Macclesfield, Gorleston, and Warenne

Many of those writing about the Macclesfield Psalter have mentioned the possibility of Warenne patronage, making reference to the closely related Gorleston Psalter as a Warenne commission. The evidence for the Warenne-Gorleston connection, however, has often ended up more or less garbled -- not without reason, in that it remains unpublished, if not uncirculated.

Although she was not the first to propose the connection, the core of the argument was presented in a chapter of my wife's dissertation (Margot McIlwain Nishimura, "The Gorleston Psalter: A Study of the Marginal in the Visual Culture of Fourteenth-Century England," [Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1999]); it was subsequently expanded, refined, and submitted as "Rabbits, Warrens, and Warenne: the Patronage of the Gorleston Psalter", to appear in the long-forthcoming Festschrift for Lucy Freeman Sandler (Eds. K. Smith and C. Krinsky; London: Harvey Miller Press).

Given recent interest in the topic and the likelihood of further delays before the article sees print, I am -- with permission -- making its full text available here. Please note that this does not include the illustrations, and that any references should cite the festschrift article and NOT this ad hoc attempt to make its essentials more promptly available to the scholarly community.

Rabbits, Warrens, and Warenne: the Patronage of the Gorleston Psalter*

Margot M. Nishimura & David Nishimura, Providence, Rhode Island

The Gorleston Psalter (British Library, MS. Add. 49622) is among the richest of a group of ostentatiously large and luxurious early fourteenth-century psalters that also includes the Ormesby, St. Omer, Luttrell, and Douai Psalters.[i] In his 1907 monograph, the most extensive publication on the Gorleston Psalter to date, Sydney Cockerell noted that all of these manuscripts save the Luttrell Psalter have some association with East Anglia, which includes the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire.[ii] More recently, Caroline Hull has identified Norwich as a center for East Anglian manuscript production and the most likely place of origin for most of these psalters.[iii]

At over fourteen inches in height, the Gorleston Psalter and its kin were outsized volumes, especially in comparison to the hand-held books of hours that were then supplanting the psalter for private devotions. That these psalters were intended as much for display as for devotion is also indicated by the lavish and often idiosyncratic decoration, which differs dramatically from manuscript to manuscript while showing certain common characteristics such as the treatment of major liturgical divisions with especially large historiated initials, elaborate full borders, and fairly intricate marginalia, all in rich, opaque pigments and burnished gold. Heraldry plays a prominent role in several of these manuscripts, though it has as often confounded as aided efforts to determine patterns of patronage.

It was the arms on a single, prominently placed shield that led Cockerell to associate the Gorleston Psalter with Roger Bigod, fifth Earl of Norfolk and Marshal of England from 1270 to 1306.[iv] Yet it is not clear that the arms on that shield were borne by any living man at the time the psalter was commissioned, and the more closely they are examined, the more the possible references multiply. There are many other heraldic elements in the psalter, however, all of which ultimately point in a direction summarily dismissed by Cockerell. Expanding on a thesis originally proposed by Christine Gormley in an unpublished Courtauld M.A. report,[v] this article will propose that the heraldry and decoration of the Gorleston Psalter unambiguously indicates the patronage of John, eighth Earl of Warenne (1286-1347) – one of the most powerful barons in England, and a major landholder in East Anglia.

The checky azure and or arms of the Earls of Warenne ranked high in the armorial hierarchy, and frequently appeared in decorative programs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: Matthew Paris’s well-known mid-thirteenth century page of shields and the sculpted shields in the naves of Westminster Abbey and York Minster are but the most prominent examples.[vi] Perhaps this is why Cockerell so easily discounted the significance of the Warenne arms in the Gorleston Psalter.[vii] Yet the blue and burnished gold checkerboards are disproportionately conspicuous throughout the manuscript, appearing in margins, psalm initials (the only arms so privileged), and over 120 line endings. Not only ubiquitous, they also regularly appear next to depictions of rabbits and rabbit warrens – juxtapositions which Gormley perceptively recognized as punning allusions to the patron’s name. What has not previously been noted, however, and what clinches the case, is the appearance of the identical allusive devices in the earl’s seals.

