 Felly, drwy'r ddweud, rydyn ni am fydd ei symud o bwymon yn ysgol o'r hanfodd yw'r sriff... ...y'r reisio yng Nghyrch, Christopher De Hamell... ...ac dyna'nnghyd am gyhoeddi, yn amlwn i'r ddegwyd gyda'r dyfyn bwysig... ...fe cyhoeddwyd wrth gyrth o hyn oherwydd Christopher rydyn yn ysgol ar y bwynd... ...yng Nghyrch sy'n enwed erbyn ar gweithreast o'r barot yn awdraffu amddangol... ...y'r bwyng yn ysgol ar gyfer hyffordd yma... Mae'r ysgolwch, mewn gwneud i'r ysgolwch, ac yma'r ysgolwch, sy'n meddwl am yr anhygoel, sy'n meddwl am yr anhygoel. Mae'r ysgolwch, sy'n meddwl am yr anhygoel, ac yn gyfwyrwodol cyd-chrystydd, ac yn gyfwyrwodol. Yn gyfwyrwodol, y gallu'r anhygoel, yma'r ysgolwch, is that it does what any curator and person who works of objects wants to do, which is actually to really look into these objects and tease out their history, tease out what makes them great, find out how they came to where they are today. So, you know, the best sort of detective stories. Today, Christopher, who we should congratulate for recently winning the Wolfson History Prize, is going to talk about something else, which is not in the book, and he's going to talk about Archbishop Thomas Beckett's library of books. Now, you all know Thomas Beckett. He is just the sort of person whom the Antichries have always been passionate about researching, finding out about, and if you go to the British Museum, you'll see one of the Antichries great treasures, which is a wonderful emoge casket with the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett, on showing the medieval gallery there on long-term loan from the society. So, Christopher today is going to tell us about Beckett, I guess a little bit about his life, but about his books, the manuscripts he owned, what happened to them, and this coincides with the unexpected and recent discovery of Beckett's sorter kept on his shrine of a cathedral throughout the Middle Ages. So, I'm very much looking forward to those letters I'd ask you to welcome Christopher Dahan. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I open, as is appropriate here, with the famous Beckett reliquary casket, which you've just heard about, given to the Society of Antichories by Sir William Hamilton in 1801. It depicts the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. That was an event which shocked all of Europe. A bit like the assassination of Kennedy or the death of Diana, probably everyone then alive remembered forever precisely where they were standing when they first heard the news of Beckett's murder. It became one of the great stories of the Middle Ages. There are also fragments of a medieval account of the life of Beckett in verse upstairs here in the Library of the Antichories. I don't really recall when I myself first learned about Beckett, but as a late teenager in New Zealand, I took several holiday jobs in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, then in the building shown here, where I came to know that most important medieval manuscript. It's a 12th century volume on music, and the special interest is that the volume was recorded, as I myself first found, in the 1160s in the teaching collection of the Cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral. This really caught my imagination, for I'd been with my parents to see the swashbuckling 1960s film of Beckett with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and it was exciting to me to think that the manuscript in Wellington had actually been in the cathedral at that very time. On my return to England for graduate work, even before presenting myself at university, I made a pilgrimage almost literally by foot from Winchester to Canterbury, my first visit there, to see the cloister where the manuscript on music had been kept, and to stand on the site where Beckett himself had been martyred. My subsequent thesis in Oxford was on 12th century glossed books of the Bible and their origins. These were really the first privately owned books in Europe, and I was particularly anxious to find datable examples of such books acquired by individuals. As it happens, one of the earliest lists of glossed biblical books is the record of the volumes brought back to England by Thomas Beckett himself when he returned to Canterbury from exile in France in early December 1170, a few weeks before his death. It's reported that when Beckett fled into exile in 1164, he took nothing with him. Williamford Stephen describes the Archbishop staying at the Cistercian Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy, gathering and commissioning there the latest and finest manuscripts from wherever he could find them in France. And then the Chronicle of William of Canterbury records Beckett arriving back in sandwich in Kent on 2 December 1170 as shown here, bringing home with him the wonderful new library he'd assembled while he was abroad. For most of the Middle Ages, these manuscripts were kept together in Canterbury Cathedral on shelves in the Slype, the passageway of the southeast corner of the cloister, which some of you may know as the place where the Cathedral verges keep their bicycles and the gardeners their potting plants. Beckett's library was cataloged there in the late 13th century in the library inventory prepared