13thC Sarum Master Bible returns to Salisbury

Friends of the Nations’ Libraries (FNL) has successfully raised the £90,000 needed to buy a stunning 13th-century Bible, illuminated by the famed Sarum Master, and has donated to Salisbury Cathedral – returning it home to the cathedral city after more than 700 years.

Exciting plans are being made to have special open days for the public to view this exquisite work of art, as well as lectures, study days and other events that will focus on the Bible and the Sarum Master. There are also plans to fully digitise the Bible. Details of these special events will be announced in the new year.

The Sarum Master was one of the greatest artists of his time, a manuscript illuminator working in the mid-13th century. He led a large workshop at a time when no other cities, apart from London and Oxford, are known to have supported this scale of book production. The Bible is one of only six manuscripts definitively attributed to the Sarum Master.

Of the Sarum Master Bible, Christopher de Hamel, an expert on medieval manuscripts, has said: “The Sarum Master was one of the earliest manuscript artists in England of whom we have a recognisable oeuvre.  Salisbury and Oxford had the first professional book illuminators in England, ahead of London.  Salisbury had been founded as a new town in the 1220s, and there were artists working on the stained-glass and chapter-house carvings of the new cathedral.  Like Oxford and Northampton, it had schools which might easily have developed into a university, and it had access to court money through the royal palace at Clarendon, as Oxford did with Woodstock.  This was also the moment when Breviaries and Missals were coming into use.   Because Salisbury had a book trade (and Oxford did not have a cathedral), Salisbury manuscripts were available for purchase, which no other diocese could match, and thus the local Use of Sarum became standard for all of southern England and, at the Reformation, for the Book of Common Prayer.”

“We have been overwhelmed by the magnificent generosity of many donors and nearly 150 members of the public.  Thanks to them this 700-year-old  Bible has now returned to the City in which it was created and will forever be in Salisbury Cathedral Library, one of the treasure houses of our country.”   
Geordie Greig,  Chair of FNL.

"We are hugely grateful to the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries for their work in raising the funds to bring the Sarum Bible back to Salisbury. It will be thrilling to welcome this important and beautiful manuscript to the Cathedral and to share it with our many visitors.”
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury