In England the flabellum was in use even in remote parishes. In the churchwarden’s accounts at Walderswick, Suffolk, in 1493, is an entry of IVd. for ‘a bessume of pekoks fethers.’
Although the flabellum is very rarely represented in illuminated MSS., in the Book of Kells we find miniatures of angels waving these instruments; in the Gospel of Trèves (eighth century) is a conjoined evangelistic, symbolic figure holding a small flabellum in one hand and a eucharistic lance in the other. In a Hiberno-Saxon MS. of the eighth century a figure of St. Matthew is seen holding in his hand a flabellum. In the public library at Rouen are two representations of the use of this instrument; in the one, a thirteenth-century missal, formerly belonging to the abbey of Jumièges, the fan is held by the deacon in front of the altar at which the priest
FROM A GREEK PSALTER.
(British Museum.) officiates; in the other, it is waved over the head of the priest as he elevates the wafer: this in a pontifical of the church of Rheims, thirteenth century.
A psalter in Greek, British Museum, additional MSS. 19,352, gives a miniature of an angel waving a large flabellum over the head of David who is asleep; another instance occurs in a thirteenth-century Service-Book in the Barberini Library, given by Paciandi.[72]
Representations in printed books are still more rare. In Barclay’s Ship of Fools of the World, 1509, we find, however, a woodcut illustration of a spectacled bibliophile wearing cap and bells, seated among his books, holding in his hand a flabellum of feathers, saying:
‘Attamen in magno per me servantur honore:
Pulueris et cariem, plumatis tergo flabellis.’[73]
the word flabellis being here applied to the ordinary hand-brush or duster.
By the end of the sixteenth century the flabellum had fallen into complete disuse, its original purpose having been