under the supervision of prior Eastry, whose tomb still survives in the cathedral. And Eastry's list was printed in 1903 by M.R. James, paleographer and writer of ghost stories. You know, they are beginning on the left hand side, the Libri Sancti Tome, the books of St Thomas. There are 71 volumes described entirely credibly as having belonged to Beckett. The numbering of them is printed as running from 783 to 853, since these are part of M.R. James's arbitrary numeration of the entire library of the Canterbury Monks. It's remarkable what a lot you can tell about a person by looking at their books even now when some new acquaintance invites you home and while they're out of the room fetching the drinks, you run your eye critically along the shelves. I have to say that I love medieval inventories. They're a form of licensed impertinence. You can rummage through the cupboards and poke your nose impolitely into other people's possessions of 800 years ago and it's called research. My first impression from Eastry's list of Beckett's books is that here was a man needing education in a hurry. There are introductions to grammar and rhetoric and quick handbooks on clerical life and church law. There are no heavy authors, slow to read like Jerome and Augustine, but instead Beckett had gathered the very latest summaries and encyclopedias and dictionaries and above all there is an almost complete set of the gloss on the bible, the medieval google of scriptural interpretation. At least several of Beckett's actual manuscripts still survive and can be matched up with items on that list. In those student days of long ago I went to look at them in their current locations all as it happens in Oxford or Cambridge. They do seem to confirm that these are indeed mostly books which had been gathered while Beckett was in exile in France, here you probably can't read it, is the second page of the list as printed by M.R. James. There are a striking number of Cistercian texts including works by St Bernard himself consistent with the acquisition of books while Beckett was in residence at Portony. For example number 833 in the numbering here is a treatise by Odo of Moramond on number symbolism and here is the actual manuscript. It's now in the Renn Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. Among the manuscripts given by Archbishop Whitgift and you can just make out an erased medieval inscription along the top of the first page naming it as having belonged to Sancti Tomei Archipiscopie. Here I have marked the words Sancti and Tomei with blue arrows. The author was a Cistercian monk who died in 1161 and the manuscript is absolutely Cistercian in style with those characteristic monochrome initials without gold as decreed by Bernard as appropriate for production by Cistercian monks. This is its opening initial closely paralleled in its one colour decoration in manuscripts such as this made for the Cistercian Abbey of Villars in Brabant. Beckett spent nearly two years with the Cistercians in Portony and that also survives a library catalogue from Portony at precisely that date and in that thesis of more than 40 years ago I matched up texts on Beckett's book list with those which we know were available for copying at Portony. There are many of them mostly sermons and quick fix guides to instant erudition. Doubtless the kind of texts that Beckett or his advisors felt he needed with some urgency. That alone tells us an intimate fact about the man himself. There are several classical texts on Beckett's book list. They are rarities for such a date to survive. There's this. The second volume of Beckett's Livy, number 816 on Pry Eastry's list now also in Trinity College, Cambridge. And this in Mordland College in Oxford, the copy of the Vary Eye of Cassiodorus which is number 835 in Eastry's catalogue and is recognisable from the shelf mark at the top of the right hand page. Distinctio to Groddus 10, the second side of the slide shelf 5 where Beckett's books were stored. Then there are also the glossed books of the Bible which is what I was especially anxious to see. Such as this, Beckett's Glossed Pantaduke, the first item on the book list now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And this for me is volume of the Minor Prophets with Gloss now in Trinity College, Cambridge. And this from his Glossed Volume of the Fall Gospels, number 799 among Beckett's books listed in the slide. These are books for use, but they are luxuriously and richly illuminated, not remotely or steer Cistercian texts from Ponteini. And in these we can glimpse the famous extravagance of Beckett's taste. There were also, they were also brand new texts in the 12th century and Beckett's Library was extremely up to date. That too is interesting. The manuscripts were doubtless, professionally illuminated, and they are not at all the work of monks. The manuscript of the four gospels includes a portrait of a scribe at the beginning of Luke, possibly a priest but certainly not a Cistercian monk. And the wonderful initial to the right shows a battle between two knights serenaded from the top left by a cat with a violin. Here's a detail. Doubtless from the iconographic tradition to which we also owe, hey diddle diddle the cat with a fiddle. In the initial for the opening of John's Gospel in the same manuscript is what appears to be an image of the manuscript's patron as you see here at the top. Clearly an Archbishop wearing the pallium of Canterbury with a scribe or companion below in this case not a monk at all looking up at him. This Archbishop may very well be an unnoticed contemporary portrait of Beckett himself. There seems to be another here too. This is from the author's copy of the manuscript of Herbert of Boscham's edition The Great Gloss on the Salter, which as Herbert writes in the preface was commissioned by Beckett when they were staying together at Ponteini. In fact it was never finished in Beckett's lifetime and it remained the property of Herbert of Boscham himself who eventually bequeathed it to the cathedral. The picture there presumably shows Herbert and Thomas Beckett with his name just visible above, Sanctus Tomas Martyr et Pontifex. In the thesis I argued that all these luxury gloss books were all made in Paris which is where the texts originated. I don't actually know now whether this is right and I may have overstated the case. One at least, the twelve minor prophets, is signed by an undoubted English scribe Roger of Canterbury who was doubtless a member of Beckett's household in France. Anyway I eventually wrote all this up into a slim book, now long out of print, with a picture on the front cover of a manuscript once attributed almost certainly wrongly to the possession of Beckett. In 1975 I joined Sotheby's, not far from here, as cataloger of medieval manuscripts. Among many other things I was responsible there for the rediscovery and eventual sale in 1986 of what I now call the Beckett Leaves, the earliest illustrated life of the saint. I showed you one detail a moment ago, here's another, illustrating Beckett giving the one finger of defiance to Henry II and another in which his petition is brought to the pope. I also participated peripherally, but not so closely, in the Sotheby sale of another 12th century Beckett chaos made to enclose relics of the saint, like the one here at the Antiquaries, but this one formerly of Peterborough Abbey and now in the Victorian Albert Museum. Both the Leaves and the Chasse still hold record prices both for any English manuscript at auction and I think for any work of art bought by the Vier name. Clearly the magic name of Thomas Beckett still has potency in the modern world. In the summer of 2000 I took my second and only other job as fellow librarian of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, from which I retired five months ago. My employer for 17 years was Matthew Parker, born in 1534, died 1575, former master of corpus and subsequently first archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was responsible for what is known as the Elizabethan settlement, which was the establishment of the Church of England as the religion of state, which it still is, unless Mr Corbyn abolishes it on Friday morning. Here is Parker's working draft of the 39 articles of 1562, the defining document of the Anglican Church. At least initially it was not Protestant and certainly not Lutheran. The English Church was to be Catholic but just not Roman. This is the clause in the original, the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England. Parker was a Brexit man. He believed that St Augustine of Canterbury had intended to set up an independent English Church unfettered by Rome and that it had all gone wrong when we joined the European Union in 1066. He therefore obtained license from the Privy Council to take into his own custody the oldest manuscripts in England in order to demonstrate with tangible evidence the antiquity and distinctive Englishness of Episcopal religion in this country. That is why the Parker Library was formed. Matthew Parker was especially interested in the history of the Archipiscopacy of Canterbury. He saw himself as the 70th Archbishop in an unbroken line back through Thomas Becket to St Augustine and even through the apostolic succession of Gregory back to St Peter himself. Parker wrote the lives of his predecessors published in 1571. This shows the opening of his long account on Archbishop Becket. He was also assiduous in locating and gathering medieval lives of Becket which are not common such as this by John Granderson Bishop of Exeter and this which he probably obtained from Lincoln Cathedral and this which is a unique life of Becket in Middle English verse. What's touching about this particular manuscript is that it had belonged to Thomas Cranbar who signed it and who was himself an Archbishop Thomas who was also about to be martyred when he was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1556. Parker also had Matthew Paris' drawing of Becket's own martyrdom nearly 400 years earlier. For me at least one of the most evocative treasures of the Parker Library is the primary copy of the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury which was one of the books actually owned by Becket himself. The author was a close friend of Becket and had accompanied him in exile. I had not managed to see the manuscript when I was writing my thesis. I had written to the then fellow librarian at Corpus applying to look at it and as was the custom in those days he simply