The amount of illumination in the existing manuscripts varies, but the pages chosen for illuminating are nearly always the same. In the Book of Kells the illuminations consist of three portraits of the Evangelists, three scenes from the life of Christ, three combined symbols of the four Evangelists, eight pages of the Eusebian canons, and many
initials. The Book of Durham contains four portraits of the Evangelists, six initial pages, one ornamental page before each Gospel, and before St. Jerome’s Epistle, and eight pages of the Eusebian canons. The Book of Durrow has sixteen illuminated pages: four of the symbols of the Evangelists, six pages of initials, one ornamental page at the frontispiece, one before the letter of St. Jerome, and one before each Gospel.
The oldest Irish manuscript in existence is probably the Domnach Airgrid, or manuscript of the Silver Shrine, also called St. Patrick’s Gospels. Dr. Petrie believed the Domnach to be the identical reliquary given by St. Patrick to St. Mac Cairthinn, when the latter was put in charge of the see of Clogher, in the fifth century. “As a manuscript copy of the Gospels apparently of that early age is found with it, there is every reason to believe it to be that identical one for which the box was originally made.”[44] But both case and manuscript are now held to be somewhat later in date. Another very early manuscript is the sixth century fragment of fifty-eight leaves of a Latin Psalter, styled the Cathach or “Battler.” For centuries this fragment has been preserved in a beautiful case as a relic of Columba; as, indeed, the actual cause of the dispute between Columba and Finnian of Moville.
§ V
Two features of book-economy, although not peculiar to Ireland, are rarely met with outside that country. The religious used satchels or wallets to carry their books about with them. We are told Patrick once met a party of clerics and gillies with books in their girdles; and he gave them the hide he had sat and slept on for twenty years to make a wallet.[45] Columba is said to have made satchels, and to have blessed them. When these satchels were not carried they were hung upon pegs set in the wall of the cell or the church or the tower where they were preserved.[46] We have already noted the legend which tells how all the satchels in Ireland slipped off their pegs when Longarad died. A modern writer visiting the Abyssinian convent of Souriani has seen a room which, when we remember the connection between Egyptian and Celtic monachism, we cannot help thinking must closely resemble an ancient Irish cell.[47] In the room the disposition of the manuscripts was very original. “A wooden shelf was carried in the Egyptian style round the walls, at the height of the top of the door.... Underneath the shelf various long wooden pegs projected from the wall; they were each about a foot and a half long, and on them hung the Abyssinian manuscripts, of which this curious library was entirely composed. The books of Abyssinia are ... enclosed in a case tied up with leathern thongs; to this case is attached a strap for the convenience of carrying the volume over the shoulders, and by these straps the books were hung to the wooden pegs, three or four on a peg, or more if the books were small; their usual size was that of a small, very thick quarto. The appearance of the room, fitted up in this style, together with the presence of long staves, such as the monks of all the Oriental churches lean upon at the time of prayer, resembled less a library than a barrack or guardroom, where the soldiers had hung their knapsacks and cartridge boxes against the wall.” The few old Irish satchels remaining are black with age, and the characteristic decoration of diagonal lines and interlaced markings is nearly worn away. Two of them are preserved in England and Ireland: those of the Book of Armagh, in Trinity College, Dublin, and of the Irish Missal in Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The wallet at Oxford looks much like a modern schoolboy’s satchel; leather straps are fixed to it, by which it was slung round the neck. The Armagh wallet is made of one piece of leather, folded to form a case a foot long, a little more than a foot broad, and two and a half inches thick. The Book of Armagh does not fit it properly. Interlaced work and zoömorphs decorate the leather. Remains of rough straps are still attached to the sides.