You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab surat al-Ard (Book on the Appearance of the Earth) is the expression of his lifelong interest in geography. It is the hardest of his books to date; many scholars guess 816–17 C.E., but some place it as late as 833 C.E. Al-Khwarizmi borrowed many of Ptolemy’s coordinates and often used his reference points, though he also reorganized the material and checked the facts against the latest and best geographical information available to him. For nearly a millennium and a half, Ptolemy’s Geography—in its Greek, Latin, and Arabic versions, updated by generations of cartographers in Europe and the Middle East—was the most important set of maps in the world, providing “the strongest link the chain between the knowledge of mapping in the ancient and early modern worlds.”7

  As al-Khwarizmi proved, during Europe’s so-called Dark Ages the serious intellectual work was going on far away. But that is not to say nothing was going on in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Cartography was too important to be neglected entirely. Even England—part of a small, cold, rainy island off the northwest coast of Europe, marginally significant in Western Europe, utterly irrelevant in the rest of the world—created a geographical survey in the eleventh century that would be unequaled in its extent for another eight hundred years.

  Guillaume II, Duc de Normandie, turned his eyes across the Channel to the land of the Angles and the Saxons, and in 1066 he led an invasion that would prove to be one of the most consequential in Europe’s long history. After leading his forces to a town on England’s southern coast, Hastings, and defeating Harold Godwinson, Guillaume earned a new title: no longer merely the duke of Normandy, he was William the Conqueror. Anglo-Saxon England now had French-speaking rulers.

  Nineteen years after the Norman Invasion, William was concerned about security. The Danes had their eyes on his country, and he needed money for soldiers to keep the Vikings away. The obvious source of revenue was taxation, but William had no idea how much his new country was worth. The Anglo-Saxon kings had neither the interest nor the administrative structure to compute the population and wealth of every village, but William was determined to find out. During the Christmas celebrations in 1085, therefore, he ordered a comprehensive survey of England in order to establish the basis for taxing his people. It was also a means of asserting his control over his still-new country, and of determining who among his subjects might be expected to fight on his side.

  William charged seven or eight panels of commissioners with performing the great survey, and each was assigned a set of counties. These hundreds of commissioners and aides then fanned out across the country collecting information: the name of every hamlet, village, town, and city; the population; the number of people at each social rank and of each profession; the value of the buildings; even the amount of livestock. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most important year-by-year account of early English history, recorded the process:

  He had a record made of how much land his archbishops had, and his bishops and his abbots and his earls—and though I relate it at too great length—what or how much everybody had who was occupying land in England, in land or in cattle, and how much money it was worth. So very narrowly did he have it investigated that there was no single virgate of land, nor indeed (it is a shame to relate but it seemed no shame to him to do) one ox nor one cow nor one pig which there was left out, and not put down in his record.8

  A book called the Inquisitio comitatus Cantabrigensis, or Investigation of the County of Cambridge, survives as a working draft of the material for Cambridgeshire, and it reveals how the commissioners proceeded, collecting information first by shires, then by hundreds, then by villages. Some facts came from written records, but most from in-person inspections and interviews. In each county town they organized sworn inquests of sheriffs, barons, and other representatives of each village, giving them questionnaires demanding precise answers to specific questions. Much of the public was unhappy, not yet reconciled to a French-speaking king whose agents were snooping around. Everyone knew this was a means of increasing tax revenues, and property owners tried to play down the value of their property, pointing out problems to the agents. To verify the accuracy of what they were told, the commissioners ordered special sittings of the county courts all over the country, where their sources were to give their testimony and jurors—half English, half French—worked to keep people honest.

  When the commissioners had collected all the information, they reorganized it to account for the new feudal arrangements that followed the conquest of 1066, emphasizing the role of the barons in order to change the strictly geographical organization into something more informed by social hierarchies. For each county, the commissioners produced a list of landholders, from the king at the top to the poorest tenant at the bottom. They described all their fiefs, with the names of holders of manors from both 1066, right before William took over the country, and 1085, when the survey began. They provided the dimensions of plots of land, the number of workers on each estate, and the value of the land:

  LAND OF THE BP. OF COUTANCE

  The Bp. of Coutance holds half a hide in FILVNGELEI, and Lewin of him. The arable employs ii ploughs. One is in the demesne; with ii bondmen. There are v villeins, and ii borders; they have i plough. There are ii acres of meadow. Wood ii furlongs long, and one furling broad. It was worth x s. Now xxx s. Alwin held it freely.

  The collection of information took a total of eight months—astonishingly quick, considering how much they had to accomplish and how slowly both people and information moved—after which a second team of commissioners checked their work. Several monks were then set to work transcribing 2 million words of text.

