A Sherlock Holmes finds Becket’s Psalter
Christopher de Hamel quotes Sherlock Holmes, as he might, in his latest bit of medieval detective work, showing that a book of the Psalms in a Cambridge college was once a treasured possession of St Thomas Becket. It might have been in his hand when the knights’ swords cut him down at Canterbury on Dec 29 1170.
Dr de Hamel is celebrated for his fat and beautifully illustrated book Meetings with Remarkable
Manuscripts, a title not his first choice, which nods to
Gurdieff ’s Meetings with Remarkable Men, written in the Twenties and translated into English in 1963, then adapted for Peter Brook’s 1979 film. Thomas Pakenham published his Meeting with Remarkable Trees in 1996.
Dr de Hamel’s remarkable manuscripts were 12. One was the book of Gospels made in the 6th century and sent by Pope Gregory with St Augustine when he came to evangelise the English. It’s the oldest illustrated Gospel book in the world. When Pope Benedict came to visit Britain in 2010 he and Archbishop Rowan Williams venerated it open at the page read at the service.
These Gospels of St Augustine are at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where de Hamel was Fellow Librarian from 2000 to 2016. It was after lunch at the college that de Hamel’s guest Eyal Poleg, the biblical historian, responded to his remark that in the Middle Ages books that belonged to saints were not regarded as relics. Bones, hair, clothes might be, but not books.
Dr Poleg’s reply was a bombshell. He knew of an exception, mentioned in a 14th-century inventory as a sacred object in liturgy connected with Becket’s shrine at Canterbury.
De Hamel recognised the words used in the inventory to describe the book. They were also written on a page of a 10th or 11th-century Psalter kept in the Parker Library at the very college where they were sitting.
They left their coffee and excitedly investigated. I shan’t reveal the whole detective story, grippingly told in The Book in the Cathedral.
But de Hamel finds evidence the Psalter belonged to St Alphege, the Archbishop of Canterbury captured by the Vikings and murdered in 1012. (The best known church dedicated to him is Hawksmoor’s at Greenwich.) The book was made around the year 1000. Pages in a later hand give a reading for St Alphege’s commemoration.
There is also a mysterious line-drawing opposite the first psalm in the book. (You can see the book at the “Parker Library on the Web” site.) It could be St Alphege.
The oldest image of St Thomas of Canterbury is a mosaic at Monreale, Sicily, which shows him holding a book. I had never thought about it, but in the Middle Ages the convention for a book used in the liturgy was to have it lying on the altar on what we’d call its front, and it would be opened with the right hand, from the back. That is how books like the volume held by Thomas in the mosaic are held: back to the viewer, fore-edges to our left. No doubt the book in the mosaic was intended as a Gospel, but it might as well be a book of Psalms.
No one mentions Becket holding a book at his death. Edward Grim was holding his processional cross so Becket would have had a hand free for a book. To Becket, certainly, the Psalms spoke of Jesus and his death.
Contemporary accounts say he saw his coming death as sharing in the Passion and death of Jesus. Two sources, one of them William Fitzstephen, who was there at the death, say St Thomas’s last words were to invoke the prayers of St Alphege.