The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  This fact that the Irish wrote down Irish very early still matters very much: it made books useful.

  Books could always be lovely things, used like jewels: sealed into shrines or put on an altar where nobody could possibly read them or sent to Rome as splendid presents for the Pope.

  Boniface wrote to the Abbess Eadburga on his mission to convert Frisia, asking her for a truly showy book, ‘a copy written in gold’ of the Epistles of Peter so as ‘to impress honour and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach’.39 His other need, with age, was for clarity. He asked the Bishop of Winchester for a particular copy of the Prophets that he knew was written out clearly, because ‘with my fading sight, I cannot read well writing which is small and filled with abbreviations’.40

  His books were written in an unbroken caterpillar of letters, nothing to separate the words, and they were meant to be read out loud, which required a reader who could make words and sense out of the string of letters on the page, and an audience used to hearing Latin. Many other peoples in Western Europe spoke a version of Latin, and they could understand the real old thing, but the Irish spoke a very different language; when a text was read out loud it was entirely different from daily talk and it gave them no clues to its meaning. They wanted words for the eye, not the ear. They wanted to see the form of the words clearly so they could translate their meaning, and therefore they began to put spaces between the words. Then they introduced their most brilliant invention: punctuation. Not only were the words distinct on the page: it was also clear where an idea stopped or paused or started.41

  Silent, individual reading now became much easier. It had always been a way to meditate on the meaning of a book, and understand it better, right back to the fourth-century St Ambrose, who was notorious for reading silently even when he had visitors. Now the habit could spread. New monastic rules punished anyone who read aloud, but just under their breath so as not to seem old-fashioned; they spoiled the quiet reading for everyone else.42

  Books for reading could be written out quickly and plainly: they were books for use. The Irish scribes trained Anglo-Saxon scribes. The first Christian missionaries to England had had to send for their books from Gaul or Rome, but in Bede’s time their libraries were being sent to Gaul to be copied. Bede, Boniface and the less famous Tatwine were all copied in northern France, in the monastery at Corbie.43 The most careful and solid text of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible was written out at Jarrow and Wearmouth and Lindisfarne, based on a manuscript from Naples; it rapidly became the standard version in all Northern Europe.44 By the seventh century there were already significant libraries in England. The Anglo-Saxons went out to found schools across the Germanic lands, and they became missionaries for words: the scholar Alcuin learned the new writing techniques in York and then took them over the sea to Charlemagne’s court in the 780s. He promoted a new idea: ‘the close study of letters’.45

  Anglo-Saxon scribes, too, were on the move, and not just with the various missions. They taught the court of Charlemagne the new idea of a library which should be well stocked with books and well organized for study.46 Charlemagne’s held historical books and ‘the doings of the ancients’, which were read aloud in the king’s presence, along with Charlemagne’s favourite, the works of St Augustine. When Alcuin was away from the court and wanted a copy of Pliny’s Historia naturalis, he asked to have it sent to him. On another occasion he wrote simply to ask someone to look something up in the bookchests of the court for him. This taste for books and the production of manuscripts caught on.47 Well into the ninth century, Anglo-Saxons were still crossing the sea to write in German monasteries, long after the first waves of missionary work.48 Some of the books they wrote were lovely and even spectacular, but most were portable information. With separate words and clear marks of where ideas began and ended, anyone could read in her own time for her own reasons.49

  People wanted to read Bede. Anglo-Saxons overseas wanted his account of Saxon triumphs. The growth of the English Church inspired a wide audience as English missionaries worked to convert the Frisians and the Germans. By the ninth century, the books reached St Gallen on what is now the Swiss border, where the monk Walahfrid Strabo put together a collection of key quotes for teaching and included Bede. They were in Reichenau, the island monastery in Lake Constance, and the cathedral library at Würzburg in Bavaria. They turn up in central France as deep as Tours. Bede from the edge of the world was being published over the sea to the known world.

  It was a world of gifts, a routine of absolutely unavoidable exchanges: gifts up and down the social ladder, from kings to knights to keep them loyal, from knights to kings to keep them giving, from bishops to cardinals and from cardinals to priests; from Ireland to Northumbria to Frisia to Rome and beyond. Gifts bound people together in their proper ranks and obligations. Gifts were about power, and making it visible. When in Germany, the missionary Boniface sent silver to Rome and got back incense, and on one occasion a face towel and a bath towel; he sometimes sent unspectacular things like ‘four knives made by us in our fashion’ or ‘a bundle of reed pens’ because gifts were messages and statements much more than requests for something in return, and the act of giving was the whole point. At times his gifts were as diplomatic as state gifts to royalty today, but a bit more pointed. Boniface sent a hawk and two falcons to the King of Mercia to get him to listen to a message that he was not going to like at all, a dressing-down for his appalling sexual habits, especially in convents.

  Of all the gifts that he received, Boniface tells the Abbess Eadburga, he most appreciated ‘the solace of books and the comfort of the garments’.50 Giving and sharing books became a system for putting ideas out into the world.

