FROM the many illuminated manuscripts that fell within his compass when writing The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, M. R. James singled out one painted page for special praise. He called the image of the enthroned saint on folio 8 of Cotton Ms. Claudius A iii (Fig.2) a 'gorgeous picture'. James was not alone in his enthusiasm. Many writers of the nineteenth century had devoted space to it but in recent years, to judge by the intermittent consideration, interest has subsided. The two most recent discussions embody very different opinions. Briefly, there is a discrepancy of one hundred years in the dating, between about 1000 and 1100, and an equivalent problem with the place of origin, which is variously taken to be Northern France, the Low Countries or England. The earlier literature manifests a similar variety of opinion, and if pursued back to the middle of the last century produces another problem, whether the saint represented is St Dunstan or St Gregory.

BY the later twelfth or early thirteenth century, the great early Norman Chapter house at Worcester had been decorated with a major typological cycle of Old and New Testament scenes. Whether these were painted on the vaults or depicted in stained glass windows, it is impossible to say. The circular room, which stands at the head of a tradition of centrally planned English Chapter houses, was probably built in the first quarter of the twelfth-century. From 1386-87, over a few years, the room was remodelled: large perpendicular windows were inserted and the romanesque groin-vaults which originally radiated in ten segments from the massive central column were replaced at a higher pitch to accommodate the new windows; the romanesque decoration was probably swept away at this time. But the existence of the cycle can be deduced because its inscriptions have survived, copied in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century into a manuscript still in the Cathedral library, a transcript of which was published by M. R. James.

CATALOGUING old friends for an exhibition gives one a welcome opportunity to look at them afresh after taking them for granted for many years, and perhaps to assess them anew. The need to compile bibliographical entries also brings to one's attention opinions and attributions noted only cursorily in the past and which should perhaps have been taken more seriously.

FEW English cycles of romanesque wall-paintings survive with any degree of completeness, and the majority of those that do are in rural parish churches. Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury, the primary see of England, stands apart as a major building which retains several groups of twelfth-century wall-paintings of the highest quality. The most extensive group of murals in the cathedral is in the southern crypt chapel, dedicated to St Gabriel. Of the paintings on the vault of the nave of this chapel only traces remain. These consist of foliage medal-lions containing busts and full-length figures in the transitional style datable to the 1180s. The stylistic similarity between the paintings and the Tree of Jesse page in the Paris Psalter (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale. Ms Lat.8846) suggest that the same artist was involved in both works. The murals under special consideration here, however, are those in the apse of the chapel (Figs. 67 and 68). These are exceptional, not only for their vivid and varied palette, but also for their anxious and linear style. They are also well preserved, owing to the fact that the east end of the chapel was walled off at some date in the second half of the twelfth century.

THE illuminator whose initials are the subject of this article was first identified as an individual by T. S. R. Boase in the volume treating of the twelfth century, in the Oxford History of English Art. The work to which he was there referring, is Volume I of the so-called Auct. Bible, in the Bodleian Library (Ms. Auct. E. Infra I) - now often called the Second Winchester Bible; and the quality of its illuminations led him to remark that this book is 'a great repertory, perhaps the greatest, of Romanesque ornament'. In The Two Wltinchester Bibles, published in 1981, I suggested that Volume I of the Auct. Bible was actually both written and decorated in St Albans; while Volume II, though substantially written in St Albans, was decorated in Winchester - where both volumes remained till given to the Bodleian in 1601. Their origin in St Albans was argued from textual, as well as artistic, evidence, and attention was drawn to other books, some certainly produced earlier than 1150, to which this Master of the Entangled Figures had contributed.

THE Herefordshire school of sculpture is both the best known and most frequently discussed local school of romanesque sculpture in England. Some or all the stylistic elements have been discussed in detail by Jonsdottir, Boase, Stone, Pevsner, and the present writer, while the work is analysed in exemplary fashion in Zarnecki's doctoral thesis, which he summarised in his Later English Romanesque Sculpture. The eclectic nature of the school has been emphasised, motifs being derived from such diverse sources as Santiago de Compostella, northern Italy and western France, and, closer to home, Reading Abbey, the Viking tradition, Tewkesbury Abbey, and the local Dymock school of sculpture. To date, however, only one parallel has been drawn between the sculpture in Hereford Cathedral and that of the Herefordshire school: Zarnecki related the foliage on the tympanum of the south doorway at Kilpeck with that on the former capitals of the crossing piers at the Cathedral. Can it be that this is the only connection between the Cathedral and the county school?