Harley Psalter

The Harley Psalter (British Library Harley MS 603) is an illustrated manuscript of the second and third decades of the eleventh century, with some later additions. It is written in Latin on vellum, measures 380 x 310 mm and was probably produced at Christ Church, Canterbury. The most likely patron of such a costly work would have been the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of writing, possibly Æthelnoth, who was consecrated in 1020 and remained at Canterbury until 1038.

Janet Backhouse described the Harley Psalter as "one of the most important of all pre-Conquest English illuminated manuscripts". [J Backhouse, "The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art" (British Museum, 1984)] It is the earliest of three medieval copies of the Utrecht Psalter and contains more than one hundred eleventh century coloured line drawings in the Utrecht Style.It ends abruptly at Psalm 143:12, probably due to loss of pages rather than interruption of the original work. The Psalter is particularly interesting for having been written in three phases. The first phase seems to have been begun with the intention to produce a reasonably exact copy of the illustrations and layout of the Utrecht Psalter, although the Gallic form of the psalms in this work was substituted for the Roman form. This phase encompasses the first (ff.1-27) and third (ff.50-7) phases of the manuscript and is written by a single scribe.

The second phase of production of this manuscript is represented by the fourth section (ff.58-73) where the same scribe from the first phase continued to write out the psalms, but rather than imitating the layout of the Utrecht Psalter, he simply left gaps for illustrations at the beginning of each psalm. The artist who filled these gaps strayed further from the Utrecht Psalter as well, using much simpler compositions.

Phase three of the manuscript is encompassed in the second section of the Psalter (ff.28-49) which seems to have been written later by the famous scribe Eadui Basan, although his hand seems either elderly or infirm when compared to the work he produced 1018. Only two eleventh century drawings are found in this part of the manuscript; it has been suggested that this was written in order to replace a portion of the Psalter which had been lost or damaged, as it fills a gap between two sections of seemingly earlier work.

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