Westminster Psalter

Then follow five full-page miniatures with gold grounds, showing: the Annunciation, Visitation, seated Virgin and Child, Christ in Majesty surrounded by the Evangelists' Symbols, and King David playing his harp (ff 12v-14v).

These mark the start of Psalms 26 (f 38v), 38 (f 53r), 51 (f 66), 51 and 52 (f 66r and v), 68 with Jonah thrown off his ship, and riding on the whale (f 80v), 80 (f 98r), 97 (f 114r), 101 with Christ in the initial, and a kneeling monk below it with a scroll reading "Lord hear my prayer" (f 116), and 109 with the Trinity (f 132).

These show: a king and a kneeling knight on facing pages, Saint Christopher carrying the Christ-Child, an archbishop, and finally the head of Christ in a format associated with images of the Veil of Veronica, with a prayer below referring to that relic.

[6] Recent writers such as Nigel Morgan are confident that all the 13th century illustration was produced in London, although the earlier full-page miniatures are by an itinerant master, which is reflected in Deirdre Jackson's catalogue entry for the British Library's 2011–12 Royal Manuscripts exhibition.

However Janet Backhouse, then Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, described the prefatory miniatures as "England, possibly St Albans or Winchester" in a book of 1997, and the BL website used a similar formula in late 2011, though assigning the tinted drawings to "Westminster".

Since the prefatory full-page miniatures are in a separate gathering their production may not necessarily have coincided exactly with that of the initials as regards either time or place, and they were "almost certainly created independently before being bound into the book".

These may well have been monks at Westminster, whereas the full-page prefatory miniatures were done by an artist of higher quality, who may well have been an "itinerant lay professional", as his work is also found in the initials in a bible made at St Albans Abbey, now at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS B.

[11] Like most English tinted drawings around this time, these were once attributed to Matthew Paris or his "St Albans school", but recent scholars see them as characteristic of a distinct London style: "The Westminster work has more detailed, refined faces, and contours and internal folds show more jagged effects of line.

[14] The Westminster miniatures lack some of the features that are distinctive in the Glazier Psalter, but the representation of the "sacred dynasty" of David, Mary and Jesus may still be significant, but "the idea is less clear-cut, less systematic, than in the later book".

The second occasion in March 1250, at a time when the campaigning of Louis IX of France in Egypt in the Seventh Crusade seemed about to achieve great successes, has puzzled historians since Matthew Paris, with many suggesting that Henry's main motive may have been either to claim a share of the great rewards of a conquest of Egypt, or alternatively to take control of the widespread enthusiasm for crusading that had seized the English military classes, with complicated political and financial implications for the crown.

Of these the only surviving works, other than perhaps the drawing, are tiles from Chertsey Abbey, perhaps originally made for a royal palace, showing the combat of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, among other scenes, and some at Westminster.

[22] In 1254 Henry suggested that the rededication of the new Westminster Abbey be held on St Edward's feast-day in October 1255, before his planned embarkation; in fact he was diverted to settling unrest in his possessions in Gascony and, whatever his original intentions had been, never went further.