The Macclesfield Psalter, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

The Macclesfield Psalter is entirely unknown and unrecorded.  It is the most important discovery of any English illuminated manuscript in living memory, and is probably the greatest East Anglian manuscript to appear on the market since the sale of the Luttrell Psalter in 1929.

Exactly a hundred years ago C.W. Dyson Perrins bought from Lord Braybrooke a then unknown East Anglian Psalter of quite extraordinary richness and originality, including in its Calendar the feast of the dedication of the small parish church of Saint Andrew in Gorleston, Suffolk, just to the south of Yarmouth on the eastern coast of East Anglia, near the southern border of Norfolk.   This provenance was unexpected, for books of such quality are usually associated with origins in very great cities or vastly wealthy monasteries.   It became even more surprising when Sydney Cockerell realised the book’s connection with a second outstanding English Psalter which had been since at least 1820 in the Bibliothèque municipale in Douai, ms.171 there.   The Douai Psalter, as it is now called, also contained an entry for the dedication of Gorleston Church and it was presented in the fourteenth century by one Thomas, vicar of Gorleston, to an abbot John, perhaps of Bury St. Edmunds.   In July 1905, Cockerell and Dyson Perrins travelled together to Douai, and they placed the two supreme Psalters side by side.   “The latter is by far the finer book”, Cockerell admitted in his diary (B.L. Add.MS. 52642).

The result of that visit was the first great publication on the East Anglian school of illumination, Cockerell’s The Gorleston Psalter, Chiswick Press, 1907.   The two manuscripts were found to share a common origin and presumably a common patron, then still unidentified, but to be slightly different dates and by different artists.   The Gorleston Psalter probably originated about 1310-20 whereas the Douai Psalter cannot be earlier than 1320 and might even be as late as 1340.   “It is impossible to exaggerate the richness, beauty and splendour of the Douai Psalter”, wrote Cockerell (p.4), “… The colour in the abundant decoration is most lovely and harmonious”.   M.R. James described it as “absolutely faultless”.   Then tragedy struck.   As the German armies were advancing towards Douai in the autumn of 1914, the authorities buried the precious Psalter for safety in a zinc box in the forecourt of the library.   When the box was removed at the end of the First World War, the Psalter was found to have been almost entirely destroyed by water and acidity.   All that remain in Douai today are a small number of disintegrated and washed-out vellum fragments, and several precious black-and-white photographs of 1903 and 1907.   This was probably the greatest single loss of any English work of art in the twentieth century.

Dyson Perrins bequeathed his Gorleston Psalter to the British Museum in 1958.   It is now B.L. Add. MS. 49622.   It is regarded as one of the very greatest illuminated manuscripts in the national collection.   It is related especially to the Stowe Breviary also in the British Library, Stowe MS. 12, and, in a slightly wider range, to two other East Anglian Psalters, the St-Omer Psalter, now B.L. Yates Thompson MS. 14 (Add.MS. 39810) and the Ormesby Psalter in the Bodleian in Oxford, MS. Douce 366.   For this group, including the lost Douai manuscript, cf. L.F. Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1285-1385, 1986 (A Survey of MSS. Illuminated in the British Isles, V), nos.50, 79, 104 and 43 respectively.   The fragmentary relics of the Douai Psalter were studied, necessarily mostly hypothetically, by Caroline S. Hull, ‘The Douai Psalter and Related East Anglian Manuscripts’, unpublished PhD thesis, Yale, 1994.   Another thesis, that of Margot McIlwain (‘The Gorleston Psalter’, Institute of Fine Arts, New York, 1999), suggests plausibly that the mysterious patron at Gorleston was John, eighth Earl of Warenne (1286-1347).

That, in a sense, is where the tale stops.   The discovery of the present manuscript transforms it.   Firstly, it is very probably copied by the same scribe as the Gorleston Psalter, who may also have written the Douai Psalter.   Secondly, the text and part of the illumination is copied directly from the Douai Psalter, or vice versa.   Thirdly, it is by the same actual artist, hitherto known in no other complete manuscript.   That itself adds hugely to our knowledge of English fourteenth-century art, and makes up, in part, the destruction of his almost entire known oeuvre.   Finally, it too must be from Gorleston, for its prefatory miniatures show Saint Edmund, patron saint of Suffolk, and Saint Andrew, patron saint of Gorleston Church.   One Psalter from Gorleston is unexpected; two is extraordinary; three is a workshop.

