Luttrell Psalter

  • Roasting meats on a spit

  • Roasting meats on a spit (folio 206v)

  • tempera colors and ink on vellum
  • full page: 14.3 x 9.6 in. (36.0 by 24.5 cm.)
  • The British Library
  • 625 x 327 (49 KB)
  • Carving and serving the meal

  • Carving and serving the meal (folio 207v)

  • tempera colors and ink on vellum
  • full page: 14.3 x 9.6 in. (36.0 by 24.5 cm.)
  • The British Library
  • 625 x 401 (75 KB)
  • The swineherd

  • The swineherd (folio 59)

  • tempera colors and ink on vellum
  • full page: 14.3 x 9.6 in. (36.0 by 24.5 cm.)
  • The British Library
  • 147 x 650 (34 KB)
  • Fierce boar

  • Fierce boar (folio 19v)

  • tempera colors and ink on vellum
  • full page: 14.3 x 9.6 in. (36.0 by 24.5 cm.)
  • The British Library
  • 625 x 419 (67 KB)

Editor’s Note:

In the wide margins around the edge of the finely crafted calligraphy of the Latin text are delicate decorations. These miniature marginal scenes of everyday life and strange grotesques have given historians vital information of what life must have been like for the people on that Luttrell estate in 14th century England.

These were not the first or only rural scenes to be included in psalters or books of hours. What makes the illustrations in the Luttrell Psalter so useful is that they are the most detailed and regarded by some as the best surviving pictorial documentation of everyday life that have survived from the Middle Ages.