Christ reaches out to touch the face of a young man in the initial for Psalm 26 (27 in modern translations) in this highly decorated Gothic psalter. In French Psalters, this psalm is usually illustrated with King David pointing to his eyes, reflecting the opening words of the psalm, ‘Dominus illuminatio mea’ (‘The Lord is my light’).

However, psalters made in the Mosan region of the southern Netherlands—like this one—expanded their response to the words of the psalm with a typological image of Christ healing the blind man, as told in Luke 18:35–43. Here, the man has clearly just been healed: his eyes are open and he is striding forwards towards Christ, his blind man’s staff held across his body.

This is a tiny book designed to be held in the hand. Although it has lost its calendar, its litany contains saints who were venerated in Tournai, and its style suggests that it was written and illuminated in Liege (now in Belgium) around the turn of the fourteenth century.

In spite of its small size, every folio teems with life. Each of the main liturgical divisions has a large historiated initial, many illustrating episodes from the Life of Christ. Saints stand beside the initials, while the borders are inhabited by a typical Gothic panoply of birds, beasts, and monsters: knights fight dragons or joust, hounds hunt hares and boars, men battle with swords and shields or play musical instruments.  

Two female saints watch from beside the Psalm 26 initial. The one above holds a martyr’s palm, but is otherwise anonymous. The one below holds a tower, the attribute of St Barbara of Nicomedia. According to legend, she was locked in a tower by her father to preserve her from the outside world. Nevertheless, she converted to Christianity, and had three windows installed in her bath house, to symbolize the Trinity. When her father discovered this, she was taken before the prefect of the province and tortured. However, her wounds miraculously healed each night. Eventually, she was beheaded by her own father. He was struck by lightning on his journey home—as a consequence Barbara became patron saint of armourers and engineers.

Thus, Barbara embodies something of the Psalmist’s own sense of being shielded by God.

In a literal response to the opening words of the text, ‘Dominus illuminatio mea…’ (‘The Lord is my light…’), a tonsured cleric holds a lighted candle in his left hand in the top half of the D initial for Psalm 26 (Psalm 27 in modern translations) in the Cuerden Psalter. He extends his right hand towards a naked king—presumably David—standing in water. In the lower half of the initial, an angel holds a lighted candle, and defends a king—this time fully clothed—against a group of men armed with swords and axes. These represent the wicked who draw near in verse 2. Comic grotesques perch on the extensions of the initials: a grey stork pecks at the rear end of a blue biped with a human head, watched by a small white dog; another biped with a grey hood seems on the verge of falling off the edge of the border.

The Psalter from which this initial comes was made in England, probably in Oxford, in the 1260s or 70s. It is exceptionally richly decorated, with a preface of full-page miniatures and historiated initials for each psalm, as well as at the main liturgical division. We do not know for whom the manuscript was made: its name comes from Cuerden Hall, Lancashire, where it was in the early twentieth century. It was presumably commissioned by or for the unidentified layman and woman who kneel before the Virgin and Child in a miniature facing Psalm 1. The name of St Augustine is in gold in the calendar, suggesting an Augustinian connection, perhaps with the very wealthy Augustinian abbey of Oseney in Oxford, which was dedicated to the Virgin.  

In the Middle Ages, the daily recitation of the psalms was seen as the primary weapon in the bellum spirituale—the spiritual battle against evil—of monks and nuns, and as a defence against temptation for the laity who imitated monastic practices. Many of the psalms—including this one—have a distinctly martial tone, calling on God to protect the faithful or praising him for doing so. The initials for the ordinary psalms in this manuscript include images of armed conflict, as a reminder to the reader of the need to fight the good fight through reciting the psalms.

Psalm 26 (27 in modern numbering) is the first psalm in the group recited at Matins on a Tuesday in the Divine Office. In the large historiated initial D in the Ormesby Psalter—one of the most sumptuous of the East Anglian group of manuscripts—the prophet Samuel pours oil over the head of the kneeling David. Above, God descends from Heaven, carrying a blue shield emblazoned with a gold cross.

This is the Anointing of David, as told in 1 Kings 16:1–13. According to the Old Testament, God commanded Samuel to go to Bethlehem, and to anoint one of the sons of Jesse, whom God has chosen to rule Israel in place of King Saul. On God’s instructions Samuel rejected each of Jesse’s sons, until only the youngest, David, was left.

A knight in armour watches from the upright of the D initial. He could be the Philistine champion Goliath, whom David defeated shortly after his anointing: biblical figures often wore contemporary dress in medieval art. The coat of arms on the shield and tunic suggests a real individual, however. The arms are those of the Foliots of Gressenhall, major Norfolk landowners (there is silver under the gold on the diagonal ‘bend’). This phase of work on the Psalter was probably commissioned by John de Warenne, earl of Surrey and Sussex, to commemorate a betrothal between his ward, Richard Foliot, and an unknown girl from the Bardolf family—their coats of arms appear on many of the manuscript’s folios, alongside Warenne’s own arms.

The words of the psalm, with its cry of encouragement for the beleaguered warrior, must have had a particular resonance for baronial families like the Warennes, Bardolfs, and Foliots, whose status was bound up with their right and duty to bear arms. The young Richard Foliot’s father, also Richard, died campaigning in Scotland, possibly at Bannockburn in 1314, shortly before this Psalter was illuminated for his heir.