Seventeen medieval manuscript fragments preserved in Guernsey are providing the first substantial evidence of what books were circulating on the Channel Island during the Middle Ages. The surviving pages range from biblical and liturgical works to Ovid, medieval travel writing and French literature, revealing a reading culture that had previously left few traces.
The fragments were found in the collections of Guernsey’s Island Archives and among records kept in His Majesty’s Greffier’s Strongroom. Rather than surviving as intact books, pieces of medieval parchment had been reused centuries later as covers and bindings for administrative records concerning the island’s feudal holdings.
Some of the fragments have only recently come to light, while others had previously been noticed by archivists without their texts or wider significance being fully understood. Researchers are now studying them as a collection, providing evidence for books and literary culture on medieval Guernsey where very little had previously been known.
The work has brought together the Island Archives team with Dr David Rundle of the University of Kent and Professor Tamara Atkin of the University of Oxford. Six of the fragments are in French, while many of the others are in Latin. The collection includes scholastic, liturgical and literary material.
From Ovid to Mandeville
Photo courtesy States of Guernsey
A catalogue being developed through Rundle’s Lost Manuscripts project is now providing much more information about individual fragments. The project aims to create a union catalogue of manuscript fragments surviving in the British Isles.
Among the Guernsey finds is a thirteenth-century manuscript of Ovid’s Heroides, accompanied by commentary attributed to Guillaume d’Orléans. Produced in France, the surviving parchment consists of a complete bifolium, decorated with blue initials and red flourishing. It was eventually reused to cover a 1576 record for the Fief des Coltons.
Another fragment preserves part of Le livre des merveilles du monde, the enormously popular medieval travel narrative associated with John Mandeville. Dating from the fourteenth century, the surviving bifolium was turned sideways and used as the wrapper for a 1548 Livre de Perchage. Its parchment was particularly thick, making it well suited to its new purpose; additional pieces of parchment were even stitched onto it because the medieval leaf was not quite large enough to cover the later book.
The French-language material also includes Pierre de Peckham’s Anglo-Norman La lumere as lais. One surviving fourteenth-century bifolium contains more than 300 lines of the work and retains traces of rubrication and red shading.
Together, such fragments give substance to one of the most interesting conclusions emerging from the project: when medieval readers in Guernsey turned to texts in the vernacular, the surviving evidence points towards French rather than English. The island’s position between the French and English mainlands makes that evidence particularly valuable for understanding its cultural connections.
Ahead of this week's workshop on the fragments recently unearthed by Guernsey Archivist, Callum Tostevin-Hall, and on which @tamarajatkin.bsky.social and myself have been working, here is a taster of the sort of thing they include:
lostmss.org.uk/lost-manuscr…
The collection was not limited to secular literature. One striking survival is a French translation of Leviticus dating from around the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and produced in France. Two nearly complete parchment leaves survive, with chapter numbers and running headings alternating between blue and red and decorated initials opening individual chapters.
Other books were clearly intended for more scholarly use. Two twelfth-century bifolia preserve portions of the Acts of the Apostles accompanied by interlinear and marginal material from the Glossa Ordinaria, the great medieval tradition of biblical commentary. One of the fragments even contains an annotation added by a fifteenth-century reader, evidence that the manuscript continued to be actively consulted centuries after it was originally produced.
A thirteenth-century leaf from the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX provides evidence for the study of canon law. The manuscript contains a formal gloss as well as later interlinear annotations, suggesting successive readers continued to work with the text.
Liturgical books are represented as well. A fourteenth-century missal survives as an entire bifolium, complete with musical notation written on red staves and sections introduced by alternating red and blue initials.
A Rare Version of the Griselda Story
Photo courtesy States of Guernsey
Perhaps the most significant literary fragment comes from L’Estoire de Griseldis, a dramatic French poem generally attributed to Philippe de Mézières and composed around 1395. It retells the story of the long-suffering Griselda, whose story had earlier appeared in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The version represented by the Guernsey fragment is exceptionally rare, surviving in only one other manuscript and two printed editions from the sixteenth century. Researchers believe the new witness helps demonstrate how the work moved beyond the French royal court circles in which it probably first circulated and eventually reached the wider readership reflected by those later printed editions.
The Lost Manuscripts catalogue provides further details about the find. The surviving parchment is a complete bifolium produced in France during the second quarter of the fifteenth century and written in a Gothic secretary script. The names of speakers were picked out in red. Atkin and J. R. Mattison are now preparing a study of the fragment and its significance for Guernsey’s medieval manuscript culture.
