A relic of the Priory

 It's not everyone's idea of a little light reading; a scholarly article about the provenance of a medieval manuscript.  But this one gives us a rare glimpse of the Priory which was the original Charterhouse.  

Julian M Luxford is Reader in Art History at the University of St Andrews with a particular interest in monasteries.  This article* tells of a manuscript, MS. 142/192, currently in the library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.  It dates from the late 14th or early 15th century and there is apparently nothing remarkable about it.  It isn't "illuminated" with beautiful pictures.  The text is a Latin commentary on the Book of Revelation and it is bound with its original hide-covered wooden covers.  There is nothing obvious to say that it has anything to do with the Hull Priory.  

However, some of the parchment had been erased, or scraped, before being re-used; and under ultra-violet light one line was very clear.  The book is ex libris (from the library of) the Charterhouse of Kingston-upon-Hull.  Only one other manuscript is known with the same inscription, and that is in Lincoln Cathedral library.  Luxford thinks the two books are in the same hand.  Further detective work showed how the Gonville and Caius MS had started life in a different format.  It was intended to be in folio, the large size which would have made it suitable for reading from a lectern, perhaps during meals in the refectory.  But after the scribe had written a couple of sheets on folio parchment the instruction came down to scrub that (almost literally) and make it quarto, or exactly half the size.  Rather than put the folio sheets aside he scraped off the writing, folded the sheets in half and started again.  The result is that the first few sheets of the finished work show ghostly vertical stripes where the original writing was.  Again, much of this shows up under ultra-violet light.  This intriguing book turned up as a bequest to Gonville and Caius College in 1659, and there is no knowledge of where it was between the closure of the Priory in 1539 and this bequest by William Moore.

There is a record, apparently, of three manuscripts granted to the Priory by Richard II in 1387, after Michael de la Pole's attainder.  A list of printed books by John Spalding from the London Charterhouse to the Hull Priory survives, from the late 15th or early 16th century; and there is a record of two other books in a letter of 1717.  But where any of these are now, no one knows.  So the only physical remnants of a once thriving Carthusian Priory are two manuscripts.

* A Carthusian Economy: Gonville and Caius College MS. 142/192, Julian M. Luxford