The eighth Earl of Warenne used several seals. Most are conventional in design, based upon the seal of the earl’s grandfather, the seventh earl: a knight riding a horse with checky trappings on the obverse, a large checky shield on the reverse.[viii] There are also two canting seals, however, the first known through a lost impression attached to a charter of 1329 confirming a grant of land in Betchworth, Surrey (Fig. 1).[ix] Here a checky-clad knight and horse occupy the obverse, while the reverse depicts a game park with rabbits in warrens below and a Warenne shield hanging above. The second canting seal (Fig. 2) repeats the key elements of the first, but in a form of unprecedented size and splendor, rivaling the great seals of Edward I, II, and III, whose reigns were spanned by the earl's own majority. The reverse of this seal is closely modeled on the seal commissioned by Edward III at the beginning of his reign in 1327, with the seated figure assuming the same pose, with knees bent to the right, on a similar Gothic “throne”.[x] In this case, however, the earl is seated in a game park, his feet resting above burrowing rabbits in their warren. The reason for this sigillary pretension would seem to have been Warenne’s new status as count palatine, a social dignity attained in 1333 through acquisition of the earldom of Stratherne in Scotland from his cousin Edward Balliol. The presence of this title on the seal thus indicates a date no earlier than 1333; the only surviving impression is attached to a document of 1346, the year before the earl's death.[xi] Rabbits, warrens, and other canting devices are not found on the seals of previous earls of Warenne.[xii]

The punning elements on the eighth earl’s seals work on multiple levels. There is the reference to the aristocratic privilege of “free-warren”: the right, granted by the king alone, to hunt the animals living on a given piece of land. The Pilkington Charter of 1291 records such a grant; the margins contain depictions of some of the animals Roger de Pilkington alone could hunt on the lands identified in the adjacent text, with rabbits, birds, and deer especially prominent.[xiii] On another level, the seals’ imagery plays off another meaning of “warenne” (Old French "garenne") – a game park. In fact, such parks were used for the cultivation of rabbits, and provided the sites for some of the earliest man-made rabbit warrens in England.[xiv] Of course, the (rabbit) warren-Warenne pun is probably the most obvious. Although warrens could be inhabited by other animals, medieval documents routinely use “warren” to denote a rabbit-burrow (the Latin "cunicularium" and Middle English "coney-garth", more specific terms, were used interchangeably).[xv]

Similarly involved references pervade the imagery of the Gorleston Psalter. The first page of the psalter text is occupied by an elaborate Jesse-Tree Beatus initial, one of the psalter’s best-known images (Fig. 3). In its bas-de-page there is an unusual chase scene.[xvi] The chase itself, which includes a boar, two deer, four rabbits, a monkey-like hunter, and several hounds, would not be strange a strange subject for a Beatus page, given its allegorical associations with the battle of good and evil.[xvii] Yet this chase is unique in taking place in a game park set atop a rabbit warren – the identical setting used on the Warenne seals. This imagery is immediately picked up on the recto of the following folio (fol. 9; the first text page with decorative line endings) with a virtual transcription of the key elements of the first canting seal (Fig. 1): a knight at the end of line four; the checky arms at the end of line 10; and a rabbit warren in the right half of the ending for line thirteen – the first of 26 such endings.[xviii] Another example of a warren line ending is found at the end of line two on folio 172 (Fig. 4), but here the Warenne checks fill the interior of the large initial D of Psalm 130 as well as half the bar at the end of line ten. Yet another noteworthy example is at the very bottom of folio 209 toward the beginning of the Litany, where the entry for John the Evangelist (Fig. 5) is adorned with the device of his namesake, John of Warenne. Just below, a young man standing on a dragon trains a rabbit tied on a rope – on one hand a visual metaphor for conquering the devil (the dragon) through reining in lustful passions (the rabbit), but in this context, possibly also a humorous reference to yet another Warenne-warren connection: the earls’ leading role in the cultivation of rabbits.

Unlike the hare, the rabbit was not indigenous to Britain. It was introduced in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, probably from France, and only took hold in significant numbers between 1230 and 1250.[xix] The right to cultivate rabbits was governed by the laws of free-warren, and thus the rabbit remained an exclusive and expensive commodity throughout the middle ages, in demand by the wealthiest classes for its meat and its fur alike. In East Anglia, ecclesiastical landlords established many of the early warrens, but of the lay landlords who contributed to “this new experiment,” the Earls of Warenne were among the most prominent, maintaining warrens in Methwold, Thetford, Tunstead, and Gimingham, all in Norfolk.[xx] The Warennes also cultivated rabbits in their home county of Sussex, and in 1240 the earl was ordered to supply 200 of the 500 rabbits for Henry III’s Christmas feast.[xxi] One hundred years later, the destruction caused by Warenne rabbits was given as the reason for the depreciation of 100 acres of arable land in Ovingdean, Sussex.[xxii]

