Abstract
Liverpool Cathedral MS 6 is a tiny and unusual book: it is of the hours of the guardian angel and no bigger than three inches by two. It was made in England in the second half of the fifteenth century. It has one illustration: of a kneeling woman, presumably the donor, presenting a book, presumably this book, to a queen, presumably Elizabeth Woodville. If one is to believe that the initial letters of a sixteen-line poem addressed to ‘a Lady souereyne princess’, which opens the book, spell her name, the donor is Elizabeth [a] Timraw. Elizabeth is presumed to have written the book as well as the poem, the presumption must also be that she has painted the picture, as she writes in the poems: the book ‘shulde have bene moche more illumynid withe pleasure Ande if I had tyme’. Not money, we should note. The book is not striking because it was written and illuminated by a woman, but because Elizabeth was an English woman and her book is an English book. To see it, as I recently saw it at the exhibition of ‘Medieval Manuscripts on Merseyside’ in Liverpool, surrounded by books made in the Low Countries, France, Italy, even Germany, is to be made immediately aware of how bad a book it is. I mean: how poor in quality of production. This is particularly true of the single illustration.
Neritia: What say you then to Faulconbridge, the young baron of England?
Portia: You know I say nothing to him. … How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere.
The Merchant of Venice, II.ii
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Notes and References
Neil Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, III (Oxford, 1983), pp. 165–6.
Compare the donor folios 2v-3r in Fitzwilliam Museum MS 34, a missal made in England at the same date for Richard (d. 1479) and Elizabeth Fitzwilliam, ‘stiff and even coarse in execution’, according to M. R. James, Catalogue of Fitzwilliam Museum Manuscripts (Cambridge, 1895), I, p. 88.
Janet Backhouse, ‘Founders of the Royal Library: Edward IV and Henry VII as Collectors of Illuminated Manuscripts’; Jenny Stratford, ‘The Manuscripts of John, Duke of Bedford: Library and Chapel’; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Fitzwilliam Museum MS 3–1979: A Bury St Edmunds Book of Hours and the Origins of the Bury Style’; and Pamela Tudor-Craig, ‘The Hours of Edward V and William Lord Hastings: British Library Additional Manuscript 54782’, all in David Williams (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge, 1987).
The frontispiece of the Ghent Register is described by Wim Blockmans, ‘The Devotion of a Lonely Duchess’, in Thomas Kren (ed.), Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and the Visions of Tondal (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, 1992), pp. 37–9, and is illustrated at figure 8.
I have not found the two frontispieces compared before; comparison might readily be made: the Luton Register is in the Luton Museum and the Ghent Register is in the Royal Library at Windsor. The frontispiece of the Luton Guild Register is illustrated in A. J. Pollard, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (Stroud, 1991), p. 94, which is where I first came upon it.
I am deeply grateful to Mr John Lunn of Dunstable for taking me to Luton Museum to show me the two registers and for discussing them with me. Both deserves to be far more widely known.
Thomas Kipping, draper of London, who was a founder member of the Luton guild, owned and imported manuscripts. Mr Lunn believes that it was Thomas Kipping who was responsible for getting the frontispiece of the Luton Register illuminated in the highest-class workshop of the Netherlands. For Kipping, see Kathleen L. Scott (ed.), The Mirroure of the Worlde: Bodley 283 (Roxburghe Club, 1980), ch. III. That is a reference I owe to the kindness of Mr Lunn.
The next I owe to that of Dr Philip Morgan: Kathleen L. Scott, The Caxton Master and his Patrons (Cambridge Bibliographical Society Monograph, No. 8, 1976).
Malcolm Vale, ‘Cardinal Henry Beaufort and the “Albergati” Portrait’, EHR, CV (1990), 338–54.
Colin Thompson and Lome Campbell, Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland, 1974);
K. B. McFarlane, Hans Memling (Oxford, 1971).
For all but the Withypoll altarpiece, which is in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, see Christa Grössinger, North-European Panel Paintings: A Catalogue of Netherlandish and German Paintings before 1600 in English Churches and Colleges (1992).
Ms Grössinger has also written an article on the Sherborne altarpiece: ‘The Raising of Lazarus: a French Primitive in Sherborne, Dorset’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, CXXXII (1979), 91–101. For the royal chantry chapel at All Hallows, see The Parish of All Hallows Barking (Survey of London, XII, Part I, 1929), pp. 9–17.
For Paul Withypoll, see G. C. Moore Smith, The Family of Withypoll (Walthamstow Antiquarian Society, Official Publication No. 34, 1936), pp. 13–23.
M. Davies, Early Netherlandish School (National Gallery Catalogues, 1968), p. 55;
Anne Sutton, ‘Christian Colborne, Painter of Germany and London, died 1486’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 135 (1982), 56.
