Alcuin, called also Albinus Flaccus, was born in Northumberland; he was the disciple of Archbishop Egbert, whom he succeeded in the charge of the famous school, which that prelate had opened at York. Alcuin was in all respects the most learned man of the age in which he lived; he was an orator, historian, poet, mathematician, and divine. The fame of his learning induced Charlemagne to invite him to his court; and by his assistance that Emperor, founded, enriched, and instructed, the universities of Tours and Paris. In 794 Alcuin was one of the fathers of the synod of Frankfort, and died at his abbey at Tours, in 804. In his epistle to Charlemagne he mentions with great respect his master Egbert, and the noble library which he had founded at York. Towards the latter end of the same century flourished our great king Alfred, who engaged the learned Grimbald, and other foreigners of distinguished abilities in his service.
Eadfrid, who was bishop of Lindisfarne in the year 698, was one of the most learned men of his time. He translated the gospels into latin, which work after his death was highly decorated by his successor with gold and jewels. Bilfrid, a hermit, illuminated it with various paintings and rich devices; and Adred a priest, interlined it with a Saxon version. Before each gospel is prefixed a painting of the evangelist who wrote it, and the opposite page is full of beautiful ornaments, enriched with various colours; then follows the commencement of the gospel, the first page of which is most elaborately ornamented with letters of a peculiar form, and very large, which displays at once the zeal of the writer, and the taste of the age in which the book was written.[[10]] This curious work is now among the Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum. It was lost in the sea during the removal of the body of St. Cuthbert in those troublesome times, about the year 876, when the Danes were laying waste the whole country, but it was afterwards found washed up on the shore without suffering any injury. (Hutchinson’s History of Durham, 1. p. 57.) It was under the patronage of the same learned prelate Eadfrid, that the Venerable Bede[[11]] wrote the life of St. Cuthbert.
The books which Fergus the second, king of Scotland, who assisted Alaric the Goth, had brought with him as a part of the plunder from Rome, had been deposited in the monastery in the island of Iona. From thence they were, by degrees, copied for the use of other monasteries; and besides these, other books were obtained afterwards by means of various journeys to Rome. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the monastery of Weremouth, and the friend of Archbishop Wilfrid, made no fewer than five journeys to Rome to purchase copies of books. These books became deposited in various monasteries. Some such were at Canterbury, where also were books that had been brought from Rome, both by Augustine and Theodore. And the letter of Aldhelm, the very person who founded the monastery of Malmesbury, containing an account of his studies, and progress at Canterbury by the help of such books, is one of the most curious fragments of antiquity. (Angl. Sacra. tom. 2. p. 6.)
The price of these books was at various times enormous. Aldfred, king of Northumberland, gave eight hides of land, that is, as much as eight ploughs could till, for one volume of cosmography; and on this occasion it perhaps ought not to be forgotten, that there is still preserved in the library of Hereford cathedral, an ancient map on parchment, for the illustration of cosmography as known at the period of its being drawn. In the reign of William the Conqueror books were extremely scarce. Grace, Countess of Anjou, paid for a collection of homilies, two hundred sheep, a quarter of wheat, another of rye, and a third of millet, besides a number of martin skins. (Kaimes’s Sketches, 1. 136.)
In these conventual Scriptoria were copied the writings of the fathers and the abstruse works of the first schoolmen; here also were copied little works of genius, sometimes the effusion of fancy and imagination. The fables of Æsop were so much in repute, that we are told king Alfred himself made a translation of them from the Greek. The fanciful devices on the friezes and mouldings of some of our ecclesiastical structures, which have an allusion to Æsop’s Fables, had their first origin amongst pious and ingenious persons, in the peaceful retirement of their conventual retreats. This remark is much confirmed by a curious observation which has been lately made, that even many of the fables themselves that now pass for Æsop’s, seem to have had their real invention and origin in the abodes of the religious. In a very curious memoir concerning the works of Mary, an Anglo-Norman poetess, born in France, who wrote in the French language in the reign of king Henry the third of England, and who among other things translated the fables of Æsop, it is made to appear that there were indeed but few of Æsop’s original fables in her collection, and even those she had borrowed entirely from England, and the greater part, from several allusions in them, evidently shew, that they must have been composed in monasteries, before her time. (See Hume’s Hist. of Eng. vol. 1. 4to. p. 68.—King’s Munimenta Ant. vol. 4. p. 113.—and Archæologia, vol. 13. p. 36-67.)
