03 October 2024
Our first 1000 digitised manuscripts return
Following the cyber-attack on the British Library last year, staff have been working behind the scenes to restore access to the Library’s digitised manuscripts. The Library has now made an initial batch of 1,000 digitised items available online, of which over 600 are ancient, medieval and early modern manuscripts.
A full list of the items, with links to their digitised images and summary catalogue information, can be consulted on the British Library website. Improvements to the discoverability of the manuscripts will be made in due course.
The page for Easter Sunday in the Sherborne Missal: Add MS 74236, p. 216
A highlight is the Sherborne Missal (Add MS 74236), a service book containing all the texts required for celebrating Mass on the different feasts, holidays and saints’ days throughout the year. Made for the Benedictine abbey of St Mary in Sherborne, Dorset, the manuscript has been called one of the masterpieces of 15th-century English illumination, with decoration on nearly all of its 694 pages. You can read more about the manuscript in our previous blogpost and listen to a guided tour and discussion of the page for Easter Sunday as part of the BBC’s Moving Picture Series.
A phoenix rising from the ashes, from an illuminated Bestiary: Harley MS 4751, f. 65r
The selection also includes all 400 manuscripts digitised as part of The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project, a ground-breaking collaborative project between the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The manuscripts, made in England and France between the years 700 to 1200, comprise a wide range of texts and topics, including biblical, liturgical and theological works, science, music and medicine, Classical and contemporary literature and works on history and law. Among them are a lavishly-illuminated Bestiary (Harley MS 4751), with illustrated accounts of birds, beasts and fantastical creatures, and the Eadui Psalter (Arundel MS 155), a copy of the Book of Psalms, written by a scribe called Eadui Basan at Christ Church, Canterbury in the early 11th century, with a partial gloss in Old English.
The Beatus page of the Eadui Psalter, showing the opening of Psalm 1: Arundel MS 155, f. 12r
There are also a number of manuscripts containing significant works of Middle English literature. They include the ‘Amherst Manuscript’ (Add MS 37790), a Carthusian anthology of theological material containing the only surviving medieval copy of the Short Text of The Revelations of Divine Love by the anchoress Julian of Norwich. This work is an account of the 16 mystical visions Julian experienced in her early 30s, and the earliest surviving example of a book in the English language known to have been written by a woman.
The Short Text of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: Add MS 37790, f. 98v
As further digitised manuscripts become available online, we will post updates about them on the Medieval Manuscripts blog. Browse a list of all currently available digitised manuscripts here.
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07 June 2022
Golden scenes from the Life of Christ
Eight leaves with narrative scenes from the Life of Christ on gold grounds feature in our Gold exhibition. They are now separated from any text, but it is very likely that originally they formed part of a prefatory cycle of images appearing before the book of Psalms. Because they have been de-contextualised, the leaves’ origin is uncertain and has been much debated. Suggestions range from centres in Denmark, Germany, northern France and Flanders, around 1200. The figures are rendered in bold primary colours, with thick black lines creating their features and outlining their clothing, made more vivid by the contrasting incised gold surface on which they are placed.
All of the figures appear on burnished gold grounds, which have been incised with different patterns, including diamonds and swirling foliage. Hints of how the paintings were made are apparent in the glimpses of the reddish gesso, the base on which the gold leaf was laid, in the Annunciation to the Shepherds image. The gesso has been exposed in places due to damage of the gold. This aspect of their production is explored in more detail in the Library’s Gold exhibition, where these two leaves are featured in a section focused on technique.
The leaves are now kept separately, but until the 1930s they were bound together with a rare copy of the Heliand, a 9th-century poem in which the Four Gospels are combined into a single narrative account in Old Saxon (Cotton MS Caligula A vii). They were probably bound together by Robert Cotton (b. 1571, d. 1631), whose vast collection of manuscripts was one of the foundation collections of the British Library.
These leaves were digitised as part of the Polonsky Medieval England and France 700-1200 project. For another example of a prefatory cycle in a Psalter digitised as part of the same project, see our previous blogpost on Prefacing the Psalms.
