Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages

by Richard Rudgley

  The library he had so enthusiastically amassed was the inspiration for the scriptorium, the part of the monastery in which books were written and illuminated. Among his prize possessions were a number of books that he had obtained from the library of a famous Roman monk named Cassiodorus. These works in particular were a major influence on the output of the Northumbrian scriptorium. The most famous is the Codex Amiatinus Bible, which now lies in a library in Florence. J. A. Vaughan, a writer on Biscop's life and achievements, describes this mighty tome: 'It is an enormous work, ten inches thick, weighing seventy-five pounds, and requiring two men to carry it.'

  Even for the bibliophile of today who has the luxury of being able to admire books from across the globe, it is a timeless work that is truly world-class in its stature. The technical and artistic magnificence of this manuscript was thought to be due to its Italian origin – until just over a century ago. Only careful analysis revealed that while it was greatly influenced by Italian works it was, in fact, made in Britain. It was on its way from Jarrow to be presented to the Pope but it never reached its intended destination. What had misled people for so long was the dishonesty of some Italian monks into whose hands it fell. They rubbed out the original inscription (which revealed its origin) and replaced it with an Italian one.

  King Egfrith continued to support the Northumbrian church and endowed it with more land, this time on the south bank of the Wear at Jarrow. A twin monastery and a church, St Paul's, was built in 681, and Ceolfrith was made abbot. Biscop employed his cousin as a co-abbot for Wearmouth, and then set out on his sixth and last journey to Rome. He was to spend four years abroad; when he finally returned he was told that his cousin and many other monks had died of the plague.

  After an eventful and fruitful life, Biscop suffered from a debilitating condition that left him bedridden. Despite the fact that he had given his cousin such a prominent post, he could not be accused of nepotism. He left strict instructions that his brother should not take over as abbot of the monastery as he was not sufficiently advanced on the spiritual path. Biscop decided instead that Ceolfrith should be abbot of both the twin monasteries. Shortly after, on 12 January 690, he died.

  Biscop had not only set up the twin monasteries and the best library in northern Europe, he had also made them famous far and wide. The organisation of the monasteries was based on the rule of St Benedict and became a model for many others both in Britain and beyond. He had re-established the Roman world in Britain – albeit a different Rome. One thing he cannot have foreseen was that his twin monasteries were also to count among their brethren one of the leading intellectuals of the age, a man who was to be known as the Venerable Bede.

  The Father of English History

  The life of Bede was very different to that of the widely travelled and tireless Biscop. He was born in 673 in the environs of the monastery at Wearmouth. At the age of seven he entered Biscop's monastery to begin his education. Later in his youth he moved over to the newly founded Jarrow where he was looked after by Ceolfrith. At nineteen he became a deacon, and a priest at the age of thirty. The long-distance travels and worldly experience of Biscop were not to be emulated by Bede who, it seems, travelled no further south than York and no further north than Lindisfarne in his whole life. His whole work was to be wrought in the confines of a 10-foot-square cell and the monastic library.

  By 716 the twin monasteries housed about 600 monks and were a thriving centre for learning. Bede established himself as an extremely gifted scholar and eagerly pursued his studies, using the magnificent library that had been so painstakingly founded by Biscop. The library was well stocked and not just with biblical commentaries and the works of the church fathers. There were texts by diverse classical writers – Pliny, Virgil and Homer among them. There were also works by anonymous Irish scholars which gave Bede access to the records of the Celtic Church. He could read not only Latin but also Greek and Hebrew. His main works were written in Latin but he also wrote poetry in Old English and was even working on a translation of the Gospel of St John into his native language when he died in 735.

  In the modern world, the sheer quantity of knowledge breeds specialists. Bede stands by way of contrast as a polymath not only with a firm grasp of many fields but also the added ability to contribute something lasting to many of them. He is best known for his work as a historian, but he had many other talents. Many believe him to have been the most learned man in the Europe of his time. Bede's interests were wide-ranging and his writings include biblical commentaries, translations of the lives of saints, his own biography of St Cuthbert, works on the calculation of time and his most famous work the Ecclesiastical History of the English People written in 731 at the height of his powers.

  Bede was foreshadowing events that were still a long way in the future when he wrote his History. England as a country was not to achieve unity until the tenth century. An English Church and an English people existed in his mind before they existed as political and social realities. His vision of history was to have a lasting impact on how the English viewed themselves and their own past. His most famous book was to have an immediate impact and copies of it were in demand across Europe. It was, in its time, the equivalent of a best-seller and even today it shows no signs of ever going out of print.

  In the Britain of Bede's time it was usual to refer to dates by the year of a king's reign, but with so many regional kings this made for a very unwieldy system poorly suited for a history on the scale that Bede was writing. He decided to use the then little-known Anno Domini system of dating that had been developed by Isidore, bishop of Seville. Bede was not only the first English historian, he was also the first to use the AD dating method for the writing of history. Today, of course, this is taken for granted, but at the time Bede's decision to use it was bold and highly innovative. It was also a considerable labour, as the historical sources he was using were obviously not using this chronology and he had to convert the numerous dating systems. This meant not only a host of Anglo-Saxon sources based on years of a king's reign but also Roman ones based on the reigns and periods in office of assorted emperors and popes.

