Not everything in the Church was equally valued by the Tudor regime. The priority for the commissioners dispatched throughout the kingdom’s dioceses in the spring of 1535 was to determine the foundations of the Church’s wealth, what the instructions issued to them called the ‘certainty of the temporalities and spiritualties’, that is all forms of property and the income it generated both ‘annually and perpetually’. It was the regime’s next intervention in Church affairs, the Visitation that was announced after Easter 1535, that any attention was given to other valuables. On the pretext of searching out the dubious relics which monasteries – especially – were suspected of using to dupe the public into making cash donations, they documented any gold, silver and gemstones they discovered. Impressive objects of obvious value they took into their custody, often with no opposition from monastic heads who at once could see the twin dividend of willingly reforming their practice and winning the favour of the king with a present of rare price. But even then, the visitors were selective. They looked out for, and asked after precious metals, jewels and any hoards of hard cash but they paid no attention to the Church’s largest, oldest and, probably, rarest treasures, their collections of books.
So we should not be surprised to find that whoever bound the fair copy of the valuation survey for the diocese of Lincoln cut up leaves from a fine medieval manuscript, one which in 1535 was already approaching a hundred and fifty years old.
Two leaves, cut down the middle, now taped but originally no doubt stitched, were positioned as flyleaves at the front of the book. Like almost all of the Exchequer copies of the diocesan surveys, the Lincoln book was rebound in the nineteenth century robbing us of any clue as to the original cover. It may be that it was first wrapped in folded parchment, perhaps more leaves from the same manuscript. The cut pieces appear to amount roughly to half the size of the original leaves suggesting the source was a large volume. The text is laid out in two columns, typical of a book of folio or quarto proportions and the script is large and formal, the style that palaeographers describe as ‘Textura’.
The script, the form and filigree decoration of initial capital letters and the rubrics are all consistent with manuscript books written in England. The character of the script, its upright, rectilinear letter forms but with certain ascending strokes – notably, d – positioned diagonally suggests a date of writing in the years around 1300. The pieces carry two Latin texts: (1) the opening paragraphs of a homily on the Gospel of John, chapter 16, by the eighth-century monk, Bede of Monkwearmouth, in fact his sixth homily for the Third Sunday after Easter; (2) verbatim passages from the Book of James, chapters 3 and 4. The passages from James 4 are arranged under the rubrics respectively, ‘lectio prima, secunda and tertia. The chapter featured in the first three readings of the medieval office of Matins; chapter 3 can be found as a reading in the office of Prime. To find both forms of reading points to only one possible origin for the two cut leaves, a breviary, which held all the readings required for each office arranged according to the calendar of the Church year.
Sadly there is nothing on these two leaves that might identify the church to which the breviary belonged. These were workaday books and the largest, wealthiest churches would look to replace them over time. It is conceivable that they came from Lincoln Cathedral itself. They were many of them dating from every era of Church history and in the eyes of the Crown commissioners and the clergy themselves, there was no special value even in examples that were old or especially well made. But they were the mainstay of every church’s religious life, until the imposition of the new English prayerbook under Henry VIII’s heir, Edward VI. They were the ‘certainty’ of pre-Reformation religion.
James Clark
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