The Library’s Gold exhibition is a feast for the eyes, with 50 manuscripts and books from many different cultures, languages and time periods, all illuminated or bound in gold. It runs from Friday 20 May - Sunday 2 October 2022, and you can book tickets online now. An accompanying book Gold: Spectacular Manuscripts from Around the World is available from the British Library shop.
Kathleen Doyle
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Supported by:
The exhibition is supported by the Goldhammer Foundation and the American Trust for the British Library, with thanks to The John S Cohen Foundation, The Finnis Scott Foundation, the Owen Family Trust and all supporters who wish to remain anonymous.
09 March 2022
Tall tales of the medieval ‘holster book’
If you have a modern medium-sized paperback (also known as B-format in the UK) or an A4-sized notebook at hand, you can check the page proportions of most modern printed material. That is, that the width of the page is between 65 and 70 percent of the height of the page. This relationship between height and width also holds true for most medieval manuscripts. But there are intriguing exceptions to this norm. For instance, there is a subset of medieval books that have remarkably tall and narrow dimensions.
One of the advantages of this unusual format is that it makes it easy to hold the book open with one hand and to turn the page with the other. This suggests that the text within these books may have been referenced while standing up or moving around. They are also often relatively small and portable, and some scholars have suggested that they were meant to hang from a belt or to be kept in a leather ‘holster’. Another theory is that they were easily packed in a saddlebag to take travelling. This is why they are now often called ‘holster books’ or ‘saddle books’.
One late 10th-century English example of such a book is now the first part of a composite manuscript. It mainly contains the Rule of St Benedict (Regula Sancti Benedicti), by St Benedict of Nursia (b. c. 480, d. c. 550). The Rule is a set of guidelines for the spiritual and practical life of a monastic community and was the most important such rule in the early medieval period. Its influence was especially marked during the so-called Benedictine reform movement in England during the second half of the 10th century. The reformers, with the support of King Edgar (r. 959–975), aimed to reinstate strict monasticism following the Rule of St Benedict. In reformed houses, a passage of the Rule was read aloud every day.
This copy is around 230 mm tall and only around 95 mm wide. The proportions of this book were discussed by John Lowden in this virtual exhibition, in which he suggested that it might have been made to fit a recycled ivory plaque used to decorate the book cover. The large writing and short lines of this copy of the Rule would also have assisted with the communal daily readings.
Books used in the liturgy were also quite often made in this format. One example is the Noyon Sacramentary, a book containing the prayers and texts needed to perform Mass and other ceremonies made for the use of Noyon Cathedral in the late 10th century. It has been called a ‘saddle book’ since it might have been meant for use by the bishop of Noyon when he needed to travel to consecrate churches throughout the bishopric. You can read more about its decorated initials and their connections to earlier 9th-century manuscripts in a previous blogpost.
Many tall and narrow books from the late 10th and 12th centuries contain works by classical authors, for instance this copy of the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil (b. 70 BC, d. 19 BC) made in the late 12th or early 13th century. Considered Virgil’s masterpiece, the Aeneid soon became a standard text in Latin education and it continued to be used to teach Latin grammar and rhetoric throughout the Middle Ages. It is possible that this book was used by a teacher who needed it constantly at hand, to read aloud from and refer back to, while moving through a classroom setting. Another possible reason for this format specifically for classical poetry is that it fits the generally short lines of verse, such as the hexameter of Latin epic poetry.
It is even more likely that another 12th-century manuscript, which was digitised as part of The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project, was used in a classroom. This book contains the Thebaid by the Roman poet Statius, another Latin epic poem that was a popular text of the medieval school curriculum. As seen on this page, with the end of Book I and beginning of Book II, the layout of its tall and narrow pages left generous outer and lower margins. This was evidently necessary, considering the many marginal and interlinear glosses and annotations that were added subsequently, in several layers and by different hands. This is a sign of its use in a scholarly teaching context.
If you want to learn more about the medieval engagement with ancient Greek and Roman works and authors, check out the article on The classical past on the Polonsky Medieval England and France 700-1200 project website.
