A 1,000-Year-Old Lost Book Belonging To A Princess Who Fled England Was Recovered In The Netherlands
A 1,000-year-old manuscript has been missing for centuries, and fragments of it have finally been recovered. The lost manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the country was conquered by the Normans during the 11th century.
A total of 21 fragments of the manuscript were identified from an archive in the city of Alkmaar in the Netherlands.
The pieces of parchment were found within a Greek dictionary made up of four volumes. They had been used to reinforce the bindings of the dictionary, which was bound around A.D. 1600 in a Dutch workshop.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, bookbinders would sometimes use parchment to fortify their book bindings. However, this material was expensive, so they would cut up old manuscripts from the earlier medieval period to use.
These manuscripts were considered to be no longer of any value. They were either associated with Catholicism or written in a language that could not be read.
The manuscript fragments were discovered accidentally by Thijs Porck, a researcher at Leiden University. Images of the fragments were sent to him by staff at the Regional Archive Alkmaar.
They came across the fragments while surveying early modern book bindings in their collection featuring medieval parchment.
“I drove to the archive the next day and was very happy to see that it was not just one fragment but 21 fragments. That was the start of a fascinating research journey that took more than a year and a half to complete,” said Porck.
The fragments were from a Latin language manuscript that contained notations written in Old English. The notations, also known as glosses, are common in medieval texts.
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They are usually inserted between the lines or in the margins of the main text for the purpose of explaining foreign or difficult words.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was spoken between A.D. 500 and 1100 in Britain. It is the earliest recorded form of the English language and is similar to German, Dutch, and Frisian.
The manuscript fragments come from a Psalter, a volume containing the biblical Book of Psalms. Above every Latin word, Old English was written to help explain the text’s meaning. That way, any reader of the Psalter was able to learn Latin. Based on the script, Porck dated the 21 fragments from 1050 to 1075.
“The interlinear Old English gloss makes it a very interesting find because it is relatively rare to find materials in this language,” Porck said.
“I could reconstruct some leaves of the Psalter, and, when it was complete, it must have been a beautiful and luxurious book.”
He added that the fragments could be linked to others found across Europe, including England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland.
They all may have once been part of the same manuscript. Many of the fragments came from books that were purchased and bound around 1600 in the Dutch town of Leiden.
Sometime in the mid-16th century, manuscripts from England were shipped to the European mainland so bookbinders and soap makers could use them for their products. The 11th-century manuscript could have been among them.
Or, it could be a long-lost manuscript that belonged to an English princess named Gunhild, who fled the country following the Norman Conquest, which began in 1066.
Gunhild was the sister of the English king Harold Godwinson, who was killed at the Battle of Hastings that same year.
Gunhild died in 1087 in Bruges, Belgium. Her Psalter and other belongings were donated to the St. Donaas Catholic Church. The last recorded mention of the manuscript at the church was in 1561.
In 1580, Calvinists confiscated the books of the church and founded a public library with the books they saw to be useful. The rest were sold, which may be how Gunhild’s Psalter ended up in a bookbinder’s workshop in the 1600s.
The study was published in January 2024 in the journal Anglo-Saxon England.
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