text of the præ-Christian ages is discovered. Next to it in importance is
the Syriac Bible, and next to that, the Latin Vulgate. All three indicate
the prior existence of a Hebrew original; but to obtain a critically exact
knowledge of what that original was at the time of Alexander the Great, one
must resort to the Septuagint; at the time of Christ, to the Syriac; and at
the time of the Emperor Julian, to the Vulgate. The Hebrew text, as we now
have it, underwent so many changes and corruptions during the first few
centuries of the growth of Christianity as a younger rival to Judaism, that
even the oldest Hebrew MSS. are precluded by their comparative modernity
from claiming equal importance with the three versions referred to. The
multiplication of copies of the Syriac Scriptures, between the first
century after Christ and the seventh, must have been very great; that of
the Greek Bible and Testament, from the first to the fourteenth century,
still greater; and that of the Latin Vulgate, from the fifth to the
fifteenth, enormous. The early missionaries of the Christian Church were
Hellenised Syrians or Egyptians, and they stamped the art of their native
countries upon the new Biblical literature in every country except Italy.
Italy was the exception, simply because it was the centre of political
power and of Græco-Roman culture, and thus too learned and too fastidious
to accept a new popular religion or an inferior type of ornamental art. But
all the external provinces of the Empire underwent the influence of the
enthusiastic proselytizers, and even Byzantium succumbed to it after the
Empire of the West had been extinguished. The types of ornament created for
the embellishment of Bibles were Egyptian in {25}design and colouring; and
this is the reason why the pictures in all the early examples of
book-illustration in the West are supposed to have a Byzantine aspect; the
fact being that while classical art faded away almost with paganism in
Italy and Hellas, the Oriental substitute, which reigned from Asia Minor to
Ireland, was preserved in Byzantium till the downfall of the Greek empire.
A few belated specimens of degenerate classical ornament are found to
represent the ages between Constantine and Charles the Great; but in
general terms it may be said that Roman book-illustration died out in the
fourth century. It came to life again, but in utter metamorphosis, in the
decorated Irish books of the sixth-seventh century, which were really the
first examples of the mediæval art of illumination.
The Coptic alphabet and the Gothic alphabet were two late and artificial
inventions, due entirely to a holy rage for producing the Bible in the
language of the Egyptians and the Goths. The two Slavonic alphabets
likewise were late scripts, invented for the purpose of translating the
Bible into Slovene. The Armenian alphabet (and out of it the Georgian) had
a similar origin, and seems to have had some relationship to the Slav
Glagolitic. They are both attributed to the fifth century.
_Writing in Italy during the first five centuries of the Christian era_
We have not as full a knowledge as could be wished for of the ordinary
styles of writing under the Roman empire. The books of the fourth and fifth
centuries which are extant show that calligraphy was then flourishing in
great splendour, so far as capitals and uncials were concerned; and the
coins and inscriptions of the three preceding centuries show us Roman
capitals at their best. That rustic capitals were used in the first century
is proved by the Herculanean remains, and that the fashion of writing in
square capitals, {26}rustic capitals, and uncials was still practised in
Italy down to the eighth century, we have sufficient grounds for knowing.
But as to the style of handwriting used in books of which editions of
perhaps a few hundred copies were issued--such, for example, as the edition
of his own epigrams which Martial found at Lyons--we can only form
conjectures. The semi-uncials of the fifth and sixth centuries, which grew
into the minuscules of the seventh and eighth, must have been as much
needed in the first century as the sixth, but there is no trace of them.
The Roman cursive hand, upright or backsloped, that appears in the few
extant tablets and wall-inscriptions of the first and second centuries,
would have been too difficult for the readers who bought books to enjoy
them, and would assuredly have served as an obstacle to their sale. It
resembles rather the charter hand of later days than the minuscule writing
of books, but the letters are unconnected, and there is no trace of any
attempt at neatness. It is indeed almost illegible, without slow and
painful decipherment. One striking peculiarity is the _b_, which has
frequently the shape of _d_, a form that was retained in the official
diplomatic hand of the fifth century. Such as it was, however, the cursive
hand would have had considerable influence in shaping the semi-uncial or
minuscule writing, which must have existed before it was adopted by the
Irish in the fifth century and most other barbarians in the sixth. That
semi-uncial, although we find no examples of its use in the empire before
the end of the fifth century, had evidently been the immediate parent of
the first Irish, which only differs from it in the superior evenness and
regularity of the latter. It included the _g_, _r_, _s_, _t_, which are
usually looked upon as special and characteristic letters of the Irish and
Anglo-Saxon alphabet.
