Bifolium from the 'Sacramentary of St. Boniface', in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

a bifolium from a calendar (end of July-early November), each leaf 325mm. by 240mm., ruled for 31 entries per page, written in a dark brown ink in an early but accomplished example of insular hybrid minuscule with numerous majuscule features, 'Id' (Ides), 'Kl' (kalends), entries for significant days and alternate vertical columns in orange-red (now somewhat faded), four large decorated 6-line initials, one beginning each page, in coloured geometric designs on dark brown ink grounds, terminating in elaborate scrolling geometric patterns infilled with green, yellow, orange and purple, and that on fol. 2v terminating in a small lacertine animal with a serpent-like head, entire initials surrounded with orange-red dots around the outer and inner edges, missing section of upper margin of fol. 1 (approximately 35mm. by 110mm.) with small losses from titles and top of a single initial, recovered from a binding and somewhat translucent, with small holes and a modern repair to gutter without affect to text, else in excellent condition for age with fresh and bright decoration

Two complete leaves from a sacramentary which was perhaps once the possession of St. Boniface (d. 755), the Apostle of Germany, and now the only recorded eighth-century Anglo-Saxon leaves with any significant decoration in private hands

provenance

1. Written in a monastic scriptorium in England (most probably Northumbria: Lowe states they were "written in a Northumbrian centre, to judge by script and initials", Codices Latini Antiquores, viii, 9), and most probably sent from there to Germany to help in the mission of St. Boniface during the eighth century,

2. In an ecclesiastical community in the vicinity of Regensburg in the eighth century, perhaps as a gift of St. Boniface to the abbey of St. Emmeram, founded immediately after Boniface had created the diocese of Regensburg in 739. It has plausibly been supposed that Boniface gave the volume to the first bishop, Gaubald of Regensburg (held office 739-61). The leaf has the addition of Sci Emhram(m)is (22 September) in an eighth-century Continental hand (but showing clear influences of English script) on fol. 2r here (for the other additions see below); the volume apparently remaining in Regensburg until the Reformation. The leaves now in Berlin served as the covers of an account book of 1649 from the St. Wolfgangbruderschaft in Regensburg.

3. The present leaves were first published, in 1905, after their discovery in a European private collection.

literature

L. Baumann in Monumenta Germaniae Historia, Necrologia Germaniae, iii, 1905, p. 369.

P. P. Siffrin in Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft, x, 1930 & Ephemerides Liturgicae, 1933 XLVII, pp. 201-24.

H. Frank, "Die Briefe des hl. Bonifatius und das von ihm benutzte Sakramentar" in Sankt Bonifatius, Gedenkgabe zum zwölfhundertsten Todestag, 1954.

K. Gamber, Das Bonifatius-Sakramentar, und weitere frühe Liturgiebücher aus Regensburg, 1975 .

E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, viii, 1959, no. 1052.

B. Bischoff & V. Brown, "Addenda to Codices Latini Antiquiores", Medieaval Studies, xlvii, 1985, p. 357.

H. Gneuss, 'Liturgical Books in Anglo-Saxon England and their Old English Terminology', Learning of Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, 1985, p.140.

H. Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Fragments, 2001, no.791.

W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, 1946, pp.146-7, n.5.

R. Rushforth, An Atlas of Saints in Anglo-Saxon England, 2002, p.14, no.2.

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing where appropriate.
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text

These leaves are part of a monumental Sacramentary, written in the dawn of English civilisation, a little over a century after St. Augustine had begun to Christianise the Anglo-Saxons, and two centuries before England would even approach being a unified political unit. They are at least fifty years older than the Book of Kells, and indeed the script and the style of decoration of all Irish manuscripts of the late eighth and early ninth century is "overwhelmingly dependent" on that of Northumbrian manuscripts such as the present one (J. Brown, 'The Irish Element in the Insular System of Scripts to circa A.D.800', in A Palaeographer's View: The Selected Writings of Julian Brown, 1993, p. 209). They are the second oldest English Calendar in existence (Rushforth, Atlas, no.2).  Other fragments of the volume survive in institutional ownership as Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Lat. Fol. 877 (end of the Proprium de Tempore, and acquired by the library in 1925) and Regensburg, Bischöflichen Zentralbibliothek (beginning of the Canon Missae, discovered in 1974); all published together in K. Gamber, Das Bonifatius-Sakramentar, 1975. The text leaves in Regensburg and Berlin are written in an insular half-uncial script (that which Lowe called 'insular majuscule'), and the present leaves are written in an apparently early example of insular hybrid minuscule which preserves many majuscule forms, and are clearly the work of the first half of the eighth century. Lowe compared the script to that of the Durham Cassiodorus (Durham, Cathedral Lib., B.II.30; Northumbria, c. 730), and further comparisons could be made to Cologne, Dombibl. Cod. 213 (early eighth century, Northumbria; Alexander, no. 13, pls. 60-1); Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibl., Hamilton 553 (Northumbria, first half of eighth; Alexander, no. 14, pls. 62-5); and perhaps also Gotha, Forschungsbibl., Cod. Memb. I.18 (continental centre under "strong Anglo-Saxon influence", mid-eighth; Alexander, no. 27, pls. 128-32).

Additions of local Regensburg records to this manuscript in the period immediately following 717-19 suggest that it was written and exported in the early decades of the eighth century. The first such addition is that of the note of the death of Theobald ducis (14 October), in "angelsächsischer Schrift" (B. Bischoff), and the scribe must have been a missionary from England. This must be Theobald of the line of the Agilolfings, who ruled as a Bavarian duke from at least 711, alongside his father and some of his brothers. References to his wars with the Thuringii have been interpreted, probably correctly, as indicating that the region around Regensburg was his share of the dukedom. As noted above an eighth-century Continental hand with clear influences of Anglo-Saxon script subsequently added the record of St. Emmeram's death on 22 September. Further early Continental additions include the birth of Theodo (Theobald's father) to 8 October: n(a)t(ale) theotoni, followed by the difficult later addition filio tassiloni duce (perhaps to be understood as 'he who had as a son Duke Tassilo', ie.  Tassilo II, duke in Passau c. 717-19), Sci Quintini (St. Quentin, obit 31 October, 287), and the name tintone, perhaps another local dignitary, to 8 September. Such additions cannot post-date the 780s when the dynasty of the Agilolfings fell from power, and that of Theobald's name in the hand of an apparent Anglo-Saxon migrant to Bavaria suggests a date in the decades immediately after Theobald's death.

All this is highly suggestive that the volume was the possession of St. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, and used in his missions there. Boniface was born between 672 and 680 in the south-western part of Wessex, and originally named Winfrith.  As a youth he entered the Abbey of Nutshalling between Winchester and Southampton, and there began an austere and studious life, rapidly advancing in his studies, excelling in the understanding of scriptures, and also distinguishing himself in history, grammar, rhetoric, and poetry, eventually taking charge of the monastic school there. At the age of thirty he was ordained priest, and remembering his childhood calling, he set aside his offices and privileges, and decided to commit his life to the hardships and dangers of preaching to the heathen Old Saxons. In 716, he set off for Friesland, but political disturbances there caused him to return temporarily to England. He was promptly elected abbot of Nutshalling, but again set this honour aside and travelled to Rome to secure papal support for his mission. This was granted in 718, and Boniface travelled widely as a preacher throughout Bavaria, Alamannia, Thuringia, Hessia, Frisia and some parts of Frankia, where previously only a handful of Rhineland bishops had sent missions. Willibald's Vita Bonifacii records some of Boniface's more active efforts to prove to the heathen Saxons the futility of their gods, including his chopping down of a great sacred oak tree of extraordinary size at Geismar, at a public assembly, "called in the old tongue of the pagans the Oak of Jupiter"; using the resulting timber to have a chapel constructed. Numerous monasteries and bishoprics were founded in his wake (nearly all of which, like Regensburg, went on to be the great centres of German religious life and education). He was consecrated by the pope as a bishop in 722, and archbishop of Mainz and Primate of Germany in 748, taking the name Boniface. In 755, while on his final evangelising mission at Dorkum on the River Borne, he was attacked and murdered with his companions by a large group of heathens. His body was taken to Utrecht, and subsequently moved to Mainz, and then interred in the Abbey of Fulda. Small portions of his relics are at Louvain, Mechlin, Prague, Bruges, and Erfurt, and a substantial portion of his arm is at Eichfeld.