  The glorious bible that Bede and others made at Jarrow was a gift for the Pope. Books were also buried with the saintly dead as gifts to keep them company. The book as gift, then, was sometimes quite different from the book to be read, a difference which later became almost ridiculous. One famous English calligrapher called Earnwine gave a fine book of psalms to King Canute and Queen Emma, who promptly sent it off to Cologne as a gift. When the Bishop of Worcester was in Cologne on the king’s business, he was naturally given a present, which happened to be Earnwine’s psalter. He brought it back to England, where it began.51 Nobody ever had to read a book like that.

  Books were also sent about so they could be copied and copied again; the text itself was the gift. Boniface, like Bede, wanted that kind of book. He sometimes knew exactly which one he was after, and at other times he fished about for titles. He asked a former student for ‘whatever you may find in your church library which you think would be useful to me and which I may not be aware of or may not have in written form’.52 Just knowing which books existed and which you wanted was not at all easy; which is why Bede added a list of all his works at the end of the Historia ecclesiastica, including the biblical books he studied, the heroic verse he wrote, the terrible translation of a Greek text that he edited and corrected, his books on time and the nature of things, his hymns, his epigrams and his book on spelling.53 It reads a little like the back matter of a modern paperback. A librarian at Murbach in the ninth century was drawing up lists of books the monastery needed from the catalogues of other libraries and references in the manuscripts that he could examine; he was still using Bede’s list.54 He made notes alongside the names of some authors: ‘we are seeking his remaining books’ and ‘we want to find many others’.55

  This world of books was not a locked room full of chained volumes, the picture of later monastery libraries. Books moved. The territories that did not have Bede’s History directly from Jarrow sometimes took copies of a copy made from the copy in Charlemagne’s court library, and distributed by his orders.56 Boniface had to tell Abbess Bugga that he couldn’t send the writings she wanted ‘for I have been prevented by pressure of work and by my continual travels from completing the book you ask for. When I have finished it, I shall see that it is se
nt to you.’57 The notion of a busy missionary archbishop copying whole books for someone else may be less surprising if copying was also a way of studying. A bishop tells an abbot he’s not returning a book because ‘Bishop Gutbert has not yet returned it.’58 Gutbert was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time. A young abbot can’t send back a book because, he says, the very important Abbot of Fulda wants time to make himself a copy.59

  The books that circulated this way were not just books about the Bible and the Church. Later, holy libraries consisted mostly of the Church fathers, the founders of the story of the Church, although even then one monk wanted Suetonius and those good dirty stories about the Caesars.60 But in Bede’s time, and for centuries afterwards, monasteries and cathedrals also cared for the pagan leftovers of Rome. Long before the official Renaissance brought back classical culture and Latin texts, which would not have been possible if nobody had bothered to preserve them in the first place, the Irish were fussing with Virgil; when a seventh-century schoolmaster says he’s just had some valuable copies from ‘the Romans’ he might just possibly mean the ones in Rome, but more likely he means the Irish scholars influenced by Rome.61 In the mid eighth century a nun called Burginda made a copy of a commentary on the Song of Songs and added a careful, wordy letter to the ‘distinguished young man’ who received it; her Latin misfires a bit, and she makes a mess of the subjunctive, but she knows how to quote Virgil so she must have found Virgil in her convent library alongside assorted holy works. Ecburg, Abbess of Gloucester, used Virgil too in a letter to explain in proper, flowery terms her pain at being separate from her sister: ‘everywhere cruel sorrow, everywhere fear and all the images of death’, almost a direct quotation.62

  And yet a pagan poet was a problem: essential, but dangerous. The scholar Alcuin read Virgil as a boy, imitated him in his own poems, but when he became an abbot he forbade his novices to read the man at all.63 In Carolingian schools Virgil might have been the very first heathen author the children read, mostly as an example of how to make verse scan,64 but he was firmly labelled heathen. Monasteries filed the heathen books among the schoolbooks and grammar because they were to be read in gobbets only, for their style and not their meaning, and under careful supervision. Nobody was supposed to pay attention to all the love, sensuality and battles.

  If you had the right connections, you could borrow books from these holy libraries. One affluent noble, Eccard of Macon, had to write into his will instructions to send back the books he had from the monastery at Fleury, a chestful of them that he obviously had never meant to return in a hurry. The cathedral librarian at Cologne wrote loans down carefully at the end of his book list, but he had to leave whole pages blank in case Ermbaldus, a most enthusiastic borrower, decided to borrow yet more books ‘for the exercise of his ministry’.65

  To know laws and charters, to rule and know what you were ruling, it was very useful to read if not essential. Laymen owned books about law, about God, about farming and about war: the knowledge a noble needed. We know because they left them to their children in their wills, each title given to a particular child, so the books were something valued and considered. They often included history books, the history of the popes, the doings of the Franks. We can guess that the long poems in Latin and the historical stories at Charlemagne’s court were meant for a lay audience, and a rather grand lay audience at that. But the mighty were not exactly encouraged to take this literacy business too far. One eighth-century boy called Gerald was told to stop reading when he had worked through the Psalms and it was time for him to study more serious matters like archery, riding to hounds, and flying hawks and falcons. He did go back to books, but only because ‘For a long time he was so covered in small spots that it was thought he could not be cured. So his mother and father decided he should be put more closely to the study of letters.’ In Gerald’s case, remarkably, ‘even when he became strong, he continued to study’.

