by Michael Pye
Writing hours were daylight hours because that was the best possible light, three hours at a time and usually two shifts in a day; ‘it is hard to bend the neck and furrow parchment for twice three hours,’ a scribe writes on one manuscript, and another, on an eighth-century manuscript, says, ‘He who does not know how to write thinks it is no labour. Yet although the scribe writes with three fingers, his whole body toils.’ Irish scribes had a way of gossiping and complaining in the margins: ‘I am very cold’ or ‘That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it’ or ‘Oh that a glass of good old wine were at my side.’ Their notes may have been for people working alongside them, because sometimes a team of four or more would work together on a single manuscript;19 but some were entirely personal, as when a scribe writes out the scene of Judas Iscariot betraying Christ with a kiss and adds in the margin: ‘Wretch!’
Then after the evening service of Compline there was time for cutting, polishing and ruling the skins for parchment. The ruling, done with the sharp point of a stylus or an awl, was vital if the text was to line up; pages were written separately and they had to face each other squarely in the finished book. There was also the business of discreetly correcting the pages already written. Correcting meant adjusting the letters and making sure they were the proper ones, but also putting in punctuation, which was often done after the words and letters had been written out.20 Punctuation was points, and the longer the pause the more there were and the higher they appeared above each line.
Everything about Bede’s life makes it seem that he was regulated and confined – everything except the books he wrote. His monastery was not strictly Benedictine but he closely obeyed the Benedictine rule of stability: to stay put. He chose never to be a pilgrim like the abbots of his house, even though he knew very well that the Irish thought you could hardly be Christian without travel to Rome, to shrines, to other places of learning. Most of his writing is careful, thoughtful accounts of the Bible, book by book, the kind of work that is best done in a closed, quiet room; and he was also, as he says, very familiar with the brisk, meticulous business of being in a scriptorium. So what liberated his mind to puzzle over where he was in time, and how the moon affected the sea and what might explain the plague even better than God’s anger?
For a start, monasteries were not at all cut off from the general world. Plague proved that. In the months after the sickness ‘of great villages and estates once crowded with inhabitants only a tiny scattered remnant remained, and sometimes not even that,’ Bede wrote.21 The monasteries shared their fate because they were often on the coast, which was where plague landed; plague travelled fastest by sea. They were also connected to all those great villages and estates, for monasteries were markets, hubs for trade in commodities like salt; people were always arriving and leaving. Villagers came in to worship, and monks went out to minister to the villages. Even on the more remote monastery island of Lindisfarne, sickness persisted for a year and almost every man died; even Lindisfarne was in the world.
The most surprising scraps of knowledge filtered into the scriptorium. In the bible that Jarrow made for the Pope there are curious marks on the golden halo round the head of Ezra the Scribe: they may just be tefillin, the tiny leather boxes holding fragments of the Torah that some Jews wear. Ezra also wears the headdress and breastplate of a proper Jewish high priest.22 It is true that Christians later had to be stopped from wearing St John’s Gospel as a cure for headache, which is a mutation of the same idea, but someone knew actual Jewish customs. The elegant designs on the page that look like the most subtle carpets owe much to Coptic art, and to the kind of prayer mats that were used in the Middle East and only later in Northumbria. When the monks came to bind up St Cuthbert’s own bible, buried with him as a kind of Book of Life, they sewed the binding in a distinctly Coptic style.
These elaborate decorations meant experiments with new techniques and new tools. Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, in the very early eighth century, started to use lead to draw out his designs on the back of the page; then he set the sketches on a frame of transparent horn or glass and put a strong light behind them so he could consult his design as he painted the page itself. He worked alone so his inventions went no further at the time, they were as hidden as he was, but they were remarkable: he made the first lightbox and the first lead pencil.23
Bede did much more than make scrapbooks out of the texts he knew. He checked and changed, left things out and added to the old ideas; he thought again. He chose which old books to believe when he wrote history and he reshaped history by fitting the particular history of England into the grand and biblical story of the whole world.24 He was trying something extraordinary: to see where he stood in time.
He puzzled over things that others took for granted, like the plague and how it could be God’s will when these were the happiest times for the English and their Church,25 the age when they had Christian kings to rule them and priests to teach them and the whole of England was learning to sing holy songs. If disease was God’s judgement on sinners, ‘the avenger of evil deeds’26 as it was supposed to be in pagan times, then why was He punishing His people now for doing the right thing?
