Palæography / Notes upon the History of Writing and the Medieval Art of Illumination

by Bernard Quaritch

Writing in Italy during the first five centuries of the Christian era

We have not as full a knowledge as could be wished for of the ordinary styles of writing under the Roman empire. The books of the fourth and fifth centuries which are extant show that calligraphy was then flourishing in great splendour, so far as capitals and uncials were concerned; and the coins and inscriptions of the three preceding centuries show us Roman capitals at their best. That rustic capitals were used in the first century is proved by the Herculanean remains, and that the fashion of writing in square capitals, rustic capitals, and uncials was still practised in Italy down to the eighth century, we have sufficient grounds for knowing. But as to the style of handwriting used in books of which editions of perhaps a few hundred copies were issued—such, for example, as the edition of his own epigrams which Martial found at Lyons—we can only form conjectures. The semi-uncials of the fifth and sixth centuries, which grew into the minuscules of the seventh and eighth, must have been as much needed in the first century as the sixth, but there is no trace of them. The Roman cursive hand, upright or backsloped, that appears in the few extant tablets and wall-inscriptions of the first and second centuries, would have been too difficult for the readers who bought books to enjoy them, and would assuredly have served as an obstacle to their sale. It resembles rather the charter hand of later days than the minuscule writing of books, but the letters are unconnected, and there is no trace of any attempt at neatness. It is indeed almost illegible, without slow and painful decipherment. One striking peculiarity is the b, which has frequently the shape of d, a form that was retained in the official diplomatic hand of the fifth century. Such as it was, however, the cursive hand would have had considerable influence in shaping the semi-uncial or minuscule writing, which must have existed before it was adopted by the Irish in the fifth century and most other barbarians in the sixth. That semi-uncial, although we find no examples of its use in the empire before the end of the fifth century, had evidently been the immediate parent of the first Irish, which only differs from it in the superior evenness and regularity of the latter. It included the g, r, s, t, which are usually looked upon as special and characteristic letters of the Irish and Anglo-Saxon alphabet.

After the fifth century Italy ceased to be entirely Roman. In Rome itself, and in the region subject to the Popes, the production of fine manuscripts of the old style in capitals and uncials still went on, sometimes written in gold and on purple vellum; and the modified cursive hand above referred was applied to the writing of books as well as the writing of despatches. When this custom began is just what we should like to know, because it would give us the true origin of all modern minuscule writing or printing. A specimen, dating from the seventh century, is given in the Palæographical Society's facsimiles, which is clearly the type that was followed and improved upon in Central France, in the Caroline period. Carelessly written as it seems, it indicates that a considerable length of time had elapsed since the pen had been trained to form alternate light and heavy strokes, and to give to the curves of the letters an agreeable roundness, which was wholly missing in the earlier Roman cursive. It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that such writing was used in books long before the arrival of the fifth century; but there is no proof accessible.

The British Isles during the Roman period

It would have been correct enough to bracket Britain along with Spain and Gaul in a preceding paragraph, but we cannot venture to claim for this country any knowledge of writing before the arrival of the Romans. It is true that a great part of the south of the island was Gaulish, and that the Gauls of Gaul, who knew how to write, were in intimate relations with the Britons. Britania was probably a land of Celtiberian population like Spain, but without such traditions as the Turdetani. It was Romanised very effectively all over the south, and with the Latin language the people used Latin letters like their fellows in Gaul and Spain. Like other Roman citizens, the Britons became Christians, underwent subjugation by pagan barbarians, and lost their lives or their Latinity, those who escaped massacre being absorbed by the invaders. So far as writing is concerned, they have left nothing beyond some lapidar inscriptions; but these and whatever else they produced in the form of MSS. during the first four centuries were no doubt as wholly Roman as anything of the kind in Italy.

