Adding to the prize pot: manuscript missions in the Traitors Castle

As series three of The Traitors (UK) comes to an end, the castle and its grounds have once again played a starring role as the setting for murder and intrigue. The remote Ardross estate in Scotland has become a familiar backdrop to plotting, betrayal and challenges that test competitors’ physical and emotional strength as they test each other’s

 loyalty. Before its recent celebrity, however, the estate was known to book historians as the home of the collector Charles Dyson Perrins, who owned the property from 1898 to 1937. Perrins had a family house near Malvern (built and furnished with money from the condiments business now best known for Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce), but spent summers at Ardross, bringing his rare books and manuscripts with him.

A Body in the Library

Perrins began collecting medieval manuscripts around the time that he bought Ardross. These were an extension of his interest in early printed books. At first, he spent relatively small sums on manuscripts, but in 1904 the purchase of the Gorleston Psalter marked his arrival as a major collector. On his way to Malvern from London, Perrins dropped into Henry Sotheran’s shop in search of something to read on the train. He left with a fourteenth-century English Psalter manuscript priced at £5,250 (about £750,000 today).  

Perrins was understandably hesitant about spending so much money on a book, so he invited the freelancing expert Sydney Cockerell to come to Malvern to advise him. Cockerell later claimed that ‘a single glance was enough for me

 to recommend its purchase at any price’.ⁱ Cockerell also persuaded Perrins to hire him to catalogue his growing manuscript collection. Thus, in August 1905, Cockerell arrived at Ardross to find ‘Everyone out shooting or fishing [...] so I had a pleasant nap after lunch, & then a two mile walk by a beautiful river near the house, which is a modern building of pink sandstone, none too beautiful but very comfortable’.ⁱⁱ

The following day Cockerell began studying the Gorleston Psalter, interspersing his examination of manuscripts with games of billiards and long walks.  On his return in 1906, Cockerell’s attention was focused on the de Brailes Hours, a thirteenth-century English manuscript illuminated by William de Brailes, which Perrins had bought in Paris, and the fifteenth-century Italian Mirandola Hours (both books are now in the British Library). In 1907, Cockerell’s Ardross mission was to catalogue Perrins’s Books of Hours, and his diary records that he worked on ten different Books of Hours as well as a Psalter.  

Loyalty leads to success

Perrins sponsored the publication of Cockerell’s study of the Gorleston Psalter, which was published in 1907. The following year, Cockerell used fifty manuscripts from Perrins’s collection as the core of a major exhibition of illuminated manuscripts staged at the Burlington Fine Art Club in London. The exhibition cemented Perrins’s reputation as a collector of manuscripts and contributed to Cockerell’s appointment as Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. In this case, therefore, loyalty brought benefits to both men and resulted in significant contributions to the study of medieval books in the unlikely setting of a nineteenth-century Gothic revival castle. 

 For more information on Perrins and his manuscripts see: Charles William Dyson Perrins as a Collector of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts c. 1900-1920 

_{i ‘Mr. Dyson Perrins’, The Times, 7 Feb. 1958, p. 11; see also S. C. Cockerell, ‘Diary 1904’, British Library, Add. MS 52641, fol. 47 (which identifies the bookseller as Sotherans).}

_{ii S. C. Cockerell, ‘Diary 1905’, British Library, Add. MS 52642, fol. 50.}