After the fifth century Italy ceased to be entirely Roman. In Rome itself,
and in the region subject to the Popes, the production of fine manuscripts
of the old style in capitals and uncials still went on, sometimes written
in gold {27}and on purple vellum; and the modified cursive hand above
referred was applied to the writing of books as well as the writing of
despatches. When this custom began is just what we should like to know,
because it would give us the true origin of all modern minuscule writing or
printing. A specimen, dating from the seventh century, is given in the
Palæographical Society's facsimiles, which is clearly the type that was
followed and improved upon in Central France, in the Caroline period.
Carelessly written as it seems, it indicates that a considerable length of
time had elapsed since the pen had been trained to form alternate light and
heavy strokes, and to give to the curves of the letters an agreeable
roundness, which was wholly missing in the earlier Roman cursive. It does
not seem unreasonable to suppose that such writing was used in books long
before the arrival of the fifth century; but there is no proof accessible.
_The British Isles during the Roman period_
It would have been correct enough to bracket Britain along with Spain and
Gaul in a preceding paragraph, but we cannot venture to claim for this
country any knowledge of writing before the arrival of the Romans. It is
true that a great part of the south of the island was Gaulish, and that the
Gauls of Gaul, who knew how to write, were in intimate relations with the
Britons. Britania was probably a land of Celtiberian population like Spain,
but without such traditions as the Turdetani. It was Romanised very
effectively all over the south, and with the Latin language the people used
Latin letters like their fellows in Gaul and Spain. Like other Roman
citizens, the Britons became Christians, underwent subjugation by pagan
barbarians, and lost their lives or their Latinity, those who escaped
massacre being absorbed by the invaders. So far as writing is concerned,
they have left nothing beyond some lapidar inscriptions; but these and
whatever else they {28}produced in the form of MSS. during the first four
centuries were no doubt as wholly Roman as anything of the kind in Italy.
At so short a distance from the shores of Roman Britain, it is not likely
that the Irish remained letterless till the fifth century of the Christian
era. It is almost certain that the labours of St. Patrick (about the middle
of that century) were but complementary to those of earlier missionaries;
and that the adoption of the Roman alphabet in Ireland may be dated from
the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. The consummate
ornamental beauty of the MSS. executed in Ireland during the seventh
century, and the testimony given by St. Adamnan (writing about A.D. 670) to
the expertness of St. Columba as a calligrapher (about 550) tend to prove
that the art had been practised for a long time before it attained to such
excellence. The particular merit of the Irish is that they seem to have
developed (out of Roman semi-uncials) a handsome minuscule form of writing
earlier than any other people. The cursive of the Romans had always been an
ugly and ill-decipherable script; and it was only in the seventh century
that even the Italians, under barbarian pressure, evolved a fairly good
readable minuscule. The minuscules of Gaul and Western Germany, called
Merowingian, were still in a formless and primitive rudeness at the time
when the Irish had already attained the elegance of practised penmanship.
The Goths have next to be mentioned, as they and the Irish were the only
two barbarian nations that adopted the Græco-Roman alphabet before the
break-up of the Roman empire.