Rabbits are admittedly abundant in Gothic marginalia, and warrens are not unique to the Gorleston Psalter. In a double-page bas-de-page sequence in the Queen Mary Psalter, for example, two well-dressed ladies ferret out rabbits from a warren and then beat them with sticks,[xxiii] while in a lower margin of the later Luttrell Psalter, rabbits scurry for safety as a ferret approaches the central hole of their warren – a simple rounded mound of earth like that in the Queen Mary Psalter.[xxiv] What we find in the Gorleston Psalter, however, is something quite different: warrens repeatedly appear in line endings and margins as self-contained emblematic images, not as part of larger programs comprising scenes of hunting and rural life.[xxv] The sheer number of rabbit images in the Gorleston Psalter is also without parallel, as is their variety. Sometimes rabbits share their warrens with unlikely guests (a stag, fol. 177v); elsewhere they narrowly escape the warrener’s nets (fol. 132v).[xxvi] Rabbits burrow not only in warrens (e.g., fol. 172v), but also in hoods (e.g., fol. 202v), and trumpets (e.g., fols. 196v, 199v).[xxvii] The images in which rabbits run in and out of trumpets are of particular interest, for the trumpets are of the type associated with the herald, whose duties included identifying, announcing, and recording the blazons of knights at tournaments and other chivalric events.[xxviii] The trumpets may lack pendant banners, and they may be blown by an odd assortment of creatures; nonetheless, the scampering rabbits and the nearby checky line endings leave no doubt about the intended heraldic reference, playful appearances notwithstanding.[xxix]

But what about Cockerell’s argument for Bigod patronage? On folio 70v there is a shield next to an initial in which a balding layman reads at a lectern; the placement is singular in that it does not mark a major text division. The shield is charged per pale or and vert, a lion rampant gules: the arms of the Marshals, which led Cockerell to identify the lay reader as Roger Bigod, fifth Earl of Norfolk, Earl Marshal from 1270 until his death in 1306.[xxx] This is by no means the only initial inhabited by a reader, however, and the identification with Bigod poses obvious difficulties if the Gorleston Psalter is to be dated to the second decade of the century, as the stylistic evidence suggests. [xxxi] The arms, moreover, only appear twice in the entire manuscript, and while their placement on folio 70v may be anomalous, one would expect a patron’s arms to be displayed rather more prominently. The other appearance of these arms is on folio 68v, the first page of Psalm 51 and the first page bearing shields with blazons other than those of England and France (Fig. 6).[xxxii] A shield bearing the Marshal arms is at bottom center; in the flanking corners are shields with the arms of England and France, while a fourth shield with the checky arms of Warenne is given pride of place at the top right of the border. Immediately to its left is a mermaid, the only one in the manuscript and a possible reference to the legendary ancestor of the eighth earl’s grandmother, Alice of Lusignan. In the large introductory initial, Doeg attacks the priests of Nobe, whose gaze further singles out the Warenne arms.[xxxiii]

If the Marshal arms do not belong to the Gorleston Psalter’s patron, how are they to be read? The original bearers of these arms were the Marshals, Earls of Pembroke. After five Marshal brothers died in the first half of the thirteenth century without male heirs, the title of Earl Marshal passed by way of the surviving sister to Roger Bigod, the fourth Earl of Norfolk (d. 1270).[xxxiv] It is possible, indeed probable, that the fourth Earl did not assume the Marshal arms, but his successor as Earl Marshal, the fifth Earl of Norfolk, also named Roger Bigod, did. The fifth earl died without an heir in 1306, and there is no indication that the arms were borne thereafter by any of his relatives or descendents.[xxxv] The next Earl Marshal was Robert Clifford (1273-1314), succeeded by Thomas of Brotherton (1300-38), both of whom continued to bear their own family arms.[xxxvi]

Lucy Freeman Sandler has suggested that the Marshal arms might here refer to the Cluniac Priory of St. Mary in Thetford, Norfolk.[xxxvii] In fact, the priory assumed the arms in its own right after the death in 1306 of Roger Bigod, whose ancestor had founded the priory in the twelfth century. The priory had previously used the older Bigod arms of or, a cross gules. The priory continued to use the Marshal arms up until the Dissolution; later in the fourteenth century, they were also used by the prior himself.[xxxviii] The Warennes and Bigods had long dominated Thetford,[xxxix] but from the end of the twelfth century until 1318, its sole lordship belonged to the Earls of Warenne – though the Bigods continued to hold nearby manors throughout.[xl] Moreover, the families were connected: the seventh Earl of Warenne was the half brother of Hugh Bigod, who was the father of Roger, the second Bigod Earl Marshal; and Hugh Bigod had married Maud, the last of the Marshals, who then married the sixth Earl of Warenne after Hugh’s death. Given the circumstances, the presence of the Marshal arms in a Warenne-commissioned manuscript would be no surprise. Yet while their resonance for a Warenne patron must not be lost sight of, their inclusion in the Gorleston Psalter may primarily be due to other concerns – concerns that also lie behind the large number of other blazons that appear in the manuscript, many of which have no obvious, direct Warenne connection.

