A 1,000-year-old psalter says much about Novgorod's spirit .
One of them, an 8th Century psalter believed to have been made by the monks of Canterbury, was decorated with twining capital letters as abstract and whimsically complicated as any .
Brother John Tikytt (or Tikyll), Prior of the Augustinian Monastery of Wyrkesopp, England, was engaged, about the year 1310, in limning a psalter.