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Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
11 January 2022
Reach for the stars
Marcus Tullius Cicero (b. 106 BC) is one of the best-known ancient Roman authors. A formidable speaker at court trials and political debates as well as a prolific theorist of rhetoric and philosophy, he influenced generations of scholars and students. It is less known, however, that through his striking and often beautifully illustrated work the Aratea, he was also responsible for introducing many a medieval and early modern reader to the Classical constellations.
In addition to his many prose works, Cicero was also a poet. However, his reputation as a poet was tarnished somewhat by an infamous work he wrote about his own political genius, The history of my own consulate, which is now lost. Nevertheless, other examples of his poetic texts are preserved, including his translation of an epic poem by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Aratus.
Aratus was asked by the Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas (320 – 239 BC) to compile a handbook on stars and constellations. The resulting work, entitled Phaenomena (Appearances on the Sky) is in hexametric verse and presents an overview of the entire astronomical knowledge of Aratus’s time in polished poetic language. It was highly esteemed, and survives in many copies, often with commentaries. An early example is a fragment of a 4th-century papyrus codex that contained the poem with notes on the right-hand margin.
The popularity of this work is also demonstrated by the fact that the Phaenomena is the only pagan poetic text that is explicitly referred to in the New Testament. In the Acts of the Apostles, when Paul speaks to the Athenians on the Areopagus, his speech begins with a quotation from ‘one of the poets’ of the Greeks. The unnamed poet was in fact Aratus. Paul cites from line 5 of his Phaenomena claiming that ‘we are all offspring’ of a supreme God (Acts 17: 28).
It was perhaps this wide-reaching popularity of Aratus’s poem that attracted Cicero to translate it into Latin at the very beginning of his career. His translation became known as the Aratea, after the original Greek poet. Unfortunately, Cicero’s translation does not survive in its entirety; the prologue and several other portions of the work are now lost and less than half of the original text has eventually come down to us. However, what the manuscripts did preserve is the illustrative tradition of the text, which may date from Late Antiquity.
One of the earliest and fullest copies of Cicero’s Latin translation of Aratus’s poem is a manuscript made in the early 9th century (Harley MS 647). The manuscript preserves a carefully edited text: Cicero’s Latin verses are arranged in blocks copied on the lower half of the page in Caroline minuscule. Above, there are lavish coloured illustrations, which contain explanatory notes written in old-fashioned Roman rustic capitals inside the images. The work, therefore, is both useful and beautiful, as is apparent in the section on the constellation Cygnus the swan.
This early layout comprising text, illustration and commentary proved very successful. It had a long afterlife surviving in a number of later manuscripts, such as a deluxe copy produced at a Benedictine abbey in Peterborough around 1122. This adaptation of Cicero’s Aratea shows a similar layout to the manuscript 300 years earlier but the illustrations are now drawn in pen, without colours except for red dots marking the stars of the constellation.
Manuscript copies of Cicero’s Aratea were produced up until the end of the 15th century when they were replaced by printed copies retaining the illustrative tradition of the earliest manuscripts on the printed pages. This longstanding history of the textual and illustrative tradition of the Aratea shows not only the success of Cicero’s poetical skills in translating Aratus but also the wide-reaching influence of ancient literature and scientific thought on the evolution of science through the manuscripts and their illustrations. You can read more about medieval astronomical manuscripts in our article Medieval science and mathematics on the Polonsky Foundation Medieval England and France, 700–1200 website.
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Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
25 November 2021
Merlin the magician: from devil’s son to King Arthur’s trusted advisor
Merlin is the central mythical character in the world of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. A shadowy and untameable figure who seldom takes a single form for long enough to show us his true nature, he eludes definition today, just as he did a millennium ago, and his origins and fate remain mysterious. His character was probably an amalgam of Myrddin Wyllt, a bard and wild man of the Caledonian forest in Welsh tradition, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a warrior-prophet who was among the last of the Romans in Britain, and possibly a local pagan god whose cult was associated with the Welsh town of Carmarthon (from Caer Myrddin, meaning Merlin’s fort or castle).