_The Goths and Germans_
The people who in the fourth century after Christ called themselves
_Gut-thiuda_, _i.e._ Goth-people, had been for many centuries the most
easterly branch of the Germanic race. {29}Down at least to the second
century B.C. their tribes occupied the regions bordering on the Vistula and
the Dniester, extending from the Bay of Dantzig to the Black Sea. At the
north-western end of the line they were in the time of Tacitus known as
Guthones; those at the other end were called Bastarnæ by Polybius and
Strabo, and recognised as _Germans_. The latter people were the first of
their race to become acquainted with civilisation. The amber-trade was
already in the time of Herodotus a vigorous traffic, carried on between the
Baltic and the Greek settlements on the Euxine. It passed through the lands
of the Guthones and the Bastarnæ, and led undoubtedly to the growth of the
form of notation called Runes. The Runic alphabet, inscriptions in which
are numerous in Scandinavia, was evidently deformed from the Greek, and
must have originated about the Dniester some five or six centuries before
Christ. As time went on, that alphabet naturally drifted further and
further north; the Goths and Germans, nearest to the Greeks, having, of
course, less need of it according as their knowledge increased. From the
shores of the Baltic it was carried into Scandinavia, and became the
earliest form of writing in Northern Europe. Mr. George Stephens claims for
the oldest of the extant Norse Runes an antiquity exceeding that of our
era, but a more moderate Scandinavian writer sets the earliest date at
about A.D. 300. In any case, it must be allowed that some form of writing
was obtained by Gothic tribes from Greek traders before the time of Christ,
and that it afterwards found a home in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The
name of _Runes_ is equivalent to that of ciphers or riddles or mysteries,
and we may infer that its real origin was in the cutting of strokes to
express numbers. Runic letters never reached the pen-and-ink stage of other
alphabets, and their records are hardly more than inscriptions upon
tombstones. For that and similar purposes they continued to be occasionally
employed, both in England and Scandinavia, long after the {30}use of Roman
or modified Roman letters had been established in all countries. The
singular variations in form and number and value between runes of different
dates and different places, are easily accounted for by the circumstance
that there can have been no continuous practise of such inscriptions in any
country in which Christianity had already established a simpler script.
Runes do not seem to have come into use among the Western Germans, that is,
the tribes which occupied the region which we now call Germany. Hrabanus
Maurus, in the tenth century, wrote about the runes of the Marcomanni, and
gave figures of them. This has led German writers to assert the existence
of Runic letters among the Suevi in the early days of the Roman empire; but
Hrabanus adds to "Marcomanni" the gloss "quos nos Northmannos vocamus." His
Marcomanni were not the Marchmen of the Roman period. Bede is also said to
have formulated a list of the runes of the Northmen. One reason which
retarded the educational advancement of the Western Germans was that they
never came into contact with the Romans till the beginning of the first
century B.C., and even then only for a short time, in the invasion of the
republic by the Cimbri and Teutones. They were shut away from the Roman
frontiers by the buffer states of Celtic countries, and it was only after
the conquest of Gaul, Rhætia, and Noricum that the Romans came into
continuous conflict with Marcomanni and Suevi. It was Cæsar who first made
the name of Germani historical, and Tacitus who invented Germania as the
name of the country.
The name Germani is, as Zeuss suggests, Gallic for "Neighbours," and was
pronounced _Gármani_ by the Gauls, who had first been asked by the Romans
how their neighbours were called. It is curious that even in this country
the Britons called the invading English _Garmani_, by what Bede supposed to
be a corruption of speech. (The Celts in later days were not Latinised
Britons, and knew nothing of {31}Germans. They made no distinction between
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but called them all Saxons.)
The name by which the Germans call themselves is not a race name, but
merely the adjective meaning national, native, vernacular. Just as the
Italians afterwards used the phrase _in volgare_ to mean "in Italian," as
distinguished from Latin, so the Germans had the word _diutisc_ or
_thiutisc_ (deutsch) to mean vulgar, as opposed to _walahisc_ or _walesc_
(welsch), which meant Latin. The two adjectives became in time proper
names, with the sense of German and Roman. The Western Germans had nothing
to do with writing till they conquered the Welshmen of Gaul. Consequently,
we proceed to the Gothic alphabet.
After repeated attacks on the Roman empire in the third century, and
repeated defeats, the Goths had extended their seats southwards, and were
resident, in a partly Christianised state, in the lands north and south of
the Danube. Wulfila, or Ulfila, a Goth, said to have been born in
Cappadocia, a man of great ability, who was able to preach in Gothic, in
Greek, and in Latin, thought the time had come to Christianise his
countrymen completely. For that purpose he translated the Bible into the
Gothic language, and created an uncial alphabet, derived partly from Greek,
partly from Latin, and partly from Runic. Of his twenty-seven letters, two
are merely numerals. In the twenty-five that were used for writing, the _c_
(g), _d_, _l_, _p_, and _ch_ have their Greek uncial shapes, the _a_, _b_,
_e_, _f_, _h_, _i_, _k_, _m_, _n_, _r_, _s_, _t_, and _z_ may be called
Latin uncials; the _q_ resembles our capital _u_, but is plainly an
adaptation of the Greek _koppa_, the _th_ seems to be modified from the
Greek _ph_, but may have easily been the Greek _th_; a Roman G is inserted
in the alphabet in the place of the Greek _Ksi_, and seems to have been
used as _gh_ or _Y_ consonant; a Greek Y is used for the Runic angular P
which represented the Teutonic _w_; an o with a dot in the centre stood for
_hw_; and the vowels O and U appear as [Symbol: 8 without bottom half-loop]
and [Symbol: inverted U]. The Gothic _th_, _hw_, _w_, _o_, {32}and _u_ are
found in the Runic alphabet, from which Ulfila must have borrowed them. So
far as it was possible to him he avoided the letters of his pagan
ancestors, but for certain sounds existing in Gothic, and not in Greek or
Latin, he was compelled to fall back upon the Runes. Just in a similar way,
the Anglo-Saxons two hundred years later, when adopting the Irish-Roman
alphabet, were obliged to add the necessary _th_ and _w_ from the same
Runic source.
