TV STAR Michael Palin and historian Dr David Starkey are backing a national public appeal to save the Macclesfield Psalter.

The ninth Earl of Macclesfield, the Rt Hon Richard Parker, put the fourteenth-century manuscript up for auction in June after a bitter family dispute.

It was sold to the Getty Museum in California for £1.7 million

But the Government has again agreed to block the export licence for three months to give campaigners a final chance to match the price and keep the religious, but irreverent, book in the UK.

The 252-page volume of prayers and psalms contains remarkable examples of English painting and also a bizarre collection of humorous images, such as a dog dressed as a bishop and strange naked wild men.

More than £650,000 has already been pledged but a further £1m must be raised by February next year through the appeal, organised by the National Art Collections Fund.

David Barrie, director of the fund, said: "It is fantastic that we have been given more time - the weeks to come will be critical to the success of the campaign.

"The psalter is an object of amazing inventiveness and outstanding craftsmanship, produced at a time when this country's artists were famous throughout Europe.

"It would be desperately sad if we as a nation were not able to raise the necessary funds to keep it in the UK. Every donation, however small, will take us a step closer to keeping it where it belongs."

Ironically, the appeal was announced on BBC Two's new Culture Show a week after Macclesfield was officially branded a cultural desert.

But the only connection the manuscript has with the town is its name and the fact that it belonged to the Earl.

He was ordered to move out of his ancestral home of Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire by a judge this year after a dispute with his extended family. Ownership of the fourteenth-century castle was transferred to a family company in 1922 for tax reasons.

The Earl, whose family left Macclesfield in 1715 and is also only connected to the town by his title, put the psalter and other items from the library on the market.

"Python" Michael Palin said: "The Macclesfield Psalter is one of the richest and most beautiful examples of an early English illustrated book. It is a rare and very special insight into our medieval cultural life, and if anything deserves to stay in its country of its origin, this is it."

The psalter was probably made at Gorleston in East Anglia, in the 1320s - a time when it was one of the foremost artistic centres in Europe. If saved it will be kept at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Professor Michael Kauffmann, medieval expert of the National Art Collections Fund, said: "The Macclesfield Psalter is the most important rediscovery of an English manuscript in living memory.

"It is also one of the very few surviving representatives of a great phase in the history of British painting, perhaps the last, at any rate before the period of Constable and Turner, when it attained a truly international stature.

"The psalter, containing the psalms of the Old Testament and other prayers, was the principal Christian prayer book of the Middle Ages, and the question arises: what was the man urinating into a chamber pot held by a deformed giant, or a woman declining the advances of a man endowed with a meaningfully erected sword, doing in a book of private religious devotion?

"Such scenes, once thought to be purely decorative, are now interpreted as often having literal or symbolic meaning in relation to particular words in the text or to the manuscript's patron.

"It is this dichotomy between a deeply religious text and the humorous marginal scenes which makes this tiny book a monument of historical, cultural and psychological significance."

Dr David Starkey, author, historian and broadcaster, said: "I do not automatically support campaigns to keep works of art in England. But for the Macclesfield Psalter the case is open and shut: the Psalter was created in East Anglia and it will lose half its meaning if it is torn from its native roots."