The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are by Michael Pye Page A

wrote to the Abbess Eadburga on his
     mission to convert Frisia, asking her for a truly showy book, ‘a copy written in
     gold’ of the Epistles of Peter so as ‘to impress honour and reverence for
     the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach’. 39 His
     other need, with age, was for clarity. He asked the Bishop of Winchester for a
     particular copy of the Prophets that he knew was written out clearly, because
     ‘with my fading sight, I cannot read well writing which is small and filled with
     abbreviations’. 40
    His books were written in an unbroken
     caterpillar of letters, nothing to separate the words, and they were meant to be read
     out loud,which required a reader who could
     make words and sense out of the string of letters on the page, and an audience used to
     hearing Latin. Many other peoples in Western Europe spoke a version of Latin, and they
     could understand the real old thing, but the Irish spoke a very different language; when
     a text was read out loud it was entirely different from daily talk and it gave them no
     clues to its meaning. They wanted words for the eye, not the ear. They wanted to see the
     form of the words clearly so they could translate their meaning, and therefore they
     began to put spaces between the words. Then they introduced their most brilliant
     invention: punctuation. Not only were the words distinct on the page: it was also clear
     where an idea stopped or paused or started. 41
    Silent, individual reading now became much
     easier. It had always been a way to meditate on the meaning of a book, and understand it
     better, right back to the fourth-century St Ambrose, who was notorious for reading
     silently even when he had visitors. Now the habit could spread. New monastic rules
     punished anyone who read aloud, but just under their breath so as not to seem
     old-fashioned; they spoiled the quiet reading for everyone else. 42
    Books for reading could be written out
     quickly and plainly: they were books for use. The Irish scribes trained Anglo-Saxon
     scribes. The first Christian missionaries to England had had to send for their books
     from Gaul or Rome, but in Bede’s time their libraries were being sent to Gaul to
     be copied. Bede, Boniface and the less famous Tatwine were all copied in northern
     France, in the monastery at Corbie. 43 The most careful and solid text of
     Jerome’s Vulgate Bible was written out at Jarrow and Wearmouth and Lindisfarne,
     based on a manuscript from Naples; it rapidly became the standard version in all
     Northern Europe. 44 By the seventh century there were already significant libraries in
     England. The Anglo-Saxons went out to found schools across the Germanic lands, and they
     became missionaries for words: the scholar Alcuin learned the new writing techniques in
     York and then took them over the sea to Charlemagne’s court in the 780s. He
     promoted a new idea: ‘the close study of letters’. 45
    Anglo-Saxon scribes, too, were on the move,
     and not just with the various missions. They taught the court of Charlemagne the newidea of a library which should be well
     stocked with books and well organized for study. 46 Charlemagne’s held historical
     books and ‘the doings of the ancients’, which were read aloud in the
     king’s presence, along with Charlemagne’s favourite, the works of St
     Augustine. When Alcuin was away from the court and wanted a copy of Pliny’s
Historia naturalis
, he asked to have it sent to him. On another occasion he
     wrote simply to ask someone to look something up in the bookchests of the court for him.
     This taste for books and the production of manuscripts caught on. 47 Well into the
     ninth century, Anglo-Saxons were still crossing the sea to write in German monasteries,
     long after the first waves of missionary work. 48 Some of the books they wrote were
     lovely and even spectacular, but most were portable information. With separate words and
     clear marks of