refused me admission. I was rather upset. Even today the Parker Library is still the only manuscript collection in the world to which I've ever been declined access. It therefore gives me particular pleasure to show you Parker Library manuscript 46. Here it is again with the opening of book five. This is one of the books I've often brought out for visitors for it still continues to give me a thrill to touch and to turn the pages of a book once owned by Thomas Becket himself. I think it's probably my favourite book in the Parker Library and if the fellows would like to give me a present to mark my recent retirement I would accept gratefully. The Polycraticus is really the first English text on political science and on the relationship of kings to their subjects and on the necessary deference to the church precisely the topic of the controversy with Henry II and it is almost inconceivable that Becket didn't read the manuscript or have it read to him. Becket's manuscript in the Parker Library has a good many notar marks added by some twelfth century reader drawing attention to passages of particular interest. No examples of Becket's handwriting are known and it would be interesting to know whether these markings have any bearing on the controversy. Here's another. The manuscript matches up with item 853 in that inventory of books owned by Becket as in this rather fuzzy scan where the wording corresponds almost exactly with that on the front flyleaf of the book shown here. The Polycraticus of John of Salisbury and his Metalogicum and then it did say Sanctitomio Materis of St Thomas the Martyr and so they knew it was his copy but when Becket's shrine was destroyed and his name was deleted from history by Henry VIII in 1538 one of the monks or subsequent owner must have scraped away the name to preserve the book. It was a distinctively canterbury custom to transcribe the wording of that inventory onto the flyleaf of a book a point to which we will return later. The shelf mark above, you can see it here, distinctly O2 gradus 10 is the location among Becket's books in the Slype similar to the numbering which we saw in the Cassiodorus at Mordellin College in Oxford. Second book case shelf 10. Let's come back to the storage of Becket's books in the Middle Ages. The manuscripts were marked with his name as the previous owner as in the Polycraticus and the Livy and they were shelved together but only as part of the working library of the Cathedral Priory with all the other miscellaneous book acquisitions of the 12th and early 13th centuries. It's an odd fact that although Becket was almost immediately declared a saint and was canonised in 1173 the books which he had owned personally were simply sent across for storage in the daily reference collection of the monks. The martyr's books were not regarded as religious relics. Canterbury Cathedral preserved and greatly venerated many other items associated with our new saint, recorded in detail in successive inventories including two miters, a gold one in which he was first buried and the white one he actually used, his embroidered gloves, his hair shirt, his bed clothes and bed hangings, his belt, his monastic cowl, his flail made of thongs, his chasable, his sandals and even his matintosh if I correctly interpret capo pluviali in the Cathedral Infantry but his books were simply shelved with other miscellaneous donations to the library of the Priory. Among the relics still exhibited in the Cathedral of Sons in France are 12th century vestments said to have been used there by Becket and those very many Becket reliquaries, here's another one, this one down in France, attest to a huge industry in the supposed body parts or other intimate possessions of the saint but these do not include books. The monks of Canterbury operated the biggest pilgrim site in Christendom and they exhibited items or places in the cathedral with only the most tenuous association with the saint. The equivalent of the postcard shop in Canterbury Cathedral sold items like this which is also from the collection of the Society of Antiquaries, a little container for holy water which had touched the shrine and was reputed to do miracles as it's not a word I use much I'm not actually sure whether it's pronounced ampola or ampula however both monks and pilgrims were oddly indifferent to the martyr's library then still in the cathedral it's very strange this good historical case for suggesting that the famous Eadwyn Salter now at Trinity College in Cambridge was commissioned by Becket but if it was the monks of the cathedral neither recorded the fact nor cared. They even discarded some of Becket's books when the library was rehoused in the early 15th century. Duplicate texts from the cathedral were at that time sent up to Canterbury College in Oxford in the late Middle Ages for classroom use and eventual destruction by students and at least two of these were carved from Becket's own shelf and they knew it blandly giving away the saint's personal volumes of the old new digest on Roman law like all good toys taken to school they never came back. The Cassiodorus of Mordland College was already in Oxford by the 1480s by which time its association with Saint Thomas Becket had been entirely forgotten. This all shows a very