As a fortune-teller and shape-shifter, Merlin became associated with necromancy and the dark arts in the imagination of medieval Christians. The story of his birth was founded in the religious legend of the Harrowing of Hell. The demons of Hell, annoyed by Christ’s interference and his rescuing of souls from their domain, plot their revenge through the birth of an Antichrist.
They send a devil to impregnate an innocent princess of Dyfed in Wales, but when the child is born, their evil plans miscarry as the devout mother finds a priest to baptise him before he is pulled into their evil orbit. This is Merlin, a child prodigy with magical powers and the ability to foretell the future, attributes that he decides to use on the side of good rather than evil.
The earliest of the Arthurian texts to include Merlin was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account in his Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain). For more information on this work and the surviving manuscripts of early legends, see, our article on Early Latin Versions of the Legend of King Arthur published on the Polonsky Medieval France and England, 700-1200 website.
Merlin first appears when, following the massacre of the British chieftains by the Saxon leader, Hengist, in the treacherous ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the British King Vortigern flees to Wales where he tries to build a strong tower to protect himself. But every night, the progress made by his builders is mysteriously undone when the foundations crumble. His wizards claim that only by mixing in the blood of a child who has no mortal father will he make the foundations sound. Merlin is found and brought to Vortigern for his purpose, but he is able to see a pool beneath the tower, in which lie two sleeping dragons, one white and one red, and he explains that the white dragon (i.e. the Saxons) will triumph over the red (i.e. the British). He then enters a trance and foretells the future of the Britons to the end of time, predicting the coming of a great king by the name of Arthur.
Perhaps Merlin’s most remarkable achievement is single-handedly transporting a ring of magical stones known as ‘the Giant’s Dance’ from Ireland to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire to build Stonehenge. The earliest surviving picture of Stonehenge, showing Merlin helping to place the huge stones, is in a copy of the Roman de Brut, a verse chronicle of British history by a poet from Jersey named Wace, written in Anglo-Norman French.
Merlin’s next undertaking is to orchestrate the marvellous conception, birth and education of the future King Arthur. As he foretells, the young boy pulls the sword from the stone and inherits his rightful kingdom and - with Merlin’s help and guidance - achieves greatness. But though Merlin uses his powers to warn his young protégé about the future, he is powerless to change events that have been ordained. One day he appears in the form of a young boy to Arthur, who is out hunting in the forest, revealing that Arthur is son of King Uther and of Igraine. Later, changing into an old man, he prophesies that Mordred, the son who Arthur has conceived with his half-sister Morgause, will one day destroy his father and the court at Camelot.
Though he is a trusted adviser to kings, Merlin remains an unpredictable character with strange habits and a menacing laugh that announces his sometimes-macabre intentions. In one episode, he changes into a deer and is served up as Caesar’s dinner, later returning as a wild man to interpret the Emperor’s dreams.
When he becomes obsessed with the fairy huntress, Niniane, he performs bizarre stunts for her that include setting two harpists alight with sulphur, saying they are evil sorcerers.
In the end Niniane brings about Merlin’s downfall. Having tricked him into revealing all his magical knowledge to her, she uses one of his spells to seal him in a stone tomb in the forest of Broceliande, or in some versions in an oak tree, until the end of time.
Stories of King Arthur and Camelot, alongside some of the most celebrated tales in medieval manuscripts, are featured in my recently published book, Dragons, Heroes, Myths & Magic: The Medieval Art of Storytelling, now on sale now in the British Library shop. Perhaps it would make the perfect Christmas gift for a medieval story-lover?
Chantry Westwell
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27 September 2021
A figured poem
The poem De Laudibus sancte crucis (In Praise of the Holy Cross) is the work of Rabanus Maurus (b. 780/781, d. 856), one of the greatest teachers and scholars of the Carolingian age. Rabanus Maurus was in charge of the imperial abbey school of Fulda in central Germany, and he was later archbishop of Mainz. While in Fulda, he composed this poem which comprises a set of verses where the words both embody and celebrate the cross, drawing on an Antique tradition of arranging words and phrases within figures.
