The copying of the text was done first. Paintings of two of the gospel writers bound into the book showed how Eadfrith and other scribes of the time worked. Having placed a board across their laps, they put their feet on a stool approximately half the height of their chair. This canted the board towards the scribe and allowed him to see his work square-on rather than looking at the letters obliquely as happens when writing on a flat desk. While this set-up produced very beautiful calligraphy, the long hours needed to complete all four gospels without help must have taken their toll on Eadfrith’s back and posture. And, with only small and often unglazed windows to admit it, the quality of the light was poor in monastic buildings of the seventh and eighth centuries and most scribes preferred to work outdoors when the weather allowed.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were tremendously costly in more than time and discomfort. Known as a codex, the bound book was made up of pages of vellum or calfskin. The younger the animal the better the quality of the writing surface and the monastery at Lindisfarne must have had access to large herds of cows whose progeny they could afford to slaughter each year. Four years after the first sheets of vellum had been scraped, sized in lime and stretched out for Eadfrith, another tremendous project was undertaken in Northumbria – this time at the joint monastery of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow. Three copies of the entire Bible were commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrith and, to produce the vast quantity of vellum needed, land was granted to raise a herd of 2,000 cows. In the economy of eighth-century Northumbria, this represented a huge outlay.
Once a sheet of vellum was pinned to a writing board, tiny holes were made to delineate the area for text and then it was ruled with a pointed stick. Since vellum was organic and still springy, it was hoped that these ruled lines would become quickly invisible. In the portraits of Matthew and Mark (Luke and John are shown by Eadfrith working with scrolls, the predominant form of the book in the first century AD and so historically correct), the gospel writers are seen holding quill pens. The long tail feathers of geese or swans were preferred because they could be repeatedly sharpened and, in the illustrations, none of the pens appears to have been left fledged in classic style. For closer, finer work, reed pens could be used but the pressure from a scribe’s fingers usually meant a short life. Ink sat in an inkhorn often poked through a hole in the writing board. Until the middle of the twentieth century, school desks were still being made with a hole for an inkwell and the design is a direct descendant from the methods of the Northumbrian scribes. The bible-black ink used by Eadfrith was probably made from a form of carbon – either soot or burnt bones. Irish scribes sometimes used iron-gall, a black ink made from oak apples and sulphate of iron.
The text in the Lindisfarne Gospels is very beautiful. Eadfrith wrote the Latin in a script called ‘insular uncial’. This probably developed from Roman cursive but the smooth surface of vellum allowed greater flourish than was possible on much rougher papyrus. Letters had more rounded forms and these could be achieved without the risk of the pen nib catching and spattering ink over the page. Uncials are capital letters but, in the Lindisfarne Gospels, Eadfrith added some ascenders or upward strokes, such as b, d, h, or l, or descenders as with p and q. Letters with bowed elements, like the last two, are given wide flourishes and ascenders are often decorated with wedge-shaped finials, an opportunity for Eadfrith to add more colour.
The gospels were written in a diminuendo style with very large and gorgeously decorated capital letters at the beginning of sections. The size of the letters gradually shrinks until a standard script is reached and this carries on until the end of a chapter or passage. And unlike earlier Roman script and inscriptions, Eadfrith made each word distinct with the use of spacing and, borrowing from Tiro, Cicero’s famous secretary and the inventor of shorthand, scribes used a number of standard abbreviations.
Once Eadfrith had completed the text, he began to paint. Using compasses, set squares and protractors, he almost certainly worked out his designs and compositions on wax tablets first. Then, with a series of dots and pinpricks, he transferred the outline to the vellum and began using his tiny brushes. Those made from the coats of pine martens were much favoured. Eadfrith’s palette was wide and shows the network of trading contacts these apparently isolated Northumbrian communities had. Yellow, green, blue, black, gold, silver and white could be sourced from Britain’s plant life and mineral resources but rich reds such as kermes or carmine came from the Mediterranean. Lapis lazuli was brought from Afghanistan and pulverised to produce ultramarine while folium, which yielded a range of tints from pink to purple, was extracted from the sunflowers of the Mediterranean littoral.
Once the pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels were complete, they were bound in fascicles or gatherings of double pages. This was a moment in the production process which shows how much planning was required. Because the hide of a calf provided a large area for writing (and when laid on its long side, the shape of the book), it meant that double pages could be bound in multiples of at least two. If a codex was thought likely to make 16 pages then numbers one and sixteen needed to be copied on the same double sheet and so on. Not all gospels were made like this but calfskin was very expensive and the advantages of fascicle binding became quickly clear.
A beautiful leather binding and cover, richly tooled but now lost, was made for the gospels by Aethelwald, Eadfrith’s successor as Bishop of Lindisfarne. And an outer cover of gold, silver and gemstones was created by a man called Billfrith the Anchorite, another term for a hermit. Perhaps he worked alone in his forge but given the precious materials he was using, he cannot have been left in isolation.
The Lindisfarne Gospels have been acclaimed as a master-work, a perfect synthesis of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon techniques, motifs and sensibilities. In the tenth century a dedication was added and it simply said that the great book had been made ‘in honour of St Cuthbert’. And, between the lines of Eadfrith’s immaculate Latin text, a translation into Old English was added. It is the earliest gospel in the vernacular in England.
