East Anglian masterpiece finally giving up its secrets

They say the devil is in the detail. But in the case of the Ormesby Psalter, it's the wonder that's to be found there instead.

Look closely at the startlingly vivid colours of this medieval wonder - one of the greatest treasures of the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and you'll see something decidedly rum going on.

Tucked away in its margins and corners are a 'vibrant and outlandish' crew of monsters and men, mermaids and centaurs, birds and beasts, often with the world turned upside down (hares attacking a frightened hound with swords as on our cover, for instance). How very quirky – and how very East Anglian.

In fact, it's what drew Dr Freddie Law-Turner to the book in the first place. 'This wonderful marginalia is very characteristic of East Anglian manuscripts,' she explained. 'If there's weird monsters in the margin, then it's likely to be East Anglian.'

She has just produced the first detailed look at this manuscript since the 1920s. Her book, The Ormesby Psalter: Patrons and Artists in Medieval East Anglia, is the fruit of 18 years of study, first started when she studied the subject for her PhD.

And that subtitle gives a clue that it's not just the object itself Freddie is interested in, it's the people. Who made it – and who paid for it.

The manuscript is rarely on display (the last time was in the 1980s), but you can enjoy the next best thing with this sumptuously-illustrated gem of a book which explores the beauty of the book while also teasing out the very human story behind it.

The Ormesby Psalter itself is not a tuck-away-in-the-folds-of-your-cloak book. It's a whopper, measuring 39.4cm by 27.9cm – that's a shade under modern A3 size. It consists of 213 parchment folios in 'remarkable condition'. It's actually several religious items bound together as one: Psalms, Canticles, a Calendar and Paschal Table, and two Litanies.

It's also spectacular, packed with vivid shades of pink, blue, green and gold. The latter, especially, would have impressed even in a pre-electricity world. As Freddie writes: 'The punched and patterned burnished gold would have shone and flickered in the candlelight of a medieval church.'

So what exactly is a psalter? 'The Psalter is the Book of Psalms in Latin. If you were a layperson in the Middle Ages this would have been the book you would own,' she explained. 'In the 13th and 14th century East Anglia was terribly wealthy, thanks to the wool trade, and people had the money to pay for glamorous things.

'Giving a modern equivalent is hard, but this book was something like buying a top-of-the-range Ferrari.'

Its name comes from Robert of Ormesby, whose donation of the book to Norwich Cathedral Priory in the 1330s is recorded in scarlet ink – that must have been a red-letter day in all senses of the phrase. Robert was sub-prior of the religious house, third in its pecking order.

We know next to nothing about him. He was sometime a prior at Hoxne – a daughter 'cell' of Norwich – and was the second son of a prosperous Norfolk family. Freddie calls him 'splendidly obscure'.

Because he donated the psalter to his successor sub-priors, though, Freddie has discovered it could well link in to one of the cathedral's biggest disasters. The monks were still struggling to cope with the aftermath of the Black Death when, on January 15 1362, the spire collapsed into the east end of the priory church. And because we know exactly where the choir stall for the sub-prior was, we know the psalter must have been kept there – right underneath where the spire came crashing through. That may well account for water damage on the psalter, which was repaired and re-bound.

Robert did not commission the book, however. The psalter was put together in at least four phases – or 'campaigns' – over many years, with at least two interruptions. The hand of four or five scribes, three main illuminators and numerous lesser ones can be spotted among the pages.

Apart from Robert's datable donation, trying to work out the 'when' has been even more tricky than the 'who'. 'These objects are the only way the past has to speak to us,' she observes. 'But you have to understand what they're trying to say. They weren't created out of thin air.'

The very first campaign was probably down to some unknown senior cleric. But Freddie has now been able to deduce who was behind the next phase.

But analysing the heraldry in the illustration of the Jesse Tree, the wonder-of-wonders that leads into Psalm 1, has enabled her to establish that one of the campaigns must have been at the behest of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, to mark the betrothal of his ward Richard Foliot of Gressenhall to an (unnamed) member of that famous Norfolk family the Bardolfs.

De Warenne was a big-hitter in the Middle Ages. The remains of one of his strongholds, Castle Acre castle, show the ambition of this powerful aristocrat. His part in the Psalter story can be dated to around 1316-1338. But then he lost the wardship of Foliot, so presumably donated the psalter to the sub-prior. He had no more use for it…

The final campaign came sometime in the 1360s.

As for the artists who illuminated the manuscript, we know none of their names. To scholars they are known by such epithets as the Jesse Master or (and bad luck to the anonymous artist concerned) the Cheap Finisher. Their individual styles are very distinctive – remember those weird creatures? – and can be seen in a cluster of magnificent works which have survived to the modern age.

One of them, the Macclesfield Psalter, was auctioned for £1.25 million in the early 2000s. And the Ormesby Psalter is even better than that one. Never mind one top-of-the-range Ferrari – you could buy the whole showroom. Not that there's any danger of it coming on to the open market.

So how on earth did it survive the Reformation, when so many beautiful religious objects were smashed or burned? 'When you look at what survives, it's often the best ones, the very highly illuminated books such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. People look after them,' Freddie says. '[These books] are really what survives of medieval painting.'

Apart from these books, we only have a tiny, tiny remnant of painted altar-pieces and some rood screens, the latter often defaced.

On May 2 1538 Norwich Priory was dissolved, only to be quickly re-founded as a secular cathedral. But its magnificent library was dispersed, with many items now to be found in Cambridge colleges.

'There is no evidence that [this]happened to the Psalter. It just appears in the catalogue of a bookseller in the 1830s. Goodness know where it had been up to then.'

The Bodleian secured it in a bequest in 1834, and it has been there ever since.

Which does give me one final question. If I can summarise then, Dr Law-Turner, this book was commissioned in East Anglia, inspired in East Anglia, and made in East Anglia.

So any chance we can have it back please? Reader, she giggled.

The Ormesby Psalter: Patrons and Artists in Medieval East Anglia, by Dr Frederica Law-Turner, is published by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (£30). Dr Law-Turner will be doing a talk on it at the Bodleian's Weston Library on Tuesday October 31 (1 pm) when the Psalter itself will be on display for the first time in several decades.