New imaging techniques have uncovered a fragment of an early medieval psalter within Hereford Cathedral’s oldest manuscript, The Hereford Gospels.

The discovery has been made by a team of collaborators including Professors Richard Gameson and Andy Beeby from University of Durham, Professor Bill Endres from the University of Oklahoma and Professor Dave Messinger from the Rochester Institute of Technology. The team have been working together to recover and decipher the text since at least 2023 when the Mappa Mundi Trust granted permission for full imaging of the Gospels. This latest research builds on previous work about the Hereford Gospels by this team as well as Dr Michelle Brown.

The discovered psalter text is what is known as a palimpsest, a piece of writing that has been erased and written over, and it is believed that it originates from the same time period as the Gospels, 800AD. Whilst staff and researchers have known about its presence since the 1990s and a clear image was taken in 2016, it has not been possible to make the text legible until now. The research team have undertaken several targeted multi-spectral imaging sessions since 2023 with the collaboration of the library & archives team at Hereford Cathedral.

The Hereford Gospels during an imaging session

The palimpsest is one of only two pre-1100 palimpsests from Britain, and suggests the Hereford Gospels might have been produced in a place with limited resources but which still had other manuscripts within reach.

Hereford Cathedral Librarian, Jennifer Dumbelton, says: “This is thrilling news, and it’s been a privilege to see scholars working together on an international scale to decipher this text. We’re very fortunate to care for such a special item here at our cathedral.”

Professor Richard Gameson says: “It was very exciting to recognise these exceptionally rare palimpsest leaves for what they were, thirty years ago; it is most satisfying, all these years later, finally to have been able to read them and understand their full significance.”

The Hereford Gospels will be on display in the Mappa Mundi & Chained Library Museum at Hereford Cathedral as part of the Shaping Early Medieval Faith: The Hereford Gospels exhibition from Monday 30 March – Saturday 12 September 2026. Click here to read more about the exhibtion.

A full set of images of the digitised Hereford Gospels will be released under Creative Commons license in due course; the website being created to host them is currently in development.

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