  Like all historians, Bede was not impartial: he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to write. His History was not merely a disordered collection of data that he had accumulated as a result of the countless hours he spent in the library. As a Christian, he did not view the life of humankind as merely the passing of the ages but as part of a divine plan. There were also moral lessons to be learnt from the actions of people in the past. In his opening passage he wrote: 'If history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good: or if it records evil of wicked men, the devout, religious listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and perverse and to follow what he knows to be good and pleasing to God.'

  We have already seen how the history of Britain during this time was dominated by the expansion of Christianity. It was against this background of a patchwork of interconnected pagan and Christian kingdoms that Bede was composing his version of history. He saw Christianity as the guiding force that would bring unity to Britain. He writes that there are five languages and four peoples of Britain. These four – the English, the British, the Picts and the Scotti (Irish people who had settled in Britain and were to become known as the Scots) – all had their own languages. The fifth was Latin, the language of Roman Christianity, which Bede saw as the means by which they would all be united.

  He was writing a history of Britain that would not only be the first coherent history of its people (by means of the unifying concept of the AD chronology), but would also outline the manifest destiny of the English as part of the divine plan. Bede's use of the term 'the English people' in this and his other works is very complex and the fine detail need not concern us here. When he describes the history of the arrival of Germanic peoples to Britain, he typically refers to them as Saxons. After their conversion to Christianity he then describes them as English. So
urces emanating from Rome before he wrote the History described them as English, and it seems Bede was following this lead. For Bede, being English and being Christian were indivisible.

  The Reckoning of Time

  It was religious motivations such as the calculating of the dates for the celebration of Easter and the use of the AD system of dating that lay behind Bede's scientific and mathematical interests. The Christian religion was the driving force that would lead to scientific progress. Time is one of the underlying themes in both his historical and more technical works. Bede's own stable environment, regulated by the orderly division of time essential to the workings of the monastery, allowed him to concentrate his energies on solving problems concerning time. Although he is now best known as a historian, his The Reckoning of Time was hugely influential in the early Middle Ages.

  The Synod of Whitby in the year 664 was an attempt to bring the Celtic and Roman churches together in order to reconcile their differences. One of the main points of contention centred on Easter. There was no consensus about when Easter was to be celebrated. Before the Synod, one church could be celebrating Easter while the other was celebrating Lent. This dispute was not just based on theological hair splitting – it was splitting the Christian community apart. The mathematical problems in calculating Easter still remained fundamentally unsolved until the time of Bede. It was such a contentious issue that the normally serene scholar found it impossible not to criticise those he saw as responsible for this state of affairs. When writing about the Irish bishop Aidan (who founded the monastery at Lindisfarne), Bede had many good things to say about him but could not stop himself repeatedly criticising this paragon of the Celtic Church for his 'inadequate knowledge of the proper observance of Easter'.

  The unity that Bede strove for in his history could not be achieved without a consensus on the timing of the celebration of Easter. This was why it was such an important issue for him. If Easter was to be related to the Jewish Passover, the Last Supper, then this made the Christian Church dependent on the Jewish calendar, which was lunar. The Christian calendar was based on the Roman calendar, which was solar. Somehow these two points of reference needed to be reconciled. That Easter had to be on a Sunday also had to be taken as part of the equation.

  Bede worked out the solution. Earlier scholars had shown that there was a way to reconcile the lunar and solar data, but it was Bede's original contribution to solve this in conjunction with the need for Easter to be on a Sunday. He compiled his exhaustive arguments, which involved a cycle of 528 years – the new basis for working out the date of Easter. For those who could not follow his complex calculations, he appended a series of tables to his book which could be used practically without recourse to the main text. The numerous surviving manuscripts that consist of only the tables show that this possibility was widely taken advantage of by those less learned than himself.

  Bede had a need to communicate not only with other learned monks but also with others who did not have the privilege of such an education. He was able to explain complicated things in simple ways. Laura Sole, the curator of Bede's World, a stone's throw from St Paul's church at the Jarrow monastery, gave me an example of his skill as a teacher. He was aware from his reading that the Earth was a sphere and that there were distinct climatic zones, which he divided into five. He explained it to Anglo-Saxons (who would never have seen a globe) by likening it to a huge fire on a cold winter night. If you are too close to the fire, you are too hot to be comfortable. If you are a long way from the fire, you are too far to feel its benefit. If you are in the intermediate zone (Britain being in the temperate zone of the northern part of the world), then the effects of the fire would provide the necessary comfort.

