The Patrons of the Percy Psalter-Hours

In March 2019, the British Library acquired a late 13th-century book of hours of the Use of York
known as the Percy Hours. This would be exciting enough on its own, but the British Library also
holds its long-separated other half, the Percy Psalter, with which it originally formed a single-volume
psalter-hours. This acquisition allowed the Library to reunite the two manuscript halves in the same
institution for the first time in around 200 years.

The Percy Psalter-Hours is one of a relatively small number of devotional books for the laity surviving
from 13th-century England, and probably the only example from York. It provides rare insight into a
period of great change in book culture, when devotional books for the laity were growing in
popularity and regional workshops for commercial book production were emerging around the
country.

Despite its significance, the question of the manuscript's patronage has never been satisfactorily
answered. Scholars have long recognised that the original owners should be identifiable based on
the portrait of a knight and lady with coats of arms on the Beatus page. While scholarly opinion has
generally settled on Henry de Percy (d. 1314) and his wife Eleanor FitzAlan (d. 1328) as an
approximate fit for the heraldry, there are serious problems with this identification. This paper, still
a work in progress, presents a new identification of the patrons for your opinions and feedback.

About the Speaker
Dr Eleanor Jackson is Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. She completed her
PhD at the History of Art Department at the University of York in 2017.

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