Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 183,
Bede the Venerable, Two Lives of Cuthbert with Regnal Lists, etc. contains as its frontispiece a miniature painting by an unknown artist depicting
King Aethelstan presenting a manuscript to
Saint Cuthbert. The manuscript is from the library of
Archbishop Matthew Parker; it was digitized in Stanford's
Parker Library on the Web project. Aethelstan was
King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927 and
King of the English from 927 to 939 when he died. The painting of Aethelstan in this codex is the earliest surviving portrait of a reigning English king. Because Cuthbert died in 687 Aethelbert presented this manuscript to the saint's monastic community in
Chester-le-Street.
The cataloguing notes for this manuscript on the Parker Library on the Web read as follows in October 2020:
"CCCC MS 183 is one of several manuscripts associated with Æthelstan, King of the English (924/5-39), but the only one of these written in England in his reign. He seems to have commissioned it for presentation to the community of St Cuthbert, which at this point was at Chester-le-Street in Country Durham, having fled Lindisfarne to escape Viking attacks but not yet settled in its eventual home at Durham. The famous presentation picture shows Æthelstan, with bowed head, presenting the book to St Cuthbert himself, and is a very important example of the revival of figure art in manuscript painting during Æthelstan's reign. It was written between 934 and 939, the year of Æthelstan's death, by a scribe who also appears in London, BL MS Royal 7. D. XXIV, perhaps at
Glastonbury, but certainly somewhere in the south of England. It contains Bede's two Lives of St Cuthbert, the first in prose and the second metrical, and a mass and office for Cuthbert's feast day, as well as lists of popes, bishops, and kings, and a record of Æthelstan's other gifts to the community. Its production can be linked to Æthelstan's political activities in the North."
Jeremy Norman’s
