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The title page of the great eighth-century Irish Book of Kells, so rare and richly illustrated that it was venerated as an object in its own right. The fantastical style shows the influence of the powerful, heathen Germano-British art arriving in Ireland at the time.

All writing held a kind of magic quality for the reader, most of all that of the holy texts. The feeling was that the light of God shone on the reader through ‘the letters’ veil’. Reading was a physical act of spiritual exhilaration, in which the meaning of the words came like an illumination, much as light came through stained glass.

Books were, in a sense, miraculous objects. After the growth of the European economy in the early fifteenth century, demand grew steadily for these wonder-working texts: Books of Hours, Psalters and Scriptures. Of course the great books, like the Psalter of Eadwine of Canterbury and the Book of Kells in Ireland, were relics in their own right. Bound in leather and encrusted with precious jewels, embellished with magnificently illuminated letters to help the reader to find his place, these masterpieces were kept in cathedral treasuries along with the plate and the holy vessels. Such writing was for God’s eyes, not for communicating everyday things to common men.

The problem with these great works, whose creation involved immense, time-consuming acts of worship, was that not only were they filled with errors, but very often the entire texts were irretrievably lost because there was no way of finding them once they had been written and placed in the monastery or church. There was no filing system.

First of all it was very hard to tell what the name of the author might be, or indeed what the subject of the work was. For example, a manuscript entitled Sermones Bonaventurae could be any one of the following:

Sermons composed by St Bonaventure of Fidenza

Sermons composed by somebody called Bonaventure

Sermons copied by a Bonaventure

Sermons copied by somebody from a church of St Bonaventure

Sermons preached by a Bonaventure

Sermons that belonged to a Bonaventure

Sermons that belonged to a church of St Bonaventure

Sermons by various people of whom the first or most important was somebody called Bonaventure.

Where would such a book be filed?

In spite of this rather haphazard attitude to placement, the book itself was an extremely rare and valuable object. Warnings such as this were often added to the text: ‘Whoever steals this book let him die the death; let him be frizzled in a pan; may the falling sickness rage within him; may he be broken on a wheel and be hanged.rsquo;

Even if it were known in which church or monastery a text was, retrieval might involve a long and risky journey, which might even then end in failure because the book was lost within the library through lack of cataloguing. Reference material of all kinds was therefore at a premium. In spite of the scarcity of information, however, it was still not considered necessary to corroborate the accuracy of information contained in a text by comparison with another.

For this reason there was no concept of history; there were only chivalrous romances and chronicles based on widely differing monastic views of what had happened in the world beyond the community’s walls. There was no geography, no natural history and no science, because there could be no sure confirmation of the data upon which such subjects would rely. This absence of proven fact bothered few people. Life was depicted by the medieval Christian Church as ephemeral and irrelevant to salvation. The only true reality lay in the mind of God, who knew all that needed to be known and whose reasons were inscrutable.

Into this alien world of memorising, hearsay and fantasy, the pressure for rational, factual information began to come first from the traders. For centuries they had travelled the roads, keeping their accounts by the use of tally sticks. The word ‘tally