The manuscript itself is of the tenth century, and belonged to the Abbey Church of St. Maurice d’Agaune, and from here it was stolen in the fourteenth century. It afterwards found a home at Sion, and was purchased for the Victoria and Albert Museum at the Spitzer sale in 1893.
No doubt examples of rich monastic bindings did exist in England, but none of them are now known. It is likely enough that their value condemned them, and that they were entirely destroyed in the earlier half of the sixteenth century to swell the revenues of the king. The manuscripts belonging to these destroyed covers have, luckily, been kept, and numbers of them came to the British Museum by gift of George II.
Two ornamental bindings only of English origin now remain; these are both simple, they are the St. Cuthbert’s Gospels and the English coronation book of Henry I. These are described in Chapter VIII.
There were plenty of leather bindings ornamented with blind tooling or cut leather work in mediæval times, and these also are described later on.
The idea of ornamenting bindings with sunk panels is of Arab origin. The fashion came to Europe by way of Venice, and the Venetians themselves quickly saw that the possibilities of decorating bindings were largely increased by this device. It is done by means of two boards, the upper of which is pierced, then the whole is covered with leather and ornamented with painted work or stamped work as the case may be. In inferior bindings of this sort, the sunk panels are sometimes produced simply by hard pressure, but the state of the edges of the panels will soon show how they are made. If they are steep there are the double boards, if very sloping there may only be one.
Queen Elizabeth had some of these Venetian sunk bindings presented to her and she liked them. Consequently there were a few examples of it made in England in the sixteenth century. At a later time Charles Lewis bound several large books with double boards in this way, and I think he was the only important English binder who has ever done so to any great extent.
The double boards have left a trace of their existence in the form of a trench which is frequently found along the edges of the boards of sixteenth century bindings of English, Italian, and French workmanship. The trench, however, is merely a survival and does not necessarily imply the actual existence of double boards. It is a distant tribute to our indebtedness to the East.