In fact, the Marshal arms on folio 68v appear to belong to a larger armorial panoply best characterized as patriotic and celebratory in nature. On either side of the Marshal arms appear the arms of England and France; on the facing page, folio 69, the (fictitious) arms of Edward the Confessor (Azure a cross patonce between five martlets or) and St. Edmund (Azure three crowns in pale or) flank an unidentified shield charged gules a cross argent between four leopards' heads or.[xli] It is possible that these three shields represent institutions[xlii] – the arms of Edward and Edmund could refer to Westminster Abbey and Bury St. Edmunds – but this double-page opening also recalls programs such as the series of Virtues in the Painted Chamber of Westminster Palace (ca. 1260s; destroyed 1834), in which the arms of England, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund alternated in panels framing the figure of Debonerete.[xliii] Paul Binski described this scheme as promoting “a notion of Plantagenet family virtue,” associating Henry III with the good works of his sainted ancestors while extending this association to his two eldest sons, the princes Edward (later Edward I) and Edmund, namesakes of the two saints.[xliv] This combination of arms recurs in subsequent Plantagenet commissions, and Edward II carried banners with the arms of Sts. Edward and Edmund into battle.[xlv] Similar imagery is also documented in at least one large-scale non-Plantagenet commission. On the parish church of Heckington, Lincolnshire, the gable of the south porch (1330-40) is carved with a seated figure of Christ, flanked by a king, a cleric, two censing angels, and the arms of England, Edward the Confessor, and St. Edmund. Veronica Sekules has interpreted the inclusion of the heraldry in this program as “emphatically patriotic.”[xlvi] As in the Gorleston Psalter, the patron, here Henry de Beaumont, a second cousin of Edward II, had his own arms placed in close visual proximity to those of England and its blessed kings.[xlvii]

The Marshal arms fit perfectly into such a program, in that they refer to one of the most illustrious offices in the English chivalric hierarchy. Although the arms may have been assumed by the Thetford priory after 1306, their past associations remained vividly alive – so much so, that a number of post-1306 armorial rolls continue to list per pale or and vert, a lion rampant gules as the arms of the Earl Marshal or the late Earl of Norfolk.[xlviii] Perhaps that was to be expected, given that the arms and the office both harked back to that near-legendary paragon of knightly prowess and fealty, William Marshal.

Indeed, a distinctly chivalric outlook seems to inform the armorial references introduced throughout the Gorleston Psalter. The next major division page after the double-page opening of folios 68v and 69 is folio 86, marking Psalm 68. The blazoned shields are here set amidst images of prayer and thanksgiving;[xlix] proceeding counter-clockwise from the upper left, they belong to Hugh le Despencer, Sir John de Freville, Giles de Trumpington, Sir Gilbert Peche, and Sir John de Wateville.[l] Apart from Despencer, who was Earl of Winchester, all had land in and family ties to southern East Anglia -- the counties of Cambridgeshire, Essex, and Suffolk. No less significantly, all were knights who served in the military campaigns of Edward I and Edward II. Wateville, for example, was summoned to fight against the Scots in 1301, and Peche was captured at Bannockburn in 1314, while Sir John de Freville was knighted in 1306 at the same ceremony as Edward II, John of Warenne, and Hugh Despencer the younger.[li] Though he sat out Bannockburn, and though he was often at odds with the king, John of Warenne could well have commanded all of the men represented here. Other barons and knights of Edward I and Edward II account for the rest of the individual arms on shields in the psalter: the Earls of Warwick, Pembroke, and Arundel (the last, John of Warenne’s nephew and heir); Sir Payn Tiptoft; Roger, Lord Kerdeston; Thomas Bardolf; and Robert de Clifford, to name some of the most prominent. [lii] The knightly associations are reinforced, moreover, by the numerous images of armored men that populate many of the line endings, margins, and initials.[liii]

Warenne patronage explains many of the key features of the Gorleston Psalter. The Gorleston Psalter may also tell us some things about John of Warenne. A Warenne connection to Gorleston in Suffolk, for example, is not otherwise documented,[liv] but the only dedication in the psalter’s Calendar is for what must be the parish church of St. Andrew, Gorleston.[lv] Judging from taxation records of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, St. Andrew’s was a very prosperous establishment, and likely to have attracted powerful benefactors.[lvi] Yet there seem to be no records linking any of the families heraldically represented in the Gorleston Psalter directly to the church or town, while arms belonging to families with known links to Gorleston do not appear in the psalter at all.[lvii]

John of Warenne’s will attests to his interest in books, specifying that a bible he had had made in France should go to his son William, one of several illegitimate children mentioned in the document.[lviii] Although this bible cannot be traced, Warenne patronage is evident in one other surviving book besides the Gorleston Psalter: a Duns Scotus manuscript, ca. 1320-30, now in Paris.[lix] The decoration of the Paris Duns Scotus is much less lavish than that of the psalter, but heraldry once again identifies the patron. On folio 1 of the first of two volumes, a rectangular banner bearing the Warenne arms hangs from a long trumpet, which is blown towards the historiated introductory initial by a young man who appears to be emerging from a narrow bar of the border.[lx] Except for the rampant red lion in the lozenge of the lower left border – a possible reference to the author’s nationality – these are the only arms in the entire manuscript.[lxi] In the initial, the author, in Franciscan garb, receives his book from an angel. John of Warenne had a Franciscan confessor, which might have something to do with the commission of a text by the most eminent of Franciscan philosophers. [lxii]

