Record price for Becket manuscript

Press, 1 July 1986, Page 22

Record price for Becket manuscript

NZPA-PA London Four 700-year-old pieces of paper fetched more than £1 million ($2.87 million) — an auction record. The buyer, at first a mystery, has been revealed as the American oil tycoon, John Paul Getty 11. The reclusive millionaire, who was recently awarded an honorary knighthood for his gifts to British charitable causes, said in a rare radio interview that he had bought the pages — from an ancient, illuminated manuscript, the only known copy of a medieval illustrated “Life of St Thomas Becket,” to ensure they would remain in England. “It is English and it should stay here,” he said. The British Library said yesterday it had failed in its bid to recapture the document for Britain. Getty, aged 53, the son of the late billionaire, John Paul Getty I, has lived in Britain for 20 years. His previous donations include £5O million ($143.5 million) to the National Gallery. Sotheby’s had expected to raise up to £300,000 ($861,000) from the manuscript pages.

The final price of £1,375,000 ($3,946,250) was more than three times the previous record for any English illustrated manuscript The manuscript dates from between 1230 and 1240, about 60 years after Archbishop Becket was murdered in his own cathedral at Canterbury. Sotheby’s say the author was almost certainly the great English chronicler, Matthew Paris, a monk at St Albans Abbey.