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Detailed record for Yates Thompson 14


ff. 1-173
	Title		Psalter, Use of Sarum (the 'St Omer Psalter')

ff. 1-173
	Title		Psalter, Use of Sarum (the 'St Omer Psalter')

Origin		England, E. (Mulbarton, Norfolk?)
Date		c. 1330-1340
Language		Latin
Script		Gothic
Artists		The decoration of this manuscript is connected to later developments in the East Anglian school, incorporating Italianate figural style; especially related to the Gorleston Psalter Crucifixion (BL Additional 49622, fol. 7) and the Douai Psalter (Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 313).
Decoration		1 large historiated initial, accompanied by a full historiated foliate border, in colours and gold (f. 7). 5 smaller historiated initials or miniatures including a small initial in the right corner, accompanied by full (historiated) foliate borders, in colours and gold (f. 29v [finished and partly overpainted by the 15th century campaign], f. 44 [finished and partly overpainted by the 15th century campaign], ff. 57v, 70v, 120). Small initials in gold on red and blue grounds (f. 7). Decorated line-fillers, in colours and gold (f. 7).
Dimensions in mm		335 x 225 (215 x 130)
Official foliation		ff. [ix] + 175 (+ 2 paper and 4 parchment flyleaves at the beginning, and 1 paper flyleaf at the end)
Collation		i6 (ff. 1-6), ii-xiii8 (ff. 7-102), xiv8+1 (1st leaf inserted; ff. 103-111), xv-xix8 (ff. 112-151), xx2 (ff. 152-153), xxi8 (ff. 154-161), xxii6 (ff. 162-167), xxiii8 (ff. 168-175).
Form		Parchment codex
Binding		Post-1600. Bound in Paris by Derome le Jeune, c. 1780; gilt edges.
Provenance		Commissioned by a knight of the St Omer family of Mulbarton, Norfolk, but left incomplete: depictions of a male and female (f. 7), the male wearing the St Omer arms, perhaps Sir William de St Omer (d. after 1347). Erased arms (f. 54v). Humphrey (b. 1390, d. 1447), duke of Gloucester, prince, soldier, and literary patron: erased inscription, made legible by UV light 'Cest liure est a moy Homfrey fiz frere et vncle de roys duc de gloucestre comte de penbroc grant chambellan dangleterre ...' (f. 173); he was made duke of Gloucester in 1414; as Henry V died on 31 March 1422 and the Duke was made Protector of England on 5 December following, the probability is that the entry was made between those dates, or he would have been given the higher title. Egidius Dancel, 17th century: inscription and alphabetic index corresponding to page numbers in the same hand (1st 3 parchment flyleaves [ff. v-vii verso]). Thomas Thorpe, bookseller: his 1828 catalogue, lot 2902, priced at £25. John Wilkes the Elder (d. 1894): his sale 12 March 1847, lot 442, bought by Rodd. Bertram Ashburnham (b. 1797, d. 1878), 4th earl of Ashburnham; his Appendix Ms. 32 ; bought from Rodd for £210, according to the handwritten annotations in the BL Manuscript Department's copy of Catalogue of the Manuscripts at Ashburnham Place: Appendix (London: Hodgson, 1853). Bertram Ashburnham, 5th earl of Ashburnham: his sale, May s1897, bought by Yates Thompson together with the entire Ashburnham Appendix: book-plate with an inscribed number 'From the Library of the Earl of Ashburnham Appendix no. XXXII May 1897' (1st flyleaf [f. i]). Henry Yates Thompson (b. 1838, d. 1928), collector of illuminated manuscripts and newspaper proprietor: with his book-plate inscribed '[MS] 58 / £lee.e.e [i.e. £900.0.0] / [bought from] The Earl of / Ashburnham / May 1897' (1st flyleaf [f. ii]); given to the British Museum on his 80th birthday, December 1918, in honour of M. R. James, S. C. Cockerell, and G. F. Warner, who had assisted Thompson in the cataloguing of his collection: gold-tooled dedication on red leather (inside upper cover); it became Additional 39810 and was re-numbered after the creation of the 'Yates Thompson' shelfmark, following Mrs Yates Thompson's bequest of other manuscripts in 1941.
Notes		This manuscript was formerly Additional 39810.