The lost bible was made in France; the Gorleston Psalter, in East Anglia. The Paris Duns Scotus appears to have been written in France, but its decoration – the work of at least two hands – is wholly attributable to English illuminators, suggesting that the text was brought to England before being decorated and bound.[lxiii] John of Warenne’s book commissions spanned the Channel, and the Gorleston Psalter, in its own way, may have been no exception. For the profusion of marginal images that sets it apart, even from other East Anglian manuscripts, finds its closest contemporary parallels in the books from northern France commissioned by the Bar family of Lorraine.[lxiv] There is a connection, for John of Warenne married Joan of Bar, a granddaughter of Edward I, in 1306. The marriage was not a success, and was without issue – except, perhaps, the Gorleston Psalter.[lxv]

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*This article was presented in embryonic form at the Conference of the Oxford Seminar in the History of the Book before 1500, 8 July 1994, and as a work-in-progress at the annual symposium for research fellows, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 10 May 1995. As a dissertation chapter, it benefited greatly from comments by Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Barbara Drake Boehm, and Karen Marrs. It is now dedicated to Lucy Freeman Sandler, whose enthusiasm for this topic has been unflagging throughout. The purchase of photographs for this article was funded in part by the Liberal Arts Division of the Rhode Island School of Design.

[i] The Gorleston Psalter is Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 1285-1385, 2 vols., Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, V, ed. Jonathan J. G. Alexander (London: Harvey Miller, 1986), II, no. 50.

[ii] Sydney C. Cockerell, The Gorleston Psalter (London, 1907).

[iii] Caroline S. Hull, “The Douai Psalter and Related Manuscripts,” (Dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, 1994).

[iv] Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, 8.

[v] Christine Gormley, “The Hare Motif in the Gorleston Psalter: Its Meanings and Implications,” (M.A. Report, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1992).

[vi] Michael Michael, “The privilege of ‘proximity’: towards a re-definition of the function of armorials”, Journal of Medieval History, XXIII/1 (1997), 55-74.

[vii] Noting the prevalence of the Warenne arms in the Gorleston Psalter, Cockerell explained that they are "the commonest of coats at this period," though also noting that the arms of Clare, "almost equally common," are absent: Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, 19 n. 2. Similarly, Cockerell explained the presence of the Warenne arms in the Ormesby Psalter on the grounds that family were of "almost royal rank and importance" and their arms were "very easy to draw”: Sydney C. Cockerell and M. R. James, Two East Anglian Psalters at the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Printed for the Roxburghe Club, 1926), 33.

[viii] London, Public Record Office, E40/4818.

[ix] Engraved from a drawing by John Anstis (see London, British Library, MS. Stowe 666) for John Watson, Memoirs of the Ancient Earls of Warren and Surrey (Warrington, 1782), Pl. I (of seals), no. 236. A cast of the reverse is preserved at Magdalen College, Oxford; see Jonathan J. G. Alexander and Paul Binski, eds. The Age of Chivalry (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 1987), 117, Fig. 81.

[x] From 1327; see Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, no. 670.

[xi] W. H. St. John Hope, “A Palatinate Seal of John, Earl of Warenne, Surrey and Stratherne, 1305-1347,” Surrey Archaeological Collections, XXVII (1914), 123-27.

[xii] See Hilary Jenkinson, Guide to Seals in the Public Record Office (London: HMSO, 1954), Pl. VII.

[xiii] Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS Bradfer-Lawrence 51; Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II, no. 3, and I, Fig. 43.

[xiv] Mark Bailey, "The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy,” Agricultural History Review, XXXVI (1988), 4.

[xv] The earl would likely also have appreciated the humor in his primary residence in the north being at Conisborough, South Yorkshire.

[xvi] See Richard Marks and Nigel Morgan, The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200-1500 (New York: Braziller, 1981), Pl. 19.

[xvii] Howard Helsinger, “Images on the Beatus Pages of Some Medieval Manuscripts,” AB, LIII (1971), 161-76.

[xviii] For other examples, see fols. 11v, 15v, 19, 49, 57, 80, 94, 103v, etc.

[xix] Elspeth M. Veale, "The Rabbit in England," Agricultural History Review, V (1957), 88.

[xx] Bailey, “Rabbit,” 4.

[xxi] Veale, “Rabbit,” 88; “100 were to be supplied from the lands of the bishopric of Winchester,” and the other 200 by the king’s escheator.