Presumably the patron of the present Psalter was the same Earl of Warenne.   He was owner of vast estates, Earl of Surrey and Sussex, and commander of armies in Scotland and Aquitaine.   He was closely involved in the affairs of Edward II.   He was excommunicated for multiple adultery.   The many rabbits in the borders include depictions of their warrens (fols.116r, 151r, etc.), a pun on the family name.   There may have been a coat-of-arms in the border on the Beatus leaf, now mutilated.   The other two Gorleston Psalters are of large scale.   This book is tiny.   Two were perhaps for the altars of the church, and the third for private use by the family; or the earl and the countess had one each, with the miniature version for a child or other member of the household.   The medieval parish Church of St. Andrew at Gorleston still stands in what are now suburbs of Yarmouth, built of flint, with a very tall square tower.

The Psalter almost certainly left Gorleston in the Middle Ages.   The Earl of Warenne died in 1347 and his widow, Isabel de Holland, died in 1359; they left no legitimate heirs and their estates reverted to the crown.  The Gorleston Psalter was almost certainly acquired by Norwich Cathedral Priory.   The Douai Psalter was given by the vicar of Gorleston to another monastery, probably Bury St. Edmunds, perhaps in the 1370s (C.S. Hull, ‘Abbot John, Vicar Thomas and M.R. James: the Early History of the Douai Psalter’, The Legacy of M.R. James, ed. L. Dennison, 2001, pp.118-27).   This was common practice.   Other East Anglian personal Psalters were generally given to religious houses after the deaths of their first owners, including the Ormesby Psalter which was given to Norwich Priory and the Psalter of Robert de Lisle (B.L. Arundel MS. 83.II), given to Chicksands Priory.   The present book was acquired by a convent, for there is an erased inscription of a nun below the miniature of Saint Edmund on fol.1r, “syst[er] barbara barsie” (reading of the surname not quite certain) and, on fol.8v, apparently “barbara boke” .   The nearest nunneries to Gorleston were Bungay Priory, about 15 miles south-west of Gorleston, and the priory of St. Mary and St. John at Carrow in Norwich, about 18 miles to the east of Gorleston.   No books are known from Bungay.   Carrow is the source of two extant Psalters, one in the Walters Art Museum and one in the national museum in Reykavik.   The names of several additional saints have been added to the prefatory prayer on fol.8r, beginning with Saint John the Evangelist, patron of Carrow, and ending with Saint Barbara.

Unlike the Gorleston Psalter, the feast and octave and translation of Saint Thomas Becket were not erased from the Calendar.   The manuscript was possibly in recusant hands after the Reformation.   It belonged around 1600 to Anthony Watson and to John Smeaton, probably in that order, for both their names are also on fol.1r.   The first reads “Anthonius Watson Ep: Cicessentris”.   He was bishop of Chichester 1596-1605, but, perhaps more relevantly, he was a Cambridge man, a graduate and later Fellow of Christ’s College 1573-83.   The manuscript was perhaps then still in East Anglia.   Watson was present at the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 and he took part in the Hampton Court Conference.

The Psalter was probably acquired by Sir Thomas Parker (1667-1732), first Earl of Macclesfield, Lord Chancellor of England.   It is just possible that it was already at Shirburn Castle when it was bought by the first Earl in 1716, since the purchase included the residue of an earlier library, with some medieval books formerly owned by the Chamberlayne family, of recusant sympathies.   It has been in the library at Shirburn ever since.   It has the 1860 bookplate and pressmark 3.C.11.

text

Cockerell opens his book on the Gorleston Psalter by saying that there were four classes of medieval illuminated book which are distinctively English.   They are Anglo-Saxon Psalters (especially from Winchester), Bestiaries of the twelfth and early thirteenth century, Apocalypses of the late thirteenth, and, lastly, the lavish East Anglian Psalters of the first half of the fourteenth century.   The present Psalter comprises:

Folios 1r-2v, dedication miniatures.

