A 13th-Century King Arthur Manuscript Up for Sale For £2m

The Clermont-Tonnerre Grail manuscript is expected to fetch up to £2 million in an auction. (Christie’s Images Ltd. 2026)

What Is the Clermont-Tonnerre Grail?

Sometime around 1290, an anonymous French scribe and artist put vellum to work on one of the great literary projects of the age. The result was a manuscript containing the core texts of the Lancelot-Grail cycle. This Old French prose compilation gave medieval Europe its fullest, most elaborately plotted account of King Arthur, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, and the quest for the Holy Grail. The manuscript features 126 miniature illustrations, including a rare depiction of Merlin transformed into a stag, each one executed with polished gold leaf, which was aggressively burnished to make it shine. For roughly 700 years, the volume never entered a public collection, never appeared at auction, and, until Christie’s began preparing this sale, had never been comprehensively studied.

On 8 July 2026, it will make its auction debut at Christie’s London, in the house’s Valuable Books and Manuscripts sale, with an estimate of £1.5m–£2m.

The manuscript is known as the Clermont-Tonnerre Grail, named for the aristocratic French family that owned it during part of its long private history.

It includes images of Merlin shape-shifting, including as a large stag as seen here. Christie’s Images Ltd. 2026

The Text: The Lancelot-Grail Cycle and Its Place in Medieval Literature

To appreciate why this manuscript matters, it helps to understand what the Lancelot-Grail cycle actually is. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle, also known as the Vulgate Cycle or Pseudo-Map Cycle, is an influential 13th-century French Arthurian literary cycle of unknown authorship, written in Old French. It was composed between approximately 1215 and 1235 and represents the most popular and widely circulated Arthurian prose tradition of the period.

The cycle runs to five main branches. It opens with the Estoire del Saint Graal, a history of the Grail vessel from Joseph of Arimathea, and moves through the Estoire de Merlin, an account of the wizard’s birth and early dealings with Arthur’s court. The centrepiece is the vast Lancelot propre, tracing Lancelot’s life, his love for Guinevere, and his friendship with Galehaut. This is followed by the Queste del Saint Graal, the spiritual climax of the cycle in which Galahad, the pure knight invented specifically for this text, achieves the Grail, and finally the Mort Artu, which brings Arthur’s kingdom to ruin. Though some manuscripts attribute authorship to Walter Map, a 12th-century cleric, modern scholarship dismisses this claim due to chronological inconsistencies. Most scholars believe the cycle was composed collaboratively by multiple anonymous authors, possibly under the direction of a single organising intelligence, perhaps Cistercian monks familiar with religious allegory.

In the 15th century, Thomas Malory drew on the Vulgate to write Le Morte d’Arthur, the first English-language prose book of Arthurian legends. The cycle is, in other words, the primary literary engine behind the Arthurian tradition as the English-speaking world received it. Without it, there is no Malory. Without Malory, the shape of the Arthurian legend would look very different indeed.

The Clermont-Tonnerre Grail contains texts from the Merlin and Grail portions of this cycle. Irene Fabry-Tehranchi, a French specialist at Cambridge University Library who has published on the Lancelot-Grail tradition, notes that the manuscript’s “Suite Vulgate du Merlin” section has an abridged, rewritten ending — making for a “special version”. This is not unusual. As Fabry-Tehranchi explains, “In some cases, scribes thought they could rewrite the story and make it more appealing to what either their patrons wanted or a way that felt better to them. That was a standard medieval writing practice.” In short, the text is not a mechanical copy; it is itself an editorial act, a 13th-century scribe making decisions about what the story should be.

The Illustrations: The Master of the Liège Apocalypse

The illustrations are executed on vellum with burnished gold leaf, making them exceptionally vibrant. Christie’s has identified the artist as the anonymous “Master of the Liège Apocalypse”, a designation drawn from his work on a separate illuminated manuscript dealing with the end of days. The same hand, the same style: deftly drawn figures animated by sharply contrasted black pupils; neat orange dots placed carefully on cheeks; square-jawed male faces; and profiles with exaggerated nutcracker chins and foreheads that continue in an almost straight line into a Grecian nose with an overlong tip.

The illustrations move through the full repertoire of chivalric action and courtly intrigue. Knights astride horses engaged in bloody combat. Merlin, the shape-shifting sorcerer, appears first as a talking stag, then as a shepherd outside Camelot’s castle walls, speaking with Sir Gawain. Dr Eugenio Donadoni, director of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at Christie’s, describes the miniatures as full of “narrative detail” and among the richest examples of the Master’s surviving work.

