The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [47]
In England there were carols at Bury St Edmunds, Evesham, Abingdon, St Augustine’s in Canterbury, and at Durham, where there were eleven windows along the north wall, each accommodating three carols.
As they copied, the monks would whisper the words to themselves, and knowledge would sound in the cold, vaulted air. The technique was painstakingly slow. Each monk prepared his sheet of animal skin. The finest was calf skin, or vellum. First the skin was smoothed with a pumice stone and a scraper (plana). It was then softened with a crayon, folded four times, and placed on the vertical desk in front of the copyist. To write, he used black ink and a bird-feather quill pen, which he sharpened when blunt with a penknife.
Each monk sat on a stool, copying from the original manuscript placed on a reading frame above his desk. Horizontal lines of tiny holes were pricked across the page with an awl or a small spiked wheel. There were no page numbers as we know them, but at the bottom right-hand corner of the ‘quaternion’, as the folded page was called, was the number of the quaternion and of its folded page: 9i, 9ii, etc. Monks seldom completed more than one text each year. The process was immensely slow and fatiguing.
The act of copying also had liturgical significance. A twelfth-century sermon on the subject, delivered to the copyists of Durham Cathedral, stated:
You write with the pen of memory on the parchment of pure conscience, scraped by the knife of divine fear, smoothed by the pumice of heavenly desires, and whitened by the chalk of holy thoughts. The ruler is the will of God. The split nib is the joint love of God and our neighbour. Coloured inks are heavenly grace. The exemplar is the life of Christ.
The copyist would try to reproduce on the parchment exactly what he saw on the original. This was often extremely difficult to decipher, particularly if, as was often the case, it had been penned during times of disturbance or famine, when standards of writing and scholarship were low. Also, if the writer of the original had been in a hurry he would have used abbreviations, which might take much time and effort to decipher. Above all, if the original had been written to dictation there would often be errors of transmission.
The most famous English carols were at St Peter’s, the Benedictine abbey in Gloucester, now the cathedral. Between 1370 and 1412, twenty carved stone carols were built; each was 4 feet wide, 1 foot 7 inches deep and 6 feet 9 inches high, and had two windows.
An early fifteenth-century copyist at work. The text to be copied is on the upper lectern. The monk has ruled off the pages, and in his left hand he holds the scraper, used to erase errors.
Boredom led monks to add their own touches to the margins of manuscripts. Here, an eleventh-century Cistercian scribe depicts the manual work demanded of him by the Order.
The copyist usually identified a word by its sound. The carols would be filled with monks mouthing and mumbling, often getting the spelling of a word wrong—writing ‘er’ for ‘ar’, for instance—because of the difference between their pronunciation and that of the original writer. Spelling was a matter for the individual, while punctuation consisted only of a dash or a dot.
The oral ‘chewing’ of the words had a dual purpose. The act of prayer was closely associated with reading aloud. The words written in a prayer would therefore take on added significance through being spoken. The reading of holy text was more a matter of savouring divine wisdom than of seeking information. Reading was almost an act of meditation. It was said of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, that ‘without resting, his mouth ruminated the sacred words.’ And in the 1090s St Anselm wrote about the act of reading: ‘taste the goodness of your Redeemer… chew the honeycomb of his words, suck their flavour which is sweeter than honey, swallow their wholesome sweetness; chew by thinking, suck by understanding, swallow by loving and rejoicing.’
Kings and noblemen