The vast resources devoted to making the book should be understood in the context of the eighth century. Above all Christianity was seen as the religion of the word and the Bible as the repository of the word of God. As such the gospels, placed on the high altar during Mass, were objects of veneration in their own right. This way of looking at Eadfrith’s achievement places the book alongside the great altarpieces, devotional sculpture and icons of Christian art. Made to honour a very great saint, made in the monastery he knew and loved so well, near where he went to die, the gospels are absolutely of Lindisfarne in a spiritual as well as a historical sense. It is a matter of great regret that they are kept in the British Museum in London.
While the scribes worked in the peace and beauty of Lindisfarne, all was not quiet on Northumbria’s northern front. In his ‘recapitulation’ of dates and important events at the conclusion of his great history, Bede noted that, in 698, ‘Bertred, the royal commander of the Northumbrians, was killed by the Picts’. Perhaps this defeat took place around the Stirling Gap or was the result of a reassertion of Pictish control over Fife. The battle or skirmish happened well after the death of Bridei, the victor of Dunnichen and slayer of Ecgfrith, and it is evidence of a growing power in the north. The Anglian bishopric founded at Abercorn on the southern shores of the Forth was abandoned around this time and its bishop, Trumwine, ‘withdrew with his people’, finding refuge deep in Northumbria at the monastery at Hartlepool. Abercorn lay very close to the old ferry crossings to Fife – near the narrows where the modern bridges stand – and within easy reach of a hostile shore opposite. If Aldfrith and his generals could not sustain a bishopric at Abercorn, it may be that their reach had shrunk back to Edinburgh and the fortress on the Castle Rock and perhaps what is now West Lothian had been lost.
Pictish kings had close dynastic links with the rulers of Dalriada and the Old Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde and, as Bede concedes, all were released from Northumbrian overlordship when
Ecgfrith and his war bands fell at Dunnichen. In the south, another great power rose up to confront Aldfrith and his successors. The name Mercia derived from the word for marches or borders because it lay on the southern frontier of Northumbria but, with the long reigns of three capable kings, it ceased to be marginal and became the central political focus in England. Aethelbald, Offa and Coenwulf ruled Mercia from 716 to 821, more than a century of continuity and expansion. Directed by them, Mercian armies enforced overlordship in the south and, while Northumbria remained more or less independent, it was as a junior partner. Kings who sat on the throne at Bamburgh were no longer Imperatores Totius Britanniae.
Monasteries had begun to multiply in the late seventh and early eighth centuries but Bede did not approve. Here is a passage from a letter to his old pupil at Jarrow, Bishop Egbert of York:
Others even more disgracefully, since they are laymen with no experience or love of life under a rule, give money to kings and buy for themselves, under the pretext of building monasteries, estates in which they freely indulge their lust: they have these ascribed to them in hereditary right by royal charters which are confirmed by the written assent of bishops, abbots and secular magnates as though they were truly worthy of God. Having thus usurped for themselves small or large estates, free from both human and divine service, they serve in reality only their own desires as laymen in charge of monks. Moreover they do not assemble real monks there, but rather wanderers who have been expelled from genuine monasteries for the sin of disobedience, or whoever they may have enticed out of them, or any of their own followers whom they can persuade to receive the tonsure and promise monastic obedience to themselves. They thus fill the ‘monasteries’ they have built with groups of these deformed people and – a very ugly and unprecedented spectacle – the very same men are now occupied with wives and procreating children and now rise from their beds and accomplish assiduously whatever needs to be done inside the monastic precincts. Moreover they obtain with similar audacity places for their wives, as they say, to build ‘monasteries’: as these are laywomen they authorise themselves to be rulers of the handmaids of Christ. To all these people the popular proverb applies: ‘Wasps can indeed make honeycomb, but they fill it with poison, not honey.’
Bede’s rant may have been justified but the habit of treating monasteries like family possessions was neither new nor did it prevent them from being exemplary. The sanctity and piety of Iona and its monks are rarely questioned but ten out of its first twelve abbots were relatives of St Columba. The monastery at Whitby, scene of the famous synod, was also a family concern in its early years. The root of Bede’s anger was the use and abuse of monastic status for advantage and exploitation. Religious houses and those who ran them enjoyed exemption from military service and were entitled to a share of war booty, including conquered territory. Sometimes monasteries and their property were divided between the heirs of a founder and even converted back into secular estates over time.
What underpinned monastic privilege and attracted those who subverted it was something simple and easy to underestimate in this secular age – it was absolute belief. Early Christians believed that good deeds, generous gifts, prayer and devotion (even that done by proxies) in various combinations could be accumulated in sufficient quantity to guarantee entry into Heaven. With that firmly in mind, secular rulers moved to protect monasteries and their pious monks and some even believed that the name and form of monasticism, if not its spiritual substance, was sufficient to store up credit for the afterlife.
