2 - The material fabric of early British books

Summary

A certain enemy cut me off from life, robbed me of my mortal strength, then dipped me and dunked me in water, took me out again, and set me in the sun where I utterly lost the hairs that I had. Then the hard edge of a knife cut me, scraped clean of impurities. Fingers folded me, and the bird’s joy repeatedly made tracks across me with lucky droppings; across the burnished rim it swallowed dye from the tree, a measure of liquid, then stepped on to me again and journeyed with black tracks. Then a man clad me in protective boards, covered me with hide, adorned me with gold. Thereupon the wondrous work of smiths made me radiant, encased in filigree.

As this famous Riddle from the Exeter Book of Old English poetry teasingly records, medieval books were made from sheets of parchment which were cut to size, folded and gathered into groups to form quires. The sheets were marked with prickings to guide the rulings, which in their turn guided the script. When the sheets had been written, rubricated and (if appropriate) decorated, the quires were finally sewn onto cords which were laced into wooden boards, to form a codex. Each stage of this process was subject to variations according to the time and place of manufacture, and to the nature and grade of the manuscript itself. The volume described in the Riddle was probably a gospel-book (as the text goes on to reveal): accordingly, its functional binding of wooden boards clad in leather was ornamented with a treasure cover of gold and filigree work. The same luxurious process is described in the Life of St Wilfrid (d. 709), who ‘ordered jewellers to make for [his gold-on-purple gospel-book] a casing fabricated entirely of the purest gold and [adorned] with the most precious gems’, and is alluded to in the colophon of the Lindisfarne Gospels: ‘Æthelwald … impressed [the book] on the outside and covered it, as he well knew how to do. And Billfrith the anchorite forged the ornaments which are on it on the outside and adorned it with gold and with gems and also with gilded-over silver – pure metal.