The "De Roucy" Hours?: An Addendum

Last weekend I asked Ellie Jackson, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, for a copy of an article she published last year, and she kindly sent me a PDF: 

Eleanor Jackson, ‘Pursuing the Percys: The Original Owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours’, Journal of Medieval History, 48.4 (2022), 524–45

It concerns a late 13th-century Psalter-Hours that I examined nearly 25 years ago when it was in a private collection; it was acquired by the BL in 2019. By coincidence, one of the things it addresses is so relevant to the blog I wrote a few weeks ago about the heraldic arms in the so-called "de Roucy" Hours, that I thought it would be worth writing this brief addendum to that post. (If you have not already read it, I suggest you do so before continuing here).

 

The previously unresolved puzzle about the patronage of the Percy Psalter-Hours depends on the identification of heraldic shields that appear in the lower margin of the page on which the text of the psalms begins:

BL, Add. MS. 70000 [Source]

[Detail of lower margin]

The colour of the rampant lion in the middle shield has always been uncertain. As Janet Backhouse, former Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library wrote in 1990 (emphasis added), 

"In the centre is a shield of gules also bearing the shape of a lion rampant, but this is now so seriously damaged that it is impossible to be certain, even with the aid of a microscope, whether it was originally coloured gold or silver."

And, as Jackson explains, whether the lion was originally silver ("argent") or gold ("or"), is crucial for identifying the original patron:

This is precisely the same problem I addressed in my previous blog about the Roucy/Elmhirst-Courtanvaux Hours, in which it is hard to determine whether the background of a heraldic shield is either (i) gold, or (ii) a pigment/metal representing silver. In my previous post about the "de Roucy" Hours, I suggested that the answer can be found by an examination of physical evidence, because the pigments/metals used for gold and silver have different chemical properties. The 13th-century Percy Psalter-Hours provides a precisely comparable situation.

To the right of the large Beatus initial on the first page of text shown above, are the letters that spell the first word of Psalm 1 (Beatus vir ..., Blessed is the man ...),  each with two or three letters written alternately in (i) gold or in (ii) a pigment of metal that has turned to a metallic dark grey with age:

Here is the whole opening phrase of Psalm 1, placed next to the same text as seen from the reverse of the same leaf:

 

It is absolutely clear from this juxtaposition that the gold letters in the second and fourth rows do not cause any strike-through to the other side, while the darkened "silver" ones in the first, third, and fifth rows do.

Having established that the "silver" lettering causes strike-through, and the gold lettering does not, we can look for the same evidence relating to the heraldic shields in the lower margin, by comparing the front and back of the leaf:

 

From the dark strike-through of the middle shield, quite unlike the shields to either side, both of which unambiguously have gold backgrounds, we can conclude that the background of the middle shield was not gold, and was instead a pigment or metal representing silver, argent. This the same conclusion reached by Jackson in her article using different, but convincing, evidence.

In summary: people may disagree about whether the background colour of the heraldic arms in the "de Roucy" Hours (of which an example is at the top of this page) appears to be gold or silver now, but the physical and chemical evidence suggests that the 15th-century illuminator used a metal or pigment that was intended to represent silver, not gold. Thus, as suggested in my previous blogpost, the association with the de Roucy family seems to be entirely without basis.