Professor Atkin explains that the collection fundamentally changes what can be said about medieval Guernsey:
“Ask most people, including scholars of medieval and early modern literature, what they know about the literary culture of premodern Guernsey, and the answer that you’ll invariably get back is ‘not much’. These discoveries by the team at Island Archives transforms what we can now say about Guernsey’s medieval manuscript culture. They offer definitive evidence of Guernsey’s medieval literary and textual culture and reveal that books of several kinds – scholastic, liturgical, and literary – were available on the island.”
The fragments also include something much more directly connected with medieval Guernsey itself. A mid-fourteenth-century account roll, written in Latin, has been identified as having been produced on the island. It contains accounts and the names of local individuals before it, too, was eventually folded over and reused as the wrapper for a later record.
Medieval Books Become Early Modern Bindings
The discovery began about two years ago with Archival Assistant Callum Tostevin-Hall. While searching for a sixteenth-century copy of Edward III’s 1331 Extente of Guernsey, he noticed that its catalogue information referred to a vellum cover containing Latin writing that had been removed during earlier conservation. Tostevin-Hall says, “I checked this cover and was astonished to find that it was clearly a reused bifolium from a medieval manuscript!”
That observation ultimately developed into the wider investigation of the seventeen fragments. Their survival is largely the result of changing attitudes towards the medieval books themselves. Once the manuscripts were no longer needed, their durable parchment could be cut, folded and repurposed to protect administrative documents.
And we are off! Wonderful first session at today’s fragment study day with @drdavidrundle.bsky.social @benpohl.bsky.social @fragmentarium.bsky.social and others! Here’s Archive Assistant Callum Tostevin-Hall in action setting the Guernsey fragments in context.
Island Archivist Vikki Hart describes them as “striking early examples of recycling,” adding: “What was once a practical act of reusing old parchment has, centuries later, preserved pieces of the island’s history that would otherwise have been lost.”
Research into the collection is continuing. At a study day held in Guernsey on 10 September, scholars examined the fragments while considering where the manuscripts had originally been produced, how they reached the island, who might have read them and how the books eventually came to be dismantled. Tostevin-Hall said these questions were central to the next stage of the project.
Rundle believes the seventeen pieces may not be the end of the story. “As you get a buzz every time a fragment is found, this island is buzzing!” he said. “This collection is exciting in its variety, of subjects and of dates, and hint at a culture which has not even been imagined.”
More fragments may yet survive unnoticed in Guernsey’s collections. For now, these scraps of parchment are beginning to reconstruct something that had almost entirely disappeared from the historical record: the books that medieval people on the island studied, heard, used and read.
I was first contacted by Callum at the Island Archives in 2024, and it feels like barely a month goes by without a new discovery! Shout out not only to him and @drdavidrundle.bsky.social but also J.R Mattison, with whom I’ve been writing about the Griselda fragment. Excellent collaborators all!
Seventeen medieval manuscript fragments preserved in Guernsey are providing the first substantial evidence of what books were circulating on the Channel Island during the Middle Ages. The surviving pages range from biblical and liturgical works to Ovid, medieval travel writing and French literature, revealing a reading culture that had previously left few traces.
The fragments were found in the collections of Guernsey’s Island Archives and among records kept in His Majesty’s Greffier’s Strongroom. Rather than surviving as intact books, pieces of medieval parchment had been reused centuries later as covers and bindings for administrative records concerning the island’s feudal holdings.
Some of the fragments have only recently come to light, while others had previously been noticed by archivists without their texts or wider significance being fully understood. Researchers are now studying them as a collection, providing evidence for books and literary culture on medieval Guernsey where very little had previously been known.
The work has brought together the Island Archives team with Dr David Rundle of the University of Kent and Professor Tamara Atkin of the University of Oxford. Six of the fragments are in French, while many of the others are in Latin. The collection includes scholastic, liturgical and literary material.
From Ovid to Mandeville
A catalogue being developed through Rundle’s Lost Manuscripts project is now providing much more information about individual fragments. The project aims to create a union catalogue of manuscript fragments surviving in the British Isles.
Among the Guernsey finds is a thirteenth-century manuscript of Ovid’s Heroides, accompanied by commentary attributed to Guillaume d’Orléans. Produced in France, the surviving parchment consists of a complete bifolium, decorated with blue initials and red flourishing. It was eventually reused to cover a 1576 record for the Fief des Coltons.
Another fragment preserves part of Le livre des merveilles du monde, the enormously popular medieval travel narrative associated with John Mandeville. Dating from the fourteenth century, the surviving bifolium was turned sideways and used as the wrapper for a 1548 Livre de Perchage. Its parchment was particularly thick, making it well suited to its new purpose; additional pieces of parchment were even stitched onto it because the medieval leaf was not quite large enough to cover the later book.
