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The Sherborne Missal
From: The British Library
| By:
Michelle P. Brown |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Before its acquisition for the British nation in July 1998, the Sherborne Missal was the most important and valuable English illuminated manuscript in private hands. Michelle P. Brown, curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library, outlines the Missal's history and explores its meanings. Paying tribute to its "electrifyingly inventive imagery," she explains why this particular survivor of the Middle Ages is so special. |
 ade at St. Mary's Abbey in Sherborne, Dorset, around 1400-07, the Sherborne Missal was still in England during the Reformation, when images of the Pope and St. Thomas Becket were defaced in compliance with edicts of Henry VIII made during the 1530s. |
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| The Crucifixion from the Sherborne Missal. | |
Probably owing its survival of that traumatic period to the opulence and quality of its illumination, it may have travelled to the Continent soon after and was certainly in France by 1703, when it was given to the overjoyed antiquary Nicolas Foucault by the Bishop of Lisieux. It subsequently belonged to the French bibliophiles Charles d'Orleans (d. 1744) and M. de Selles, treasurer-general of the French Navy, failing to reach its reserve at the sale of the latter's library in 1761. |
The Sherborne Missal returned to England later that century, after a French note dated 1785 had been added, and was purchased by George Mills in 1797. This gentleman, who was based at the Slaughter-house in Gloucester, England, and at St. Kitts in the West Indies, seems to have lived well beyond his means, and his library had to be dispersed long before his suicide, leading to the purchase of the Missal by the second duke of Northumberland in 1800, at a cost of £ 215. It remained at Alnwick Castle until it was deposited on loan at the British Library in 1983. |
The duke's decision to offer the book for sale to meet the costs of inheriting the estate mobilised a collaborative operation involving the British Library, various government offices, granting bodies and representatives of the book trade to ensure that this medieval masterpiece remained in the country and passed into public ownership. |
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| Marginal detail with a peacock, a symbol of the Resurrection. | |
The duke assisted in limiting the sums involved, in the face of giddily escalating sale-room prices, but even after the government agreed to accept the volume in lieu of inheritance tax a hefty sum was still required to meet the agreed valuation. An extremely generous grant of the unprecedented amount of £ 4,125,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund has gone a long way toward meeting this, but even so, in mid-2000 the British Library has still to raise approximately £ 1 million for the outstanding payments and in order to give the manuscript the exposure it deserves. |
A medieval service book
If size were a criterion of value, the Sherborne Missal would automatically qualify. It weighs more than 20 kilograms, measures around 536 by 380 mm and contains 694 parchment pages of elaborate Gothic script, musical notation and a whole gallery of illuminated images. |
The Missal is the largest, most lavishly decorated late-medieval service book to have survived the Reformation intact. Its survival is remarkable in the face of perils that began some 20 years after it was made, when the townspeople of Sherborne burnt the Abbey in a dispute over ecclesiastical authority, the parish priest allegedly firing the first flaming arrow at its roof. The world that the Sherborne Missal opens up to us is one of colourful personalities with ambitious agendas for this world and the next, who reflect not only the devotional fervour of the age but also its political and social realities. |
A missal contains the texts and often, as in this case, the music needed to perform the Christian mass throughout the year, with the variants required for special points in the liturgical year and for saints' feast-days. All churches needed them, but few possessed such elaborate examples. The key to understanding this lies in the spiritual and political aspirations of its sponsors. |
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| Patron Abbot Bruyning kneels next to an initial with Christ and two apostles. | |
The Sherborne Missal is unusual in revealing much concerning its circumstances of production. The key patron, Robert Bruyning, abbot of Sherborne (1385-1415), is depicted at least 100 times, usually kneeling in prayer and sporting an impressive array of vestments (probably those actually owned by Sherborne). He is joined eight times by the figure of his spiritual overlord and possible fellow patron, Richard Mitford, bishop of Salisbury (1396-1407), who had enjoyed a position close to the throne as Richard II's clerk of the signet and was rewarded, despite a temporary imprisonment, with the sees of Chichester and then Salisbury. The decoration abounds with heraldic detail; and the arms of Mitford and of Henry V as Prince of Wales, a title he assumed shortly after the accession of his father, Henry IV, in 1399, give a production date of around 1400-07. |
The scribe and the artists
The overt celebration of the sponsors extends to the usually anonymous craftspeople, or at least to the most important of them. The scribe John Whas is shown seven times and states in a colophon that he had to rise early each day to write the book and that his body was much wasted as a result. ("Librum scribendo Ion Whas monachus laborat, Et mane surgendo corpus multum macerabat": "John Whas, the monk, this book's transcription undertaking, with early rising found his body sorely aching.") He wears a Benedictine habit and was presumably a member of the Sherborne community. Bishop Erghum's rental for the manor of Sherborne in 1377 mentions a cottage-dweller, John Whas, who may well have been the scribe's father. |
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| Initial "M" depicting Moses with Aaron, with scribe John Whas in the margin. | |
