MONK’S DRAWING OF COMET.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 294, 9 November 1934, Page 7

MONK’S DRAWING OF COMET.

SETS DATE FOR CANTERBURY BOOK. A comet blazed through the skies nearly 800 years ago, and so enabled the British Astronomer Royal in 1934 to suggest in what year Eadwine, a monk of Christ Church Priory, Canterbury; copied Psalm 5 into the famous Canterbury Psalter, of which a collotype reproduction is being issued by The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral. No information as to the career of this monk, Eadwine, has come down the centuries, and even his dates are unknown. But on internal evidence it has been decided for some time that the Canterbury Psalter belonged to rouglily the middle of the twelfth century. At the head of each psalm is an illuminated picture illustrating the matters which the psalm deals with, but at the foot of the page containing the fifth psalm is also a drawing of a comet with an exceedingly long tail. It is accompanied with a written description in the Anglo-Saxon tongue of which the translation is given as follows: “Concerning the star called Comet. A suchlike ray has the star known as the Comet, and in English it is called ‘the hairy star,’ it appears seldom, after (periods of) many winters, and then for an omen.” Psalm 5 makes no mention of either star or 'comet, and the suggestion has accordingly been entertained that at the time Eadwine wrote out this particular psalm a comet appeared and was recorded by him in this way.

Mr Charles Cotton, deputy librarian of the Chapter House Library at Canterbury, went further, and ■ guessed from the length of its tail that this was Halley’s comet. .Mr Cotton put this matter before the Astronomer Royal, who replied that Halley’s comet was observed in 1145, when it was noted by both European and Chinese chroniclers. The tail is said to has been ten degrees in length, thus tallying with the description given in Eadwine’s Psalter. If the other evidence shows (as it does) that the date of the Psalter was roughly 1140-1150, the Astronomer Royal concludes that the comet would seem to fix it at 1146.