The Hours of Richard III (eBook)

TWO

The Manuscript, Its Scheme of Decoration and Status

Lambeth Ms. 474 is a book of hours according to the use of Sarum. It is now in a mid-sixteenth century binding, with some gold tooling, which has recently been rebacked. The binding was executed in the workshop of the King Edward and Queen Mary Binder which was active in the 1540s and ’50s doing work for Henry VIII, Edward and Mary as well as less illustrious customers.12 Unfortunately it is not known who commissioned this rebinding. All edges are gilt. The lining sheet from a fourteenth-century service book with music is visible. Two brass clasps with catches survive, hinged to the front cover, but the bottom hinged bar is missing.

It now has 184 vellum folios with two unruled flyleaves at the end, blank except for some erasures; several leaves are missing and there are no unruled flyleaves at the beginning. Most of the twenty-six gatherings have eight leaves, the first is of two only, the third of six. In the twenty-first gathering, between folios 151v and 152 there is a neat stub. Of the twenty-fourth the seventh leaf is lost (the one that contained the beginning of ‘Richard III’s prayer’). The twenty-fifth gathering has two leaves and after these (that is, after the end of the same prayer) at least three ruled folios have been crudely cut out. The twenty-sixth gathering consists of the leaf on which is written the surviving portion of Richard III’s ‘litany’ – it is of a different, rougher vellum, comparable to that of the concluding two flyleaves. All gatherings and all folios have been numbered in pencil, presumably by M. R. James when he collated the manuscript.13 In two instances only, the Calendar and the instructions of the seasonal variations of the Hours of the Virgin, do the major sections of the text correspond with the physical divisions of the manuscript.

Devotional pieces were added to the original text for the use of Richard III and there are minor inscriptions by or about other persons. All these, as well as the damage or erasures, will be dealt with below in the discussion of the contents, under the appropriate folio, and in the section on ownership.

Without its binding the book now measures 193 by 140mm. It was originally much larger. If the proportions of the decoration of the Annunciation page are considered and if comparison is made with other manuscripts, closely related to Richard III’s Hours in date and style, which survive in their first binding after only one careful cropping, an original size of at least 236 by 173mm. is arrived at.14 Such a size would have left about 10mm. of space between the decorative sprays of the full border of the Annunciation page and the edge of the page. The sixteenth-century binder, who for some reason had to rebind the Hours, overcut the book, but he must be a little excused for his destruction of the Annunciation border for here the artist had painted far more in the upper margin than did the artist of the other two full borders. The binder certainly resewed the manuscript because some letters of the addition of Richard III’s birthday in the October Calendar now disappear into the spine.

The text is in one column throughout and is in what M. R. James described as a ‘tall narrow English hand,’ a gothica textualis quadrata formata. A full page has eighteen lines ruled in brown ink, the text space measuring 83–83.5mm. by 117–117.5mm.15 The devotional additions made for Richard III imitate the hand of the original book.

The manuscript is decorated simply but richly. There are historiated initials (that is, decorated with a picture) for the three key divisions of the text: the Hours of the Virgin (Matins; f.15), the Penitential Psalms (f.55) and the Vigil of the Dead (f.72). The initial of the second has been cut out. All these have full vinets, that is to say a border decoration extending around all four sides of the text.16 There are no other pictures in the book; the rest of the decoration is composed of elaborate, formal foliage patterns of demi-vinets and champs (initials decorated in colour on a gold ground with ornamental sprays in the margin).17

The size of the introductory initials suit the importance of the individual offices, psalms, prayers, and so on down to the responses. Thus, a nine-line historiated initial and a full vinet opens Matins and six-line historiated initials with full vinets open the other key items in the book; a nine-line decorated initial introduces Salve virgo virginum (f.152), while eight-line decorated initials are suitable for the beginnings of Lauds (f.25), Prime (f.37v), Terce (f.41), Sext (f.43), None (f.45), Vespers (f.47v) and Compline (f.49) of the Hours of the Virgin, as well as the Psalms of the Passion (f.101) and the Confiteor (f.124), and the Fifteen Oes (f.145). Seven-line initials are sufficient for the Commendation of Souls (f.90v), the first of the Miserere psalms (f.109), and the Psalter of St. Jerome (f.112v). There are no six-line initials, apart from the two superior, historiated ones, and only one five-line initial, the one introducing the Seven Joys (f.162v). Four-line initials are frequent, for example one opens the first stanza of Omnibus consideratis (f.131v), the prayer of the Venerable Bede (f.136v), the O intemerata (f.156v), the Obsecro te (f.158), the Five Sorrows of Mary (f.168), and the Stabat mater (f.173). The status of the initial I is often not immediately clear as they curve down the margin and have no space left for them in the text, but most of them rank as four- or three-line initials (eg. ff.25v, 35v, 95v, 122v, 129v, 131, 151v).

The majority of prayers rate three-line initials and as these appear towards the end of the book, the book gives the appearance of ‘running out’ of decoration in its second half (especially ff.168v–180), as do other books of hours, for the same reason. The last, or rather the last surviving, prayer of the original book, to St. Julian, is introduced by a one-line initial (f.180v).

Subsidiary sections of the longer items are similarly marked by initials of different sizes. Two- and three-line initials introduce hymns, chapters, psalms and prayers throughout the Hours of the Virgin, and one-line initials introduce most minor items. Subsidiary initials for the Seven Penitential Psalms are all two-line ones, as are those for the Commendationes Animarum and Psalms of the Passion. The Vigil of the Dead is also served by two-line initials, except for one four-line initial at the beginning of the Dirige (f.74v). After an introductory eight-line initial for the first of the Fifteen Oes each subsequent one is marked by a three-line one.

One-line initials perform a great variety of functions: these are in gold or blue alternately and are decorated with pen flourishes in blue for the gold ones and red for the blue. None are remarkable. The lowest level in this hierarchy of attention marks is represented by the pale stroke of ochre paint through certain capitals in the text.

Titles and rubics are in red, sometimes heavily abbreviated, such as those indicating verses or responses. Paragraph signs are also in red (eg. f.36) and line fillers are in blue and gold.

The pages of the Calendar have little decoration: the one champ of the KL at the head of each month has alternately red and blue as its main colour and always has two stiff sprays of foliage jutting out from it. The painter seems to have considered decorating the outer margin of January with other sprays and tentatively sketched in a few, but he thought better of it and went no further. Red, blue and black mark the days and feasts in the usual manner, with one-line initials as described above. (See also in the Analysis of Contents for the Calendar).

The champs introducing the textual additions made for Richard III are in the London style, as it had become in the 1480s: their prolongations are like solid fern fronds rather than the curling tendrils of the decoration of the original book. The one-line initials are in the style of the rest of the book.

The time expended on decorating a book indicates something of its status and relative cost in the absence of precise details of its commission and price. Clearly the Hours of Richard III, with the scheme of decoration indicated above, is in a very different class of manuscript from the lavishly illustrated hours commissioned by such as the Dukes of Berry and Bedford. Nor does it have the status of a book of hours with a long sequence of historiated initials and miniatures such as the Nevill Hours, called after its first known owner, Richard III’s cousin George Nevill, Lord Abergavenny.18 It is, in its turn, superior to hours that have no historiated initials and call for no representational skill from the decorator, such as Lambeth Ms. 459 made in London 1470–90, which has plenty of crude foliage-decorated initials, or Bodley 113, an unpretentious Sarum hours similar in style and date to Richard’s and made in London 1425–50 with a plain vinet for the Hours of the Virgin, demi-vinets, champs, all unelaborate and with little gold.19 Closest to the Hours of Richard III but sufficiently different in small details to show effectively the range of books of hours produced in the same workshop, probably within months of each other in this case, is manuscript AB 6 C 4 of the Benedictines of Altenburg, Austria.20 This has a full vinet and one historiated initial of seven lines for the Hours of the Virgin, using the same model as Richard’s Hours, and its Vigil of...