The major artist John Siferwas has left us six portraits here. His dress proclaims him a Dominican, and we know from other sources that he was a onetime member of the Dominican house at Guildford. He was ordained an acolyte at Farnham by the bishop of Winchester in 1380 and is still mentioned in Somerset wills of the 1420s. He was therefore probably in middle age while working on the Missal. He was proud of his family, which had its roots in Hampshire, Dorset and Somerset, modestly depicting himself accompanied by the Siferwas arms immediately adjacent to those of the Prince Henry. |
A larger self-portrait shows him presenting the Lovell Lectionary (BL, Harley MS 7026) to John, Lord Lovell, who ordered it for Salisbury Cathedral. It is tempting to imagine Bishop Mitford being so impressed by Siferwas's work that he involved him in the Sherborne commission, or that the points Sherborne and its abbot were making concerning their relationship to Salisbury led them to employ a leading artist who had recently produced one of the cathedral's most prestigious books. |
Siferwas is the only named artist, but a closer examination reveals that at least four others participated in the illumination, perhaps other members of the community or lay artists from the area working under the supervision of the master, Siferwas. It is assumed that Whas was responsible for all the script, but this remains to be verified. Certainly having that side of the work done in-house would have been a saving. The great missal commissioned for Westminster Abbey by Abbot Nicholas Lytlington in the 1380s took two years for the bought-in scribe and contractor for the other parts of the work, Thomas Weston, to complete, which he did for £ 5 of the overall cost of £ 25, plus board and lodging. |
Sherborne and Salisbury
Sherborne had long-lived royal connections, being the resting place of the brothers of King Alfred the Great, and the images in the Missal promote continued royal interest. Stressing connections with former royals to those of an incoming dynasty was always a delicate process. Sherborne's relationship with Salisbury was also important. It was the source of Salisbury's authority, counting Aldhelm and Asser among its bishops before the see was transferred to Salisbury in 1075. In 998 St. Wulsin introduced the Benedictine order to Sherborne as part of the reformation of the Anglo-Saxon Church, an event depicted in the Missal and celebrated at Sherborne recently. Sherborne was amalgamated with the see of Ramsbury, Wiltshire, in the eleventh century, and in 1075 the continental incumbent, Herman, in accordance with the Conqueror's policy, moved the see to the nearby castle town of Old Sarum (a hill fort just outside modern Salisbury). |
In the early thirteenth century the cathedral became the focus of the new town of Salisbury. However, until the civil war of Stephen's reign the bishop continued to have an interest in Sherborne, and in a successful attempt to assert its independence during the twelfth century the house invoked the assistance of the pope and the head of the Cistercian Order, whose second leader, Stephen Harding, had trained at Sherborne. |
Even after the abbot of St. Mary's was secure in his authority, the bishop of Salisbury served as his spiritual overlord, and from the mid-fourteenth century he was lord of the manor, and castle, of Sherborne and therefore the nearest neighbouring landholder. Such a relationship was bound to be a delicate and sometimes strained one. Not surprising, then, that one of the foremost agendas of an extremely complex scheme of book production was to emphasise Sherborne's strengths. Abbot and bishop are shown together eight times, but the abbot occurs on 100 occasions, fulfilling the key roles, and is undoubtedly the star of the show. |
The iconographic scheme is at pains to emphasise that the see of Salisbury owed its origins to Sherborne, one of the most ancient Anglo-Saxon bishoprics, founded in 705 and with an even earlier history extending back into the British Church, with early saints such as Alban and Bathild (an Anglo-Saxon slave girl who made good, becoming a queen of Merovingian Gaul) and Celts such as Juthwara (a Cornish lass beheaded by her stepbrother on suspicion of pregnancy) receiving commemoration. Tellingly, the text of the Missal does not correspond to Sarum, or Salisbury, use, as might be expected, but preserves the Old Gregorian form allegedly introduced to England by St. Augustine, thereby preserving aspects of the oldest liturgies of the English Church. Couple this with the programme of decoration of the Ordinary of the Mass which in effect includes a potted history of the Church, of Sherborne's role in its history, and a summary of its property holdings and record of its benefactors, and any informed and interested party could be left in no doubt of the firm foundations upon which any claims of the house, and its authority, rested. |
A treasure-house of information
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| Marginal detail with a Robin Redbreast. | |
The Sherborne Missal remains an unexplored treasure-house of information on the world in which it was made. It is electrifyingly inventive in its imagery and is a masterpiece of the "International Gothic" style (its monumental Crucifixion page owing much to Italian panel and fresco painting), celebrating Britain's contribution to European culture. |
Local details also abound, both from the West Country and from elsewhere in Britain. The Missal's remarkable marginal series of naturalistic bird depictions, many labelled with their Middle English names, apparently derive from sketches originally made in the north of England, although most of the species remain native to the West Country, too. |
The names are another particular focus of interest, echoes from a world that was producing vernacular masterpieces such as the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman. Other of the exemplars available to the team devising the Missal included a heraldic roll of arms, known as the Seger armorial, originally compiled in the thirteenth century, and the twelfth-century Sherborne Cartulary (BL, Add MS 46487), which is one of the few other surviving relics of the Sherborne library, and a volume of administrative material relating to Sherborne, compiled probably to assist the abbot during Bruyning's time (BL, Cotton MS Faust A.ii). |
The Sherborne Missal is on permanent public view in the John Ritblat "Treasures" Gallery at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB. |
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