A number of copies of this work survive, including one made in the Premonstratensian Abbey of St Mary and St Nicholas, Arnstein, in around the 1170s, now in the Harley collection in the British Library (Harley MS 3045). In all but one copy, the figured poem or carmina figurata is on the left, with an explanatory commentary in prose on the right-hand page. Most of the figures are in the form of a cross.
Rabanus Maurus dedicated one of his copies to Louis the Pious, King of the Franks and Emperor of the West from 814 to 840, and this dedication and image of the king is preserved in later copies. In the Harley copy, for example, Louis is depicted as a miles Christi (soldier of Christ), at the beginning of the work, with a cross, a shield and a halo. The inscriptions place the Emperor under the protection of Christ, while recalling his role as a defender and promoter of the Faith.
Some of the figures are in the form of letters rather than images, as in this one, which includes the words ‘Crux’ (cross), reading downwards, and ‘Salus’ (salvation), reading across. This poem is about angels, and the names of some of them are included in the figured letters. For example, the ‘u’ (shaped as a ‘v’) of Crux is formed from the word ‘arcangeli’ (archangels).
The author included an image of himself as well, portrayed as a kneeling monk below an image of a cross. His identity is made clear by the inclusion of his name ‘Rabanus’ in red letters visible on his face and habit.
Another elegant copy of De Laudibus sancte crucis was made in the abbey of St Germain des Prés in Paris around the middle of the 11th century (now Paris, BnF, MS latin 11685). This manuscript was digitised recently as part of The Polonsky Foundation Medieval England and France 700-1200 project.
You can can also find out about some of the other manuscripts made in Arnstein in our previous blogpost about the Arnstein Bible.
Kathleen Doyle
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Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
09 July 2021
Murder most foul in the Cotswolds
Opening the door of a pretty Norman church down a country lane in the Cotswold village of South Newington, I was shocked to be confronted by two rather violent murder scenes painted on the wall. The first is of a man being viciously cut down while he raises his hands in prayer; his head is split in two by a sword, and blood spurts over his forehead. Though the paintings are rather fragmentary and difficult to make out at first, the figure in the red cloak, his hands raised in prayer is unmistakeably Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered by four knights in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, an event that caused a great scandal throughout Christendom.
Beside it is another violent scene that has been identified as the execution in 1322 of Thomas Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, who led a rebellion against King Edward II (r. 1307-1327). He is also shown kneeling while his executioner towers over him, using all his force to chop off his head. Drops of blood spurt from his neck – by one account it took several blows to decapitate him. Both paintings have been dated to the 1330s.
While attempts to canonise Thomas Plantagenet were, not surprisingly, unsuccessful, Thomas Becket was made a saint not long after his martyrdom, and Canterbury became a popular destination of pilgrimage. Two hundred years later, Henry VIII did his utmost to stamp out the cult of Becket and ordered all representations of him to be destroyed. Becket’s face in this painting only survived because it had an image of St George, another popular English saint, painted over it at a later date. It was uncovered and restored in the 20th century.
Had the full scene in the wall painting survived, it may have looked a little like one of the two scenes below. Both are dated to the early part of the 14th century and are in the margins of personal prayerbooks probably made in south-eastern England. The Queen Mary Psalter contains a whole series of more than 20 images from the life and afterlife of St Thomas Becket.
The Taymouth Hours has numerous scenes of the torture and murder of saints across the lower margins. On the other side of the page from Becket is an even more gruesome scene: the martyrdom of St Lawrence, who was burned on a brazier.
A finely painted miniature from the 15th century of the scene in Canterbury Cathedral shows details of Thomas’s ethereal gaze, the grim facial expressions of the attackers and the elaborately decorated backdrop of the sanctuary. This is from a rather small prayer book (about the size of a Kindle), but the digital images allow us to zoom in and see the exquisite details clearly.
As one of the most popular English saints, Becket was frequently depicted alongside other well-known saints. Here in a Psalter from northern England he is shown with two much-venerated female martyrs of the early Church: St Catherine of Alexandria and St Margaret of Antioch.
