Manuscripts of various classes were now richly illuminated with many varied series of picture subjects, and the old hieratic canons of Byzantine conservatism were soon completely thrown aside. In the ornaments of the Anglo-Norman manuscripts of the twelfth century rich foliage is used made of conventionalized forms which recall the old acanthus leaf, the half expanded fronds of various ferns and other plants, all used with great taste in their arrangement, and wonderful life and spirit in every line and curve of the design. Older Celtic motives are also used; ingeniously devised interlaced work of straps and bands, plaited together in complicated knots, and terminating frequently in strange forms of serpents, dragons and other grotesque monsters[97]. These ornaments are strongly decorative both in form and colour, and, though delicately painted, are treated somewhat broadly, very unlike the microscopic minuteness of the earlier Irish and Anglo-Celtic school. _Illuminated Psalters._ _Martyrdom of St Thomas._ At this time a large number of very magnificently illuminated _Psalters_ were produced; and the use of gold leaf both for the backgrounds of pictures and in combination with brilliant pigments began to come into more frequent use. A fine typical example of English manuscript art at the close of the twelfth century is to be seen in the so-called _Huntingfield Psalter_, which was executed, probably in some monastic house in Yorkshire, a little before 1200 A.D.[98] It contains 68 miniatures of very fine style, delicately painted on backgrounds partially of gold; the subjects are taken from both the Old and the New Testament, beginning with the Creation of the World. The general style of the illuminations in this _Psalter_ is more exclusively English in character and less Norman than is usual in manuscripts of this date. The book is interesting as containing one of the earliest representations of the Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, who subsequently became so popular a Saint in England and Normandy. In this case the painting is not quite of the same date as the bulk of the manuscript, but it evidently was added not many years after Becket's death, which occurred in 1170; Saint Thomas was canonized only two years later[99]. One of the earliest representations of this subject is a miniature painted by Matthew Paris on the border of a page of his _Greater Chronicle_ in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, No. xxvi. _The Angevin kingdom._