Around 820 a magnificent copy of the Psalms was produced in the Rheims area, densely illustrated with a series of drawings in pen. These drawings still astonish by their lively, animated character, arranged almost informally around the text on the page. This Carolingian manuscript, known as the Utrecht Psalter (from the city where it has been since 1716), contains the three Latin versions of the Psalms. It was in Canterbury from at least ca 1000, where three copies or modernized versions of it were made. This leaf comes from one of them, a major Psalter with a prefatory portrait of the scribe Eadwine, a monk at Christ Church, Canterbury ca1155-60. This is one of the introductory leaves to the Psalter; each leaf was divided into compartments to tell the story of King David, the author of the Psalms, and the life of Christ that was foretold by the Psalms. This was the most extensive cycle of pictures for the New Testament produced in twelfth-century England.

Though a few of the compositions are related to drawings in the Utrecht Psalter, the style owes nothing to the Carolingian manuscript. The Canterbury copy has a limited range of colours. The figures are stocky and locked in monumental poses to convey the drama of the action. The convention used for the drapery is known as 'damp fold', a version of Byzantine conventions common throughout Europe from ca.1100. The lower part of the leaf is a different hand, showing that more than one illuminator could work in this style.

Four leaves were probably detached from the Eadwine Psalter at some time around 1600, when Thomas Nevile, Dean of Canterbury from 1597 to 1615, gave the Psalter to Trinity College, Cambridge, where it remains today (MS R.17.1). Manuscripts of this date were not generally admired, despite the rich decoration in this particular example. However, its evident antiquity attracted those who were interested in the origins of Britain. By the nineteenth century, these leaves belonged rather oddly to the collection of William Ottley (1771-1836), who saw the High Renaissance as the summit of art. In 1838 they were described as 'Saxon work, 11th century' - a barbarian curiosity and a suitable foil to later works which showed how Giotto emancipated art and set it on a route that was to lead to Raphael and his peers'.