My encounter with the image of Thomas Becket in the Cotswolds was timely, as the 850th anniversary of his murder is being marked this summer by an exhibition at the British Museum (postponed from 2020), Thomas Becket: murder and the making of a saint. Included among the objects on display are other British Library manuscripts with scenes from his life and death, featured in our recent blogpost, Thomas Becket: manuscripts showing the making of a saint. There's also more about saints in medieval manuscripts, including Becket, on the Polonsky Medieval England and France 700-1200 project website.
You can also discover amazing images from British Library manuscripts for yourself using the 'Advanced Search' page in the our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. If you search for ‘Becket’ in the 'Image description' field, twenty-five results are displayed, some from manuscripts in this blogpost. For example, the Queen Mary Psalter (seen above) includes this scene of Thomas Becket being brought into the Lord’s presence by two angels. It is beneath a full-page image of the Trinity in the section containing the Canticles.
Chantry Westwell
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Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
27 June 2021
Prefacing the Psalms
From a relatively early date in the Latin West, luxury Psalters featured cycles of introductory or prefatory full-page images. Very often these focused on the life of Christ, although other subjects such as the Creation and King David were also featured. It is likely that these cycles of images grew out of the interpretation of the Psalms as a prefiguration of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. This concept reflects Jesus’s comment that ‘all things must needs be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me’ (Luke 24:44).
One large and impressive Psalter features twenty full-page prefatory images. It was probably made in Oxford because the calendar following the miniatures includes a reference to the translation (or reburial) of St Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford, in 1180. The absence of another important event, the translation of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury into a new shrine in 1220, suggests that this manuscript may have been made before that occurred.
In this Psalter each illuminated page contains two scenes that illustrate events from the life of Christ. Sometimes the images include scrolls with biblical quotations that supplement and interpret the paintings, perhaps indicating that the original owner of the book may have been able to read Latin or would have viewed it with someone who could. For example, in the upper register of this image Christ walks on water and St Peter attempts to follow, but he is starting to sink into the sea. The banner proclaims ‘Modice fidei quare dubitasti’ (O thou of little faith, why didst thou doubt?) (Matthew 14:31).
In the lower register of the same image is the Transfiguration, during which Christ, flanked by Moses and Elijah, is ‘transfigured’ to appear in glory to Sts John, Peter and James, all kneeling below. Christ is enclosed in an almond shape mandorla, which was often used to frame and signify Christ in Majesty. Moses, to his left, is identifiable by the horns on his head. This attribute is based on the account of Moses’ descent from Mount Sinai in the Latin Vulgate Bible, which says that ‘he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord’ (Exodus 34:29), where the Hebrew word ḳaran was mis-translated as horned (the word can also mean ‘to radiate’).
Another interesting aspect of the cycle in this manuscript is the use of silver, which unlike many medieval examples has not tarnished to black. This is particularly apparent in the sword and armour of the soldier who raises his sword to murder a young boy in the illustration of the Massacre of the Innocents. The mail of the soldier’s helmet, body armour and greaves (leg armour) is all carefully delineated and the silver retains its sheen.
The vivid images that preface the Psalms thereby enhance the devotional experience of reading and meditating on the Psalms, as well as providing a visual commentary on the biblical text. This beautiful Psalter was digitised as part of the Polonsky Medieval England and France 700-1200 project and you can find out more about English manuscript illumination on the project website.
Kathleen Doyle
Follow us on Twitter @BLMedieval
Part of the Polonsky Digitisation Project
Medieval manuscripts blog recent posts
- Our first 1000 digitised manuscripts return
- Golden scenes from the Life of Christ
- Tall tales of the medieval ‘holster book’
- Reach for the stars
- Merlin the magician: from devil’s son to King Arthur’s trusted advisor
- A figured poem
- Murder most foul in the Cotswolds
- Prefacing the Psalms
- Thomas Becket: manuscripts showing the making of a saint
- ‘Frenssh’ as it was ‘spak’ in medieval England
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