The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (9 page)

These books were Bede’s work. From the
time he became a priest at the age of thirty ‘until the age of 59’ he says
he spent his time studying Scripture, collecting and annotating the works of the Church
fathers and making extracts from them, adding his own explanations, even putting right
one rotten translation from the Greek.
¹²
He was under orders from his bishop
to gather and make a
digest of the books
around him because they were so many and so long that only the very rich could own them
and so deep that only the very learnèd could understand them.
¹³
He was to take the
riches of the Jarrow and Wearmouth library, manuscripts of all ages and origins, and
publish them to all those houses which did not have a decent library at all.
¹⁴
Books
were not fine possessions to be stored away, precious but not for use; they were a
practical way to distribute ideas and information, ship them out and share them.

Bede knew the whole process of making books
from imagining and dictating the words to being the clerk who took them down, in the
medieval version of the Roman shorthand called ‘Tironian notes’, a puzzle of
dots, bows and teardrops, curved, wavy and straight lines all tilted five different ways
and taking their meaning from where they were placed on the page. The code was an
important part of literacy; it was schoolroom stuff.
¹⁵
He also knew about
being the scribe, the one who made fair or even lovely copies of the final result; he
worked on one glorious coloured and decorated Bible, the
Codex Amiatinus
, which
was given to the Pope.
¹⁶

So he worked in the
scriptorium
,
the writing place, a narrow world inside the monastery. Everyone wrote exactly the same
way: a neat, uniform and impersonal hand. In Jarrow, the writing was an uncial script,
which is round like your first schooldays writing, but all in capital letters. Getting
it right was very important because uncial script was Roman, and Jarrow was very much a
monastery which looked to Rome. The Irish monks on Iona used an island script, and they
had full heads of hair; at Jarrow the monks had the tonsure and they wrote in the Roman
way because to do anything else would have bordered on heresy. Rome and the Celtic
Church in the North were still arguing over issues such as how to date Easter, and
writing was a way to choose sides. The scribes could sometimes play and make something
personal in the decoration of the page, even glory in the beauty of what they could
make, but it would be centuries before scribes could have reputations as artists. The
act of writing was anonymous and a matter of monastic discipline.
¹⁷

They wrote with black ink made of oak galls
and iron salts, using
goose feather quills.
They wrote on parchment: sheepskin or the hide of a calf, shaved, polished and cut until
it had the texture of a kind of suede and a colour close to ivory, between white and
yellow. When they wanted colours, gold was gold leaf, silver was silver leaf, fixed to
the page. Black in the painted patterns and images was usually carbon, white was chalk
or crushed shells; blue was woad before the much more costly lapis lazuli was easily
available, purple came from lichen, yellow from a salt of arsenic, oranges and reds from
toasted lead, and for green the scribes used verdigris, made by holding copper over
vinegar for a while. A scribe making a book as lovely as the bible made at Jarrow for
the Pope, or the Gospels made at Lindisfarne, was chemist and artist all at the same
time, especially in the making of subtler colours like the surprising, polished
pinks.
¹⁸

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 whole 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.