interesting difference of attitude between the Middle Ages and now. If we had a pair of socks for example which had been worn by William Shakespeare or even some strands of his hair I am inventing examples they would have only minor curiosity value for us but a book from Shakespeare's library if such a thing existed and it doesn't and especially if it had signs of use by him would be an incomparable treasure for us today for it would be a window into the intellect and the soul of the man. It was the other way round in the Middle Ages books mere books once owned or used by medieval saints did not generally have the status of relics. One day not long ago I had the Bible historian Ile Polleg to lunch at Corpusyn Cambridge and I remarked conversation over coffee afterwards something along the lines of what I've just outlined which is the oddity that books in medieval England were not regarded as relics. Ile said that he knew of a medieval reference to what had clearly once been an exception. He tapped at his laptop which he had with him and he brought up an entry dateable to 1321 in the sacrist role of Canterbury Cathedral describing an important but never traced manuscript among the relics of the cathedral apparently used in the liturgy around the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. It begins in Latin, item textus cum solterio sanctitome Argento deorato co opatus gemis o natis and I had one of those sudden heart-stopping shivers of recognition which make our lives as antiquaries worthwhile for I have seen those words before. Here they are almost word for word at the end of a portable solter manuscript 411 now also in the Parker Library recording and I translate approximately. This solter with silver gilt boards ornamented with jewels formerly belonged to N Archbishop of Canterbury and eventually came into the possession of Thomas Beckett late Archbishop of Canterbury as his witness in the old inscription. We rushed across to the library at once and I fetched out the manuscript. We gazed at it together trembling with excitement. The writing shown here is Postmade Evil from the period of Matthew Parker. It might even have been added after the manuscript reached Cambridge. The book is now missing its front flyleaf where as we saw in Beckett's Polycraticus the wording of any Canterbury inventory would also normally have been written but it is and so that is what the reference is to the old inscription but it's no longer there the present binding to his 18th century. The manuscript itself dates from around the year 1000. Its origin was once assumed to be continental perhaps from Reims or Toa as M.R. James suggested in his catalogue of the Parker Library but it's actually written by the same scribe as the contemporary Boethius with Old English Gloss also among Parker's books and certainly from Canterbury. The prayer to all confessors in the Psalter opens with invocations of St Gregory and St Augustine of Canterbury evangelist of England and a Canterbury province is more or less absolute. Prayers added to the manuscript in the 12th century are in that distinctive prickly hand characteristic of the scribes of the cathedral scriptorium after the Norman conquest and we'll return to these later. The passage of a manuscript from Canterbury Cathedral into Parker's possession is very simple for that was his single largest source of acquisitions as Archbishop he simply helped himself to anything he wanted. There's not really much doubt that this was a former cathedral manuscript and that it is indeed the actual book described in the Sacrist Road in the 1320s. The inscription referring to N, Archbishop of Canterbury, is strange because the only medieval candidate would have been not Helen Archbishop for six years in the early eighth century. Clearly impossible and the assumption is that it's a general term, no men, unnamed anonymous and that the Psalter is being attributed to possession by unspecified Archbishops. An unusual feature of the book is that it has a second litany by another scribe with and I have marked these in the first and eighth lines the names of St Vincent twice and Eustace both written in capitals. Curiously the Benedictine Abbey of Abingdon had relics of both Eustace and Vincent and so it has sometimes been proposed that the Psalter might have been from that. That's not necessary if we accept that it was originally used by unspecific Archbishops of Canterbury for its first owner was then surely Elfridge Archbishop from 995 to 1005 who had himself previously been a monk of Abingdon Abbey. If it was a private prayer book for the use of an Archbishop then this makes sense. Now let's return to the sacrist inventory of 1321. I've subsequently been to look at the original in the British Library. It's describing items actually kept on or around Becky's glittering shrine. This is an imagined view of what it might have looked like before its total destruction in 1538. The entry begins. Item Textus Cumsulterio. Textus in this context means a binding from the verb tegra texitectum to cover. The word is commonly used for gospel books in dual bindings but it refers to the decorated cover not the inside. The same sacrist role includes three items described as Textus Cine Libro empty ornamental book covers. The