Select bibliography		Henry Yates Thompson, Facsimiles in Photogravure of Six Pages from a Psalter Written & Illuminated about 1325 A.D. for a Member of the St Omer Family in Norfolk (London: Chiswick Press, 1900). Henry Yates Thompson, A Lecture on Some English Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Chiswick Press, 1902), pls. XXXI-XXXVI. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Second Series of Fifty Manuscripts (Nos. 51 to 100) in the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson (Cambridge: University Press, 1902), no. 58 pp. 74-82. Sidney C. Cockerell, The Gorleston Psalter (London: Chiswick Press, 1907), pp. 2-4, pl. XV. [Sydney Carlyle Cockerell], Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1908), no. 68 pp. 32-33, pl. 68. J. A. Herbert, Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Methuen, 1911), p. 229. Schools of Illumination: Reproductions of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 6 vols (London: British Museum, 1914-30), IV: English: A. D. 1350 to 1500 (1922), p. 8, pl. 13. [J. A. Herbert], Illuminataed Manuscripts and Bindings of Manuscripts Exhibited in The Grenville Library, Guide to the Exhibited Manuscripts, 3 (Oxford: British Museum, 1923), no. 29. Eric G. Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Paris: Van Oest, 1928), pp. 8-9, 25, pls. 19-20. O. Elfrida Saunders, English Illumination, 2 vols (Florence: Pantheon; Paris Pegasus Press, 1928), I, pp. 94, 100-02, 105-07, 111, II, pls. 113-14. Otto Pächt, 'A Giottesque Episode in English Illumination', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), 51-70 (pp. 52, 53, 57, pl. 14d). Joan Evans, English Art 1307-1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 40-41, pl. 26b. F. Wormald, 'The Yates Thompson Manuscripts', The British Museum Quarterly 16 (1952), 4-6 (p. 6). B. L. Ullman, ‘Manuscripts of duke Humphrey of Gloucester’, in Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Storia e letteratura, 51 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1955), pp. 345-355 (first publ. in English Historical Review , 52 (1937), 670-672), (p. 354 no. 18). [when the manuscript was Add. 39810] Margaret Rickert, La Miniature Anglaise: Du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Milan: Electa, 1961), pp. 12, 21. Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages, 2nd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 130-32, 134, 181-83, pls. pp. 133, 182(a). [D. H. Turner], Reproductions from Illuminated Manuscripts, Series 5 (London: British Museum, 1965), no. 29. [Derek Howard Turner], Illuminated Manuscripts Exhibited in the Grenville Library (London: British Museum, 1967), no. 24 p. 31. Josiah Q. Bennett, 'Portman Square to New Bond Street, or, How to Make Money though Rich', The Book Collector (1967), 323-39 (pp. 325, 326, 330). A. N. L. Munby, Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures 1750-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 124-25. Richard Marks and Nigel Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200-1500 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), pp. 18, 80, pl. 21. Lynda Dennison, 'The Fitzwarin Psalter and its Allies': A Reappraisal', in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 42-66 (pp. 50 n. 36, 65). Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), pl. 66. Justin Clegg, The Medieval Church in Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2003), p. 33 pl. 27. C. M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700-1500 (London: Harvey Miller, 2003), pp. 212, 215, 230, pl. 158. F. O. Büttner, ‘Der illuminierte Psalter im Westen’, in The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of its Images, ed. by F. O. Büttner, (Belgium: Brepols, 2004), pp. 1-106 (p. 18 n. 48). Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (London: Harvey Miller, 2004), p. 157 n. 54. Stella Panayotova, The Macclesfield Psalter: ...A Window into the World of Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum 2005), p. 14. Treasures of the British Library, ed. by Nicolas Barker and others (London: British Library, 2005), p. 240. M. A. Michael, ‘Seeing-in: The Macclesfield Psalter’, in The Cambridge Illuminations: The Conference Papers, ed. by Stella Panayotova (London: Harvey Miller, 2007), pp. 115-28 (p. 116 n. 12).