Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

S. Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia.

One of the earliest of the monks of the North of Europe whose life was associated with scholarship and intellectual influence, was S. Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia, whose life covered the term between the years 521 and 597. Columba belongs to the list of Irish saints, although the larger portion of his life’s work was done in Scotland. Before he had reached the age of twenty-five, he had presided over the foundation of no less than twenty-seven monasteries in Ireland, the oldest of which were Darrow and Derry; the latter, having long been the seat of a great Catholic bishopric, became, under its modern name of Londonderry, the bulwark of the Protestant contest against the efforts of the last of the Stuart kings.

The texts have been preserved of a number of songs ascribed to Columba, and, whether or not these verses were really the work of the monk, the tradition that he was the first of the Irish poets doubtless has foundation. In the time of Columba, the Irish monasteries already possessed texts in greater quantity than could be found in the monasteries of Scotland or England, but even in Ireland manuscripts were rare and costly, and were preserved with jealous care in the monastic libraries. Not only was very great value put upon these volumes, but they were even supposed to possess the emotions and the passions of living beings. Columba was himself a collector of manuscripts, and his biography by O’Donnell attributes to him the laborious feat of having transcribed with his own hand three hundred copies of the Psalter. According to one of the stories, Columba journeyed to Ossory in the south-west to visit a holy and very learned recluse, a doctor of laws and philosophy, named Longarad. Columba asked leave to examine the doctor’s books, and when the old man refused, the monk burst out in an imprecation: “May thy books no longer do thee any good, neither to them who come after thee, since thou takest occasion by them to show thine inhospitality.” The curse was heard, and after Longarad died, his books became unintelligible. An author of the ninth century says that the books still existed, but that no man could read them.[51]

Another story speaks of Columba’s undertaking, while visiting his ancient master Finnian, to make a clandestine and hurried copy of the abbot’s Psalter. He shut himself up at night in the church where the Psalter was deposited, and the light needed for his nocturnal work radiated from his left hand while he wrote with the right. A curious wanderer, passing the church, was attracted by the singular light, and looked in through the keyhole, and while his face was pressed against the door his eye was suddenly torn out by a crane which was roosting in the church. The wanderer went with his story to the abbot, and Finnian, indignant at what he considered to be a theft, claimed from Columba the copy which the monk had prepared, contending that a copy made without permission ought to belong to the owner of the original, on the ground that the transcript is the offspring of the original work. As far as I have been able to ascertain, this is the first instance which occurs in the history of European literature of a contention for copyright. Columba refused to give up his manuscript, and the question was referred to King Diarmid, or Dermott, in the palace at Tara. The King’s judgment was given in a rustic phrase which has passed into a proverb in Ireland: “To every cow her calf [le gach boin a boinin], and consequently to every book its copy.”[52]

Columba protested loudly, and threatened the King with vengeance. He retired to his own province chanting the song of trust, the text of which has been preserved and which is sacred as one of the most authentic relics of the ancient Irish tongue. He succeeded in arousing against the King the great and powerful clans of his relatives and friends, and after a fierce struggle the King was overcome and was obliged to take refuge at Tara.

The manuscript which had been the object of this strange conflict of copyright, a conflict which developed into a civil war, was afterwards venerated as a kind of national military and religious palladium. Under the name of Cathac, or “the fighter,” the Latin Psalter said to have been transcribed by Columba was enshrined in the base of a portable altar as the national relic of the O’Donnell clan. It was preserved for 1300 years in the O’Donnell family, and as late as 1867, belonged to a baronet of that name, who placed it on exhibition in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. O’Curry prints a fac-simile of a fragment of the manuscript, which he believes to be in the hand-writing of S. Columba, and O’Curry and Reeves are in accord in the opinion that the famous copy of the Gospels known as the “Book of Kells” is also the work of the poet monk.[53]

After the successful issue of his contest with Finnian, S. Columba journeyed through the land, making a kind of expiatory pilgrimage for the purpose of atoning for the bloodshed of which he had been the cause. He went for counsel to his soul-friend or confessor, S. Laisren. The saint bade him as a penance leave Ireland and go and win souls for Christ, as many as the lives that had been lost in the battle of Culdreimhne, and never again look upon his native land. He finally took up his abode in the desolate little island of Iona, on the coast of Scotland. Other refugees were attracted to the island by the fame of the saint, and there finally came into existence on the barren rocks a great monastery which for centuries exercised throughout Britain and North Europe a wide-spread influence in behalf of higher Christianity and of intellectual life.

