Thomas Becket was nigh inseparable from it. He may even have held it as he was murdered in Canterbury 850 years ago. Now perhaps the best-known writer on medieval manuscripts in the world tells of his exhilaration on identifying Becket’s cherished Psalter
It was all the fault of Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. The 1964 film, Becket, caught me at the most impressionable moment of my early teens, in New Zealand, where we then lived, as far from Canterbury Cathedral as anyone had ever been. I was entranced by that distant world of chivalry and religion.
I later took a holiday job in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, where I was shown a mid-twelfth-century manuscript of Boethius on music, the oldest book in the country. It had a little mark on its first page, like a curly “H”, which was thought to resemble a symbol used in a copy of this text listed in the inventory of the cathedral priory of Canterbury in the Middle Ages. There was an old inscription scraped away at the end of the manuscript. I had been told that ultra-violet light in a darkened room could sometimes render erasures legible and, more to humour their summer intern than in expectation of results, they allowed me to try it out.
