The Luttrell Psalter is famed for its striking depictions of peasants labouring contained within a series of bas-de-page illuminations within the main body of the manuscript. These have invariably been used uncritically to generate illustrative material for books, particularly history books, written about the fourteenth century or the later Middle Ages more generally. Thus the miller graces the cover of the paperback edition of M. M. Postan’s The Medieval Economy and Society, the Luttrell family feasting illustrates Kate Mertes’ The Medieval Noble Household (Figure 3.1), a colour reproduction of Sir Geoffrey illustrates simply ‘Knight on horseback’ in the Medieval Britain volume of The Cambridge Cultural History (Figure 3.3), and the musicians in the margins of fol. 176r represent medieval entertainment in Edith Rickert’s Chaucer’s World. Such examples could be repeated many times over, but the implicit reading of these images is that, apart from their being pretty pictures, they are mirrors of medieval life and that the figures so represented are in some ways representations of real life. This mentalité even spills into the work of art historians, who one might otherwise expect to be more critical in their use of this source. Nevertheless, they regularly state that the manuscript was largely completed before or by 1340 when Agnes Sutton, the wife of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, for whom the manuscript was made, died, this conclusion being based on the fact that Agnes is shown alive both in the feasting scene and in the depiction of Sir Geoffrey’s arming (Figures 3.1, 3.3). Such views even affect Michael Camille’s interpretation of the manuscript, as it does Janet Backhouse’s picture book, which emphasizes the many ways in which the manuscript’s details ‘reveal acute observation of real life’.

This literal reading of the manuscript and its illuminations is unsatisfactory. But the question arises, if the manuscript illuminations are not simple mirrors of a real past, then how are we to understand them and, within the context of this volume of essays, what may we deduce from them about labour in medieval peasant society and the relationship between a lord and his tenants? To address the second, we must have some handle on the first: namely, what was the function of the Luttrell Psalter? Unfortunately this is not a question that has much exercised art historians.