  His ability to communicate as a teacher was undoubtedly an important aspect of his influence at the time, but he is nevertheless best remembered as a great scholar and synthesiser of the world of knowledge available to him through books. Yet the raw material that he came across in the monastic library required much moulding for it to be transformed into a vehicle for his own vision. Not only did he have to reconcile diverse chronological systems, he had to find a means to calculate them. The Arabic numerals we use today were not known in the world of Bede and his contemporaries. Roman numerals made complex calculations extraordinarily difficult and so Bede taught a method of calculation using the fingers and other parts of the body. By moving the fingers into different positions it was possible to represent all the numbers up to 9,999. By employing the elbows, shoulders and other body parts you could get up to a million!

  It was with the aid of such a system that he constructed his Christian calendar, or computus as it was known, which included his lengthy exposition of how the date of Easter should be calculated. He was not a scientist as the term is understood today, but his work reconciling the lunar and solar calendars and other matters involved complex calculations. The aim of his work was religious but the means to this end necessarily involved the solving of problems by mathematical means. It was to have an effect on the development of learning in the Middle Ages that would result in a more experimental approach to problems. The scholarship of the barbarian had truly come of age.

  Bede had travelled little in life, but his mortal remains were to make their own journey after his death. After he died on 26 May 735, he was buried under the south porch of the church at Jarrow. His bones were later reinterred near the altar where they remained until the early part of the eleventh century. It was at this time that they were moved to Durham Cathedral to be placed in the tomb of St Cuthbert. In 1370 they were moved across the cathedral to be housed in a tomb in the Galilee chapel. This was to be his final resting place.

  We must now go back in time to the story of St Cuthbert, whose own relics were to one day become the spiritual foundation stone upon which Durham Cathedral was built.

  Chapter Eighteen

  HOLY ISLAND

  It was seen, perhaps, from the back of a dimly lit church as a mystical object, a visible symbol of St Cuthbert, of God, of Christ, everything that would act as a power line to God. I think for all kinds of people it had that electricity about it.

  Michelle Brown, curator at the British Library, on the Lindisfarne Gospels

  It was St Columba who was the first to establish an Irish monastery beyond Ireland when he founded that of Iona, an island of the Inner Hebrides, in either 563 or 565. Iona itself was later to serve as a springboard for later phases of the missionary process. The first Irish monk who came to the north-east of England with the intention of converting the local Anglo-Saxons left in despair soon after arriving as he found them too rude, coarse and barbarous. Another would come in his place and have a good deal more success, effectively beginning the active conversion of the north of England. This was Aidan, an Irish bishop who came from Iona in 635 at the request of King Oswald, who had already become a Christian himself earlier while in exile. The king gave him the island of Lindisfarne to set up his monastery. The founding of the monastery was to mark the beginning of Christianity in Northumbria.

  The tidal island of Lindisfarne is still accessible by a causeway that can be walked across at low tide. Outside the busy tourist season the island is very quiet, preserving something of its ancient tranquillity. According to Bede's account, the original monastery buildings on Lindisfarne were made of timber like the other Anglo-Saxon buildings of the time – unlike the later twin monasteries of stone at Jarrow and Wearmouth. The monastic population of Lindisfarne has been estimated to have been about 600. Although this was an all-male community there were other places, such as Hartlepool, where nuns and monks lived side by side, usually ruled over by an abbess; this system came from Gaul.

  Like the twin monasteries, Lindisfarne was a hive of manual and intellectual industry. Its scriptorium produced numerous works, and sometimes the weather conditions meant that the monks could not keep up with the many orders for books. There are little notes written by the monks apologising for not coming up with the goods on
account of both their inks and hands freezing due to the cold. Despite these difficulties, Lindisfarne established itself as a centre of artistic excellence and learning that was in many respects way ahead of its counterparts in the supposedly more 'civilised' realms of France and Italy. An obscure island off the coast of northern England peopled by barbarian monks had become one of the leading lights in the Christian world of its day.

  St Cuthbert – His Life and Afterlife

  The most important saint of this period of British history was Cuthbert. In his lifetime he was an example to those around him. In death the cult that surrounded him was to have a powerful effect on the development of the Church in northern England. He was born in the early 630s. He first entered the monastery of Melrose on the river Tweed; this was then ruled by Eata, a follower of Aidan. Cuthbert later followed Eata to Lindisfarne, where he was to remain for the rest of his days. Bede describes Cuthbert as an intrepid missionary who would 'visit and preach in the villages that lay far distant among high and inaccessible mountains, which others feared to visit and whose barbarity and squalor daunted other teachers'.

  Cuthbert was of a different character to both Biscop and Bede. He was drawn to the life of the hermit and first began to distance himself from the day-to-day life of the monastery by living on the tiny tidal islet called Hobthrush island (colloquially known as St Cuthbert's island) a hundred or so metres off Lindisfarne. This soon proved to be too close for the requirements of a genuine hermitage, as monks from Lindisfarne could not resist the temptation to distract him from his solitary labours of the spirit.