A princess’s psalter recovered? Newly discovered fragments of an Old English glossed psalter

A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: a number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. This discovery is a possible key to a European mystery: pieces of the same manuscript were previously found in England, Germany and Poland. The original manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the Norman Conquest.

Recycling of medieval manuscripts in early modern bindings

Many books were printed and bound in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read. Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: twenty-one fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the find and analyzed the text and provenance of the fragments.

Reading between the lines: Old English glosses in a Latin psalter

Old English psalter glosses are fascinating, as I have discussed in this blog post: ‘You are truly the same’: The Varied Nature of Old English Glossed Psalters. The newly discovered fragments in Alkmaar belong to this tradition and provide an Old English translation above every Latin word: “ælce dæg” above tota die [every day]; “utgang wætera” above exitus aquarum [outpouring of waters]; and “halig” above sanctus [holy]. These Old English glosses probably had a didactic purpose: with this translation aid between the lines, the user of this psalter could learn Latin. The discovery in Alkmaar adds a total of more than 500 Old English glosses to the Old English corpus and is of significant value for our knowledge of the language of early medieval England – for example, the fragments contain a number of word forms that occur nowhere else, including the word “gewændunga” for the Latin commotionem ‘movement’.

A European mystery: Fragments scattered throughout Europe

The find in Alkmaar is spectacular in and of itself, but the discovery has an extra dimension because fragments of the same manuscript have previously been found in book bindings throughout Europe: in Cambridge (England), Haarlem (The Netherlands), Sondershausen (Germany) and Elbląg (Poland). By comparing the script, decoration, language and content of the fragments, it can be determined that they all come from the same 11th-century psalter. I even managed to reconstruct that one of the Alkmaar fragments must have been cut from the same double leaf as the fragment found in a Haarlem book: where the text stops on the Alkmaar fragment, it continues in the Haarlem fragment.

How were fragments of that one manuscript spread throughout Europe? The find in Alkmaar seems to provide part of the answer to this: a city account shows that the books with the fragments were purchased in Leiden in the year 1601. They were probably also bound there, because a number of other books with fragments of this same manuscript appear to have a link with Leiden. For example, the books in Poland belonged to a Polish nobleman who studied at Leiden University between 1600 and 1602 and the fragment that is now in Haarlem also appears to come from a book that was purchased in Leiden at an auction in the year 1601. The fact that parts of the 11th-century manuscript were also incorporated into books that are now in England and Germany may be explained by the many international students who came to Leiden in the 17th century.

This does not yet completely solve the mystery: around the year 1600, dozens of bookbinders were active in Leiden. I am now collaborating with my Polish colleague Monika Opalińska (who discovered the fragments in Poland) to find out whether they can identify the precise binder – if they succeed, they hope to find more fragments of the 11th-century psalter with Old English glosses.

Original owner of the manuscript: A refugee princess?

That only leaves the question of how a Leiden bookbinder around 1600 came to own an English manuscript from the 11th century. It is known that around the mid-16th century, manuscripts from England were shipped to the continent by boatloads, so that they could be reused by bookbinders and soap makers. It is quite possible that the manuscript with the Old English glosses was included amongst these, but there is also a second theory. It could well be the long-lost psalter with Old English glosses that belonged to Gunhild, an English princess who fled to the continent after the Norman Conquest of 1066, taking her psalter with Old English glosses with her. Gunhild died in Bruges in the year 1087 and donated her psalter and other treasures to the St. Donaas Church. There, her psalter was last seen in the year 1561 and described as a psalter with English glosses “which one cannot properly understand here”. Since then, every trace of Gunhild’s psalter has been lost, but I did manage to find out that the books of the Donaas Church were confiscated by Calvinists in the year 1580: with the useful books they founded a public library, but other, unnecessary books were sold. A psalter with incomprehensible glosses must have belonged to the latter category – is this how the psalter ultimately ended up in the hands of a Leiden bookbinder? It just might be. Perhaps the fragments which have been found in the Alkmaar book bindings belonged to a royal book!

Porck’s article, with analysis, edition and images of the Alkmaar fragments, appeared this week in the peer-reviewed journal Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge University Press) and can be consulted online for free via: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675123000121. Images of the fragments are available for viewing on Fragmentarium.ms.