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

where ideas began and ended, anyone could read in her own time for her
     own reasons. 49
    People wanted to read Bede. Anglo-Saxons
     overseas wanted his account of Saxon triumphs. The growth of the English Church inspired
     a wide audience as English missionaries worked to convert the Frisians and the Germans.
     By the ninth century, the books reached St Gallen on what is now the Swiss border, where
     the monk Walahfrid Strabo put together a collection of key quotes for teaching and
     included Bede. They were in Reichenau, the island monastery in Lake Constance, and the
     cathedral library at Würzburg in Bavaria. They turn up in central France as deep as
     Tours. Bede from the edge of the world was being published over the sea to the known
     world.
    It was a world of gifts, a routine of
     absolutely unavoidable exchanges: gifts up and down the social ladder, from kings to
     knights to keep them loyal, from knights to kings to keep them giving, from bishops to
     cardinals and from cardinals to priests; from Ireland to Northumbria to Frisia to Rome
     and beyond. Gifts bound people together in their proper ranks and obligations. Gifts
     were about power, and making it visible. When in Germany, the missionary Boniface sent
     silver to Rome and got back incense, and on one occasion a face towel and a bath towel;
     he sometimes sent unspectacular things like ‘four knives made by us in our
     fashion’ or ‘a bundle of reed pens’ because giftswere messages and statements much more than requests for
     something in return, and the act of giving was the whole point. At times his gifts were
     as diplomatic as state gifts to royalty today, but a bit more pointed. Boniface sent a
     hawk and two falcons to the King of Mercia to get him to listen to a message that he was
     not going to like at all, a dressing-down for his appalling sexual habits, especially in
     convents.
    Of all the gifts that he received, Boniface
     tells the Abbess Eadburga, he most appreciated ‘the solace of books and the
     comfort of the garments’. 50 Giving and sharing books became a
     system for putting ideas out into the world.
    The glorious bible that Bede and others made
     at Jarrow was a gift for the Pope. Books were also buried with the saintly dead as gifts
     to keep them company. The book as gift, then, was sometimes quite different from the
     book to be read, a difference which later became almost ridiculous. One famous English
     calligrapher called Earnwine gave a fine book of psalms to King Canute and Queen Emma,
     who promptly sent it off to Cologne as a gift. When the Bishop of Worcester was in
     Cologne on the king’s business, he was naturally given a present, which happened
     to be Earnwine’s psalter. He brought it back to England, where it began. 51 Nobody ever had to read a book like that.
    Books were also sent about so they could be
     copied and copied again; the text itself was the gift. Boniface, like Bede, wanted that
     kind of book. He sometimes knew exactly which one he was after, and at other times he
     fished about for titles. He asked a former student for ‘whatever you may find in
     your church library which you think would be useful to me and which I may not be aware
     of or may not have in written form’. 52 Just knowing which books existed
     and which you wanted was not at all easy; which is why Bede added a list of all his
     works at the end of the
Historia ecclesiastica
, including the biblical books he
     studied, the heroic verse he wrote, the terrible translation of a Greek text that he
     edited and corrected, his books on time and the nature of things, his hymns, his
     epigrams and his book on spelling. 53 It reads a little like the back
     matter of a modern paperback. A librarian at Murbach in the ninth century was drawing uplists of books the monastery needed from
     the catalogues of other libraries and references in the manuscripts that he could
     examine; he was still using Bede’s list. 54 He made notes alongside