The collecting of medieval illuminated manuscripts was an unusual pursuit in late eighteenth– and early nineteenth–century Britain. They were appreciated principally by antiquarians, above all Francis Douce and Joseph Strutt, because, by the fourteenth century, they were rich (especially in their margins) in representations of contemporary everyday life, costumes, occupations, domestic work, local customs and architecture, painted with the ever–increasing descriptive naturalism of the late middle ages. The new patrons in this period were aristocratic – and often royal – laymen wanting romances, histories, didactic treatises and works of private devotion. Illumination had moved out of the church and cloister to a more secular environment. The development of heraldry and genealogy could be studied in these manuscripts by the eighteenth–century descendants of these noble and royal patrons and by their librarians and chroniclers. Realistic portraits of their remote ancestors could be found there. Horace Walpole carried his pioneering enthusiasm for Gothic art into making a small collection of illuminated books. His most important acquisition was a Psalter bought from the duchess of Portland and formerly owned by the earls of Arundel and Oxford; it eventually passed to the earl of Waldegrave, the son of his niece. It dated, however, from the sixteenth century and it was attributed to Giulio Clovio, the most fashionable illuminator of the period whose miniatures were effectively often small–scale easel paintings rather than book decoration. There were so few British collectors of illuminated manuscripts that their prices, far below those of comparable rare printed books until about 1900, were actually falling in the early nineteenth century.

These few collectors were generally concentrated in London, traditionally the centre of the book trade, but in Liverpool, ‘a remote part of this remote kingdom’, there were three very remarkable enthusiasts for late medieval illuminated manuscripts who were neither antiquarians nor aristocrats. They were more or less exact contemporaries: William Roscoe was born in 1753, Sir John Tobin in 1763 and Charles Blundell in 1761. In their various fields each was pre–eminent – Roscoe as the epitome of Liverpool culture with an international reputation, Tobin as one of the most enterprising and successful merchants and shipowners in Liverpool, Blundell as the very wealthy owner of by far the most important art collection in Liverpool.