When he came to write his schoolbook about nature, De rerum natura, Bede looked beyond the Bible and the usual written authorities; he used experience. He connected plague with the thunderstorms that break up summer and start the autumn, to the corruption of the air due to excessive dryness or heat or rain. He had no grand theory, but he looked and asked questions. He was right about the season for plague, although he never knew the reason. The sickness was spread by fleas that lived on the bodies of rats, which fed on the corn transported by ships, which sailed in the summer.27
He saw the moon riding higher in the sky than the sun and asked how that was possible when everyone knew the moon was closer to the Earth. His explanation was an elegant experiment in thought: he asked his readers to imagine they were walking at night into an immense church, all brightly lit for some saint’s day and with two particularly brilliant lamps: one hanging high at the far end, one hanging lower but closer. As you walked into the church the lamp that’s closer would seem to be hanging higher than the lamp in the distance and as you walked forward it would seem to move higher and higher still until you were directly under it and the truth was obvious: it seemed higher precisely because it was closer.28
He casually suggested that it would be easier to work out the age of the moon if you knew your fifty-nine-times table, which suggests that he did; he used mathematics even though it was hard to manage any complicated sum using the inflexible Roman numerals. His near contemporary Aldhelm used to complain that remembering the numbers to carry over when adding or dividing or multiplying or subtracting was so difficult that he could manage only when ‘sustained by heavenly grace’.29 Bede’s method was to do sums on his hands, not on paper, with a system of straight and bent fingers in different combinations that could reach 9,999; after that, he says without explaining, you need other parts of the body. The system had other attractions for a boy in the quiet monastery, a scribe in the silence of the scriptorium. Just agree a simple code, settle on a number for each of the twenty-three letters of the Roman alphabet, and the system allowed silent talk across a room.30
Bede fixed the story of how the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain and how they brought true Christianity; he wrote commentaries on Scripture that were in demand across Europe; but more than those, he was the hero of computus. It may have been his most remarkable achievement at the time, but even the word is unfamiliar now, let alone the thinking: a blend of maths, astronomy and ideas about how the universe is shaped, all combined to establish a true and proper calendar. Anything to do with number had an element of holy mystery since as one Irish text has it ‘take number away and everything lapses into ruin’. The calendar also had everything to do with medicine, since diagnosis and treatment were linked to astronomical time, but computus had one main use: to calculate the date of Easter.
The who
le Christian year was shaped by the date of Easter; but the Church’s own rules for fixing it meant Easter fell on a different Sunday each year, a floating feast. It was not just the most important festival, the day for remembering the event that gave Christianity meaning; it was also one of only two feast days on which anyone could be baptized into the Church, unless they were in imminent danger of dying unsaved. The other was Whitsun,31 and that always fell seven Sundays later. Without a settled date for Easter, nobody would know when to begin the long forty-day fast of Lent, which ends on Easter Day. So the date had to be set well in advance; it was not like the Islamic Ramadan which can be fixed by observation, watching for a full moon and the equinox. Fixing Easter required a kind of calculus.
It involved bringing two different calendars into line: the thirteen months of the Jewish calendar and the twelve months of the Roman calendar. The Gospels say Christ died during the Jewish feast of Passover, and Passover is fixed on the first full moon of ‘the first month’ in the Jewish lunar calendar. That would seem clear enough, except that the early Church fathers decided that it really meant the first full moon after the spring equinox, and that is where the trouble started. The date of the equinox was fixed according to the very different Roman calendar, which follows the sun. And since the solar year isn’t a round number of days, the actual equinox tends to come adrift from its official date, which complicates things even more.
This was a political issue. The Church was one Church, united, so it could not celebrate Easter on different days in different places. The Church was ruled from Rome, whatever the Irish Church thought, so the date had to be the one set in Rome. But the Irish insisted that news did not always travel reliably from Rome, so they devised their own way of fixing the date, and those ways did not agree with Roman ways. Bede was a true Roman, and he set out to find a universal answer to the problem.
He had to be radical. He was not being a historian now; he was looking to future dates and saying what would happen. He had to find names for years that were still in the future, something which neither Germans nor Romans did; they both named years after the king, emperor or consul in power at the time, so that Bede’s own monastery was begun in the twenty-ninth year of the reign of King Ecgfrith rather than what we know as 674 CE.32 He used thought and facts to solve an immediate problem, which was something the ancients hardly ever did in writing; their science was the recording of facts for their own sake. He needed a practical result from numbers, with (and despite) all their holy and mystical significance. He then had to deal with the Irish, and find a formula that Rome could happily endorse.
He showed how the moon years and sun years came together in cycles of nineteen Roman years. Writers before him had worked out the cycle, but he was the writer who gave them authority and spread the idea; he published it. For that, he had to understand the movements of sun and moon. He began with the written authorities in the library, who had ideas on how the moon works in the world: the bishops who said oysters grow fatter as the moon grows fuller, that wood cut after the full moon will never rot, that the more moonlight there is, the more dew. Then Bede observed for himself the phases of the moon and their real effect in the world.