Fabry-Tehranchi notes that the manuscript was “originally made for aristocratic patrons, possibly women who were very fond of Arthurian stories”. This fits what we know of late 13th-century manuscript culture. Arthurian romances circulated at the highest social levels; ownership of a lavishly illustrated Grail manuscript was simultaneously an act of piety, literary sophistication, and conspicuous display.

Dr Donadoni confirmed that the Clermont-Tonnerre Grail is the earliest and most profusely illustrated of only three such manuscripts known to be in private collections and that its text is unique.

Seven Centuries of Private Ownership

What makes this manuscript particularly unusual is not simply its quality but its biography. Previous owners included a 15th-century knight, a jouster, an “obsessive medievalist”, and a 20th-century industrialist named Jean Lebaudy, who was awarded two Croix de Guerre for his heroic deeds in both World Wars. Each owner added a chapter to the manuscript’s afterlife; none placed it before the public.

Christie’s has detailed provenance for the manuscript, showing a long line of previous owners. This documented chain of custody across seven centuries is itself historically significant. Many medieval manuscripts passed through monastic dissolution, war, and the great disruptions of the Reformation with their provenances broken or obscured. A continuous private record from the late medieval period to the present is rare.

It has never been publicly exhibited nor studied in any great detail, according to the auction house. Donadoni has described it as “virtually unknown”, a striking claim for a manuscript of this age and quality, and one that reflects exactly how much can remain hidden in private ownership for generations.

What Scholars Want — and Why It Matters

The prospect of this manuscript selling to another private buyer has prompted a clear and understandable reaction from the scholarly community. Fabry-Tehranchi has stated that this “private ownership of a key medieval manuscript is a real challenge for scholars”, arguing that it “prevents further research”. She has expressed hope that a public institution will acquire it, a library or museum where it can be properly catalogued, digitised, and made available to researchers.

Donadoni acknowledges this tension: “It should interest institutions because it’s a virtually unknown manuscript of one of the greatest medieval romances, but it could interest private buyers for the same reasons that it appealed to the long line of owners who have treasured it over the course of the past 700 years.”

There are around 200 surviving copies of the Lancelot-Grail cycle in institutional collections worldwide, ranging from the Bibliothèque nationale de France to the British Library. Seven are complete; the rest are fragments. Very few belong to private collectors. The Clermont-Tonnerre Grail, being intact, heavily illustrated, and textually unique, occupies an important position in the tradition — not as a replacement for better-known institutional copies, but as independent evidence of how the texts were adapted, copied, and illustrated for private patrons at the end of the 13th century.

The manuscript also arrives at a moment of renewed interest in Arthurian textual history. In March 2025, Cambridge University Library publicised Ms Vanneck’s Box 5a, a manuscript identified after a five-year scientific investigation as part of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, dated to between 1275 and 1315, describing Sir Gawain wielding Excalibur and Merlin disguised as a blind harpist turning the king’s standard into a fire-breathing dragon. The Clermont-Tonnerre Grail dates from the same period and contains the same textual tradition. The Cambridge discovery and the Christie’s sale together suggest that the manuscript corpus of the Lancelot-Grail cycle is not yet fully understood.

What This Manuscript Tells Us

Donadoni quotes from the manuscript itself: “And the story will forever be told and gladly heard for as long as the world lasts,” words attributed to Merlin within the text. It is the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that medieval scribes apparently took seriously enough to copy with gold leaf.

The Clermont-Tonnerre Grail is not a curiosity. It is evidence of how the most widely read secular literature of 13th-century France was produced, illustrated, owned, and adapted for specific audiences. It tells us something about the patrons who commissioned it — almost certainly aristocratic, probably female, certainly wealthy — and about an artist skilled enough to handle burnished gold and the precise rendering of chivalric emotion with equal confidence. Its textual variants tell us that the Lancelot-Grail cycle was never a fixed canon; it was a living tradition, reshaped by every scribe who thought they could improve on it.

Whether it enters a public collection on 8 July or disappears into private ownership for another century remains to be seen. Scholars have made their preference plain. Fabry-Tehranchi has observed that “there are so many appealing angles to this manuscript: historical, art historical, textual and cultural. ” That range of interest, stretching from codicology to art history to the history of medieval aristocratic reading culture, is precisely what makes the case for institutional acquisition so compelling. A manuscript this significant, studied this little, should not take another 700 years to reach the public record.