verbatim in the first line: nec vile velis, generose Neville.

• Identity: the Abergavenny line, not Billingbear. Settled, and not reopened

by the eiusdem note below. The addressee is connected to Owen's patroness Lady Mary Neville, daughter of the Earl of Dorset; Mary Sackville's husband is documented and is not Henry Neville of Billingbear. The exclusion of this witness from the Billingbear network therefore stands.

• Public control: Owen II, English

and Latin, epigram 66.

Date resolved, 1 August 2026. The epigram is present in Epigrammatum libri tres (London: ex officina Humfredi Lownes, sumtibus Simonis Waterson, 1607), Internet Archive bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_epigrammatum-libri-tres-_owen-john_1607, whose title page calls it Editio Tertia, prioribus emendatior.

The Latin therefore predates the 1609 Sonnets quarto by at least two years.

Edition history from USTC (1 August 2026)

The first edition is now identified:

USTC also records the Stationers' Register entry, from Arber vol. III p. 325:

Entered into the Stationers register on the 29 June 1606: "Master Waterson

Entred for his copy vnder the h[andes of Master Owin Gwyn and the wardens A

booke called Epigrammatum libri Tres Aucthore Johanne Owen Brittanno Nouæ

Collegiæ Oxoniensis vjd"

So the collection was licensed on 29 June 1606 and the Mary Neville dedication persists across at least sixteen years of reprinting, in London and on the Continent.

One thing this does NOT yet establish. The 1607 title page says prioribus emendatior, and editions of Owen grew between issues. Whether II.66 is present in the 1606 first edition has not been checked — the USTC digitisation link is EEBO/ProQuest, and only three copies are recorded. Until a 1606 copy is inspected, the safe statement is that the epigram is in print by 1607, with 1606 the likely but unconfirmed earlier date. The Harvard Houghton copy (STC 18984.5) is the obvious target.

Two contextual facts from the same volume:

• The book is dedicated `Ad Illustrissimam D. Mariam Neuille, Comitis

Dorcestriæ filiam, Patronam suam` — Lady Mary Neville, daughter of the Earl of Dorset, Owen's patron. This confirms the generi (son-in-law) relation in the heading of II.66.

• II.66 sits in a run of noble mottoes. II.65 is

In Comitis Dorcestriæ Angliæ Thesaurarij dictum — the Earl of Dorset's own adage — immediately before the Neville one. The motto epigram is a series convention, not a singular gesture toward this family.

A note on eiusdem generi — precision only, identity unaffected

The heading of II.66 reads IN D. HENRICI NEVILLE EQUITIS EIUSDEM GENERI DICTUM. Whose son-in-law eiusdem denotes is worth getting right, but it does not affect the identification, because both readings land on the same family. Recorded here so the point is not re-litigated:

1. The immediately preceding epigram is the Earl of Dorset's. II.65 is

In Comitis Dorcestriæ Angliæ Thesaurarij dictum. The natural referent of eiusdem — "of the same" — is the subject of the epigram it follows. That makes the addressee the Earl of Dorset's son-in-law, not Lady Mary's.

2. Lady Mary is herself Dorset's daughter. Book III.9 is addressed

To the Lady Mary Neville, daughter of the Earl of Dorset, his patroness.

3. Lady Mary is married to a Sir Henry Neville. Book III.205 is

AD THOMAM NEVILLE, D. HENRICI ET D. MARIAE NEVILLE MAXIMAE SPEI ET OPTIMAE INDOLIS PUERUM — to Thomas Neville, boy of Sir Henry and Lady Mary Neville.

On that reading the addressee is Lady Mary's husband — Dorset's son-in-law — rather than a generation below her. The Birmingham gloss, "THE MOTTO OF SIR HENRY NEVILLE HIS SON-IN-LAW", carries the same ambiguity in "HIS".

Either way the answer is the Abergavenny line, since Mary Sackville's husband is documented and is not the Billingbear Neville. The only thing at stake is whether to describe the addressee as her husband or her son-in-law. Worth fixing in any prose that names the relationship; not a reason to revisit the identification.

