The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (11 page)

It was a world of gifts, a routine of
absolutely unavoidable exchanges: gifts up and down the social ladder, from kings to
knights to keep them loyal, from knights to kings to keep them giving, from bishops to
cardinals and from cardinals to priests; from Ireland to Northumbria to Frisia to Rome
and beyond. Gifts bound people together in their proper ranks and obligations. Gifts
were about power, and making it visible. When in Germany, the missionary Boniface sent
silver to Rome and got back incense, and on one occasion a face towel and a bath towel;
he sometimes sent unspectacular things like ‘four knives made by us in our
fashion’ or ‘a bundle of reed pens’ because gifts
were messages and statements much more than requests for
something in return, and the act of giving was the whole point. At times his gifts were
as diplomatic as state gifts to royalty today, but a bit more pointed. Boniface sent a
hawk and two falcons to the King of Mercia to get him to listen to a message that he was
not going to like at all, a dressing-down for his appalling sexual habits, especially in
convents.

Of all the gifts that he received, Boniface
tells the Abbess Eadburga, he most appreciated ‘the solace of books and the
comfort of the garments’.
⁵⁰
Giving and sharing books became a
system for putting ideas out into the world.

The glorious bible that Bede and others made
at Jarrow was a gift for the Pope. Books were also buried with the saintly dead as gifts
to keep them company. The book as gift, then, was sometimes quite different from the
book to be read, a difference which later became almost ridiculous. One famous English
calligrapher called Earnwine gave a fine book of psalms to King Canute and Queen Emma,
who promptly sent it off to Cologne as a gift. When the Bishop of Worcester was in
Cologne on the king’s business, he was naturally given a present, which happened
to be Earnwine’s psalter. He brought it back to England, where it began.
⁵¹
Nobody ever had to read a book like that.

Books were also sent about so they could be
copied and copied again; the text itself was the gift. Boniface, like Bede, wanted that
kind of book. He sometimes knew exactly which one he was after, and at other times he
fished about for titles. He asked a former student for ‘whatever you may find in
your church library which you think would be useful to me and which I may not be aware
of or may not have in written form’.
⁵²
Just knowing which books existed
and which you wanted was not at all easy; which is why Bede added a list of all his
works at the end of the
Historia ecclesiastica
, including the biblical books he
studied, the heroic verse he wrote, the terrible translation of a Greek text that he
edited and corrected, his books on time and the nature of things, his hymns, his
epigrams and his book on spelling.
⁵³
It reads a little like the back
matter of a modern paperback. A librarian at Murbach in the ninth century was drawing up
lists of books the monastery needed from
the catalogues of other libraries and references in the manuscripts that he could
examine; he was still using Bede’s list.
⁵⁴
He made notes alongside the names
of some authors: ‘we are seeking his remaining books’ and ‘we want to
find many others’.
⁵⁵

This world of books was not a locked room
full of chained volumes, the picture of later monastery libraries. Books moved. The
territories that did not have Bede’s
History
directly from Jarrow
sometimes took copies of a copy made from the copy in Charlemagne’s court library,
and distributed by his orders.
⁵⁶
Boniface had to tell Abbess Bugga
that he couldn’t send the writings she wanted ‘for I have been prevented by
pressure of work and by my continual travels from completing the book you ask for. When
I have finished it, I shall see that it is sent to you.’
⁵⁷
The notion of a
busy missionary archbishop copying whole books for someone else may be less surprising
if copying was also a way of studying. A bishop tells an abbot he’s not returning
a book because ‘Bishop Gutbert has not yet returned it.’
⁵⁸
Gutbert was
Archbishop of Canterbury at the time. A young abbot can’t send back a book
because, he says, the very important Abbot of Fulda wants time to make himself a
copy.
⁵⁹