  The result was The Description of England, better known as The Domesday Book—a name that comes from the assumption that what appeared there was as authoritative as what God had written in the book of judgment for the end of time. In fact it was two books, with Great Domesday covering most of the country and Little Domesday giving the raw data on Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk. Even in the combined work there were omissions. Domesday did not cover all of the north of England. London and Winchester were omitted altogether, though there are gaps in the manuscript, suggesting that there were plans to include other information at some point. Even so, the work occupies more than sixteen hundred large pages of parchment, collecting the names of 13,418 places and 109,230 “villeins” out of a population of around 2 million. It established a value for all the surveyed English land of £73,000. The Domesday Book served William well: with his new comprehensive reference book in hand, he determined his tax policies. He never got to make much use of the information, though, for he died in 1087, some say from illness and others from injury. But he left a powerful administrative machine in place for his son, William Rufus, and for a long line of Norman kings of England.

  TITLE: Book of Winchester or Liber de Wintonia

  COMPILER: William the Conqueror (c. 1028–1087)

  ORGANIZATION: Geographical and by social rank

  PUBLISHED: 1086

  VOLUMES: 2, “Great Domesday” and “Little Domesday”; now bound in 5 vols.

  PAGES: 1,668

  ENTRIES: 13,418 places

  TOTAL WORDS: 2 million

  SIZE: Great Domesday, 15″ × 11″ (38 × 28 cm); Little Domesday, 11″ × 8″ (28 × 20 cm)

  AREA: 1,400 ft2 (131 m2)

  Even more important, though, may be the use subsequent researchers have been able to make of this great work of reference. The Domesday Book offers an unparalleled record of social life in eleventh-century England—the kind of snapshot we have nowhere else in medieval Europe. It shows us what happened in the first twenty years of William’s reign: whereas once virtually the entire country was owned by native English, by 1086 just 4 percent of the land was under English control, with around 20 percent now under the personal control of William himself and the rest by his fellow Normans. Over the same period, we see women diminishing from owning 6 percent of the land to just 2 percent—fu
lly two thirds of the land owned by women had been transferred to male control. It may surprise some to hear that England, long proud of its ancient heritage of liberty, had 28,235 slaves in 1085. Most of the peasants, though, were freemen, owning at least a garden plot. It was hardly a time of equality; fully a quarter of the country was owned by just a dozen barons, and much of the political power was in the hands of the nation’s 1,027 priests.

  The Domesday compilers had no intention to produce a work of social history, but they did so despite themselves. Windsor, now the home of Queen Elizabeth, was then a tiny village with one plow, one slave, and a fishery. Throughout England the principal meat was pork. Cow’s milk was available, but only to the rich. Honey, on the other hand, was abundant, and was used both as a medicine and to make mead. Domesday’s degree of detail is impressive: “In Louth, the Bishop of Lincoln had 12 ploughlands taxable. The bishop now has in lordship three ploughs, 80 burgesses. One market at 29 shillings, 40 freemen and two villagers. Two knights have two ploughs and meadow, 21 acres. Woodland, pasture in places, 400 acres.”

  Domesday also gives us insights into less popular professions: there were sixteen beekeepers in England, for instance, and one joculatrix, or female jester. We learn about local customs: in Chester, the book records, “If a widow have unlawful intercourse with a man, a fine of 20 shillings. If a girl, a fine of 10 shillings.” There is even a glimpse of a private amour: Little Domesday related the story of a Breton soldier who fell in love with a woman in Norfolk and married her, one of the very few real-life accounts of everyday people in love in the whole of the Middle Ages.9 This gazetteer cum census cum geological survey is the oldest surviving public record in the English-speaking world and one of the largest administrative efforts in the whole of the European Middle Ages. Nothing even approached its comprehensiveness until the Victorian era, when the 1841 census produced an even more detailed picture of the country. Not until the age of the railway and telegram could this survey completed at the beginning of the millennium be superseded.

  The original Domesday has been an unusually peripatetic book. It was moved from the Anglo-Saxon capital, Winchester, to the new capital, Westminster, and eventually to Chancery Lane, the heart of England’s legal profession. The Great Fire of London forced it to move again, to Nonsuch Palace, near Epsom, in 1666, before coming back to London. In the late eighteenth century, the British government spent £38,000—a staggering amount then—producing a type facsimile, but by this time it was recognized as a national treasure. New threats in the twentieth century once again took the book away from danger: during the First World War, it was protected at Bodmin Prison, and during the Second at Shepton Mallet Prison.

  The original Domesday Book is now in the National Archives at Kew, in London’s Richmond borough, where it remains the oldest public record in England. The book is coming up on a thousand years of age, and in that millennium it has suffered some serious indignities. Some of the worst assaults came from those who thought they were caring for it. Clumsy “restorations” and rebindings have caused irreversible damage. In the mid-1980s, a more careful team of three conservation specialists gave it the most thorough and careful refurbishment in its thousand-year history. The result was bound in five volumes, and the whole survey was digitized in August 2006.

