The Opus Ruralium Commodorum is a horticultural and agricultural guide, written by Petrus de Crescentiis (c. 1233–c. 1320) between 1304 and 1309. After working as a jurist in Bologna, where he was also educated, Crescentiis retired to his country estate just outside the city walls, the Villa dell’Olmo. There he wrote this book, which draws on his own experience running the villa as well as classical and medieval texts on the same subject. One such work was Palladius’s De Agricultura, a copy of which is in the Fellows’ Library (see MS40). Made up of twelve parts, the Opus Ruralium Commodorum gives advice on how to manage an estate. The Fellows’ Library also holds a 15^th-century copy of this text (see MS12), written in France.

The manuscript contains one illuminated initial in book one (fol. 4r), coloured with dusty blue, green and pink. This is the work of a Winchester illuminator, whose initials appear in another 15^th-century manuscript (MS22) in the Fellows’ Library, and in the Liber de Hyda (British Library, Add. MS 82931), which contains a cartulary of Hyde Abbey: a Benedictine monastery (dissolved in 1548) just outside the walls of medieval Winchester.

 

Literature: Neil R. Ker and Alan J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, Volume IV: Paisley–York (Oxford, 1969), p. 631; Paul Yeats-Edwards, Winchester College (Warden and Fellows’ Library) Medieval Manuscript Collection: Brief History and Catalogue (London, 1978), p. 10; James M. W. Willoughby, The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Vol. 2 (London, 2013), pp. 850–51.

Provenance: Unknown, at Winchester College by 1634.

Location: Fellows’ Library