November - Remembrance Day

The Cuerden Psalter's 'labour of the month' shows a figure knocking down acorns, from an oak tree to feed his three pigs.  This year there has been a particularly heavy crop of acorns and other mast so the sixty days of 'pannage', when foresters let their pigs out to forage on the New Forest, has been extended.

However free-range pigs are not a part of rural Lancashire life today - but Remembrance Day is.

Hidden Hart Colloquium

Yesterday I was in London at the Hidden Hart colloquium; Blackburn's "Worthy Citizen", listening to some fascinating papers and giving a talk myself.

The programme and abstracts can be read via http://blackhartbooks.wordpress.com/the-colloquium/


Debs Thorpe, who presented a paper 'Northern Soul: An Eight Hundred Year-Old Collection in a Yorkshire Sixth-Form College', has since posted a blog reflecting on aspects of the colloquium;

http://thescribeunbound.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/a-sensory-experience-a-touchhearsmell-approach-to-exhibiting-medieval-manuscripts/

The Cuerden Psalter

The Cuerden Psalter now belongs to the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York, where it has been since they purchased it in 1929, three years after the death of Reginald Arthur Tatton.

Images and information about the Psalter can be found by searching the catalogue on the Corsair Morgan website

The book long belonged with Lancashire families; Nowell (1536), Peter Brooke of Astley, Robert Townley Parker and  Reginald Tatton.  It is the very here and now of rural Lancashire communities that I am endeavouring to 'connect' with the vellum pages of the psalter.