The French-language material also includes Pierre de Peckham’s Anglo-Norman La lumere as lais. One surviving fourteenth-century bifolium contains more than 300 lines of the work and retains traces of rubrication and red shading.
Together, such fragments give substance to one of the most interesting conclusions emerging from the project: when medieval readers in Guernsey turned to texts in the vernacular, the surviving evidence points towards French rather than English. The island’s position between the French and English mainlands makes that evidence particularly valuable for understanding its cultural connections.
The collection was not limited to secular literature. One striking survival is a French translation of Leviticus dating from around the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and produced in France. Two nearly complete parchment leaves survive, with chapter numbers and running headings alternating between blue and red and decorated initials opening individual chapters.
Other books were clearly intended for more scholarly use. Two twelfth-century bifolia preserve portions of the Acts of the Apostles accompanied by interlinear and marginal material from the Glossa Ordinaria, the great medieval tradition of biblical commentary. One of the fragments even contains an annotation added by a fifteenth-century reader, evidence that the manuscript continued to be actively consulted centuries after it was originally produced.
A thirteenth-century leaf from the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX provides evidence for the study of canon law. The manuscript contains a formal gloss as well as later interlinear annotations, suggesting successive readers continued to work with the text.
Liturgical books are represented as well. A fourteenth-century missal survives as an entire bifolium, complete with musical notation written on red staves and sections introduced by alternating red and blue initials.
A Rare Version of the Griselda Story
Perhaps the most significant literary fragment comes from L’Estoire de Griseldis, a dramatic French poem generally attributed to Philippe de Mézières and composed around 1395. It retells the story of the long-suffering Griselda, whose story had earlier appeared in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The version represented by the Guernsey fragment is exceptionally rare, surviving in only one other manuscript and two printed editions from the sixteenth century. Researchers believe the new witness helps demonstrate how the work moved beyond the French royal court circles in which it probably first circulated and eventually reached the wider readership reflected by those later printed editions.
The Lost Manuscripts catalogue provides further details about the find. The surviving parchment is a complete bifolium produced in France during the second quarter of the fifteenth century and written in a Gothic secretary script. The names of speakers were picked out in red. Atkin and J. R. Mattison are now preparing a study of the fragment and its significance for Guernsey’s medieval manuscript culture.
Professor Atkin explains that the collection fundamentally changes what can be said about medieval Guernsey:
“Ask most people, including scholars of medieval and early modern literature, what they know about the literary culture of premodern Guernsey, and the answer that you’ll invariably get back is ‘not much’. These discoveries by the team at Island Archives transforms what we can now say about Guernsey’s medieval manuscript culture. They offer definitive evidence of Guernsey’s medieval literary and textual culture and reveal that books of several kinds – scholastic, liturgical, and literary – were available on the island.”
The fragments also include something much more directly connected with medieval Guernsey itself. A mid-fourteenth-century account roll, written in Latin, has been identified as having been produced on the island. It contains accounts and the names of local individuals before it, too, was eventually folded over and reused as the wrapper for a later record.
Medieval Books Become Early Modern Bindings
The discovery began about two years ago with Archival Assistant Callum Tostevin-Hall. While searching for a sixteenth-century copy of Edward III’s 1331 Extente of Guernsey, he noticed that its catalogue information referred to a vellum cover containing Latin writing that had been removed during earlier conservation. Tostevin-Hall says, “I checked this cover and was astonished to find that it was clearly a reused bifolium from a medieval manuscript!”
That observation ultimately developed into the wider investigation of the seventeen fragments. Their survival is largely the result of changing attitudes towards the medieval books themselves. Once the manuscripts were no longer needed, their durable parchment could be cut, folded and repurposed to protect administrative documents.
Island Archivist Vikki Hart describes them as “striking early examples of recycling,” adding: “What was once a practical act of reusing old parchment has, centuries later, preserved pieces of the island’s history that would otherwise have been lost.”
Research into the collection is continuing. At a study day held in Guernsey on 10 September, scholars examined the fragments while considering where the manuscripts had originally been produced, how they reached the island, who might have read them and how the books eventually came to be dismantled. Tostevin-Hall said these questions were central to the next stage of the project.
Rundle believes the seventeen pieces may not be the end of the story. “As you get a buzz every time a fragment is found, this island is buzzing!” he said. “This collection is exciting in its variety, of subjects and of dates, and hint at a culture which has not even been imagined.”
More fragments may yet survive unnoticed in Guernsey’s collections. For now, these scraps of parchment are beginning to reconstruct something that had almost entirely disappeared from the historical record: the books that medieval people on the island studied, heard, used and read.
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