[xxii] H. W. Blaauw, "Remarks on the Nonae of 1340, as Relating to Sussex," Sussex Archaeological Collections, I (1848), 62.

[xxiii] A reflection of contemporary culling practices. London, British Library, MS. Royal 2 B.VII, fols. 155v and 156; see George Warner, Queen Mary’s Psalter (London: British Museum, 1912), Pl. 191.

[xxiv] London, British Library, Additional MS 42130, fol. 176v; see Janet Backhouse, The Luttrell Psalter (London: British Library, 1989), Fig. 32. For another example, see the extensive rabbiting cycle in the lower margins of the Taymouth Hours (London, British Library, MS Yates-Thompson 13, fols. 68v-72), which is part of a larger series of “jeu de dames;” Henry Yates Thompson, A lecture on some English illuminated manuscripts (London, 1902), Pls. XVII-XX.

[xxv] There is a single warren line ending in the Bromholm Psalter: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1523, fol. 102v; see Cockerell and James, Two East Anglian Psalters, 46.

[xxvi] This scene is opposite and may relate thematically to a rabbit funeral scene at the top of fol. 133; see Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, Pl. IX.

[xxvii] See Ibid., Pl. IX; on possible allegorical meanings for rabbits running in and out of hoods, of which there are two other examples (fols. 148 and 212), see Sarah Stanbury Smith, “‘Game in Myn Hood’: The Traditions of a Comic Proverb,” Studies in Iconography, IX (1983), 1-12.

[xxviii] On the general history of the profession in England, see Anthony Wagner, Heralds of England (London: HMSO, 1967); on the practice of the herald as related to one specific event, the 1306 Feast of the Swans, where both Edward II and John of Warenne were knighted, see Constance Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo. Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), esp. 38-44. Concerning the trumpet, see Edmund A. Bowles, La pratique musicale au Moyen Age (Geneva: Minkoff & Lattès, 1983), 46.

[xxix] See note 60.

[xxx] Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, 8.

[xxxi] Nigel Morgan expresses apprehension about the Bigod connection on just these grounds in Peter Lasko and N. J. Morgan, eds. Medieval Art in East Anglia (Norwich: Jarrold and Sons, 1973), 18.

[xxxii] Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts I, Fig. 117.

[xxxiii] 1 Kings 22: 17-18.

[xxxiv] His arms hang upside-down in the left margin of folio 147v of Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora, Part II, above the image and beside the description of the death of Gilbert, the third Marshal brother, in 1246: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 16; see Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Fig. 152.

[xxxv] It is possible that the fifth Earl of Norfolk was the only Bigod to use the Marshal arms. The traditional Bigod arms, or, a cross gules, appear on the seal of his uncle, the fourth earl (d.1270), even though the inscription includes the title of Earl Marshal. We thank John A. Goodall for bringing the earlier Bigod seals to our attention. See also Anthony Wagner, Historic Heraldry of Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 46. In the roll of arms known as the Parliamentary Roll, ca. 1310, "le Counte de Mareschal" is entered at the end of the list of deceased earls with the blazon per pale or and vert, a lion rampant gules, presumably because Roger Bigod was already dead when the list was written, but the arms he bore as Earl Marshal were still associated with him, rather than with the current officeholder: Robert W. Mitchell, English Medieval Rolls of Arms. Vol. 1, 1244-1334 (Tweeddale, Scotland, 1983), 337-89; the entry for Earl Marshal is no. 1046. For the dating of the roll and the significance of the entry for the Earl Marshal, see N. Denholm-Young, "The Song of Carlaverock and the Parliamentary Roll of Arms as found in Cott. MS Calig. A. XVIII in the British Museum," Proceedings of the British Academy XLVII (1961), 251-62.

[xxxvi] Robert Clifford was only "acting" Earl Marshal from 3 September 1307 to 10 March 1308; there is no evidence that he ever bore arms other than checky or and azure, a fess gules: Denholm-Young, “Carlaverock,” 252. Thomas of Brotherton, Edward II's half-brother, was created Earl of Norfolk in 1312 and invested as Earl Marshal in 1316; his arms, gules, three lions passant gardant or debruised by a label of five points argent, appear in "Sir Wm. Le Neve's 2nd Roll," drafted in the latter part of Edward II's reign, under the entry for “Le Cunt' Mareschal”: Mitchell, English Rolls, 417-23, no. 23.

[xxxvii] Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II, 57.

[xxxviii] Francis Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, vol. II (London: William Miller, 1805), 114-15.

[xxxix] William, third Earl of Warenne, established the Augustinian Priory of the Holy Sepulcher at Thetford in 1148. Both Bigods and Warennes remained active benefactors of their priories into the fourteenth century. Alan Crosby, A History of Thetford (Chichester: Phillimore, 1986), 33-37.

