The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain

AEdiluulf 's encomium of Ultan provides one set of answers to questions that are central to the study of Anglo-Saxon scribes. Some writing implements have been recovered from Anglo-Saxon contexts at various sites, including Barking, Flixborough, Jarrow, Whitby and Winchester. Some of the handful of scribal colophons found in our manuscripts makes this explicit: the Raegenbold and Farmon who added the Old English gloss to the MacRegol Gospels describe themselves as priests. The first relatively clear reference to a scriptorium in the sense of a communal writing-room relates to the generation after the Conquest and the special circumstances of the professional scribes hired by Abbot Paul of St Albans. The extant material reveals diverse patterns of collaboration in the task of writing a book. Some volumes are holographs, which are entirely written by a single scribe.

Anglo-Saxon scribes and scriptoria

The activities of Abbot Ceolfrith and the missionary Boniface give us valuable insights into the history of the Anglo-Saxon Bible. This chapter gives fair weight to part-bibles, from both the Old and New Testaments, and the less numerous complete bibles. The foundations of scripture in English were laid during the Anglo-Saxon period. Irish influence is especially visible in the style of decoration of Northumbrian gospel-books. A number of Uncial gospel-book leaves now bound with other books were probably also copied at Wearmouth-Jarrow. Lindisfarne, Durham and Echternach are characteristic of the complex story of the Northumbrian gospel-book. The chapter also deals with the beginnings of the vernacular Bible. The Latin Vulgate remained the official Bible of the English church from the Anglo-Saxon period until the Reformation, but the concept of the part-bible in the contemporary English vernacular was already established by the end of the tenth century.

The biblical manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon England

A certain enemy cut me off from life, robbed me of my mortal strength, then dipped me and dunked me in water, took me out again, and set me in the sun where I utterly lost the hairs that I had. Then the hard edge of a knife cut me, scraped clean of impurities. Fingers folded me, and the bird’s joy repeatedly made tracks across me with lucky droppings; across the burnished rim it swallowed dye from the tree, a measure of liquid, then stepped on to me again and journeyed with black tracks. Then a man clad me in protective boards, covered me with hide, adorned me with gold. Thereupon the wondrous work of smiths made me radiant, encased in filigree. As this famous Riddle from the Exeter Book of Old English poetry teasingly records, medieval books were made from sheets of parchment which were cut to size, folded and gathered into groups to form quires. The sheets were marked with prickings to guide the rulings, which in their turn guided the script. When the sheets had been written, rubricated and (if appropriate) decorated, the quires were finally sewn onto cords which were laced into wooden boards, to form a codex. Each stage of this process was subject to variations according to the time and place of manufacture, and to the nature and grade of the manuscript itself. The volume described in the Riddle was probably a gospel-book (as the text goes on to reveal): accordingly, its functional binding of wooden boards clad in leather was ornamented with a treasure cover of gold and filigree work. The same luxurious process is described in the Life of St Wilfrid (d. 709), who ‘ordered jewellers to make for [his gold-on-purple gospel-book] a casing fabricated entirely of the purest gold and [adorned] with the most precious gems’, and is alluded to in the colophon of the Lindisfarne Gospels: ‘AEthelwald … impressed [the book] on the outside and covered it, as he well knew how to do. And Billfrith the anchorite forged the ornaments which are on it on the outside and adorned it with gold and with gems and also with gilded-over silver – pure metal.

The material fabric of early British books

The books made by Insular monks and nuns during the earlier fifth century stand as monument to their contribution to the transmission of scripture, to the preservation of elements of the cultures of northern European prehistory and of the Graeco-Roman world, and to the transition from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Display scripts are a striking feature of Insular book production. The illuminated incipit page reached its zenith in the great Insular gospel books, wherein it formed an essential part of the programme of decoration. A successive fusion of Uncials and New Roman cursive would similarly give rise to fully developed half-Uncial as a more economical solution to the need for a legible, prestigious book script. The use of minuscule scripts also characterises the later members of the Southumbrian Tiberius group of manuscripts such as the Royal Prayerbook, the Book of Nunnaminster and the Book of Cerne.

Writing in the Insular world

Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript

There is mounting evidence that terrestrial arthropods are declining rapidly in many areas of the world. It is unclear whether freshwater invertebrates, which are key providers of ecosystem services, are also declining. We addressed this question by analysing a long‐term dataset of macroinvertebrate abundance collected from 2002 to 2019 across 5009 sampling sites in English rivers. Patterns varied markedly across taxonomic groups. Within trophic groups we detected increases in the abundance of carnivores by 19% and herbivores by 14.8%, while we estimated decomposers have declined by 21.7% in abundance since 2002. We also found heterogeneity in trends across rivers belonging to different typologies based on geological dominance and catchment altitude, with organic lowland rivers having generally higher rates of increase in abundance across taxa and trophic groups, with siliceous lowland rivers having the most declines. Our results reveal a complex picture of change in freshwater macroinvertebrate abundance between taxonomic groups, trophic levels and river typologies. Our analysis helps with identifying priority regions for action on potential environmental stressors where we discover macroinvertebrate abundance declines.

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Abundance trends for river macroinvertebrates vary across taxa, trophic group and river typology

r. d. fulk, robert e. bjork and john d. niles (eds.). Klaeber’s Beowulf, Fourth Edition.John D. Niles (ed.). Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition. Trans. by Seamus Heaney.

Kathryn Powell

Papers

Meditating on Men and Monsters: A Reconsideration of the Thematic Unity of the Beowulf Manuscript

Abundance trends for river macroinvertebrates vary across taxa, trophic group and river typology

r. d. fulk, robert e. bjork and john d. niles (eds.). Klaeber’s Beowulf, Fourth Edition.John D. Niles (ed.). Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition. Trans. by Seamus Heaney.