It was probably between 1615 and 1621 that Sir Robert Cotton became possessed of the celebrated manuscript known as the Utrecht Psalter.  Its early history is obscure, and experts have differed widely as to its probable date and origin.  Sir Thomas Hardy, who summarised its contents, and drew up a report upon the intrinsic arguments in favour of its remote antiquity, called attention to the fact that it could not have been written in England, because it contains certain liturgical pieces which were not in use in this country, at the time assigned for its age by other internal evidence.  He suggested that it was brought into England by the Christian princess, Bertha, daughter of Charibert the Frankish king, who became the queen of Ethelbert.  He based this supposition on the costliness of the manuscript which would point to its having belonged to a royal personage.  He next considered the probability that this Psalter was presented by Queen Bertha to the monastery of Reculver, in Kent, where the king had built a new palace, and where Bertha attended the services of her religion, Hardy drew this inference from the coincidence that at the time when the volume came into Cotton’s hands there was bound up with it a charter, recording the gift of certain lands by Lothair, King of Kent, to Bercwald, Abbot of Reculver, and to his monastery.  The charter is dated Reculver, May 7, 679, and it seems to have been the custom in smaller monasteries to place royal and other charters inside valuable books for preservation, in default of any more suitable depository.  This charter, which Cotton took to be an original document, he separated from the Utrecht Psalter, preserving it in another part of his library.  It is still to be found where he placed it (in Augustus, B 2).

Mr. Birch, however, disposed summarily of Sir Thomas Hardy’s ingenious theory, and pronounced Cotton’s opinion that the charter was an original document, as not worth much.  After giving all the evidence for and against the probability of Queen Bertha, having presented the Psalter to Reculver Abbey, he showed reasons for the charter being a copy of the original, and for its having been made at Christ Church, Canterbury, a religious house very closely allied to Reculver, which was secularised centuries before the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.

But the most recent authority on illuminated manuscripts, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, considers that the actual date of the Utrecht Psalter may be placed about the year 800, and he maintains with Sir Thomas Hardy, judging by internal palaeographical evidence, that without doubt, the manuscript is of Frankish workmanship, and he assigns its origin to the north, or north-east of France.* This carries us back to Queen Bertha and Cotton’s suggestion that she brought the book over with her.

* See a Paper on English Illuminated Manuscripts, A.D. 700-1066, by Mr., now Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Bibliographica, part ii., London Kegan & Co.