Folios 3r-7v, Calendar.   This is of mostly of Sarum Use, graded with lections, with minor variations sometimes marked “non Sarum” (as 2 April, Mary of Egypt, ungraded), almost exactly word for word as in the Gorleston and Douai Psalters throughout.   Where there are very slight variations from the Gorleston Psalter Calendar, the Macclesfield Psalter always agrees exactly with the Calendar of the Douai Psalter.   These include, for example, the omission of Prejectus (25 January), Potenciana (19 May), Swithun (2 July), Pantaleon (28 July), Sabina (29 August), Laudus (21 September), Justus (18 October), Eustace (2 November) and a few others, all of which occur in Gorleston but not in Douai or in the present book.   Cockerell (Gorleston Psalter, p.11) suggests they were crowded out of the Douai Psalter from lack of space.   However, both the present Psalter and the Douai Psalter do include Richard of Chichester (3 April, and his translation, 16 June), Cuthberga (31 August) and Thomas of Hereford (2 October), none of which are in the Gorleston Psalter.   The similarities are so close and consistent that the present Calendar must be copied from that of the Douai Psalter, or vice versa.   The only notable discrepancy of any kind is the omission of Dominic (5August), whose name occurs both in the Gorleston and Douai Psalters.   This may simply be scribal error.

Folios 8r-v, Prayer before the Psalter, “Suscipe dignare domine deus …”, for male use (as in the Gorleston Psalter, fol.7v).

Folios 9r-227r, Psalter and Canticles, with the principal divisions at Psalm 1 (fol.9r), 26 (fol.39r), 38 (fol.58r), 51 (fol.76r), 52 (fol.77r), 68 (leaf missing after fol.95), 80 (leaf missing after fol.117), 97 (fol.139v), 101 (leaf missing after fol.141), 109 (fol.161v) and 119 (fol.182v, first of the Gradual Psalms), followed by the Canticles from Confitebor (fol.207v) to the Athanasian Creed.

Folios 227v-233r, Litany.   The saints invoked and the petitions which follow agree word-for-word with those of the Douai Psalter and Stowe 12, but they differ considerably from those of the Gorleston Psalter.   They include many English names – Alban, Aelphege, Edmund of East Anglia, Dunstan, Botulph, Swithun, Osyth, Etheldreda, and others – and prayers for the king and for the comfort of the poor and of prisoners, and the long prayer Ostende nobis (fols.232v-233r here) printed by Cockerell (Gorleston Psalter, pp.15-16) from the Douai Psalter.

Folio 233r-235r, Collects, Deus qui proprium (fol.233r), Omnipotens sempiterna (fol.233v), Deus qui caritatis (fol.233v), Deus a quo (fol.234r), Fidelium deus (fol.234r) and Pietate tua (fol.234v), ending, “… et requiem eternam concede, per”, all exactly as in the Douai Psalter but differing from the Gorleston Psalter.

Folios 235v-252r, The Office of the Dead, with Vespers (fol.235v) and Matins (fol.237v), with 9 lections, ending on fol.245v, followed by a series of prayers, the first opening imperfectly “tractionibus in rixis …” (fol.246r), Veniam peto coram te (fol.247r), Deus in cuius dictione (fol.247v), Salvator mundi (fol.248v), Gratias ago tibi (fol.249r), Gratias ago tibi (fol.249v, for use on rising in the morning), Gratias ago tibi (fol.249v, for use on going to bed) and finally Confiteor tibi domine (fol.250r), ending “… persolvere possim, per xpistum dominum nostrum”.   There are prayers added in a hand of c.1500 on the final blank, fol.252v.

