The Luttrell Psalter's illustrations come alive in a medieval village.
The book this film comes out of is real and you can look at it. The Luttrell Psalter was made in the 1320s or 1330s for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, lord of Irnham in Lincolnshire, and its fame rests on its margins rather than its psalms. That is where the illuminator drew the working year: ploughing with oxen, harrowing, weeding, reaping, carting the sheaves, the harvest dinner, women feeding hens, a cook, a cart with a broken wheel. It survives in the British Library and it is the closest thing England has to photographs of the fourteenth-century countryside.
Guided by the detailed and often humorous images of everyday life from the Luttrell Psalter, the Luttrell Psalter Film gives a unique glimpse of a year in the life of a medieval English village. Filmed over four seasons, it shows the changing landscape with its fields and flowers, and the daily activities which dominated the lives of our forefathers.
This 20-minute film draws on over 35 different images from the margins of the manuscript, allowing the people from the Psalter to walk out from its vellum pages.
There is almost no dialogue. What you hear instead is Latin, the psalter's own liturgy, sung, and a song in Middle English about a hard winter and a broken season, and otherwise the noise of the work: hammering, harness, weather. Nothing is explained to you, and looking at the marginal drawings themselves feels much the same.
The film follows the year rather than a story, because the year was the story. A village's food supply and its rent and its survival all turned on getting each task done in its short window, and the Psalter's margins are organised the same way. Watching it after looking at the manuscript is a slightly uncanny business. The drawings are stylised and the film is not, and yet the same gestures keep arriving.
Twenty minutes, directed by Nicole Loven for Crow's Eye Productions, filmed across four seasons in the English landscape.