Gilbert Thurlow, The Medieval Painted Retables in Norwich Cathedral (Norwich, n.d.), p. 2; Pamela Tudor-Craig, Richard III (National Portrait Gallery, 1973), pp. 19–20.
William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (Coventry, 1730), I, pp. 446–7. A good idea of John Brentwood’s Doom, which no longer exists, may be had from that over the chancel arch in St Thomas’s church, Salisbury, although the latter dates from thirty or forty years later.
Tudor-Craig, Richard III, 20–1.
P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Painting in Medieval England’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), Age of Chivalry (1992), p. 116.
Mention ought to be made of the late fifteenth-century donor priest at Romsey; he is all that survives of a wall painting from a chantry of St George. And of the early fifteenth-century crucifixion, which I have not seen, in the refectory of the Charterhouse at Coventry; there is, apparently, an inscription of 1415: N. Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (1966), sub Cheylesmore.
One of the striking exceptions is what remains of the rood screen at Binham Priory, Norfolk. The screen, as the guide book by Donald Insall tells us, ‘was painted over at the Reformation with black-letter texts from the Tyndale and Coverdale translations of the Bible, but the original saints are now showing through’. It is a somewhat startling, even moving, sight, and would have pleased Leonardo da Vinci, who said that pictures were more powerful than words.
The first authority is G. R. Owst, ‘Some Books and Book-Owners of Fifteenth-Century St Albans’, Transactions of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society (1928) pp. 194–5.
The second is Arthur Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, vol. II (New York, 1935, reprinted 1963), p. 707.
Richard Field, Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1977), introduction.
Susan Foister, ‘Paintings and Other Works of Art in Sixteenth-Century English Inventories’, The Burlington Magazine, CXXIII (1981), p. 276;
Malcolm Underwood, ‘Politics and Piety in the Household of Lady Margaret Beaufort’, JEccH, 38 (1987), p. 49.
Lynda Rollason, ‘English Alabasters in the Fifteenth Century’, in Williams, England in the Fifteenth Century, 245–54.
S. E. Rigold and E. Clive Rouse, ‘Piccotts End: A Probable Medieval Guest House and its Wall Paintings’, Hertfordshire Archaeology, III (1973), 78–89.
I am grateful for the help of Brian Spencer. To find the picture in the museum I needed it: the picture, as Mr Spencer says, ‘is exhibited very obscurely at the back of a cubbyhole in which we display two or three bits of medieval furniture’. For the house, see Parish of Hackney, Part I: Brooke House (Survey of London, XXVIII, 1960).
E. Clive Rouse, ‘Elizabethan Wall Paintings at Little Moreton Hall’, National Trust Studies 1980 (1979), 113–18;
Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, XXIII (1939), 181–2; XXIX (1963), 345–7.
M. Hicks, Richard III and His Rivals (1991), pp. 107–10.
James M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1950).
Religions et traditions populaires (Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, Paris, 1979); Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, Bilden und Zeichen religiösen Volksglaubens (Munich, 1963);
Larch S. Garrad, A Present from … Holiday Souvenirs of the British Isles (Newton Abbot, 1976); for the description of the shrines of St Chad in 1445 I am grateful to Mr Douglas Johnson: I have quoted his transcription of the eighteenth-century transcription in Shrewsbury Public Library, MS 2, ff. 92 and 94.
E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1945), pp. 125–6.
Sleaford Trinity Guild Accounts: BL Additional MS 28533, fs 2, 3v; Rev. David McRoberts, ‘The Fetternear Banner’, Innes Review, 7 (1956), 69–86;
Shrewsbury Weavers: National Library of Wales, Castle Hill MSS, no. 2637; Norwich Almanack: BL Egerton MS 2724; Cameron Lewis (ed.), The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle. An Edition of Tanner MS 407 (Garland Medieval Texts, Number I, New York and London, 1980), pp. 169 and 295.
Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (1981), ch. 8; cf. A. H. R. Martindale, ‘The Early History of the Choir of Eton College Chapel’, Archaeologia, CIII (1971), 179–98;
Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (1956), p. 187.
Charles Ross, Richard III (1981), p. 132;
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. London I The Cities of London and Westminster (1957), p. 348;
W. H. St John Hope, Windsor Castle, vol. I (1913), plates XX and XXI; Andrew Hamilton, Nottingham’s Royal Castle (Nottingham, n.d.), p. 15;
A. D. K. Hawkyard, ‘Thornbury Castle’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, XCV (1977), 51–8. None the less, Henry VII’s particular brand of pretentiousness is disclosed by an examination of his indenture with Canterbury Cathedral Priory for the prayers of the monks; the indenture is dated 20 November 1504, has an illuminated first page very like work done for John Islip, abbot of Westminster, who is a party to the indenture, and is bound in wooden boards covered in blue velvet, decorated with brass portcullises and roses, with two handsome clasps which are still functioning. I wish to thank the staff of the Cathedral Archives for finding the indenture for me during a busy Cricket Week; its call number is DCC/Ch.Ant. W48a.
