St. Teilo Gospels

The Lichfield Gospels (recently, more often referred to as the St Chad Gospels — but also known as the Book of Chad, the Gospels of St. Chad, St Teilo Gospels, the Llandeilo Gospels, and variations on these) is an eighth century Insular gospel Book housed in Lichfield Cathedral. There are 236 surviving pages, eight of which are illuminated. Another four contain framed text. The pages themselves measure 30.8 cm by 23.5 cm. The manuscript is also important because it includes, as marginalia, some of the earliest known examples of written Old Welsh, dating to the early part of the 8th century. Peter Lord dates the book at 730, placing it chronologically before the Book of Kells but after the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Marginal entries indicate that the manuscript was in the possession of Welsh church, St. Teilo at some point in the ninth century and eventually came into the possession of Lichfield Cathedral somewhere in the tenth century.

The manuscript was rebound in 1962 by Roger Powell, at which time it was discovered that in the rebinding of 1862 the manuscript had been cut into single leaves and that the pages had been trimmed during the rebinding of 1707. In 2010, Bill Endres, then at the University of Kentucky, led efforts to digitize the manuscript.

In 2014, Endres returned to Lichfield Cathedral and used Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to capture the drypoint glosses in the Lichfield Gospels. One gloss recovers contributions of women during the early medieval period: its listing of three Anglo-Saxon female names suggests that women worked in the scriptorium at Lichfield.

Scholars view four places as possible sites for the making of the Lichfield Gospels: Ireland, Northumbria, Wales, and Lichfield. Paleographic and stylistic similarities link it to Northumbria and Iona: the painting techniques resemble those of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. Some scholars view this great gospel book as likely written in Wales due to the Welsh marginalia, perhaps Llandeilo Fawr or other site in South Wales. However, in 1980, Wendy Stein made an extensive argument for Lichfield, viewing Wales as unlikely but Ireland and Northumbria as still possible. In 1996, by studying the Lichfield Gospel’s type of paper, pigmentation, and style of text, researcher Pamela James concludes that the most likely place of origin for the manuscript is Lichfield itself. In 2003, the discovery of the Lichfield Angel provided further evidence for a claim of Lichfield. Sharp (2016) has drawn similarities to motifs in the Gospels with goldwork in the Staffordshire Hoard. But without definitive evidence, this debate is likely to continue.

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