Gilded Page by Mary Wellesley
A pessimistic person might dwell on the relative rarity of surviving texts from the ancient and early medieval world, but a more optimistic person might be amazed that so much material still exists at all. Before the invention of the printing press, texts had to be copied by hand, and the natural cycles of the popularity of genre, style, and subjects of literature that we still see today were, of course, present in earlier centuries. Outside of a few major works that never lost popularity over a wide area, the survival of many texts owes as much to luck as the diligence of monks and curators who copied and recopied them. Mary Wellesley’s “The Gilded Page” describes the close calls as well as the hard work of book lovers over the centuries which have allowed us to view and read some of the most famous works of art and literature in British history.
Context
The sheer effort it took to produce a manuscript is amazing. Before the spread of paper in the fourteenth century, parchment made from sheep or calves’ skin was used. Then the pages were cut and lined. The actual copying of the script could be done at a rate of about two hundred lines in a day. After being checked for errors, they would be decorated and bound. A high-status manuscript’s decoration could take decades to complete. Wellesley describes the Winchester Bible as an example of how an expensive manuscript could be produced. After 15 years of work, it remained unfinished and still contains instructions on further steps to be taken, describing what colors should be used, the layouts of pictures to be drawn, etc. Just the large block of gilded lettering that began a page required several steps. The initial drawing in lead would be overlaid with ink to prevent bleeding, then a layer of plaster to hold the gold leaf would be applied, and the gold burnished, and finally painted figures, Moses killing an Egyptian for example. The names of the people who produced this work are unknown, but scholars have been able to differentiate craftsmen with their unique style, such as “the Master of the Morgan Leaf” and “the Master of the Leaping Figures” in its pages.
Of course, many manuscripts were not produced as ceremonial centerpieces as the Winchester Bible was. More humble secular works were produced and copied over the centuries, often ending up jumbled together seemingly at random in volumes across England. What survived was often at the whim of whatever a scribe chose, or as a collection prepared for a particular sponsor. Miscellaneous manuscripts could contain anything from a dialogue on falconry to a prescription to improve eyesight. To show just how important a scribe’s choices could be to our understanding of a text, Wellesley describes a particular collection of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which has been edited and rearranged to highlight the work’s religious and anti-Semitic content. Had these been the only versions of the tales to survive, without their full context, we would have a completely different outlook on Chaucer’s work than we now have.
Fire At the Library of Ashburnham House
Late in the night of October 23, 1731, a fire broke out in the apartments below the library of the appropriately named Ashburnham House. Ironically, this location had been chosen to store the Cotton Library collection of rare manuscripts after its previous home had been deemed too susceptible to fire. It was also the home of the Royal Collection of Manuscripts. At the time of the fire, the library contained two original copies of the Magna Carta, the manuscript containing “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the only Beowulf manuscript in existence.
The Effort To Save the Texts
Wellesley describes the frantic efforts to save as much as possible in difficult conditions. The books were locked in cases in a long narrow room, with windows on each end through which the librarians began throwing the books. The early efforts were to preserve state papers, leaving medieval manuscripts to burn longer. Water damage from the attempts to douse the flames was enormous. Hundreds of volumes were either totally destroyed, or heavily spoiled. The next few days were spent gathering pages littering the yard, some of which still exist as unreadable clumps of refuse.
Aftermath
Luckily, some of the texts which were destroyed, such as the Life of Alfred the Great by the monk Asser, had been copied long before the fire. Other less famous texts in the same volume were not so lucky and were lost forever. The text of Beowulf, the greatest poem Of the Anglo-Saxon era, was signed but not destroyed. It did not then have the reputation it has today however, and it fell to a Danish scholar Grimur Thorkelin to commission two transcriptions of the text fifty years later, preserving many words that are today unreadable in the Cotton manuscript. Unfortunately for Thorkelin, his work was largely destroyed during the Napoleonic wars when the British fleet bombarded Copenhagen in 1807 and destroyed his home. It took another 8 years for him to finally produce the first printed edition of Beowulf, starting its journey to become a well-known classic of world literature.
Final Thoughts
In a world of mass media, it is difficult today to conceive how a single accident could nearly wipe out so much important literature, but it has happened many times throughout history. The fire became national news and led to legislation to properly preserve these priceless artifacts, leading eventually to the creation of the British Museum in 1753.
Wellesley provides many amusing anecdotes about the survival or discovery of forgotten works. A search in the attic of an old house for ping pong balls in 1934 led to the discovery of the lost 14th century “Book of Margery Kempe,” the first autobiography written in English. Henry the 8’ths personal notations in his book of Psalms reveal his fascination with King David and worries about his advancing age. But mostly this book reminds us of how contingent on luck and the hard work of others our connection to the past really is.