It is an interesting circumstance, deserving to be mentioned on this occasion, that before the time of Venerable Bede, there lived an Anglo-Saxon poet, of the name of Cædman, or Kedman, of the wondrous powers of whose mind Bede speaks in the highest terms, (Bede’s Eccles. Hist. book 4. ch. 24.) and says he sung of the creation of the world, of the origin of mankind, and of the whole history of the book of Genesis. He died about the year 680, and therefore must have been contemporary with Etheldreda, who founded the monastery of Ely. And it is a very curious fact, little known, that Lye, the author of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, translated this poem, and that therein it was found had been introduced, almost exactly, the same idea of the fallen angels, and even the peculiarity of the nine days falling, and of Satan’s assembling his Thanes, on their rousing themselves, which was afterwards introduced by Milton into his Paradise Lost. This account, Mr. King says, he received from Dr. Percy, bishop of Dromore, who had several manuscripts of Lye’s bequeathed to him; and who was well qualified to investigate such curious matters of ancient literature.
It should not be forgotten with regard to manuscripts, the productions of these industrious penmen in their Scriptoria, that king Alfred is said by the Saxon writers, to have first received his eagerness for erudition, in an age when he himself complained of the general ignorance even of the clergy, from his mother’s shewing him a book of Saxon poems, beautifully written, and illuminated, and promising to give it to which ever of her sons should soonest learn to read it.
Until the eleventh century, musical notes were expressed only by letters of the alphabet; and till the fourteenth century they were expressed only by large lozenge-shaped black dots or points, placed on different lines, one above another, and then first named ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, to which si was afterwards added; and they were all expressed without any distinction as to length of time; and without any such things as breves, semi-breves, minims, crotchets, or quavers, &c. The old psalters in many cathedral churches are found thus written; and in consequence of this it was, that the Scriptoria in some other places, as well as at Gloucester, are found so contrived, as to have long ranges of seats, or benches, one beyond another, for the copyists; so that a master or person standing at one end, and naming each note, it might quickly be copied out by all, naming it in succession from one end to the other. Hence the psalters were more easily copied than any other books, and it is not a little remarkable that in the library at Worcester, there is a copy of St. Matthew’s gospel, set to music throughout, with these sort of notes.
In foreign monasteries, the boys and novices were chiefly occupied in these labours, but the missals and bibles were ordered to be written by monks of mature age and discretion. The Scriptorium of St. Albans’s abbey was built by Abbot Paulin, a Norman, who ordered many volumes to be written there, about the year 1080. Archbishop Lanfranc furnished the copies. Estates were often granted for the support of the Scriptorium; that at St. Edmundsbury was endowed with two mills, and in the year 1171, the tithes of a rectory were appropriated to the cathedral convent of St. Swithin at Winchester, ad Libros transcribendos. Many instances of this species of benefaction occur from the tenth century. Nigel, in the year 1160, gave the monks of Ely two churches, ad libros faciendos.
This employment of copying manuscripts appears to have been diligently practised at Croyland; for Ingulphus relates, that when the library of that convent was burned in the year 1091, seven hundred volumes were consumed. Fifty-eight volumes were transcribed at Glastonbury, during the government of one abbot, about the year 1300. And in the library of this monastery, the richest in England, there were upwards of four hundred volumes in the year 1248. More than eighty books were thus transcribed for St. Alban’s abbey, by Abbot Whethamstede, who died about 1400. At the foundation of Winchester college, by William of Wykeham, about 1393, one or more transcribers were hired and employed by the founder to make books for the library. They transcribed and took their commons within the college, as appears by computations of expenses on their account now remaining.