We know from a number of Boniface's extant letters that the sourcing of books for use in his mission was a particular source of trouble for him. In 735-6 he wrote to Abbess Eadburga of Minster in Thanet, daughter of King Centwine of the West Saxons, imploring her for a gift of "spiritual books" to "shed light on these gloomy lurking-places of the German people" (M. Tangl, Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius, 1919, no. 18). This had evidently not been his first request: Eadburga had already replied in 720 explaining that she had been "unable to obtain a copy of The Sufferings of the Martyrs which you asked me to send you", adding that she would try and send a copy as soon as possible (Tangl, no. 15). A further letter to her, written c. 735, asks that she use the gold which accompanies the letter to produce "in letters of gold the epistles of my lord, St. Peter" for his mission (Tangl, no. 21). She was, however, not the only person to whom Boniface turned with these requests. A letter survives, again written c. 735, to Abbot Duddo, a former pupil of Boniface's, asking specifically for a copy of "the commentary on the Apostle Paul" but adding "if you have anything in your monastic library which you think would be useful to me and of which I may not be aware, or of which I have no copy, pray let me know about it" (Tangl, no. 20), and crucially three letters survive to Northumbrian clergy: the first is undated but addressed to Archbishop Egbert of York, thanking him for his recent "gifts and books", and asking for a copy of the works of Bede (Tangl, no. 33); and the second and third are to Abbot Huetbert of Wearmouth-Jarrow (written 746-7) and again to the archbishop (747-51) repeating his request for the works of Bede, and as a final measure sending the archbishop "two small casks of wine ... to use for a merry day with the brethren" as an incentive (Tangl, nos. 34 & 38).

It seems entirely possible therefore that Boniface was behind the movement of the present manuscript from England to Germany in the early eighth century, and perhaps even probable considering his requests for books from Northumbrian scriptoria, and his foundation of the see of Regensburg in 739. Certainly, he had followers who came from England, such as St. Lullus, a monk of Malmesbury who was appointed to the see of Mainz by Boniface, but none of these have any connection to Regensburg or its hinterland, and it seems easiest to place the ownership of the sacramentary in Boniface's hands.

Anglo-Saxon manuscripts with significant decoration are extremely uncommon, and those before the ninth century are incredibly rare: J. J. G. Alexander, in his survey Insular Manuscripts 6^th to 9^th century, 1978, lists only two for the seventh century, six for the seventh or eighth century, and twenty-two for the eighth century. Furthermore, almost all recorded English manuscripts from the seventh or eighth centuries were collected into national libraries centuries ago, and the handful of fragments that have emerged have done so as binding fragments in volumes owned by ancient institutional libraries. Only three have, to the best of our knowledge, been offered on the market (a fragment of a bifolium from a copy of Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica, with a small decorated initial in black ink, sold in our rooms 25 June 1985, lot 50, now in library of Wormsley; a single bifolium from an eighth or ninth century volume of St. Aldhelm's De Laude Virginitatis, with no decoration apart from a small initial monogram 'GL', sold in our rooms 6 December 1988, lot 33; and a fragment of a bifolium re-used as a spine-cover, sold in our rooms 19 June 2001, lot 3, for £19,000), and these were all fragments of leaves with negligible decoration. Thus, the present leaves are the only eighth-century complete Anglo-Saxon leaves still in private hands, and demonstrably left this country nearly 1250 years before modern export restrictions were brought into force.

decoration

The large decorated initials which begin the text of each page (each approximately 39mm. by 79mm.) are overwhelmingly 'Irish' in their style, bearing common features such as the sweeping curves of the descending bodies of the initials into the margin, and use of coloured dots (here orange) around the outer and inner edges of the body of the initial; as well as more specific features, such as the scrolling tops of the ascenders on fols. 2r & 2v terminating in symmetrical designs infilled with green, yellow, orange and purple, which are strikingly close to those in a Gospel Book produced in Northumbria in the first half of the eighth century (now British Library, Royal MS. I.B.VII; see Alexander, pl. 73 for a reproduction), and the angular knotwork designs infilled with colours which appear within the bowl and in the tail of the ascender of the initial on fol. 1v, which appears very close to a Gospel Book produced in an unknown centre (Alexander, no. 27: "a Continental centre under strong Anglo-Saxon influence") in the mid-eighth century (now Gotha, Forschungsbibl., Cod. Memb. I.18; see Alexander, pl. 128). The small serpent-like lacertine head with which the tracery of the initial on fol. 2v terminates, is a feature which has no apparent parallel, but is perhaps related to the animals in the "Cross-carpet page on p. 220 of the Book of St. Chad (Lichfield, Cathedral Library), produced at an unknown centre (presumably in the British Isles) in the second quarter of the eighth century.