The Gothic letters of Ulfila were used for about two centuries by the
so-called Ostrogoths, all the extant manuscripts of the Gothic Bible having
been written in Italy in the sixth century, the famous Silver Gospels of
Stockholm included. Of the Visigoths who had preceded the Ostrogoths in
Italy, but gone onward thence to fix their rule in Southern Gaul and Spain,
we have nothing to show that they ever made use of the Ulphilan alphabet.
Their coins of the sixth and seventh centuries bear inscriptions in debased
Roman capitals; and the so-called Visigothic writing in manuscripts of the
eighth to the twelfth centuries is simply Spanish-Roman. The use, in modern
times, of the word Gothic to indicate special forms of writing and
architecture is very absurd, but the phrase has become convenient. In so
far as writing is concerned, we may continue to use the word gothic (with a
small g) to denote the angular "black letter" of the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries.
_Irish and British writing_
Of the various species of national writing which were evolved from Roman
calligraphy, and which, from the seventh century onwards, are divided by
palæographers into Lombardic and Visigothic, Frankish (Merowingian), and
Irish (Hibernian and Anglo-Saxon), the Irish was probably the first to
attain a distinct type of its own. There would be {33}inherent probability
in the notion that the Irish alphabet and the Irish style of ornament were
created in Britain and transferred to Ireland in the fifth century when the
English arrived. Professor Westwood seemed to regard the idea with favour
but hesitated in giving it full expression. He says "it may be observed
that the earliest of the sculptured Christian stones of Wales exhibit the
same system of ornamentation, _as well as the same style of writing_, as
the Irish MSS. which are, in all probability, of a somewhat more recent
date." One will naturally seek to test the value of this observation by
examining the writer's Lapidarium Walliæ. In that work, however, no
substantiation will be found. There are a couple of instances in which
sculptured stones bearing names, which are assigned by Bishop Stubbs to the
ninth century, are said by Prof. Westwood to be _perhaps_ of the sixth or
seventh; and that is all. On the contrary, the one salient fact observable
in the Lapidarium is, that all the inscriptions of the Roman and early
post-Roman time are in pure Roman capitals, while the inscriptions upon
sculptured stones in minuscules resembling the Irish alphabet, all belong
to the period when the Angles and Saxons were in full possession of Irish
calligraphic and artistic models--that is, _after_ the seventh century. The
Britons of the fifth century, at least all over the Southern half of the
island, were a Romanised people as much as the Gauls, and it would be
ridiculous to expect Celtic provincial art in the home of Roman culture.
They were exterminated or absorbed in the east and middle of the island by
the Germanic invaders, and they were harried out of the west by their Cumri
kindred from the north, and by pirate Scots from Ireland. The latter part
of the fifth century and the whole of the sixth and part of the seventh,
formed a period during which the inhabitants of Cambria can have produced
little or nothing in the way of letters or art. It was probably not till
the beginning of the eighth century that the Cumri began to identify
themselves with the {34}ancient Britons, and to gather up the legends and
historical traditions of the British remnant as their own. There is a clear
testimony that the Cumri and the Britons were closely akin as a race, but
not identical, in the fact that names beginning with V in British use down
to the fifth century are found to begin with Gu (Gw) in the language of the
Welsh. Guend and Vend were of course two phases of an old Celtic word, but
the former is necessarily the older. Consequently the people who have used
_Gw_ from the fifth to the nineteenth century cannot be the same as those
who had already reached the _V_-stage in the first century. They were close
relatives undoubtedly, but had little in common beyond their racial
affinity and the original homogeneity of their speech. It may be surmised
that the Briton found no more kindness in his Cumric stepbrother, or his
Irish cousin, than in the fierce strangers who called him a Welshman
(because they found him talking Welsh, _i.e._ Latin).