E. A second Neville epigram — Owen, 1607 volume, Liber Tertius 141

Located 1 August 2026. It is genuine; the earlier failure to find it was an edition-numbering problem, not an absence.

141. Ad D. Henr. Neville, Domini de Abergevenny filii herede.

The Latin, as OCR'd and therefore not quotable without page-image control, reads approximately:

…memini te dicere nuper, / Sit tua quod sapido lingua inimica sali? /

Manducare salem tibi nil opus, Henrice, quare? / Omne fere, loquitur quod tua

lingua, Sal est.

The sense is a compliment on the addressee's wit: you say your tongue is no friend to salt — why would you need to eat salt, Henry, when nearly everything your tongue speaks is salt?

Position in the volume. The hit falls after the LIBER TERTIVS marker in the Internet Archive text of the 1607 Epigrammatum libri tres, in a coherent local run:

Why it was not found earlier. The Birmingham bilingual edition numbers differently: its Book III.141 is ROMA, and no Abergavenny heading appears in its Book III. Its III.205 (Ad Thomam Neville…) does match the 1607 volume's 205, so the two texts agree in places and diverge in others. The editions do not share a numbering scheme and must not be cross-cited by epigram number.

Identity: explicitly the Abergavenny line. The heading names the addressee as son and heir of the Lord of Abergavenny. This is consistent with II.66 and disturbs nothing in this packet. If II.66's addressee is Lady Mary Neville's husband — see the eiusdem note above — then the two epigrams may well address the same man, but that is a genealogical question and is not settled here.

Quotation status: OCR only. The Archive djvu renders this heading as Abergenenny and filis herede and the verse as Manducate salem… Sal cf. Obtain a page image before printing any of it.

B. John Vicars, trans., Epigrams of John Owen (1619), TCP A08687 — English

Printed heading, verified in the EEBO name sweep:

Sir Henry Neuill his Adagie. Wish no vaine thing.

The four-line English text, primary-extracted from TCP A08687 on 1 August 2026 and matching the preserved blog note exactly:

NO vaine, nor vile thing wish to have,

This Counsell is both wise and grave:

For, base things are of base esteeme,

And wisemen, vaine things, nought worth deeme.

• Identity: as Owen's Latin — the Abergavenny Neville. This item was previously

logged as an excluded false positive for the diplomat in the EEBO direct-name sweep, and that exclusion stands for identification purposes. It is not excluded as a motto witness, which is why it belongs here.

• In the printed sequence this is again a run of noble adages: `EPIG. 65. The

Earle of Dorset his Adagie` immediately precedes it, exactly as in Owen's Latin.

• Public text: https://texts.earlyprint.org/works/A08687.xml; TCP XML via the

GitHub route in section 5. Internet Archive page images: bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_epigrams-of-that-most-w_owen-john_1619.

C. John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos (1603), TCP A19903 — to Billingbear

A full sonnet headed "To the Noble, discreete, and wellbeloved Knight Sir Henry Nevill", closing:

All which presume thou art not gilt by guile

Because thy noble name denies the vile

with the printed marginal gloss Ne-vile.

• Identity: strongly the diplomat. In 1603 his son was about fifteen, while

the elder Henry had been knighted and held public office.

• Image-verified at original available resolution, Internet Archive leaf

n283; independent control from EarlyPrint TCP A19903.

• This is the only one of the four witnesses whose leaf has been directly

inspected in the project.

D. Convivium Philosophicum (attrib. John Hoskyns) — manuscript circulation

Latin, with John Reinolds's contemporary English:

Robertus Equorum amicus, / Ne vile aestimet Henricus / Dignabitur adesse…

Sir Robert Horse-lover the while / Ne let Sir Henry count it vile / Will

come with gentle speed…

• Clark's note glosses this as "Nevile, alluding to the family motto *Ne vile

velis*."

• Identity: unresolved, probably Billingbear. Tom Cain judges Henry Neville

of Berkshire only "marginally more likely" than the Birling/Abergavenny cousin, on the ground that his politics fit the rest of the company.

• Source: Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1898),

pp. 50-53. CELM HoJ 267; manuscript copy TNA SP 14/66, f. 2r-v. No manuscript image inspected; Clark's edited printed text is the control.

