You Could Look It Up (12 page)

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—fully 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 developed
1
—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

E
ncyclopedia
both is and is not an ancient word. There was a phrase,
enkuklios paideia
, in ancient Greek, but (a) it did not mean
encyclopedia
, and (b) no one is entirely sure what it did mean. It appeared only a few times in ancient literature, and what it refers to is not always clear from context. The roots mean
circle
and
learning
, and for a long time, modern writers thought
encyclopedia
meant “the circle of the sciences,” the organization of all knowledge in a tight bundle. The ancients, however, meant something like “well-rounded education.” Aristotle, for instance, used the phrase
enkulia philosophemata
to refer to the foundations of philosophy, the things a student should study before getting into the complexities of real philosophy.
1

Whatever the word signified in the ancient world, it did not mean a reference book—that was a post-Renaissance development. Encyclopedic works existed, however, aspiring to provide systematic coverage of all knowledge, at least all knowledge in one field or set of fields. Amenemope, an Egyptian in the late second millennium
B.C.E.
, composed a wisdom text called the
Instruction
, or sometimes
A Text to Dispel Ignorance about Everything That Exists
. In thirty chapters it covered the known universe, both natural and supernatural, and offered advice on how to live a worthwhile life. Some have called it encyclopedic.
2

The Greeks and Romans certainly had works that aspired to be comprehensive. Titles like Pliny’s
Natural History
had an encyclopedic character, but many writers contend for the title of “first encyclopedist.”
Some historians award the laurel to the Greek sage Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, who died in 339 or 338
B.C.E.
His work supposedly collected Platonic and Aristotelian ideas about philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, and so on—but we can only speculate, because only a few scraps of the text survive, not enough to tell us anything useful.
3