From Iona and its associated monasteries of Ireland and Scotland came scholarly teachers to France and Germany whose influence was important in giving a new direction to the work of later generations of monks. Among the Continental monasteries in which was developed through such influence a higher range of scholarly activity, were Luxeuil (in the Vosges Mountains), Corbie (on the Somme), Bobbio (in Lombardy), and St. Gall (in Switzerland). Wattenbach says that, notwithstanding their scholarly knowledge, these Scotch monks were wild and careless in their orthography. As an example of the barbarity of style and of form, he quotes a manuscript of the date of 750 (written during the rule of Pepin).

A number of years later, when, through the monks of Iona and under the general direction of S. Columba, a number of monasteries had been founded throughout Scotland, Columba had occasion to plead before the Parliament of Drumceitt in behalf of the Bards, who might be called the authors of their time, and with whom the poet monk had a keen personal sympathy. The Bards of Ireland and Britain were at once the poets, the genealogists, the historians, and the musicians of their countries, and their position and their influence constituted a very characteristic feature of Celtic life in the centuries between 500 and 800.

The Irish nation, always enamoured of its traditions, its fabulous antiquity, and its local glories, regarded with ardent sympathy the men who could clothe in a poetic dress all the law and the superstitions of the past, and who could give literary form and force to the passions and the interests of the present. The Bards were divided into three orders: The Fileas, who sang of religion and war; the Brehons, whose name is associated with the ancient laws of the country which they versified and recited; and the Seanachies, who enshrined in verse the national history and antiquities, and, above all, the genealogies and the prerogatives of the ancient families who were regarded as especially representative of the national and warlike passions of the Irish people.[54]

The great influence and power enjoyed by the Bards had naturally produced not a few abuses, and at the time of the Parliament of Drumceitt their popularity had suffered and a violent opposition had been raised against them. They were charged with insolence and with greed, and they were particularly censured for having made a traffic and a trade of their poetry, a charge which recalls some of the criticisms of classic times.

The enmities raised against them had gathered so much force that King Aedh found himself compelled to propose to the Assembly of Drumceitt the abolition of the Order and the abandonment, or, as one authority suggests, the massacre of the Bards. It would appear as if Ireland had been suffering from an excess of poetic utterances and felt that some revolutionary methods were required in order to restore to the land quiet and peace. Montalembert is of opinion that the clergy did not take any part in the prosecution of a class which they might, not unnaturally, have regarded as their rivals. The Bards had, however, for the most part kept in friendly relations with the bishops, monks, and saints, and each monastery, like each prince and lord, possessed a Bard (who in later years became an annalist) whose chief office it was to sing the glory and record the history of the community.

Nevertheless, the Bards were certainly, as a body, a residuum of the paganism that had been so recently supplanted, and it is probable that the Church, if not joining in the onslaught upon their body, was not prepared to take any active part in their defence. It seems as if the decision of the Assembly, under the influence of King Aedh, would certainly have been adverse to the poets. It was Columba, the poet monk, who saved them. He, who was born a poet and who, to the last day of his life, remained a poet, interceded for the Bards with such eloquence and earnestness that his plea had to be listened to. He claimed that the general exile of the poets would be the death of a venerated antiquity and of a literature which was a part of the country’s life. “The bright corn must not be burned,” he said, “because of the weeds that mingled with it.”[55] Influenced by his impassioned plea, the Assembly yielded at length, under the condition that the number of Bards should be henceforth limited and that the Order should be placed under certain rules to be framed by Columba himself. Thus poetry was to continue to exist, but it was not to be allowed to oppress the community with its redundance.

It is doubtless the case that one reason for the exceptional fame of Columba and the large amount of legendary detail that has been preserved of his achievements, was this great service that he had rendered to the poets of his time. They showed their gratitude by exalting his glory in numberless songs and recitals, and it is chiefly from these that has been made up the narrative of the saint’s life. Another result of this intervention on the part of the monk for the protection of the poets was a still closer association between the Church and the literary spirit of the age. All antagonism between the religious ideal and the influence of the poetry of the Bards seems from this time to have disappeared. The songs of the Bards were no longer in any measure devoted to the cause of paganism, but music and poetry became closely identified with the ideals of the Church and with the work of the monasteries. The Church had preserved the poets, and poetry became the faithful handmaid of the Church.