illumination

The fourteen large miniatures here and the many hundreds of smaller marginal pictures furnish an enormously important and utterly unexpected addition to the corpus of English medieval painting.   East Anglia was extremely wealthy in the first half of the fourteenth century, before the Black Death, and the prosperity of the wool trade is reflected in the quality and opulence of the illuminated manuscripts made there.   The Macclesfield Psalter belongs in the central tradition exemplified by the Gorleston Psalter.   This includes close similarities of colour and technique, and the uniquely English inclusion (for example) of a vast Beatus initial formed of a Jesse tree.  Many of the border motifs derive precisely from the Gorleston repertoire, including scenes both of contemporary rural life and of the world turned upsidedown where animals become human and the hunters hunted.   Almost exact parallels include a rabbit and a hound playing the organ together (fol.15r, cf. Gorleston fol.106v), the ploughing scene (fol.77r, cf. Gorleston fol.15v), a rabbit blowing a hunting horn (fol.115v, cf. Gorleston fol.161v), a fox running off with a duck (fol.134r, cf. Gorleston fol.103r), a swineherd knocking down acorns (fol.170v, cf. Gorleston fol.154r) and the irresistible sequence of the rabbit’s funeral and the solemn vigil around its bier (fols.151v-152r, cf. Gorleston fols.133r and 164r); for all these, cf. Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, pls.IX-XIII.   This is the world of psychological grotesquery and inversion evoked by Image on the Edge, 1992, and Mirror in Parchment, 1998, by the late Michael Camille, who interpreted allusions to snails, soldiers with swords in sheaths, and rabbits, to name only a few, as being explicitly sexual, not necessarily inappropriately in reference to the private life of the eighth Earl of Warenn

The Gorleston Psalter probably dates from around 1310-20.   About 1325 a full-page miniature of the Crucifixion was added to it, in a quite new style, with elements deriving quite explicitly from Sienese painting and the work of Simone Martini.   “Modelling and highlighting of draperies, bodies and faces is achieved with little use of line, whereas English painting of the period is dominated by linear effects.   The small slit-eyed faces seem to be the English artist’s interpretation of Italian heads, as is the fuzzy hair” (R. Marks and N. Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting, 1981, p.78).   This new glimpse of the earliest moment of the renaissance reappears, to some extent, in the Stowe Breviary, datable to 1322-25, and especially in the lost Douai Psalter.   The thesis of Dr Hull, cited above, assigns the Douai manuscript to two hands, one of who she called the Douai Psalter Master and the other, the Douai Psalter Assistant (op.cit., pp.160-67).   The present book illuminated is by this second hand throughout.   He should perhaps be called the Macclesfield Master.   Dr Frederica Law-Turner tells us, “His style is characterised by a distinctive palette, the utmost delicacy and refinement of technique, achieved by the soft modelling of drapery in white highlights, and a highly expressive visual language of gesture and intense facial expression.  He shows a nascent interest in the Italianate spatial effects which characterise the original campaign of [the] slightly later St. Omer Psalter, generally dated to between c.1325 and 1330.  Indeed, the Macclesfield Psalter is perhaps the first manuscript in which such effects appear.”

Both the Douai Psalter and the present manuscript include the feast of Saint Thomas of Hereford in their Calendars, 2 October.   He was canonised in 1320.   That is a terminus post quem for both books.   The Douai Psalter and the Stowe Breviary contain historical lists which cannot be earlier than 1322 and do not include the death of a bishop who died in 1325.   That is less absolute, for the lack of a name may indicate carelessness or an obsolete exemplar, and Dr Hull prefers to re-date the Douai Psalter to the later 1330s.   The present book stands somewhere between the Gorleston and Douai manuscripts, and, if the re-dating of the latter is valid, the Macclesfield Psalter was probably its exemplar.