  Books could be heirlooms, and they could also be assets. In Bede’s time Benedict Biscop bought a lovely book of cosmographies while he was in Rome, an account of the whole known world. Back in England the very literate, even bibliophile, King Aldfrith offered to give the monastery land in return for the book, enough riverside land to support eight families.66 The deal meant books were a very important part of a monastery’s useful wealth. When the Emperor Charlemagne died, he left his library to be sold ‘for an appropriate price’ and the money given to the poor.67 He knew there would be a market.

  What’s more, books were stolen. The Baltic pirates who caught Anskar, ‘the Apostle of the North’, sailing to Sweden and made him walk the rest of the way were not at all averse to the forty books he was carrying with him.68 The Benedictine Loup de Ferrières in the ninth century worried about sending a work of Bede’s to an archbishop because the book was too big to hide on anyone’s person or even in a bag, and even if it could be hidden ‘one would have to fear an attack of robbers who would certainly be attracted by the beauty of the book’. More tellingly, a monastery in the Ardennes lost a psalter written in gold and decorated with pearls, which turned up intact and was bought in good faith by a pious woman; so it was the book that had value, not its incidental jewels.69

  Laymen could always hire a scribe out of the scriptorium to do their copying, although they need not expect any holy indifference to the price; as the scribe says in Ælfric Bata’s eleventh-century instructional text, ‘Nothing is more dear to me than that you give me cash, since whoever has cash can acquire anything he wants.’ Some laymen chose to write books out for themselves. Someone on a mission with the army, most likely a lay soldier, spent his time copying a collection of saints’ lives. Someone else, called Ragambertus, wrote out the letters of Seneca and put a note on the manuscript in ornate capital letters: ‘Ragambertus, just a no-account layman with a beard, wrote this text.’70

  Other people wrote books out of love, and terror. The noblewoman Dhuoda was apprehensive when her oldest son, William, went away to battle at the age of sixteen, and she wrote him a little book to take with him. ‘I want you,’ she wrote, ‘when you are weighed down by lots of worldly and temporal activity, to read this little book I have sent you.’ She wrote of the joy other women had in living with their children, and how anxious she was about being separated from William and how eager she was to be useful. She had read widely, even if what she read may mostly have been books of extracts from homilies and the lives of saints and the works of the Church fathers. She knew the Bible and she had read and thought about a poet like Ovid, and she culled what she thought would help her son while he was away. Her pain is vivid even now, a loving woman whose child was suddenly wrenched away into an adult and murderous world; she writes of her ‘heart burning within’. She wants her son to go on reading as a kind of moral shield against the life he was going to live at court and the wars he was going to fight; ‘I urge you, William, my handsome, lovable son, amid the worldly preoccupations of your life, not to be slow in acquiring many books.’71

  Books took effort, time, skill. Books required dead calves, polished skins, the making of ink and colours and pens, the ruling of guidelines. They had to be written out by hand, carefully, and corrected and punctuated and decorated; they had to be sewn together so they would stay in their proper order. They required craft. They also required words, either a book to copy or else someone to invent and dictate. They mattered for their content, of course: Bede helped change people’s minds about the proper date of Easter, the way to date our lives in the history of the world, what happened in Britain when it became both Christian and Anglo-Saxon. But books also began to matter for themselves, even when they were practical books for reading and not jewelled, painted lovelies.

  Books were becoming independent of the way they were meant to be read. It came to this: books were worth burning.

  Gottschalk found this out. He was a monk, a poet, a bit of a wanderer who never wanted to settle in one house, and he had unconventional ideas: he was, roughly, a Calvinist se
ven hundred years before Calvin. He had come to think that all men were predestined either to Hell or to Heaven; that was God’s will, and no amount of good deeds or even bad ones could undo it.

  This was not the view of the Church, so he was ordered to appear, in 849, before the synod of the clergy in Quierzy, which is a town in Picardy, to answer for his opinions. He went along thinking he would be allowed to argue his case, so he carried with him the Bible texts he had used, and the writings of the Church fathers, the papers he needed to make his points: evidence, if you like. He expected discussion, but he was too optimistic. He found himself accused of heresy, flogged until he was on the point of death and told to keep silence for the rest of his life. Later, he’d be told he could be buried in holy ground only if he declared that he had changed his mind. He refused.

  The priests insisted on something else: they burned his books. They took Bible passages and Church fathers, books available in many places and entirely proper, and burned them publicly as though they could purge and cauterize all of Gottschalk’s thoughts about them in one fire. They were determined that nobody should read those books as Gottschalk read them, that his view of them and his opinions should be silenced as his mouth was: they were killing the ideas. The ashes from the fire are brutal proof that they now knew reading could change the use and meaning of a book. Nothing about a book was safe any more.72