[xl] Blomefield, Essay, vol. II, 53-54. By royal command, Warenne ceded the lordship of Thetford to Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, in 1318. The Bigod manors in North and South Lopham lay some ten miles east of Thetford proper: for the 1316 Nomina Villarum, see William J. Blake, "Norfolk Manorial Lords in 1316," Norfolk Archaeology, XXX (1952), 236, 270.

[xli] Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, I, Fig. 118. Cockerell wondered if these might be the arms of Gorleston, but no evidence supports this, while his notion that they might be the arms of St. Bartholomew's Priory, Smithfield, has been disproved by the recovery of different arms, gules two leopards and in chief two crowns or; see London, College of Arms, MS L.10, fol. 67, 21; cited by John A. Goodall, “Heraldry in the Decoration of English Medieval Manuscripts,” Antiquaries Journal 77 (1997), 186. The image in the large initial for Psalm 52 on folio 69 is also noteworthy, depicting an enthroned king flanked by armed men, instead of the usual fool; see Margot McIlwain Nishimura, “The Gorleston Psalter: A Study of the Marginal in the Visual Culture of Fourteenth-Century England,” (Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1999), 185-92.

[xlii] The devices on the unidentified shield also appear on a seal of the prior of St. Martin's, Dover, in the mid-fourteenth century, but in a sixteenth-century roll the field is given as sable rather than gules; Goodall, “Heraldry,” 186.

[xliii] Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 80, Fig. 118.

[xliv] Ibid., 80.

[xlv] Veronica Sekules, “Beauty and the Beast: Ridicule and Orthodoxy in Architectural Marginalia in Early Fourteenth-Century Lincolnshire,” Art History, XVIII (1995), 43.

[xlvi] Ibid., 43; see also Veronica Sekules, “The Sculpture and Liturgical Furnishings of Heckington Church and Related Monuments: Masons and Benefactors in Early Fourteenth-Century Lincolnshire,” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, 1990), 151.

[xlvii] Beaumont’s arms were carved just inside the porch. Sekules, “Sculpture,” 24. John of Warenne was himself descended from Hameline Plantagenet, son of Geoffrey of Anjou; the Plantagenet lion passant guardant appears atop the checky shield on the reverse of one of his seals; see Thomas Moule, Heraldry of fish: Notices of the principal families bearing fish in their arms (London: John van Voorst, 1842), 69.

[xlviii] See note 35.

[xlix] The large historiated initial contains an unusual depiction of the Jonah story, with Jonah alongside two adversaries, praying in thanksgiving to Christ enthroned; an anonymous lay supplicant also appears just above the initial’s upper left finial.

[l] The blazons are: Quarterly argent with gules fretty or, over all a bend sable (Despencer), gules three crescents ermine (Freville), azure crusily and two trumpets palewise or (Trumpington), argent a fess between two chevrons gules (Peche), argent three chevrons gules (Wateville); for illustrations and biographical notes, see Nishimura, “Gorleston Psalter,” Appendix B, nos. 8-12.

[li] Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo, Appendix.

[lii] The 34 shields in the manuscript carry 31 distinct coats-of-arms; only the arms of England, France, the Earl Marshal, and Tiptoft repeat in shields, but the lions of England and the fleur-de-lis of France also appear in the borders of the Crucifixion and Beatus pages (fols. 7 and 8), and in abbreviated form in over 300 line endings containing leopard's heads, fleur-de-lis, or alternating panels of both. For an illustrated analytical list of arms, see Nishimura, “Gorleston Psalter,” Appendix B; see also Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, 19-21, and Goodall, “Heraldry,” 185-86.

[liii] Nishimura, “Gorleston Psalter,” chap. 4.

[liv] In 1863, Dorcas Randall, a local antiquary, compiled three volumes of notes on Gorleston, which are now in the British Library (MSS Egerton 2129-31); they were one of Cockerell’s principal sources for the history of the town and its institutions. One of Cockerell’s published excerpts mentions John, the 7th Earl of Warenne, granting income to the prior and convent of St. Francis in Gorleston in 1280. Unfortunately, we have as yet found no corroborating evidence, and Randall does not name his source, stating only that it was an “extant deed.” See Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, 6; and London, British Library, MS Egerton 2130, fols. 221-24.

[lv] Dedicacio ecclesie de Gorlestone, maius duplex, March 8, in gold leaf (fol. 2). The feast of St. Andrew is also entered in gold at the end of November, and in the first gathering following the Calendar (fol. 11v: Cockerell, Gorleston Psalter, Pl. XIV) the crucified saint is depicted with a young layman and a cleric kneeling in prayer to either side. The scene is set against a tooled gold background and framed by architectural and foliate patterns, the latter extending from the border at the left of the page. Such elaborate treatment is given to only a handful of sacred figures in the margins. The figure of St. Bartholomew at the top of the same page is also significant, as the church owed its rents and fees to the Priory of St. Bartholomew in London. The two most prominent line endings on the page are decorated with a rabbit warren and the Warenne arms. A similar depiction of the crucified Andrew (without Bartholomew) is at the bottom of folio 175; the checky arms occupy two line endings on this page.

