HUGH OF NORTHWOLD was bishop of Ely from 1229 to 1254. One of several children of a wealthy Norfolk family, he professed as a monk of Bury St Edmunds in 1202, was elected abbot there in 1213, and became bishop of Ely in 1229. A capable administrator and civil servant, Northwold kept busy throughout his career, serving both the pope and the king; he was not afraid to oppose the latter in the interest of his abbey or see. An enthusiastic builder, he left a splendid legacy, the presbytery of Ely Cathedral which housed and glorified the shrines of Ely's long-venerated pre-Conquest saints, Etheldreda, Sexburga, Werburga, and Erminilda.

THE recent sale of the four surviving leaves of the illustrated Life of St Thomas Becket has drawn attention to their fundamental significance for the history of the production of saints' lives in mid-thirteenth-century England.' The controversy over this Life of Becket and the contemporary illustrated lives of St Alban and St Edward the Confessor concerns the rble played by the Benedictine monk and chronicler, Matthew Paris, and the Abbey of St Albans in their production. The availability of the Becket leaves for study, resulting from the generous loan of them by their new owner for exhibition in the British Library and for the exhibition of English gothic art at the Royal Academy, has enabled a reconsideration of the evidence which they provide for connections with St Albans and Matthew Paris. The evidence for Paris's authorship and illustration of lives of the saints has been frequently published and analysed. In summary the main pieces of evidence are a note in the Life of St Alban (Dublin, Trinity College, MS 177) in Matthew's own handwriting, and the testimony of the fourteenth-century chronicler, Thomas of Walsingham. The reliability of the first source is much greater than the second, for Walsingham, writing over a century after Matthew's death, may have attributed more writings to him than were his due. In Walsingham's time any books in the library of St Albans which tradition had come to associate with Matthew Paris could have been attributed to his authorship or illustration. Matthew's own assertion that 'transtuli et protraxi' a Life of St Thomas cannot be disputed, although the precise meaning of 'transtuli et protraxi' can be questioned. It is also quite clear from Matthew's note that he possessed a copy of this illustrated life, combined as a single volume with the life of St Edward the Confessor, which he lent out to the Countesses of Arundel and Cornwall. Richard Vaughan's attribution of the script of most of the Life of St Alban to the hand of Matthew Paris, and the almost unanimous agreement of art historians that most of the drawings are also by him, have led to the acceptance of the Dublin manuscript as the prime evidence for Matthew's writing out and illustration of a saint's life. There has also been an almost unanimous consensus of opinion that this is the autograph copy rather than a later version of the original. The major issue of dispute concerning the Life of St Alban is its date, which has been variously given between the two extremes of 1230 and 1259. Most of the other drawings by Matthew Paris in his chronicle volumes are reasonably precisely dated by the textual contents of the chronicles. They cover the period c.1236–59, from the time that he became chronicler of St Albans to the year of his death.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MS. Ee3.52 is not a new discovery, although its miniatures have remained unknown to scholars of English gothic manuscript illumination and – like so many manuscripts in Cambridge University and College collections – unpublished.* The Library's nineteenth-century Catalogue of Manuscripts erroneously dated it 'XVth century' and described it as 'A French Translation of the Books of the Old Testament from Genesis to Job from the Vulgate . . . each book prefaced by a curious miniature illumination'. It was not the miniatures but the rare text which first attracted the attention of scholars, those interested in early French translations of the Vulgate. Samuel Berger, in his La Bible Frangaise au Moyen Age hinted that the linguistic forms in the Cambridge manuscript indicated its having been written in England, and noted that it contained '29 miniatures, qui ne sont pas dans le style ordinaire'. More recently the text was discussed in the Cambridge History of the Bible as 'volume one of an Old Testament (or more probably of a complete Bible) made in England in the late fourteenth century'. As we shall see, the style of the miniatures, once one examines them as part of the whole book and not as curiosities appended to it, indicates that it was produced at a much earlier date, perhaps in the 1320s, by an artist associated with one of the major workshops of the period. It is also important as one of the very few illustrated manuscripts of the vernacular Bible extant from the century during which Wycliff was condemned for the heresy of promulgating English versions of the Scriptures. I shall hope to show how the visual appearance of this French text, as well as the iconography of its miniatures, reveals the transformation of Biblical pictorial narrative in the context of Anglo-Norman literacy. In this respect it provides further evidence for what I have suggested in a more general essay in the catalogue of The Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400; that the language in which manuscripts are written can affect their mode of illustration and that a crucial component in the development of the style and imagery of English gothic art is its locus in vernacular words rather than the Latin Word.

