Aberystwyth's National Library display Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell's bibles

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00:00If we didn't know anything about how they arrived at either library, I think a religious

00:19historian would say that this one was Henry's, or this one was Cromwell's, but the route

00:26that this one took to St John's College, Cambridge, came with some distant Cromwell link, so

00:32that's why this has not been for them.

00:34That was going to be my other question, where have they been, and how have they got here,

00:38the safety of them?

00:40Right, okay.

00:42Wow.

00:43Because it's astonishing that they've both survived, almost, isn't it, given the history

00:47of Cromwell and everything that's happened.

00:50It's amazing.

00:51This is the thing, books like these that are expensive.

00:55They've survived much better than that book that was pulled out of the mud of the tent.

01:00Yeah.

01:01That seems to be moving, because cheap books don't survive, expensive ones that people

01:05preserve.

01:06So, in some ways, although there was turbulence.

01:09A lot of turbulence, like the body of a queen was, you know, disinterred and thrown about,

01:14but the books have survived, which is just, it's amazing.

01:19Like, for instance, up here, we have Cromwell's face, which is a face down that's been applied

01:28to make it look more like Cromwell.

01:32And in the bottom here, just creeping through at various points, you can see that the IVAC

01:39for Vidac Rex peeking through that blue.

01:42That's because what's underneath here was very different.

01:45In the original image, it's a prison contrasting with the preacher on the other side as a reminder

01:50of the consequences of not following Henry's injunctions.

01:55But in this image, as we said, the figure has been adapted to look like James Seawall, his wife.

02:03And the dress, I think, when we banalised this, it's actually silver.

02:09So silver tarnishes.

02:11So she doesn't look very, you know, very glamorous, very queenly, necessarily,

02:16but that dress would have been silver, and with the gold necklace,

02:21and she would have shone on the page when the book was first made, so.

02:26And then we have here another example of a paste down.

02:38You can see the corner there has just lifted slightly.

02:41That's because on top of the printed image, underneath a new image has been pasted on.

02:49But what's so odd is that what's underneath this letter I is another letter I.

02:55So one theory we're thinking about is that in this other Bible, in the Welsh Bible,

03:03the letter I is covered over with a fairly controversial image of Adam and Eve,

03:08a reminder that it wasn't just Eve who sinned, but Adam as well.

03:12This is quite a Protestant way of thinking about original sin.

03:16And it may be that that image was applied to both Bibles,

03:20that it was removed from this one, causing some damage,

03:23and therefore a new letter I had to be put over the top of another letter I.

03:29And that's the kind of question that combines science and history and theology.

03:35And then that takes us on to, can that help us to identify which copy might be Henry's and which Cromwell's?

03:43You know, these kind of theological questions, are they more likely to have been in the King's Bible or in Cromwell's?

03:53And then there, just poking out was that find I mentioned earlier, the purple and yellow threads that occur in each of the Bibles,

04:04marking out the different title pages so that you can navigate through this huge text.

04:10In this image here, which, as you see, seems to be that way around.

04:19In the Welsh copy, the whole series of images here are done in manuscript.

04:25So there is no print here. This isn't just colouring in. This is kind of drawing all of these images.

04:31And the result of that is that further on into the text, there has to be a corresponding manuscript page,

04:39because printed books work in, folio books work by pairing pages up.

04:43They're like U-shapes that tuck into each other.

04:46So if you remove that title page, the corresponding page, its joint becomes weakened.

04:52So in this case, a whole page has been done by hand.

04:56Yeah, so this is handwritten, this page.

05:01It's pretty good. It's a pretty good imitation of print.

05:06It's very, very difficult to take.

05:08And as you just flip through the pages, you wouldn't notice that.

05:17And I suppose perhaps finally, thinking about some of the work we've been doing around colours,

05:23across just two pages here are such a spectrum of colours, inks and pigments.

05:29And I've found there's been hard work thinking about what this can tell us about

05:34where different parts of the Bible might have been illustrated,

05:38and whether the same page in each text is illustrated almost in a kind of, you know,

05:43battery line batch process, or actually whether something more complex is going on

05:48in terms of where and how these two stunning texts are being illustrated.

05:54It just gives us a little indication of just how much work went in,

05:59how much work, how much thinking and planning went into the making of these two books.

06:04Now we've done talking about two books.

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