He took what the Irish already understood, the connection between the stages of the moon and the force and height of the tides, and he brought that to everyone’s attention. He also refined it. He understood that the moon rising later each day was linked to the tide rising later each day, a pattern he could never have recognized without knowing that the Earth was round.33 From this he built a theory: the tides were not water gushing out of some northern abyss, nor water somehow created by the moon, but the moon tugging at the sea (‘as if the ocean were dragged forward against its will’). He measured the tides against the phases of the moon, and he measured them exactly, to the minute. For his history he had correspondents in many other monasteries along the coast from Iona in the west to the Isle of Wight in the south, and he may have asked the monks in each place to make observations for him, too.34 However he did it, he certainly knew that the time of the tides could be different in different places (‘we who live at various places along the coastline of the British Sea know that when the tide begins to run at one place, it will start to ebb at another’). He found that both moonrise and high tide were a little later each day, later by exactly 47½ minutes.
For centuries his work was mined for astronomical information. When it was finally printed and published eight centuries later – in Basle in 1529 and then in Cologne in 1537 – it was not out of antiquarian interest. It still had immediate, practical value,35 despite the need for notes to explain all the difficult bits. Indeed, his work has often survived better than his reasons for doing it. We still date events from the ‘year of Our Lord’, Annus Domini, the year of Christ’s birth; that was Bede’s invention – part of his solution to the problem of the calendar. Christianity was only just growing out of its eschatological phase, when the world was expected to end any day, and Bede wanted to rewrite world history and its ages to prove that the world still had a long time to live. He wanted to place himself in time, past and future, and in doing so he built the Western calendar as we know it.
He found himself arguing on occasions with the living and the dead, which could be dangerous in a Church that valued authority so much, and Bede had reason to know that. He once heard that he had been accused of heresy by someone who was having dinner with a bishop. He was aghast, he told his friend Plegwin, he went white. He said the talk was from ‘drunk peasants’, that it was ‘abusive talk of the foolish’; but it was disconcerting to be denounced, and denounced for a detail. His offence was that when calculating the seven ages of the world, he implied that each age need not be exactly one thousand years, which was the usual version; he wrote of ‘the unstable ages of this world’.36 He was arguing with everybody else’s assumptions, which would later seem his great and even heroic virtue.
Twenty years later, writing a new book, he was still furious.
Christians and missionaries bought books, shared books, copied books. Having their doctrine on the page gave it a particular authority; they were, after all, the People of the Book. Since all information had to be shipped about, on the page or in someone’s head, it can seem that they must have carried reading and writing itself into the North, that we owe them literacy and not just in Latin. But the story is more complicated than that. The habit of writing and reading had reached Ireland before St Patrick came over on his mission; and what brought it was the trade that went back and forth across the sea.
For Ireland wasn’t isolated before the missionaries arrived. Tacitus says the approaches to its ports were well known to traders in the first century CE. Words crossed from Latin into Irish even if Irish made them hard to pronounce; so the Latin purpura for fine cloth turned into corcur; the Irish long, a ship, is from the Latin for a longship, navis longa; and the Irish ingor comes from the Latin ancora, for an anchor. These are sea words, about sailing and about the goods that ships were carrying, and the words made the crossing before the fifth century. Military words also crossed, words the Christian missionaries did not need: words for a legion, a soldier, weapons and weekday names that are tributes to Roman gods such as Mercúir for Wednesday (and Mercury) and Saturn for Saturday.
The Irish were outside the empire, so they did not have to play by Roman rules. They did not need reading and writing in order to rise in the imperial bureaucracy. They settled questions about who owned which piece of land by hearing witnesses and swearing oaths and paying attention to the memory of a community. When they first carved words onto stone, using the Irish ogam script, they were making simple memorials to the names of the dead, markers that were solid enough to stand as boundary markers and more reliable than memory. But the Irish were also trading with the Romans, and that required either memory or records that the Romans would understand; in their voyages to Gaul or to Wales, the Irish quickly learned that the Romans’ language was different, and was written a
different way. At the same time they were working out their own way of writing down their Irish language. The ogam alphabet grew out of the marks made on wooden tally sticks to count sheep and cattle, but its other purpose may have been to mystify the Roman functionaries and merchants, who knew only their own letters.
This meant that when Patrick arrived to convert Ireland in the fifth century, he had a head start. He was preaching the faith of the Book, carrying with him books of the law and the Gospels, and the Irish had their own habit of writing and reading already. They knew something about the technology. There are clues in the Irish law tracts written later, in the seventh century, which lay down that a contract can be proved by, among other things, ‘a godly old writing’, and witnesses can make a dead man’s agreement stand but only if they are not contradicted by relevant texts cut onto stones. Writing settles deep into Irish law.37 Much more remarkably, in his life of Patrick, the seventh-century monk Muirchú tells how the missionary found himself in a contest of magic with King Lóeguire’s druid. The king told the two to pitch their books into the water, and they’d see which god was worth adoring. The druid said he’d rather not because he knew about baptism and Patrick’s God was obviously a water god. It’s true that Muirchú was writing two hundred years later, and maybe he took for granted that the Irish had always had books because he had them himself, but the more likely story is literal: druids had some form of book, perhaps metal leaves, perhaps wood or stone, which could rival the Book. Patrick taught some men their alphabet to make them priests and bishops, but not all men needed the lessons.38