THE STUDY of English gothic illuminated manuscripts has evolved from descriptions of individual books of particular importance, such as the Rutland Psalter, the Queen Mary Psalter and the Gorleston Psalter, to broader accounts that maintain the dominance of single lavish manuscripts around which 'lesser' books are grouped. D.D. Egbert's study of the Tickhill Psalter clarified the concept of the 'group'. Books related to the Tickhill Psalter by style, decoration, patronage, and iconography were considered as a 'group' in an attempt to identify the 'workshop' which produced them. Other groupings have since become ac-cepted by art historians without similarly detailed single monographs being produced: examples are the Windmill group, the Queen Mary group and the Gorleston group. The idea that such a grouping must imply a common 'workshop' has, however, been questioned recently and it has been proposed that only a 'bespoke' trade in illuminated books existed before the fifteenth century: and this proposal challenges the 'workshop grouping' model. If, on the other hand, a systematic approach is taken to these groupings, they can be used as the first stage in the creation of a theoretical model. Such a model might help to recon-struct the history of manuscript illumination in terms of 'networks' of groupings and influences, and would be quite different from the textually based 'stemma' and 'recension' models sometimes used to explain the origins of particular compositions and iconographic cycles.

SINCE 1872, when Sir Gilbert Scott completed his restoration of the Westminster Chapter House and reinstated the figures of the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin in their niches to either side of the interior doorway, these statues have been seen as among the most beautiful and important products of English gothic sculpture (Figs.47-48). The Angel had been taken out of its niche by the early eighteenth century, when the Chapter House was being used as a repository of royal records and when most of the architectural detail was covered by wooden presses used to store the papers. In 1842 it was recorded for the first time (albeit as 'St John'), and illustrated in a small guide book to the Abbey, when it was standing in the Chapter House vestibule. The Virgin had been walled up, still in her niche, and was found 'some years' before 1861 by Scott, who described the discovery in detail in his Gleanings from Westminster Abbey. This may explain why the Virgin is in worse condition than the Angel: the former was sealed in a damp environment between stone and wood, while the latter stood in an open, well-ventilated area. This difference apart, there seems no reason not to accept that these figures are the two images for which William Yxewerth was paid in 1253.

IN 1916 the Royal Architectural Museum of the Architectural Association transferred more than one hundred stone fragments of medieval architectural sculpture to the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as a still larger collection of plaster casts. Outstanding amongst the thirteenth-century material is a group of five Purbeck marble attached capitals, all very finely carved with stiff leaf foliage, two inhabited by small dragons (Figs.51–57). Since the time of their acquisition they have been listed in the Department of Sculpture's registers as 'from Chertsey Abbey', but no further information on file reinforced this localisation. They have been mentioned in an art-historical context, in passing, only twice in print and only one of the capitals has ever been illustrated.3 In view of the importance of Chertsey Abbey in the thirteenth century, and the great fame the decorated tiles from the abbey have enjoyed since the nineteenth century, this is surprising, especially as the capitals shed important light on the original appearance of what must have been one of the most splendid parts of the abbey church.

THE absence of the thirteenth-century Westminster Retable from the Royal Academy's Age of Chivalry exhibition is one that will be keenly felt by all who appreciate the remarkable creative powers of painters employed by the English court in the late thirteenth century. The Retable has brought forcibly to mind the perennial problem of whether medieval painted woodwork objects should be moved to alien environments solely for the purposes of public exhibition. The last occasion on which the Retable was so exhibited was the 1923 exhibition of English primitive painting, also held at the Royal Academy; even then it was felt that a number of Scandinavian altar-pieces, executed in English or quasi-English styles, should be represented only by photographs. Fortunately the Age of Chivalry exhibition includes a number of panels of English origin, or executed in an English style, such as the St Peter panel from Faaberg in Norway, the Newport Chest, the Thornham Parva Retable and the Despencer Retable. In the absence of the Westminster Retable, these give at least some idea of the technical range of English panel painting under the Plantagenets, and the nature of its international con-tacts. But the public has yet to see the full range of this genre of English art collected under one roof.

THE vicissitudes suffered by English gothic art are illustrated only too well by the magnificent church of the Holy Trinity at Ingham, close to the inhospitable coast of north-east Norfolk.* The effigy of Sir Oliver de Ingham (d.1344) still lies twisted on its bed of cobbles, but no trace survives of the hunting scene painted behind it, recorded in a drawing by Stothard.1 Graffiti continue to be incised into a late fourteenth-century tomb of the de Bois family, notable for its elaborate polychromy; while only remnants survive of a splendid series of monumental brasses which, according to Cotman, were sold in 1800 as scrap metal. All this is quite apart from a very heavy restoration of the church itself in the nineteenth century.

ONE of the most impressive objects in the exhibition, Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400, is the crown from the Schatzkammer of the Residenz in Munich (Fig.74). It was taken from England as part of the dowry of Blanche, the daughter of Henry IV, on her marriage to Ludwig of Bavaria in 1401. The marriage was part of the plan of Henry IV to secure support from Germany for the newly established Lancastrian dynasty, although the death of Blanche in 1406 meant that the entente did not last long. The exhibition is the first occasion on which it has returned to England, and so it is worth re-assessing the evidence for its history as well as its place in late fourteenth-century jewellery.