The present book is, almost certainly, by the same scribe as the Gorleston Psalter.   Its Calendar is identical, except where there were multiple names on single days.   The small scale here allowed space for only the first name.   When the text was copied into the Douai book, which is larger and could have contained them, they were reproduced exactly as they were pared down for the Macclesfield Psalter (see above, Calendar).   Where the Gorleston and Douai Psalters differ in their Litanies and collects, the present book corresponds exactly, word for word, with Douai.   The iconography of the major initials corresponds too.   The great opening Beatus initials of the Gorleston and Douai books are remarkably similar to the initial here, fol.9r, with Jesse asleep and his descendants in the folds of the vine-stems, and around the outer borders.   The sequence moving upward above Jesse in the same in the Macclesfield and Douai Psalters, but different from the Gorleston Psalter, which places the Virgin and Child and the Crucifixion where the other two put David with his harp and Solomon in judgement.   Here is the crucial factor which shows the sequence.   In the Gorleston Psalter, Jesse’s robe hangs down in tubular folds and dangles down over the edge of the edge of the initial.   It is exactly the same, even to the shape of the folds, in the present book.   By the time it is copied into the Douai Psalter, Jesse has woken up, rolled over, and has tucked it in.   If those three books were copied in direct sequence, as is probable, it can only have been Gorleston-Macclesfield-Douai, in that order.   There is a detailed table of subjects of English Psalter initials in L.F. Sandler, The Peterborough Psalter in Brussels, 1974, pp.98-9.   The anointing of David at Psalm 26 is somewhat unusual (although not unknown) in English Psalters: it occurs in the Gorleston, Ormesby and Douai Psalters, for example, among others.   It is here on fol.39r.   Most Psalters would show David pointing to his eyes.   The scene of Doeg wielding Goliath’s sword at Psalm 51 (fol.76r), however, is extremely rare.   It occurs in the Gorleston Psalter, the Ormesby Psalter, the Douai Psalter and, hitherto, no others.   The choices of the Annunciation to the Shepherds for Psalm 97 (fol.139v) and the Father and Son for Psalm 109, without the Holy Ghost (fol.161v), are even rarer.   Both subjects occur in only two other recorded manuscripts: the Gorleston and Douai Psalters, and nowhere else.   The illustration for Psalm 38 here, apparently David and Uriah (fol.58r), is unique.

The real delights of the Macclesfield Psalter, however, are the realistic portrait busts with soft fluffy hair, the naked semi-classical sculptural figures (fol.110v, for example), the delicately shrouded figures which lean and writhe from the borders as in the finest contemporary work of Jean Pucelle in France, the marginal figures who cross into the text and peer through the initials as historiations (fols.52v, 92, etc.), and the amazing naturalistic skate wafting across the manuscript (fol.68r).   That is the genius of this breathtaking artist.

Two full-page miniatures:

1. Folio 1r, Saint Edmund of East Anglia, 93mm. by 48mm., within a border, 107mm. by 63mm., with trefoil and daisy extensions from each corner, the saint shown as a king, crowned, wearing white gloves and decorated slippers, standing on a grassy mound holding a long arrow with which he was martyred by the Danes at Hoxne, Suffolk, in 870.

2. Folio 1v, Saint Andrew, 93mm. by 48mm., within a border, 107mm. by 63mm., with trefoil and floral extensions from each corner, the saint shown bare-footed in coloured robes held by a gold broach, holding up and gazing at a closed book (presumably the present manuscript, bound in pink and white textile with a grey border and an orange and white clasp-strap), his other hand supporting a narrow X-shaped cross.

Half-page miniature:

Folio 8v, Christ in Judgment, seated on a rainbow and displaying his wounds, 56mm. by 51mm., within a border 66mm. by 63mm., with trefoil and daisy extensions from each corner, symbols of each of the Evangelists emerging from clouds and holding scrolls with their names; burnished and tooled gold ground.

Eleven large historiated initials:

1. Folio 9r, initial ‘B’ (“Beatus vir”), 72mm. by 77mm., enclosing a complex Jesse tree within elaborate reticulated interlaced plant stems on a burnished gold ground, Jesse asleep in the lower foreground, David above him playing the harp, Solomon above him again seated on a throne with a sword of judgement, the Virgin and Child at the top, fourteen full-length figures holding scrolls on either side and continuing within the broad full border surrounding the page, three seated enthroned kings at the foot of the page; bas-de-page scenes of a grotesque musician playing a viol and a swordsman fighting a griffon; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