[lvi] E. A. Webb, The Records of St. Bartholomew's Priory and of the Church and Parish of St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield, vol. I (Oxford: Humphrey Milford-Oxford University Press, 1921), 380 and 428-29.

[lvii] There were two manors in Gorleston in the early fourteenth century. The first was held by the crown from 1296 until 1316, when it was granted to John de Dreux, Earl of Brittany and Richmond. The Bacon family held the second manor for most of the middle ages, but neither their arms nor those of John de Dreux appear in the manuscript. See Charles John Palmer, The Perlustration of Great Yarmouth with Gorleston and Southtown, vol. III (Great Yarmouth: G. Nall, 1875), 310-11, 310n, 343-45.

[lviii] Publications of the Surtees Society, Testamenta Eboracensia, Part I (London, 1836), 43. His testament was witnessed at Conisborough in 1347; he died the same year leaving no legitimate heir.

[lix] Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 3114; Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II, no. 90; François Avril and Patricia Stirnemann, Manuscrits enluminés d’origine insulaire VIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1987), no. 182.

[lx] Some other representations of heraldic trumpeters: two angels blowing trumpets hung with Bardolf and Vaux banners in the margins of the opening for Psalm 68 in the Vaux Psalter, ca. 1300-10 (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 233, fol. 101; Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II, no. 30); hybrids blowing horns hung with heraldic banners in the Howard Psalter (London, British Library, MS Arundel 83 I, fol. 55v), and the Aspremont Psalter-Hours (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 118, fol. 142).

[lxi] Both Sandler (Gothic Manuscripts, II, 99) and Avril and Stirnemann (Manuscrits, 146) suggest that the red lion on a mustard-colored ground refers to the Fitzalan family, Earls of Arundel – a seemingly perfect fit, since Richard Fitzalan II was the nephew and heir of John of Warenne. The mainline Fitzalan arms, however, have the opposite tincture: gules, a lion rampant or. Arms with or, a lion rampant gules were borne in the 14th century by the King of Scotland.

[lxii] On the Scotist system, see F. L. Cross, ed. Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 426-27; on Warenne’s connections to the Franciscans, see Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XX, 825 and 828.

[lxiii] All five of its large historiated initials have qualities identifiable with the artists of the Milemete Circle, and two appear to be by an artist who also worked on the Stowe Breviary (ca. 1322-25, London, British Library, MS Stowe 12; Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II no. 79) – among all the surviving early fourteenth-century English manuscripts, the one whose script and decorative style most closely resembles that of the Gorleston Psalter; see Nishimura, “Gorleston Psalter,” 26-28.

[lxiv] For the core group of “Bar Books,” see S. K. Davenport, “Manuscripts Illuminated for Renaud of Bar Bishop of Metz (1301-1316),” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, 1984), especially the lengthy examination of the marginal figures, 564-1049; for the related Aspremont-Kievraing Psalter-Hours, split between Melbourne and Oxford, see Margaret Manion and Vera Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 1984), no. 70, 173-76, Figs. 163-74.

[lxv] John of Warenne risked excommunication by filing for divorce in 1315, having been involved for several years prior with Matilda de Nerford, a prominent Norfolk heiress; see I. S. Leadam and J. F. Baldwin, eds. Select Cases Before the King's Council 1243-1482, Publications of the Selden Society, XXXV (Cambridge, Eng.: Harvard University Press, 1918), lxvi-lxix, 27-32.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1, Obverse and reverse of a seal borne by John, eighth Earl of Warenne (no. 236), engraving after John Anstis, from John Watson, Memoirs of the Ancient Earls of Warren and Surrey (Warrington, 1782), Pl. I (of seals) (photo: British Library).

Fig. 2, Palatinate Seal of John, eighth Earl of Warenne, 1346, London, Public Record Office, E42/244 (photo: Public Record Office).

Fig. 3, The Gorleston Psalter, London, British Library, MS Additional 49622, fol. 8, Jesse-Tree initial with a warren in the bas-de-page (photo: by permission of the British Library).

Fig. 4, The Gorleston Psalter, fol.172, Psalm 130, initial D with Warenne arms (photo: by permission of the British Library).

Fig. 5, The Gorleston Psalter, fol. 209, Litany (photo: by permission of the British Library).

Fig. 6, The Gorleston Psalter, fol. 68v, Psalm 51 with Doeg and the Priests (photo: by permission of the British Library).

Posted by David on July 30, 2005 9:23 PM