Trilingual compendium of texts (MS Gg.1.1) Diagrams of the world (MS Gg.1.1, f. 359v)

Assembled in the early fourteenth century, this "library within a book" contains a wide array of literary, historical, grammatical, scientific, astronomical, theological, pastoral and devotional texts. The texts are predominantly in Anglo-Norman (the form of French used in Medieval England), but also Middle English and Latin, illustrating the persistence of a multi-lingual culture centuries after the Norman Conquest.

This is a page from a fourteenth-century copy of a text called "Le image del mounde", a poem in French about the earth and the universe written in the 1240s by Gossuin de Metz. As the accompanying diagrams make clear, Gossuin was well aware that the earth was a sphere. Here he speculates on what would happen if one dropped a stone through to the centre of the earth.