Bede, in spite of his Romanist tendency, and his Romanist aversion to the
practice of the Celtic church with regard to the Paschal festival and the
tonsure, gives clear evidence that in the middle of the seventh century
"many Englishmen of the noble and the meaner sort" resorted to Ireland, and
dwelt there for the purpose either of study or of leading a religious life
(divinæ lectionis vel continentioris vitæ gratiâ), and states that "the
Scots received them all most willingly, giving them their daily food
without charge, _also books for reading_, and gratuitous instruction." The
Angles were apt pupils. They learned to write and ornament books of their
own in the Irish manner, and they had Irish monks in their new monasteries
who fostered the art. By the close of the seventh century, there were
expert penmen among the Anglian monks, and during the eighth century,
although the very close adherence to Irish models is the feature of most of
the ornamental manuscripts, they began to strike out a new and
characteristic line of their own in which they soon surpassed their
masters. This was in {35}figure-drawing, in miniatures painted with a
mastery of design which was altogether unknown to the Irish. The heads or
figures which appeared in Irish illuminations were merely accessory and
subordinate to the scheme of decoration, utterly contemptible as
delineations of human form. In the Anglo-Saxon miniatures of the period
which began--say about 750 and continued to the eleventh century, there is
a distinct national school, in which the over-anxious treatment of
draperies and the striking addiction to light green pigment, are prominent
characteristics. The style gives a sort of general impression that it had
been formed upon a Byzantine model, but the probability is that the later
classical survival in Italy in the seventh century had helped to form the
Anglo-Saxon taste as well as the taste of the Carolingian school. A
similar, but ruder, expression of the same Anglo-Saxon method of
illustration appeared in German work of the tenth and eleventh centuries;
and as this had its parentage in the French Carolingian art of the ninth
century, we may suspect that the tendency which brought that art to its
perfection in the time of Charles the Bald, had begun in Gaul before the
time of Charles the Great, that is, earlier than the usual date of its
sudden genesis. This conjecture would make the production of books
illustrated with miniatures synchronise in France and England, and thus
obviate the difficulty of supposing that the Anglo-Saxons invented the art
and carried it to perfection within a century of their learning how to
write. It is sufficient glory for them to have converted the artistic
movement of the time into a national school of painting unmistakable with
any other, at a time when the calligraphical schools of central and
Southern France, under an enlightened Frankish emperor, and with far
superior opportunities, were labouring for a Gallo-Roman renaissance.
{36}_Origin of Mediæval Illumination_
Books in the classical period had of course been ornamented with
illustrations, but the illumination of books (in the mediæval sense) did
not originate with the Græco-Roman calligraphers of the Empire. We cannot
suppose that it sprang into life in Ireland, but certainly its first
European manifestation was in Irish MSS., and the art had not been received
by the Irish from any of the European nations. The only alternative is,
however, far fetched, that Christian missionaries from the East (or with
Eastern training) had preceded St. Patrick and brought with them those
characteristics of Syro-Egyptian art which are traceable alike in Irish and
in Byzantine work. The documentary period of writing in Ireland is of
course later than the actual practice of the art in that country, but it is
earlier than amongst any other of the unromanised barbarians. Adamnan,
writing about A.D. 670, relates the life of St. Columba (dead in 598) and
describes the writing materials which that saint had used in his
scriptorium in the island of Hy. As he had learned to write in Ireland and
had begun his priestly career there before 540, we may place the
historically ascertainable use of writing in Ireland as beginning with the
early years of the sixth century. Irish monks carried the art to Britain,
to Gaul, to Germany; and those elaborate and intricate patterns to which
the French give the names of "lettres perlées, lettres brodées, spirales,
noeuds, et entrelacs, initiales ophiomorphiques, ichthyomorphiques," &c.,
and which they claim as indigenous productions of Carolingian France in the
early part of the ninth century--were fruits of the teaching of Irish
missionaries, in the houses which they founded in Britain and all over the
continent in the seventh century.