binding of Beckett Salter is described in further detail. It was silver gilt with ornate gems around the edges with an ivory in the centre showing Christ in majesty holding a book between four engraved evangelists. Since manuscript 411 dates from around the year a thousand the likelihood is that we have here a description of an unrecorded Anglo-Saxon treasure binding. In fact it's almost impossible in England that a dual binding was anything but Anglo-Saxon. The famous example surviving intact is on the 11th century gospels of Judith the Flanders Countess of Northumbria now in New York. Similarly with Christ in Majesty but this time all in gold. Notice the nails which hold the metalwork in place. Another one's belong to Countess Godifew, sister of Edwin the Confessor who gave it to Rochester Cathedral described as ornamented with silver and precious stones. Beckett's manuscript was obviously much smaller and it had as I said an ivory of Christ in Majesty holding a book. Could that be something like the little late 10th century Anglo-Saxon ivory of exactly this subject now in the British Museum? The date and size would fit perfectly. The ornament on Beckett's altar was on one cover only presumably the bag. The last page of corpus 411 was up against the binding. It shows offsets from the edges of nails around the edges like those in the Judith the Flanders volume except in the middle where two pins perhaps secured the central upright ivory. Even from the inventory alone we might have guessed that Beckett's altar must have been something much older than Beckett's lifetime. Treasure bindings were not characteristic of the 12th century. Beckett as we saw in his gloss manuscripts had a taste for luxury and show. Would he have used a journal binding at all? Look at this. This mosaic is the oldest known image of Beckett as a saint in Montréal in Sicily probably based on information from people who knew him personally including Joan of Sicily daughter of hen of the second and Beckett's own nephew who lived there. The Beckett casket earned by the Antiquaries was found in southern Italy and is evidence of his relics down there too. The book shown in his hand in the mosaic consistently is the right size for a salter. It is indeed jewelled on the back cover. Nearer to home is this. In the windows of the north side of Triniti Chapel in Canterbury immediately above Beckett's shrine when his jewelled salter was probably displayed. There is uncertainty as to how much of this image is a modern replacement and it may be of no value to us that Thomas Beckett is shown holding a book of exactly the right size with decoration on its lower cover unless of course it's based on or is part of the lost original window of around 1200. Let's look inside the salter. It's decorated in the so-called Franco Saxon style rare but not unknown in England around the year 1000 including one initial which seems to be only partly painted. It is the last moment of survival of the old Irish or Celtic style found in much earlier insular manuscripts such as the book of Celts. Look at those panels of interlace in the salter and compare this from the book of Celts itself. The real puzzle is the manuscript's front is peace. This is not relevant to the Beckett story but it's very odd. The assumption is that the page was originally unfinished and that the central compartment was left blank with an empty border afterwards completed in an early 11th century hand. It's one of the most famous and widely published examples of Anglo-Saxon line drawing. It's assumed to represent David but he is not shown as a king or with his harp as one would expect in a normal Anglo-Saxon salter as here. The drawing of the standing man in manuscript 411 does not obviously fit that tradition. Here's the strange thing. At the foot of the drawing are two tiny initials WS in a hand which cannot be made evil. I'm at a loss to explain them. To my eye they look like the same ink as the drawing of the man. The question then is whether the drawing could be an 18th or 19th century forgery added by WS to fill a blank space that were English facsimilists around 1800 like John Harris and George Tupper whose work was so good that it's almost impossible to fault except that they customarily have subscribed their own initials. Yet surely the quality is too high and too convincing to have been invented since there's nothing known to me at least from which the picture is copied. Could those initials be those of some reader or admirer in the Parker library? Given the collection's notorious inaccessibility even then this seems unlikely. But candidates might have been William Stanley who catalogued the manuscripts in 1722 or William Stucley, FSA fellow of quarters but I simply don't know. Be that as it may let's come back to the inscription about the manuscript coming into the possession of Thomas Beckett. This has of course been noticed before. All others who've written about the book have made fun of it mocking the credulity of Matthew Parker. It's commonly cited as a classic example of Elizabethan fantasy, a piece of preposterous and romantic invention. As recently as the new catalogue of illuminated manuscripts in Cambridge published in 2013 it's dismissed as almost certainly a complete fiction