lluminated initial, c. 24 x 32 mm, ‘C’ depicting The Last Supper with Christ shown offering the host and chalice before the disciples who are sitting intimately around the table. Judas sits in the foreground clutching a red bag filled with coins, parallel to the objects of the Eucharist. His figure is the only one without a halo. The illumination is framed in the three-line initial ‘C’ on pink grounds with white tracery on burnished gold next to a fifteen line decorated rectangle border with flowers of blue, yellow, red with green leaves on burnished gold grounds and acanthus leaves in blue and gold with white highlights on red grounds.
 
A single leaf on parchment, c. 275 x 192 mm, ruled in ink, c. 177 x 114 mm (ruled), written on twenty-two lines in brown ink, in a French bâtarde script, rubrics in red, one-line initials in burnished gold on alternately dark pink, brown and blue grounds, two-line initials in burnished gold grounds on pink and blue with white tracery.
 
The main text on the verso begins the Mass for Corpus Christi, illustrated by The Last Supper, ‘Cibavit eos ex adipe frumenti’ (‘He fed them with the finest of wheat’), followed by the text from I Corinthians II beginning ‘Ego enim accepi’, (‘For I have received’).
 
A very fine example of a Missal leaf. The illumination is bright and crisp, there is very slight lightening to the text and some minor smudging of the one line illuminated initials, the parchment is bright with very minor browning to the edges and slight rippling with one lower corner creased, two previous mounting strip marks to the top of the page, two binding holes to the edge.
 
This leaf appears to come from a broken-up Missal that most likely belonged to an Abbott. Some of the sister leaves contain the coat of arms for an abbot and reference to Walaric (565–622 AD) who was venerated at St-Valery-sur-Somme, in northern France, on the coast near Abbeville.
 
Sister Leaves:
MS 5650/35 - Sequencia from Acts 1 [University of Reading Special Collections].
Walaric - Maggs European Bulletin 17 (1992), nos. 70 and 71.