Somewhere in a bookbindery in Leiden, between 1600 and 1602, a bookbinder cut up an eleventh-century manuscript full of Latin psalms that was considered worthless to strengthen book bindings. He undoubtedly did not care that every Latin word had an Old English translation.
Now 21 of those strips of parchment have turned up in four parts of a Greek dictionary in the Alkmaar Regional Archives. And researcher and Anglicist Thijs Porck (Leiden University) has suddenly reconstructed an important part of the biography of this cut manuscript.
Some pieces of the same manuscript had previously been found in archives in Cambridge, Haarlem, Sondershausen in Germany and Elblag in Poland. The Haarlem and Polish fragments were also used as reinforcement in books that appear to have a connection with Leiden. “For months I compared the fragments with each other. Dimensions, lines, letter shapes, language and decoration correspond with each other. And yes, they all come from the same handwriting as that in the Alkmaar book bindings,” says Porck. The Leiden researcher describes the conclusions of his search and the new Old English word forms he discovered in the text in the scientific journal Anglo-Saxon England which will be released this month.
The cut-up can easily be dated between 1600 and 1602 because the Alkmaar and Haarlem books were purchased in Leiden in 1601. The endpapers used by the bookbinder can also be easily dated based on watermarks. The owner of the book also studied in Elblag, Poland, in Leiden between 1600 and 1602. It is not surprising that other versions of the manuscript eventually ended up in Cambridge and Germany, because Leiden University also attracted many foreign students at that time. It is not surprising that they owned a beautiful (and sturdy) bound book from Leiden.
But how did a medieval English manuscript end up in Leiden around 1600? The obvious origin: one of the many hundreds of medieval English monasteries that were abolished around 1540 when the English King Henry VIII founded his Church of England, independent of Rome. Mountains of outdated Latin Catholic manuscripts from the rich libraries were then dumped on the European market. They may also have found their way to the book market in Leiden decades later.
But there is also another option, says Porck, “and that is one with a beautiful story.” Because the manuscript of which Porck found 21 strips in Alkmaar was not just an ordinary monastery manuscript. “It is really of luxurious quality, with large margins and many beautiful initials.”
And let it be known that barely forty years before that Leiden bookbinder put his knife in that manuscript, just such a luxurious eleventh-century psalter with Old English ‘glosses’ (written words) was located in Bruges, in the same Low Countries as Leiden . “And that is the only psalter with Anglo-Saxon glosses known on the continent at this time,” says Porck, “and after that nothing was ever heard of that manuscript again.”
Killed king
According to a surviving description from 1561 of the Bruges church of Saint Donatus, that old psalter had been a gift to that church in 1087, by the Anglo-Saxon princess Gunhilde. That sister of the English king Harold Godwinson, who was killed at the Battle of Hastings (1066), had fled to the mainland from the new Norman rulers.
“The book in Latin is still called the Psalter of Gunhilde today,” says the description of the book from 1561, “and it also contains explanations in Saxon language that no one here can really understand anymore” – ‘cum enarrationibus linguæ Saxonice, quas hic nemo satis intelligit‘.
It is not implausible that that manuscript could end up from the church of Saint Donatus to a Leiden bookbinder shortly afterwards. Because around 1580 the Calvinists had power in Bruges for years, and just like in England under Henry VIII, the church libraries were plundered. “It is all circumstantial evidence, but it is not at all unlikely that the cut manuscript is Gunhilde’s psalter,” says Porck. “And as a romantic, I naturally seize this great opportunity for a great story for this manuscript.”