William Ablard and the Shaftesbury Psalter

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In October 2012, when complete digitisation of the Shaftesbury Psalter (BL, Lansdowne MS 383) had been put online, the provenance included this:

"William Ablard, 1612: inscription 'Wm Ablardi De Scendlebi [or Skendleby (?), Lincolnshire] ? 1612' (f. 2r)."

I suspect that this was taken directly from the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts:

Here is the inscription:

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Another Manuscript Commissioned by Jean(?) Budé

The University of Liège has recently digitized some of its most important illuminated manuscripts. Among them is a very unusual volume, MS Wittert 39:

John Batayle and the Smithfield Decretals

The Smithfield Decretals (British Library, Royal MS. 10 E.iv) is an exceptionally large (c.450 x 285mm.) and lavish (including more than 600 narrative bas-de-page scenes) copy of the Decretals of Gregory IX with the gloss of Bernard of Parma, thought to have been written in southern France c.1300, with decoration and an extra prefatory quire added in England some decades later.

The BL website has an online description with partial digitization and a description with full digitization.

Source

The main reason I found fault with a recent monograph on the Taymouth Hours is that it tends to treat hypotheses as facts. One of several such hypotheses is the proposal that the Smithfield Decretals was made for man called John Batayle who was a canon of St Bartolomew's, Smithfield, in the last quarter of the 14th century. This may be true, or it may not.

A Book of Hours Owned by the Duke de Berry?

The first proper examination of British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 37 was Sydney Cockerell's description for Henry Yates Thompson's catalogue, in which he wrote:

“Provenance. In a miniature on f. 92 a man in a rich red robe kneels before the Virgin and Child. He somewhat resembles the portraits of Jean Duke of Berry, and the fact that the Hours are of the use of Bourges makes it not unreasonable to conjecture that the book was intended for that great collector, though there is no signature or coat of arms to make it certain.”

BL, Yates Thompson MS. 37, fol.92r (detail)