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Harley MS 1229
- Record Id:
- 040-002047058
- Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:
- 040-002047058
- MDARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100000000652.0x0002df
- LARK:
- ark:/81055/vdc_100062816232.0x000001
- SLARK:
- Format:
- ISAD(G)
- Reference (shelfmark):
- Harley MS 1229
- Title:
-
Missal
- Scope & Content:
-
This Cistercian missal was written in England around 1200, possibly at the Cistercian abbey St Mary the Virgin at Waverley (Surrey): the abbey, founded in 1128, was the first Cistercian monastery in England. The missal’s size indicates that it was probably intended for use at the high altar. The manuscript appears to be missing a section since the collects for the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury at the beginning of the book to which are referred on f. 125r (‘Require proprias collectas in principio libri’) are now lacking.
Contents:
ff. 1r-111r: Temporale, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent.
ff. 111v-121r: Preface for the feasts of the Nativity, Epiphany, Easter Sunday, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Trinity, Apostles, feasts of the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Cross; the Preface of the Apostles, Common Preface and the Canon of the Mass.
ff. 121r-207r: Sanctorale, St Stephen-Thomas the Apostle.
ff. 207r-226v: Collects and Secrets, sometimes with lections, for the dedication of a church, all saints, the pope, king and queen, souls of the dead, and the ill, imperfect at the end.
[ff. [8a]r, 171v, 180v are blank].
The manuscript contains a number of later additions:
f. 111r: The hymn Gloria in excelsis Deo, added in a (?) 14th-century hand.
f. 172v: A hymn for St Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Caritate vulneratus castitate dealbatus verbo vite laureatus est Bernardus sublimatus in gloria’, added in a (?) 15th-century script.
f. 227r: A section of four prayers for a votive mass for those who are in tribulation (‘pro illo in tribulacione’), added by one or two 14th- or 15th-century hands.
f. 227v: Latin prayers (some faded), added by 14th- or 15th-century hands.
Decoration:
3 large initials in blue or green, with red penwork decoration, or in red with blue penwork decoration, at the canon of the mass (ff. 115v, 116r [2x]). 1 large initial in blue with penwork decoration in the same colour (f. 1r). Large initials in red, green, or blue, some with penwork decoration in the same colour, 3 with decoration in another colour (ff. 32v, 150r, 180v). Small initials in brown. Small (one-line) initials highlighted in red (ff. 116r-120r). Rubrics in red.
- Collection Area:
- Western Manuscripts
- Project / Collection:
- England and France 700-1200 Project
Harley Collection - Hierarchy Tree:
- [{ "id" : "040-002047058", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Harley MS 1229: Missal" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]
- Hierarchy Record Ids:
- 032-002045828
040-002047058 - Is part of:
- Harley MS 1-7661 : Harley Manuscripts
Harley MS 1229 : Missal - Hierarchy:
- 032-002045828[1229]/040-002047058
- Container:
- View / search within Archive / Collection: Harley MS 1-7661
- Record Type (Level):
- File
- Extent:
- A parchment codex
- Digitised Content:
- https://iiif.bl.uk/uv/#?manifest=https://bl.digirati.io/iiif/ark:/81055/vdc_100062816232.0x000001
- Thumbnail:
-
- Languages:
- Latin
- Scripts:
- Latin
- Start Date:
- 1175
- End Date:
- 1224
- Date Range:
- 4th quarter of the 12th century - 1st quarter of the 13th century
- Era:
- CE
- Access:
-
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- User Conditions:
- Physical Characteristics:
-
Materials: Parchment.
Dimensions: 340 x 240 mm (text space: 245 x 170 mm).
Foliation: ff. 227 + 8* ( + 3 unfoliated modern paper flyleaves at the beginning + 3 at the end); f. 8* is a parchment strip added between f. 8 and f. 9 (f. [8a]); ff. 171, 180, and 227 are added parchment strips as well; 1 parchment stub between f. 89 and f. 90; and f. 148 and f. 149; 1 parchment tab on ff. 63, 114, 186, 203, 221, and 224; a tab made from fabric is attached to f. 117; the remains of rope for a tab are on f. 116.
Script: Gothic; above the top line.
Binding: British Museum/British Library in-house. Red half leather binding; Harley’s bookplate gold-stamped on the upper and lower covers, the spine inscribed in gold at the British Museum: ‘MISSAL.’; rebound on 30 November 1960.
- Custodial History:
-
Origin: ? Waverley Abbey, Southeastern England.
Provenance:
? The Cistercian abbey of St Mary the Virgin, Waverley, near Farnham (Surrey), founded in 1128 from L'Aumône Abbey by William Giffard (d. 1129), bishop of Winchester, possibly produced the manuscript and owned it until its dissolution in 1536: this is indicated by the inclusion of St Swithun on 15 July (ff. 159r-160v), a Winchester saint. Waverley was the only Cistercian house in Winchester at this time (see Watson, Catalogue (1979), no. 641; nevertheless, Watson did not consider the evidence strong enough to include this manuscript in his Supplement to Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books; see Preston, ‘Mixed Blessings’ (1997), p. 52 n. 12). Evidence for the date: a terminus post quem is provided by the inclusion of St Malachy (3 November) in the Sanctorale (f. 195r); he was canonised in 1190 and his feast was first celebrated at Clairvaux in 1192; a terminus ante quem is provided by the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux (27 August): originally the manuscript did not include the collects that were ordered by the Cistercian General Chapter in 1202; these were added later on a parchment strip (f. 171r); Francis of Assisi, canonised in 1226, has been added to the margin of f. 188r. Perhaps the abbey added the additional prayers (ff. 111r, 172v, 227r, 227v) and annotations throughout the manuscript.
An unknown 15th- or 16th-century English owner: his name ‘John’ inscribed twice on f. 227v; perhaps also added a recipe for a cold on f. 227v: ‘for the Kold take Red ment’.
The Harley Collection, formed by Robert Harley (b. 1661, d. 1724), 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician, and Edward Harley (b. 1689, d. 1741), 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts.
Edward Harley bequeathed the library to his widow, Henrietta Cavendish, née Holles (b. 1694, d. 1755) during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (b. 1715, d.1785), duchess of Portland; the manuscripts were sold by the Countess and the Duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum; the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library.
- Information About Copies:
-
Full digital coverage available for this manuscript; see Digitised Manuscripts, https://bl.uk/manuscripts/.
Select digital coverage available for this manuscript; see the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, https://bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/.
- Publications:
-
A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808-12), I, pp. 612-14.
Charles H. Talbot, 'Cistercian Manuscripts in England', Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum, 14 (1952), 208-12, 264-77 (p. 273).
Andrew G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 700-1600 in The Department of Manuscripts: The British Library, 2 vols (London: British Library, 1979), I: The Text, p. 120 (no. 64), pl. 111.
The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts 1946-1950, 3 vols (London: The British Library, 1979), I: Descriptions, pp. 14-15 (no. 46203).
David Chadd, ‘Liturgy and Liturgical Music: The Limits of Uniformity’, in Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles, ed. by Christopher Norton and David Park (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 299-314 (pp. 307-08, 310-11).
Jean F. Preston, 'Mixed Blessings: A Twelfth-Century Manuscript from Waverley', in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers: Essays presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. by P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 49-63 (pp. 51-52).
The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts 1956-1965, 3 vols (London: British Museum, 2000), I: Descriptions, pp. 593-94 (‘Eg. 3760’).
Richard Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 144, 253, 286.
Erik Kwakkel, Rosamond McKitterick, and Rodney Thomson, Turning Over a New Leaf: Change and Development in the Medieval Book (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), pp. 90 n. 23, 123 (no. 303).
Teresa Webber, 'Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica as a Source of Lections in Pre- and Post- Conquest England', in The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past, ed. by Martin Brett and David Woodman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 47-74 (p. 57).
- Material Type:
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Legal Status:
- Not Public Record(s)
- Notes:
-
This manuscript is part of The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700-1200.