observing that the manuscript is not in the medieval list of Beckett's books kept in the slide off the cloister. It wouldn't be however for it was in the care of the sacriston with the relics used in the liturgy. In fact Beckett's was not a particularly big name in the Tudor period when his name was more likely to be being erased from books rather than fraudulently invented. The wording is so close to that of the sacrist role of 1321 that I do believe that there was indeed a medieval inscription probably hard to read if Parker's librarian had to have it transcribed to make it more legible. It was as I said doubtless on the front flyleaf in the canterbury fashion. If the Psalter was for an archbishop's private use made for Elfridge, as I'm sure it was, it's very likely to have been inherited by his successor Elfhair or Elfedge archbishop from 1006 until he's mastered them by the Danes in 1012. It may very well have belonged to him too. In 11th century script the ligature Ae looks very like N, especially if it's written in a flamboyant sacs and hand unfamiliar to the personnel of Parker's household. The names of both Elfridge and Elfedge begin with Ae. Elfedge is an interesting man. He was born probably in Somerset around 953 and he became a hermit in Bath where he was famous for his piety and saintly advice. Here he is with a Psalter on his lap. In 984 he was made Bishop of Winchester and in 1006 archbishop of Canterbury. In September 1011 the Vikings laid siege to Canterbury, burnt the cathedral and kidnapped Elfedge. He was taken to London and on 19th April 1012 he was beaten to death at Greenwich, the first archbishop of Canterbury to suffer martyrdom. This is the stained glass window at the event in the cathedral. In 1023 his possessions and relics were sent back to the custody of Canterbury. In 1078 Elfedge was canonised as a saint. I think the Psalter was almost certainly among his relics in its Anglo-Saxon dual binding because look those 12th century additions at the end in the Canterbury script comprise unique readings for the passion or death of Elfedge otherwise inexplicable in the Psalter. See how the AE in line 2 could be mistaken for an N. Maybe then the added frontispiece, not obviously David, actually shows Elfedge holding his Psalter added in 1023 venerated but not yet canonised. It gets better. In the 12th century Elfedge was Thomas Beckett's patron saint. When Beckett became archbishop in 1162 he consciously modelled himself on the reputation of his martyr predecessor and if he existed he would undoubtedly have taken the Psalter of St Elfedge into his own possession. There were contemporary accounts of Beckett carrying a devotional book on his travels. I really think that the inscription is absolutely correct and that this was indeed the Psalter of the Archbishop's of Canterbury and, as it says, that it came into the hands of Thomas Beckett. Finally, of course I must ask the question, even if it's unanswerable, was Beckett actually holding this manuscript at the moment of his martyrdom? The event is well documented. In the last hours of his life Beckett knows that it's all over. The four nights arrived noisily, clearly drunk while the archbishop is at dinner. Thomas Beckett then slips back to his bedchamber where he gathers up the regalia with which by then he knows he's about to die. His skull cap, his surplus, his dark cloak, his ring of office and it would be believable his Psalter of St Elfedge the martyr. He goes through the side door of the cathedral. I've peered closely at the antiquaries casket and I cannot see a book there, although it's very stylised. Medieval and later iconography of the murder does sometimes show a book in his hands or open on the altar or clattering to the ground. As Beckett died his absolute last words, at least according to one account, were to commend his soul into the care of St Elfedge. That might explain why the Psalter was kept on the shrine rather than being sent with Beckett's other manuscripts to the slide off the cloister and why a book, a mere book became a medieval relic. At the Reformation the dual binding must have been stripped off as the law required, but Matthew Parker, who was interested in archbishops but not at all in Psalters, doubtless requisitioned the manuscript for its known connection with the most famous medieval archbishop of Canterbury. 400 years earlier Beckett himself, already obsessed with martyrdom, had treasured the book for its previous ownership by the martyr Elfedge. In conclusion, I offer you an unpublished exclusive of what surely must have been one of the most evocative relics of medieval England and the only surviving object from Beckett's shrine. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Christopher. I think that I can gently say it's one of the most exciting talks we've had in these rooms for a long time. I'm not a wonderful part of discovery. Now Christopher Hamill has said he would take some questions, so if anyone would like to ask questions please go ahead. Lady there. I'm just going to say first of all the world authority on Thomas Beckett and Duggan is in the audience. I'll take questions from anyone except her. The question is really what do we know about the commissioning of books during a relatively short period while Beckett was in exile? Of course he was away for some years. We may tend to look at medieval manuscripts and think that they must have taken somebody years to write, but when we actually have accounts of people writing them, particularly if you were working for somebody as rich and powerful as Beckett, they probably, I bet you could write one of those gloss books in a matter of weeks. It must sometimes been a bit like having a suit made in Singapore or Hong Kong now. It takes a few weeks, but if you pay extra you can get it done overnight. There are clearly two real sources of Beckett's books. There were those that the monks are making him in Ponsonny where he was for two years, and you can get quite a lot in two years, particularly if a large number of people are working on them. The others are those that he must have commissioned from professional painters, and those gloss books are really among the earliest professional, commercially made books. These people were being paid to do it, and I expect the word went out. Someone was behind it, and it could well have been John Salisbury. Someone like that is going out and commissioning these books. I don't think there's anything unlikely about the life we've been put together in two or three or four years of books as grand as that. Writing a book, say you could do it in a month, illumination would have taken a bit longer, but of course it's not illuminated. The scribe writes the text, leaves a blank space, and it's given to the illuminator, so the illuminator can be working on the early pages while the scribe is still finishing writing it. I think it's perfectly possible. It's just that moment in history when the monks are losing control, are losing the monopoly of learning, and we begin to get the very, very beginning of a book trade. Is there any record of Beckett giving books away? The question is, is there any record of Beckett giving books away? I'm not aware of any, but it was part of what bishops did. Henry of Bloir, exactly this period, was giving books to Glastonbury and to Winchester. Hugh Pwysae a little bit later in the 12th century gave fantastic books to Durham. It was a kind of thing that a Baldwin, Beckett's successor was Archbishop, gave a number of books to Canterbury. It would have been part of what a bishop would have done in a pastoral role. I don't think Beckett had enough time in a pastoral role. He was in political trouble, he was on the run. Maybe he planned to give some of these away and it all got out of hand. I don't know of any references to Beckett giving books away. Question over there. In struggle further, Boson, who was one of his clerks, do hurry to Canterbury to gather up our money in the book and a particular little book is very precious to me. I wonder if that particular book, which is very precious to, and you take it ahead to South Berthyr, where they all met when they met up in Flanders. And I'm wondering if that precious little book is a sorter. I said I wouldn't take any questions from her, but as she recounts this thing, I feel a kind of shiver going down my spine. That wasn't a question, that is a statement, that Beckett goes back for a precious book. Of course the word precious may mean precious emotionally, but it may also mean precious in metallic terms. Maybe, because it'd be quite, it'd be very portable. I mean it's about that size. It's just the kind of book you take with you. It really is an extraordinary thing. He's probably already thinking about Marsatum, and that invocative association with this Marsat's book must have mattered to him enormously. That in a way may have a slight comment on the previous question about commissioning the library in France. Here may have been one book, but he actually took with him, so maybe they weren't all commissioned in France. But that's a wonderful, wonderful reference, and I wish I'd known that. The question is Sir William Hamilton. This is the Sir William Hamilton of Nelson fame, I assume. He was in Naples. I have no idea whether, actually, you expect he would imagine he would be more interesting classical antiquity than he would be in something medieval. But don't you, I could imagine he's in Naples in the turn of the 18th century, and he sees this very English thing and thinks that's amusing, brings it back, and then thinks I don't want it in the house and gives it to the antiquaries. But I don't actually know anything further about the history of that object, but it was given by him. Is your famously inaccessible library ever likely to exhibit this wonderful discovery? Our famously inaccessible library, I hope, is no longer inaccessible. My successor may close it down. We're now open to the public every week. We have a permanent exhibition upstairs. Every single manuscript has been digitized, every single page of every manuscript has been digitized, and is available free on the internet, and the Beckett Salter is currently on view right now. On that note, I think we should all rush to King's Cross to go to Cambridge, and I'm certainly going to try and do so myself. But I do also go to the British Museum to see Vianna Cree's wonderful Beckett Shass, but shall we leave it there with a heartfelt thanks to Christopher de Hamill for the most wonderful lecture today?