![]() ![]() ![]() Why is this called the ‘Luttrell Psalter’? The Psalms were often written out separately from the rest of the Bible, preceded by a calendar of the Church’s feast-days, and followed by various types of prayers. In the Middle Ages (and down to the present day) they formed a fundamental part of Christian and Jewish worship, for ecclesiastics and lay-people alike many people learnt to read by being taught the Psalms. The Psalms are 150 ancient songs, grouped together to form one of the Old Testament books of the Bible. On this page they form a striking contrast to the more clearly religious imagery of a praying man that appears in the initial. Like those in the Hebrew manuscript of the Duke of Sussex’s German Pentateuch, they also terminate in leafy foliage. Many of these must have been products of the artist’s imagination, and seem unrelated to the text they accompany. The animals have attracted the interest of scholars and public alike. His clear talent for inventiveness and gentle humour is expressed in the so-called ‘grotesques’: hybrid monstrosities that may combine a human head, an animal/fish/bird body, and a plant tail. His pictures display acute observation and attention to detail – he even tidied up some of the other painters’ work. The finest decoration is in the central section of the manuscript, painted by the most gifted of the artists. What are those strange animals doing there? Today scholars are more inclined to see the Psalter’s scenes as idealised versions of reality – they were, after all, designed to please Sir Geoffrey, not his workers. Copies of the manuscript were published, and its pictures widely reproduced as illustrations in history books. Such images played a large part in fostering the 19th-century romantic vision of a ‘merrie Englande’ peopled by bountiful lords and ladies and happy peasants playing as hard as they worked. There are wrestlers, hawkers, bear baiters, dancers, musicians, throwing games, a mock bishop with a dog that jumps through a hoop – and a wife beating her husband with her spinning rod. Its lively and often humorous images provide a virtual ‘documentary’ of work and play during a year on an estate such as Sir Geoffrey’s.Īs we turn the pages of the book, we see corn being cut, a woman feeding chickens, food being cooked and eaten. It was not the first to include scenes of contemporary rustic life, but it is exceptional in their number and fascinating detail. The Luttrell Psalter is one of the most famous medieval manuscripts because of its rich illustrations of everyday life in the 14th century. ![]() What is special about the Luttrell Psalter? The juxtaposition of ‘the Lord’ with Lord Luttrell (top center image) seems to indicate the role of the manorial lord as a protector, in legal and practical terms, of his household and tenants. Painted in rich colours embellished with gold and silver, with vitality and sometimes bizarre inventiveness of decoration, this manuscript is unlike virtually any other. It is one of the most striking to survive from the Middle Ages. The Luttrell Psalter, c.1320-1340 / This celebrated manuscript was commissioned by a wealthy landowner, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, in the first half of the 14th century. A complex web of ties formalised by a sworn oath defined the relationships between kings, lords, vassals, serfs and so on. Other workers carried out trades such as basket-weaving or bee keeping. At the upper end were the freemen who were often enterprising smallholders, renting land from the lord, or even owning land in their own right, and able to make considerable amounts of money. They were in effect owned by the landowner. They were obliged both to grow their own food and to labour for the landowner. A social hierarchy divided the peasantry: at the bottom of the structure were the serfs, who were legally tied to the land they worked. ![]() The countryside was divided into estates, run by a lord or an institution, such as a monastery or college. Peasants worked the land to yield food, fuel, wool and other resources. In the Middle Ages, the majority of the population lived in the countryside, and some 85 percent of the population could be described as peasants. Alixe Bovey examines the role of the peasant in medieval society, and discusses the changes sparked by the Black Death. By exploring illuminations depicting rural life, Dr. ![]()
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