After 25 January 1990, it turned out that even more ancient beliefs were stirring amongst the modern population of Britain. A tremendous storm blew down a very old yew tree in the churchyard at Selborne in Hampshire. It had been made enduringly famous by the parish minister, the Reverend Gilbert White, when he published The Natural History of Selborne in 1789. Reckoning the tree to be at least as old as the ancient church, White wrote that ‘it may be deemed an antiquity’. When the yew fell in the winter of 1990, the news produced an extraordinary reaction. Almost immediately thousands of people descended on Selborne, some of them to mourn the venerable tree’s passing, most to beg or steal a piece of the wood. It seemed that the yew’s death had drawn upon a well of old beliefs, that an ancient power was at work, a phenomenon which both appalled and astonished the watching villagers.
Often the heartwood of very old yews dies and the trees become hollow, and therefore impossible to date by counting the rings. The outer edges survive and growth continues through a ring of root systems. Girth is used to estimate age and when it crashed to the ground the Selborne yew measured 26 feet around. It seems that White had underestimated and his beloved tree was not coeval with the church but about 2,000 years old. When archaeologists examined the upended root systems, they found the remains of many skeletons. Since 1200 and probably long before, people had been buried hard up against the sides of the tree. As it slowly grew over their graves, its roots curled around the skeletons often moving them some way from their original resting place.
These early burials inside the precincts of old churchyards and close to their yew trees continue a very long tradition. In Celtic languages and tree lore they occupy a talismanic place. Because they can live for millennia in sheltered places, are densely evergreen and always lustrous and every part of them protectively poisonous, yews have long been bathed in the light of sanctity. The name is a direct survival from Old Welsh ywen or pren ywen for ‘yew tree’. It is also known in both Gaelic and Welsh as ‘the Everlasting One’ and ‘the Tree of Life’. It was believed that the sinuous and immensely strong roots and branches took a unique grip on the earth and the air, closing around the bodies of the recently dead and drawing out their essence, their ‘dream-soul’, and expelling it into the sky through their ever-living branches.
Most prehistoric yews are unlikely to have been planted by the hand of man. The gods placed them on earth and Celtic priests or Druids were attracted to groves of trees, particularly oaks, but also yews. Columba’s island of Iona’s name comes from a sacred pre-Christian association – it means ‘Yew Island’. Britain’s oldest yew stands at Fortingall in Perthshire. Measured at 52 feet in girth in 1769, now thought to be 3,500 years old, the tree has now lost its heartwood entirely (mainly due to people hacking off pieces) and it looks like a circular copse of smaller trees. But it still lives and casts its ancient shade.
Mourners on their way to burials at Fortingall kirkyard used to pass through the circle of the old tree and the pall-bearers would often stop for a moment in its centre. These glimmers of pre-Christian ritual are given substance by the tree’s location. Nearby stands a grim monument. Carn na Marbh means ‘the Mound of the Dead’ and it is a prehistoric earthwork re-used after the scourge of the Black Death in the second half of the fourteenth century. There is an inscription:
Here lie the victims of the Great Plague of the 14th century, taken here on a sledge drawn by a white horse led by an old woman.
The mound had more associations with the past. Until 1924 it was used as a prehistoric fire hill, a place where bonfires were lit at the turning points of the year. On Samhuinn Eve, now known as Halloween, the whole community climbed the hill, formed a circle around the fire and clasped each other’s hands. Then they danced round it, first deiseal or ‘sunwise’ and then tuathal or ‘against the sun’ (what used to be called ‘widdershins’). When the embers had died down, young men leaped through the fire in an echo of purification rituals. Around Carn na Marbh other mounds rise and there are several standing stones. Place names and archaeology are suggestive of a sacred landscape of the first millennium BC which looks as though it had the old yew as its centre.
Fortingall’s tree is famous – not least for the spurious legend that Pontius Pilate was born in its shade – but it is not unique. All over Britain there are churchyards with ancient yews which predate their churches. Many of those which stand on low eminences also show traces of prehistoric earthworks. What all of this points
to is continuity. When Christian missionaries arrived in an area they often chose to preach in places which were already sacred. Bede was unblushing about this practice. In his Ecclesiastical History, he repeated the advice of Pope Gregory in a letter to British churchmen dated around 600:
[We] have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols among that people [the English] should on no account be destroyed. The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there . . . In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place . . . On such occasions they might well construct shelters of boughs for themselves around the churches that were once temples, and celebrate the solemnity with devout feasting.
Fortingall derives from forterkil which means ‘the church at the fort’, a reference to the prehistoric stronghold near at hand. Far to the south, another place-name based on a different sort of fort became important in the story of Bernicia. Bewcastle is from Bothecaestor, the Roman fort where shepherds had shielings, most likely lean-to huts, against the crumbling walls. Now isolated in the high moorland of the western Cheviot ranges, Bewcastle had both a strategic and spiritual importance 2,000 years ago. When the Emperor Hadrian ordained a mighty wall to divide Britannia, his more canny commanders advised a screen of outpost forts to the north. At that time, Bewcastle did not lie in the middle of nowhere but astride a cattle and stock droving route from the Border valleys to Cumbria. In the eleventh century, a medieval castle was built out of the stones of the Roman fort and in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries an English garrison was stationed at Bewcastle to discourage Border reiving.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 25
