The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (10 page)

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

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.