The books that circulated this way were not
just books about the Bible and the Church. Later, holy libraries consisted mostly of the
Church fathers, the founders of the story of the Church, although even then one monk
wanted Suetonius and those good dirty stories about the Caesars.
⁶⁰
But in
Bede’s time, and for centuries afterwards, monasteries and cathedrals also cared
for the pagan leftovers of Rome. Long before the official Renaissance brought back
classical culture and Latin texts, which would not have been possible if nobody had
bothered to preserve them in the first place, the Irish were fussing with Virgil; when a
seventh-century schoolmaster says he’s just had some valuable copies from
‘the Romans’ he might just possibly mean the ones in Rome, but more likely
he means the Irish scholars influenced by Rome.
⁶¹
In the mid eighth century a nun
called Burginda made a copy of a commentary on the Song of Songs and added a careful,
wordy letter to the ‘distinguished young man’ who received it; her Latin
misfires a bit, and she makes a mess of the
subjunctive, but she knows how to quote Virgil so she must
have found Virgil in her convent library alongside assorted holy works. Ecburg, Abbess
of Gloucester, used Virgil too in a letter to explain in proper, flowery terms her pain
at being separate from her sister: ‘everywhere cruel sorrow, everywhere fear and
all the images of death’, almost a direct quotation.
⁶²

And yet a pagan poet was a problem:
essential, but dangerous. The scholar Alcuin read Virgil as a boy, imitated him in his
own poems, but when he became an abbot he forbade his novices to read the man at
all.
⁶³
In Carolingian schools Virgil might have been the very first heathen
author the children read, mostly as an example of how to make verse scan,
⁶⁴
but
he was firmly labelled heathen. Monasteries filed the heathen books among the
schoolbooks and grammar because they were to be read in gobbets only, for their style
and not their meaning, and under careful supervision. Nobody was supposed to pay
attention to all the love, sensuality and battles.

If you had the right connections, you could
borrow books from these holy libraries. One affluent noble, Eccard of Macon, had to
write into his will instructions to send back the books he had from the monastery at
Fleury, a chestful of them that he obviously had never meant to return in a hurry. The
cathedral librarian at Cologne wrote loans down carefully at the end of his book list,
but he had to leave whole pages blank in case Ermbaldus, a most enthusiastic borrower,
decided to borrow yet more books ‘for the exercise of his ministry’.
⁶⁵

To know laws and charters, to rule and know
what you were ruling, it was very useful to read if not essential. Laymen owned books
about law, about God, about farming and about war: the knowledge a noble needed. We know
because they left them to their children in their wills, each title given to a
particular child, so the books were something valued and considered. They often included
history books, the history of the popes, the doings of the Franks. We can guess that the
long poems in Latin and the historical stories at Charlemagne’s court were meant
for a lay audience, and a rather grand lay audience at that. But the mighty were not
exactly encouraged to take this literacy business too far. One eighth-century boy called
Gerald was told
to stop reading when he had
worked through the Psalms and it was time for him to study more serious matters like
archery, riding to hounds, and flying hawks and falcons. He did go back to books, but
only because ‘For a long time he was so covered in small spots that it was thought
he could not be cured. So his mother and father decided he should be put more closely to
the study of letters.’ In Gerald’s case, remarkably, ‘even when he
became strong, he continued to study’.

Books could be heirlooms, and they could
also be assets. In Bede’s time Benedict Biscop bought a lovely book of
cosmographies while he was in Rome, an account of the whole known world. Back in England
the very literate, even bibliophile, King Aldfrith offered to give the monastery land in
return for the book, enough riverside land to support eight families.
⁶⁶
The deal meant
books were a very important part of a monastery’s useful wealth. When the Emperor
Charlemagne died, he left his library to be sold ‘for an appropriate price’
and the money given to the poor.
⁶⁷
He knew there would be a
market.