I first came upon it in Sally Rousham, Canterbury: The Story of a Cathedral (Canterbury, 1975), p. 4, fig. 3. It should be written about.
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. North-West and South Norfolk (1962), p. 308; Pevsner, English Art, 81 and 83.
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Cambridgeshire (second edn, 1970), p. 367; Pevsner, English Art, 81.
Christopher Wilson, The Shrines of St William of York (Yorkshire Museum, 1977);
Painted Glass from Leicester (Leicester Museums, 1962);
Francis Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Oxford, 1984), pp. 28–30, figs 17 and 33;
Henry A. Hudson, The Medieval Woodwork of Manchester Cathedral (Manchester, 1924);
J. C. D. Smith, Church Woodcarvings: A West Country Study (Newton Abbot, 1969);
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Berkshire (1966), p. 274;
The Buildings of England: Cheshire (1971), p. 66.
Phillip Lindley, ‘“Una Grande Opera al mio Re”: Gilt-Bronze Effigies in England from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, CXLIII (1990), 112–30;
Carol Galvin and Phillip Lindley, ‘Pietro Torrigiano’s Tomb for Dean Yonge’, Church Monuments, III (1988), pp. 42–60.
PRO, PCC, Probate 11/19, f. 223 (28 Ayloffe).
St Marks: The Lord Mayor’s Chapel Bristol (Bristol, 1979), pp. 18–19.
Christopher Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), pp. 165–6.
Other unusual English glass, depicting the life of St Helen, is to be found in Ashton-under-Lyne parish church, Lancashire: Henrietta Reddish, ‘The St Helen Window, Ashton-under-Lyne: a Reconstruction’, Journal of Stained Glass, XVIII (1986–7), 150–61.
It is illustrated in Frühe Zeichnungen. L’Art Ancien S. A. Zürich. Katalog 54 (Zurich, n.d.), no. 3.
N. Pevsner (ed.), The Buildings of England. Lincolnshire (1964); Rev. R. W. M. Lewis, p. 300;
Walberswick Churchwardens’ Accounts AD 1450–1499 (Ashford, 1947), p. vii;
Helmingham: L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1952), Appendix B, no. 97; Thornham: PRO, Early Chancery Proceedings, C1/76/30.
Richard G. Davies, ‘Lollardy and Locality’, TRHS, 6th Ser., 1 (1991), 191–212.
J. Carnwath, ‘The Churchwardens’ Accounts of St Mary the Virgin, Thame (Oxon.) to 1524, (University of Manchester, M. Phil. thesis, 1992).
Jean Corke and others (eds), Suffolk Churches (Suffolk Historic Churches Trust, 1976), p. 16.
Norwich Record Office, NCC, Register 13 Brosyard.
‘The Library of John Blacman and Contemporary Carthusian Spirituality’, JEccH, 43 (1992), pp. 195–230.
W. J. Loftie (ed.), Ye Oldest Diarie of Englysshe Travell: being the hitherto unpublished narrative of the pilgrimage of Sir Richard Torkington to Jerusalem in 1517 (1884),
cf. E. M. Blackie (ed.), The Pilgrimage of Robert Langton (Cambridge, Mass., 1924).
P. Heath, ‘Between Reform and Reformation’, JEccH, 41 (1990), 678.
Was William Pecock’s the only original mind in fifteenth-century England? The measure of distance between him and, say, John Carpenter, clever and innovative after a fashion but an Establishment man through and through, is instructive, as is what the Establishment did to him. See, Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (1993), pp. 87–93, esp. p. 93.
Peter Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (1968), pp. 17–18.
The extremes are marked in the life of his father. In 1456 at Coventry Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, watched the tableaux and pageants with Queen Margaret of Anjou and drank a glass of rosewater, which cost the mayor two shillings. Thirteen years later, his own daughter having become queen, he was beheaded on Gosford Green at Coventry: did he, or anyone else, remember the days of wine and rosewater? See M. D. Harris (ed.), The Coventry Leet Book, Part II (EETS, 1908), pp. 292, 346.
A. Gransden Historical Writing in England, II, c. 1307 — the Early Sixteenth Century (1986), Appendix A.
For Jan D∤fugosz, see Harold B. Segel, Renaissance Culture in Poland: The Rise of Humanism, 1470–1543 (Ithaca, 1989), p. 120;
Henryk Samsonowicz (ed.), Polska Jana Dlugosz (Warsaw, 1984), passim. Jan wrote his twelve-volume Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Poloniae between 1455 and 1480.
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© 1995 Colin Richmond
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Richmond, C. (1995). The Visual Culture of Fifteenth-Century England. In: Pollard, A.J. (eds) The Wars of the Roses. Problems in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24130-9_9
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