At so short a distance from the shores of Roman Britain, it is not likely that the Irish remained letterless till the fifth century of the Christian era. It is almost certain that the labours of St. Patrick (about the middle of that century) were but complementary to those of earlier missionaries; and that the adoption of the Roman alphabet in Ireland may be dated from the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. The consummate ornamental beauty of the MSS. executed in Ireland during the seventh century, and the testimony given by St. Adamnan (writing about A.D. 670) to the expertness of St. Columba as a calligrapher (about 550) tend to prove that the art had been practised for a long time before it attained to such excellence. The particular merit of the Irish is that they seem to have developed (out of Roman semi-uncials) a handsome minuscule form of writing earlier than any other people. The cursive of the Romans had always been an ugly and ill-decipherable script; and it was only in the seventh century that even the Italians, under barbarian pressure, evolved a fairly good readable minuscule. The minuscules of Gaul and Western Germany, called Merowingian, were still in a formless and primitive rudeness at the time when the Irish had already attained the elegance of practised penmanship.

The Goths have next to be mentioned, as they and the Irish were the only two barbarian nations that adopted the Græco-Roman alphabet before the break-up of the Roman empire.

The Goths and Germans

The people who in the fourth century after Christ called themselves Gut-thiuda, i.e. Goth-people, had been for many centuries the most easterly branch of the Germanic race. Down at least to the second century B.C. their tribes occupied the regions bordering on the Vistula and the Dniester, extending from the Bay of Dantzig to the Black Sea. At the north-western end of the line they were in the time of Tacitus known as Guthones; those at the other end were called Bastarnæ by Polybius and Strabo, and recognised as Germans. The latter people were the first of their race to become acquainted with civilisation. The amber-trade was already in the time of Herodotus a vigorous traffic, carried on between the Baltic and the Greek settlements on the Euxine. It passed through the lands of the Guthones and the Bastarnæ, and led undoubtedly to the growth of the form of notation called Runes. The Runic alphabet, inscriptions in which are numerous in Scandinavia, was evidently deformed from the Greek, and must have originated about the Dniester some five or six centuries before Christ. As time went on, that alphabet naturally drifted further and further north; the Goths and Germans, nearest to the Greeks, having, of course, less need of it according as their knowledge increased. From the shores of the Baltic it was carried into Scandinavia, and became the earliest form of writing in Northern Europe. Mr. George Stephens claims for the oldest of the extant Norse Runes an antiquity exceeding that of our era, but a more moderate Scandinavian writer sets the earliest date at about A.D. 300. In any case, it must be allowed that some form of writing was obtained by Gothic tribes from Greek traders before the time of Christ, and that it afterwards found a home in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The name of Runes is equivalent to that of ciphers or riddles or mysteries, and we may infer that its real origin was in the cutting of strokes to express numbers. Runic letters never reached the pen-and-ink stage of other alphabets, and their records are hardly more than inscriptions upon tombstones. For that and similar purposes they continued to be occasionally employed, both in England and Scandinavia, long after the use of Roman or modified Roman letters had been established in all countries. The singular variations in form and number and value between runes of different dates and different places, are easily accounted for by the circumstance that there can have been no continuous practise of such inscriptions in any country in which Christianity had already established a simpler script.

Runes do not seem to have come into use among the Western Germans, that is, the tribes which occupied the region which we now call Germany. Hrabanus Maurus, in the tenth century, wrote about the runes of the Marcomanni, and gave figures of them. This has led German writers to assert the existence of Runic letters among the Suevi in the early days of the Roman empire; but Hrabanus adds to "Marcomanni" the gloss "quos nos Northmannos vocamus." His Marcomanni were not the Marchmen of the Roman period. Bede is also said to have formulated a list of the runes of the Northmen. One reason which retarded the educational advancement of the Western Germans was that they never came into contact with the Romans till the beginning of the first century B.C., and even then only for a short time, in the invasion of the republic by the Cimbri and Teutones. They were shut away from the Roman frontiers by the buffer states of Celtic countries, and it was only after the conquest of Gaul, Rhætia, and Noricum that the Romans came into continuous conflict with Marcomanni and Suevi. It was Cæsar who first made the name of Germani historical, and Tacitus who invented Germania as the name of the country.