Byland Bede

Byland Abbey was founded as a Savigniac house in 1134, starting as a colony of monks sent from Furness to Calder in Cumberland; it was brought within the Cistercian family following the absorption of the Savigniac Congregation in 1147. The community moved to several locations before finally settling at its present site near the village of Coxwold in Yorkshire.⁠[1]

The codex contains two of Bede’s Latin works, the commentary on the Acts of the Apostles and the commentaries on the Seven Canonical Letters: fols. 1r–v hold a dedicatory letter to Acca, fols. 2–34r the commentary on Acts and fols. 34r–101v the commentaries on the letters.⁠[2]

It is written in a late-Romanesque English Cistercian book-hand, for the most part by one scribe, at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire in about 1150–1175; the ownership inscription “Liber Sante Marie De Bellalanda” at the top of fol. 1r shows that it came from the library of the Cistercian Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Byland. In 2003 The Art Newspaper called it “the Byland Bede of 1160”.⁠[2][3]

In the middle of the front flyleaf, beneath a row of Anglo-Saxon characters, is a Scandinavian runic alphabet of 21 runes in two rows; below it a further row of eleven runic and rune-like characters and two final characters were added by a different hand.⁠[2]

Van Renterghem argues that the runes are probably from the second half of the twelfth century, that the alphabet shows East Norse influence, and that the runic learning more likely came from Furness or the North-West than from Byland or the North-East; she sees this as evidence that Scandinavian runes were readily available in the north of England.⁠[2]

A late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century signature on fol. 79v has been read as “Bennett”, though Van Renterghem doubts that reading and suggests it could be “Barnett”. Byland Abbey was suppressed in 1538, and its land passed to Sir William Pickering and then to the Wotton, Stapylton and Wombwell families.⁠[2]

The first known owner was Thomas Bateman of Lomberdale House, near Bakewell in Derbyshire (d. 1861). The manuscript was sold in 1893 in the Bateman Heirlooms sale at Sotheby’s, where Robert Hoe III bought it; it was sold again in 1911 by the Anderson Auction House and later came into the possession of Thomas Jefferson Coolidge Jr.⁠[2]

In August 1997 the manuscript was acquired by the private library of Sir Paul Getty (J. Paul Getty Jr.) on his Wormsley estate in Buckinghamshire, and it is described in the library’s catalogue, The Wormsley Library: A Personal Selection by Sir Paul Getty (2nd edition, 2007). In 2003 The Art Newspaper listed it among the treasures of Getty’s library.⁠[2][3]

Sir Paul Getty bought the Wormsley estate from the Fane family in 1985, and its castellated library houses his collection of books and manuscripts; the estate now belongs to Mark and Caterina Getty and their family.⁠[4]

Volume 8 (2017) of Futhark: International Journal of Runic Studies, published in July 2019, carried the article “Manuscript Runes from the North of England: The Byland Bede” by Aya M. S. Van Renterghem of Leiden University, which presented the codex as a new find of a manuscript with runes, described it in full and called it the first manuscript containing Scandinavian runes from the area.⁠[2][5]

Wormsley: Official website: https://wormsley.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]