2. The Sonnet 121 observation

Vicars's English quatrain turns on vile and base and rhymes esteeme with deeme. Sonnet 121 opens:

'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd,

When not to be receives reproach of being;

And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem'd

Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing…

Shared: the doubled vile, the esteem/deem rhyme, and the argument that base things are worth little and are so reckoned by others. The sonnet's own rhyme scheme then runs level / bevel / evil at lines 9, 11 and 13.

Attribution of the observation: Ken Feinstein, blog, 28 July 2019; local copy blog sonnet121 vicars 2019 07 28.

Chronology — the control that governs any use of this

• The Sonnets quarto is 1609. Vicars's translation is 1619. **Vicars

cannot be a source for Sonnet 121.** Any influence would have to run the other way, or both draw independently on the motto tradition.

• Owen's Latin is now dated. II.66 is in the 1607 Epigrammatum libri tres,

itself a third edition, so the Latin pun was in print at least two years before the Sonnets quarto. It is a chronologically viable analogue. This does not make it a source, and no direction claim is made here: the motto was public property, and Davies had already printed the pun in 1603.

• The Davies witness (1603) predates the Sonnets quarto and is the earliest

printed instance of the pun located so far.

3. Why the cluster matters, and what it does not show

What it shows. Between 1603 and 1619 the ne vile velis pun was a live, public, repeatedly printed convention about this surname, deployed in Latin and English, in a commendatory sonnet, in an epigram book, in its translation, and in manuscript verse circulating among the Hoskyns/Donne/Brooke company. A reader in those years encountering vile beside a Neville would be expected to hear it.

What it does not show. It does not identify which Neville any given text means; two of the four witnesses point at the Abergavenny cousin. It does not establish that Shakespeare's Sonnet 121 refers to any Neville. And a family motto in wide circulation is precisely the kind of material that can generate coincidental resemblance, which is why the identity determinations above are kept per-witness.

Related network note. Thomas Vicars, whose mother-in-law was Neville's widow, referenced both Shakespeare and John Vicars in 1628; see thomas vicars. Kept adjacent, not collapsed into the above.

4. Citations

• John Owen, Epigrammata II.66, bilingual edition, University of Birmingham:

https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/owen/2eng.html and https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/owen/2lat.html

• John Vicars, trans., Epigrams of John Owen (1619), EEBO-TCP A08687:

https://texts.earlyprint.org/works/A08687.xml

• John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos (1603), EEBO-TCP A19903:

https://texts.earlyprint.org/works/A19903.xml; Internet Archive leaf n283.

• Convivium Philosophicum, attrib. John Hoskyns, with Reinolds's translation,

in John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1898), pp. 50-53. CELM HoJ 267; TNA SP 14/66, f. 2r-v.

5. Reproduction: pulling EEBO books from Internet Archive and TCP

Both routes were used for this packet and are worth recording, because they serve different purposes.

Transcription (what you quote from) — TCP via GitHub. EarlyPrint serves a JavaScript shell for texts.earlyprint.org/works/*.xml. The raw TCP XML is at:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textcreationpartnership/<TCPID>/master/<TCPID>.xml

This is human-corrected text. Normalise long-s (ſ→s) and strip combining marks before searching, or Windſor-type words will fragment.

Page images and non-TCP editions — Internet Archive. EEBO scans use the identifier pattern bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_<title-slug>_<author-slug>_<year> (and ...1641-1700_... for the later set). Find them with the search API:

https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=<query>&fl[]=identifier&fl[]=year&rows=20&output=json

then https://archive.org/metadata/<id> for the record, and https://archive.org/download/<id>/<id>.pdf or <id>djvu for the files.

Important caveat. The Archive djvu is raw OCR of early modern type and is poor: in the 1607 Owen it renders Nil vanum as N. vanum and Ne vile velis as Ne vi ie velis. Use it to locate and to date, never to quote. The Latin quoted in section 1A above is taken from the Birmingham edition and the 1607 witness is cited for the date and the dedication, not for its wording. Where a TCP transcription exists, quote from that; where only images exist, quote only after inspecting the leaf.