Lost pages of book saved by Henry VIII aide found

Academics from the universities of Sussex and Cambridge have discovered six missing pages of a medieval Catholic manuscript in a Brighton archive.

Sir John Gage was a Tudor courtier tasked by Henry VIII with overseeing the dissolution of monasteries across Sussex, Surrey and Kent from 1536.

New research suggests Sir John, who remained a Catholic throughout the Reformation, shielded a manuscript of Nicholas Love's Mirror Of The Blessed Life Of Jesus Christ.

The pages were found at The Keep archive, having been missing from the contents list of a box deposited with the Sussex Archaeological Society in 1929, and have now been matched with the rest of the manuscript held at Yale University.

Dr Katie Walter, from the University of Sussex, said: "The dissolution of the monasteries led to the destruction of many books but others were taken and then circulated through informal networks.

"We often associate this period with book burning and destruction, so this manuscript's story goes a bit against that grain.

"It reminds us that people were also rescuing, valuing and caring for books."

The fact that two possible owners before Sir John were religious women "suggests the manuscript might have been in a monastic house before it came into his possession", she added.

Dr James Wade, of Cambridge University's Girton College, said the "key thing" was that Sir John kept the book safe "when he was meant to destroy books precisely like this one".

He said 65 copies of Love's early 15th-Century text survive today.

Sir John was a major Sussex figure whose family home was at Firle Place.

His role in dissolution involved taking stock of everything owned by monastic houses and working out how to dispose of those assets for the Crown.

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