2. Folio 39r, initial ‘D’ (“Dominus illuminatio”), 59mm. by 70mm., enclosing David being anointed by Samuel, watched by Jesse holding a scroll, within and behind and before an initial of reticulated plant stems, David seated holding an elaborate gold-topped sceptre, Samuel to the right leaning dramatically forward gesticulating and emptying a vase over the boy-king’s head; elaborate full border including heads of a queen and a bearded man, two full-length trumpeters with gold instruments (one supporting a banner of orange and gold stripes), other grotesque creatures and animals grappling with the foliage; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

3. Folio 58r, initial ‘D’ (“Dixi custodiam”), 52mm. by 66mm., enclosing David giving directions to a standing soldier watched by a bearded figure with a sceptre, perhaps David sending Uriah into battle to be killed under the reproving scrutiny of Nathan, the king seated on an elaborate gothic throne mounted on little pillars; a roundel of a young man in classical profile in the outer border; bas-de-page scene of a man on a prancing horse pointing to a damsel holding a puppy and accompanied by a naked wildman in a forest; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

4. Folio 76r, initial ‘Q’ (“Quid gloriaris”), 40mm. by 51mm., enclosing Doeg the Edomite holding Goliath’s sword and beheading the priests of Nob and all their families; the tail of the initial formed of a dragon; bas-de-page scene of a knight unsheathing a sword to fight a snail, watched by a squirrel and a man hanging upsidedown in an oak tree.

5. Folio 77r, initial ‘D’ (“Dixit insipiens”), 53mm. by 69mm., enclosing David enthroned addressing a fool apparently throwing off his clothes, watched by two scandalised courtiers, a dog in the foreground; the full border including a man with a hawk and another seated playing a stringed instrument, and four very fine portrait busts of a woman with flowers in her hair, a king, a woman in a bonnet, and a bearded wildman; bas-de-page scene of two peasants ploughing a field with a pair of horses; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

6. Folio 139v, initial ‘C’ (“Cantate domino”), 56mm. by 65mm., enclosing the Annunciation to the Shepherds, an angel standing on the left holding a scroll, three shepherds (one with bagpipes), set on a green hillside with trees, a dog, three sheep and a goat nibbling branches; the border including an angel musician, two classical profiles in roundels, and a large grotesque with bearded faces each end; bas-de-page scene of a young woman welcoming a man from whose tunic a sword projects horizontally; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

7. Folio 161v, initial ‘D’ (“Dixit dominus”), 53mm. by 67mm., enclosing the Father and Son enthroned together in animated conversation, God holding a book, Christ with his hands raised; the border including birds and roundels with the heads of a bearded wildman, a king, and a bishop; bas-de-page scene of a young man with a scroll in conversation with a seated king; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

8. Folio 182v, initial ‘A’ (“Ad dominum cum tribularer”), 40mm. by 50mm., enclosing David as a bearded saint kneeling in prayer as God emerges from a cloud to bless him; the initial partly formed of elaborate bird-like dragons biting each other; the border includes the head of a young man with his curly fair hair tied with an orange band; bas-de-page scene of a grotesque so alarming a young man that his hat comes off.

9. Folio 207v, initial ‘C’ (“Confitebor tibi”), 40mm. by 48mm., enclosing David as a bearded saint seated on a bench raising his arms towards God whose hand emerges from a cloud to bless him; the border includes grotesques, a semi-naked giant, and a jay.

10. Folio 235v, initial ‘P’ (“Placebo”), 52mm. by 70mm., enclosing a death-bed scene, an emaciated man lying in bed as a shrouded skeleton joyfully prances on his body and stabs him with a lance, watched by a grieving widow wringing her hands; the border includes Christ blessing the death scene and two young men pointing towards the event (perhaps the man’s sons, planning their inheritance); roundels of the faces of a man and a woman and a bearded bishop; bas-de-page scene of a man tumbling from a horse; the opening words of text ranged vertically to the right of the initial.

11. Folio 237v, initial ‘D’ (“Dirige”), 46mm. by 60mm., enclosing a bier draped in decorated cloth and surrounded by candles, a water stoup in the foreground; the border including dragons; bas-de-page scene of a hunched figure listening to a priest reading from a book on a lectern.