What’s more, books were stolen. The
Baltic pirates who caught Anskar, ‘the Apostle of the North’, sailing to
Sweden and made him walk the rest of the way were not at all averse to the forty books
he was carrying with him.
⁶⁸
The Benedictine Loup de Ferrières
in the ninth century worried about sending a work of Bede’s to an archbishop
because the book was too big to hide on anyone’s person or even in a bag, and even
if it could be hidden ‘one would have to fear an attack of robbers who would
certainly be attracted by the beauty of the book’. More tellingly, a monastery in
the Ardennes lost a psalter written in gold and decorated with pearls, which turned up
intact and was bought in good faith by a pious woman; so it was the book that had value,
not its incidental jewels.
⁶⁹

Laymen could always hire a scribe out of the
scriptorium
to do their copying, although they need not expect any holy
indifference to the price; as the scribe says in Ælfric Bata’s eleventh-century
instructional text, ‘Nothing is more dear to me than that you give me cash, since
whoever has cash can acquire anything he wants.’ Some laymen chose to write books
out for themselves. Someone on a mission with the army, most likely a lay soldier, spent
his time copying a collection
of saints’
lives. Someone else, called Ragambertus, wrote out the letters of Seneca and put a note
on the manuscript in ornate capital letters: ‘Ragambertus, just a no-account
layman with a beard, wrote this text.’
⁷⁰

Other people wrote books out of love, and
terror. The noblewoman Dhuoda was apprehensive when her oldest son, William, went away
to battle at the age of sixteen, and she wrote him a little book to take with him.
‘I want you,’ she wrote, ‘when you are weighed down by lots of worldly
and temporal activity, to read this little book I have sent you.’ She wrote of the
joy other women had in living with their children, and how anxious she was about being
separated from William and how eager she was to be useful. She had read widely, even if
what she read may mostly have been books of extracts from homilies and the lives of
saints and the works of the Church fathers. She knew the Bible and she had read and
thought about a poet like Ovid, and she culled what she thought would help her son while
he was away. Her pain is vivid even now, a loving woman whose child was suddenly
wrenched away into an adult and murderous world; she writes of her ‘heart burning
within’. She wants her son to go on reading as a kind of moral shield against the
life he was going to live at court and the wars he was going to fight; ‘I urge
you, William, my handsome, lovable son, amid the worldly preoccupations of your life,
not to be slow in acquiring many books.’
⁷¹

Books took effort, time, skill. Books
required dead calves, polished skins, the making of ink and colours and pens, the ruling
of guidelines. They had to be written out by hand, carefully, and corrected and
punctuated and decorated; they had to be sewn together so they would stay in their
proper order. They required craft. They also required words, either a book to copy or
else someone to invent and dictate. They mattered for their content, of course: Bede
helped change people’s minds about the proper date of Easter, the way to date our
lives in the history of the world, what happened in Britain when it became both
Christian and Anglo-Saxon. But books also began to matter for themselves, even when they
were practical books for reading and not jewelled, painted lovelies.

Books were becoming independent of the way they were meant to
be read. It came to this: books were worth burning.

Gottschalk found this out. He was a monk, a
poet, a bit of a wanderer who never wanted to settle in one house, and he had
unconventional ideas: he was, roughly, a Calvinist seven hundred years before Calvin. He
had come to think that all men were predestined either to Hell or to Heaven; that was
God’s will, and no amount of good deeds or even bad ones could undo it.

This was not the view of the Church, so he
was ordered to appear, in 849, before the synod of the clergy in Quierzy, which is a
town in Picardy, to answer for his opinions. He went along thinking he would be allowed
to argue his case, so he carried with him the Bible texts he had used, and the writings
of the Church fathers, the papers he needed to make his points: evidence, if you like.
He expected discussion, but he was too optimistic. He found himself accused of heresy,
flogged until he was on the point of death and told to keep silence for the rest of his
life. Later, he’d be told he could be buried in holy ground only if he declared
that he had changed his mind. He refused.

The priests insisted on something else: they
burned his books. They took Bible passages and Church fathers, books available in many
places and entirely proper, and burned them publicly as though they could purge and
cauterize all of Gottschalk’s thoughts about them in one fire. They were
determined that nobody should read those books as Gottschalk read them, that his view of
them and his opinions should be silenced as his mouth was: they were killing the ideas.
The ashes from the fire are brutal proof that they now knew reading could change the use
and meaning of a book. Nothing about a book was safe any more.
⁷²