  That we have been mapping longer than we have been reading and writing is an indication of just how important the cartographic enterprise is. Writings about place, whether as wide-ranging as Ptolemy’s Geographica or as focused as Domesday, have been essential to our survival. They led our ancestors toward food and water and away from danger: think of the old “Here be Dragons” legend on sixteenth-century globes. And assembling extensive information about places has remained one of the most urgent tasks of reference publishing. Today the information is provided by satellites and served up in real time, and GPS may mean the end of most printed road maps. But both the need for accounts of distant places and the methods for compiling and presenting them have not changed much since Ptolemy and William sought to give a portrait of the worlds they inhabited.

  CHAPTER 4 ½

  THE INVENTION OF THE CODEX

  Books have been around a long time—more than five thousand years—but for most of that time they have not looked very bookish. The term book refers to any physical incarnation of a text, beginning with our earliest surviving writings, pressed into clay tablets or carved into architectural stone. The ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans also had things they called books, but they were scrolls of papyrus, the form in which books circulated in much of the ancient world. A typical sheet of papyrus was between 12 and 16 inches (30 and 40 cm) long; twenty or so would be glued together to form a long strip of around 20 to 25 feet (6 to 8 m), which would then be wrapped around a wooden rod and rolled up.

  Scrolls had real advantages over earlier forms of writing. They were lighter than clay tablets, longer lasting than wax tablets, and cheaper than either. They were good enough to serve literate cultures for many centuries. But scrolls also had disadvantages. You read a scroll by unrolling one side of the text and rolling it up on the other, keeping a few columns visible at any time. This was more convenient than switching from one clay tablet to another, but the only way to find a passage in the middle of a text is to start at the beginning and roll it out, column by column. Access is always sequential. To make matters worse, most early scrolls were written in “majuscule scriptio continua”—ALLCAPITALLETTERSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATIONBETWEENTHEMMAKINGITALMOSTIMPOSSIBLETOFINDAPASSAGEYOURELOOKINGFORESPECIALLYINSOMETHINGASLONGASAWHOLEBOOK.

  Things were shaken up when a novel way of arranging writing surfaces was invented. Instead of a stream of text on a long, continuous scroll, “A book made from hinged leaves” was developed1—that is, a series of sheets, written on both sides and bound together along one edge, usually either sewn or glued to a spine. This new format, known as a codex, made it possible to turn pages, and not just one at a time: one can flip quickly to the middle of a book.

  It’s unclear exactly when this new technology was developed. A set of six sheets of 24-karat gold, bound together with hoops and engraved in the Etruscan language, was discovered in Bulgaria in the 1940s. Scholars debate its authenticity, but the best guess is that it dates from roughly 600 B.C.E. While technically a codex, it seems to have been one of a kind. More influential was the Roman tradition of binding wooden tablets together with leather thongs. Eventually tablets gave way to sheets of parchment, very thin sheets of animal skin. In the first century B.C.E., bound collections of these sheets were used as notebooks, and a century later, they began to be used to distribute texts. By the third century, this new form of book had become widespread. The scroll did not die out altogether, at least not at once, but the codex became ever more popular as a medium for publishing.

  Christians were early adopters of the new technology. Already in the second century, when the canon of the Christian Bible was being formed, most of the holy Scriptures were being distributed in codex form, while Roman and Hebrew literature was still circulating in scrolls.2 The popularity of the newfangled reading technology among early Christians helped Christianity become a religion of the Word. Codices offered what the computer age has taught us to call random-access memory—the ability to go to any position in the text without reading through the entire work in sequence. And in works specifically designed to be consulted in short bursts rather than read from cover to cover, the ability to turn pages makes all the difference.

  The codex made possible a number of related technologies. One was the page number—not unheard of in scrolls, but much more common when pages were clearly demarcated in the codex. And the page number enabled both the table of contents and the index. The latter is especially relevant, because an index turns any book into a reference book, if only for a moment. Even books written for sequential reading lend themselves to quick lookups when there is a list of topics in the back keyed to pages.

  The codex made the modern reference book
possible. Many things have changed, of course, over the last fifteen hundred years, starting with the material: at first papyrus, made from reeds; then vellum, made from calfskin; then paper, made first from rags and later from wood pulp. Bindings and title pages have changed radically, and decorations such as dust jackets and deckled edges were introduced over time. And Gutenberg’s development of movable type changed the method by which words were put on pages. But these changes were motivated by concerns about cost, availability, durability, and advertising; they did not change the basic function of the book. A modern reader is immediately at home with even a fifth-century codex, and a fifth-century reader would know at once how to operate a hot-off-the-presses book today.

  Our own era may finally be witnessing the form that will take over from the codex: the electronic book, whether it will be on the large screens of desktop computers, on dedicated devices, on tablets, or on some platform yet to be invented. Still, it would be foolish to bet against the codex. After nearly two millennia as the dominant form of distributing longish texts, it has a good track record.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE CIRCLE OF THE SCIENCES

  Ancient Encyclopedias

  Cassiodorus

  Institutiones

  543–55 C.E.?

  Isidore

  Etymologies