Give blessings to labourers, earth and its fruits.

The Luttrell Psalter is a unique book “brimming with 150 Psalms, a calendar, mass, canticle and also incredible marginalia of vivid real-life characters, bold knights, trusty farmers, daring boys, toiling wives, and exotic creatures” (Michelle Brown).

Commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham, near Corby Glen, in the 1330s, the Psalter reflects the devotional, cultural, political, economic and dynastic aspirations of Luttrell and his family. It is often regarded as an ideal representation of early fourteenth-century life used to bolster Lutteral’s legacy and power posthumously.

Initially it was the seasonal farming tasks and the community’s relationship to land, crops and husbandry that dance down the margins and across the pages that I particularly loved – things I am involved with on our Lincolnshire farm. A farm, like the one in the book, that ploughs, sows and harvests… It felt familiar. It made the 700-year gap seem very small.

Then I came to learn that rather than being a mirror the psalter is in fact a construction: formed within a society dominated by Catholicism and devised by a wealthy man. Meaning, it doesn’t show an “as-it-were-ness”, but rather an as-they-needed-it-to-be; a vision shaped to support Luttrell’s souls’ salvation and his family’s privileged life. Which makes the copy in Willoughby more fascinating – a facsimile showing false truths.

Everything in Give blessings to labourers, earth and its fruits features in the psalter – the furniture, bowls, feast, bee skep, the three-fingered gloves and knitted hoods, a sheaf, spoons… But, like the copy of the psalter and its contents, they are constructions, a medieval inspired display. The work aim invites us to think on what we call true? How we give thanks, what we preserve or invent for our own purposes and how best to represent lives that are beyond our own.

An afternoon feast invited guests to consider core themes that feature through out the psalter – food, faith, music and plants. During conversation we ate medieval inspired food and drink. To conclude we visited the village church and under wall paintings contemporaneous with the psalter Chris Pearman sang a memorial psalm.

Made for exhibition In Reference Too at Willoughby Art Gallery Corby Glen. Curated by Soraya Smithson