THE SCRIPTORIUM:
The function of the scriptorium was to supply text-books for the school, service books for the church and monastic community, and works of a more general and ambitious nature for the library. Our knowledge of the internal life of the scriptorium is unfortunately very limited and is deduced almost entirely from an examination of the MSS. produced therein. It would seem that the scriptorium was not unlike a modern school-room in some respects. In silence the younger members of the monastic community and other students sat there writing out and multiplying books, sometimes from dictation, sometimes by copying. An invigilator sat there also to preserve silence and to act as task master. On the margins of the MSS. we sometimes find short fragmentary notes devoid of literary value, but of deep human interest as showing that unregenerate human nature had its opportunities even in a monastic scriptorium as much as in a modern school-room. These notes[281] are supposed to be fragments of conversations carried on sotto voce to evade the rule of silence and doubtlessly notes were scribbled surreptitiously to companions. Though all too few these vivid human touches add not a little to our knowledge of student life in those far off days.
The scribes made all the writing materials: tablets, vellum, ink, pens. We have shown that wax tablets were used in teaching writing. They were also used in teaching reading, and for such temporary purposes as taking notes of a sermon or lecture.[282] Adamnan writing in the seventh century mentions that he inscribed certain writings first on wax tablets and afterwards on vellum.[283] For memoranda a slate and pencil were also used, as we learn from the story of Cinnfaela the Learned. When he was at the school of Tuaim Drecain, now Tom Regan in Co. Cavan, he wrote down roughly on slates what he heard during the day, but at night he transferred the entries into a vellum book.[284] These tablets were made of long strips of wood and covered with beeswax. In shape they were sometimes like short swords.
The schools prepared their own vellum or parchment from the skins of goats, sheep, and calves. This parchment was usually finely polished, but sometimes it was hard and not well cleaned. The parchment prepared by the Irish scribes was much thicker than that used by the French from the seventh to the tenth century: thus we have an additional means whereby we can identify Irish MSS. on the Continent.[285]
The ink was made of carbon. It has been found to resist all the chemical tests for iron. The blackness of the ink even at the present day is quite remarkable. The writing of the Book of Armagh, for instance, is as black as if it were written yesterday.[286]
The ink was very likely made of lampblack, or possibly of fish bone black.[287] When we come to describe the illuminated MSS. which remain to attest the artistic skill of the monastic scribes we shall see that not only were they experts at making a superior quality of ink but, what is still more remarkable, they manufactured a large variety of pigments which even at the present day have lost little of their original brilliancy after a lapse of one thousand years.