disagreement with the authority of Professor {37}Westwood, whose work on
the Anglo-Saxon and Irish miniatures is such a splendid testimony to his
zeal and ability. His conjectural dates are, however, frequently
misleading. An instance is that of the so-called Bible of St. Gregory,
figured on his plates 14, 15. In the text he says that Sir Frederick Madden
had declared the MS. to be "unquestionably of the eighth century," but he
prefers to call it of the seventh, in agreement with Casley and Astle (who
thought so in the last century!). He ought to have accepted the opinion of
a recognised master in palæography like Sir Frederick, so far as the
writing is concerned, in preference to that of two men living at a time
before the science had attained anything like exactness in England. He
ought also to have seen or felt, while making his elaborate facsimile, that
the nearest parallel to the style of illumination of his "first page of
Luke" is to be found in Carolingian work executed about 800; and that no
great space of time could separate the two examples. The English work was
probably the earlier, but it can hardly have been accomplished before 770.
The purely Irish patterns in the columns supporting the arch, with the
excellent picture of St. Luke that surmounts it, prove by their combination
that the work is Anglo-Saxon of its second and finer period, that is after
the phase in which it was merely and wholly imitative of the Irish. With
these considerations in view, and a remembrance of Bede's words quoted
above in relation to Anglian education in Ireland about A.D. 650, the
assignment of the Bible of St. Gregory to the seventh century is a pure
absurdity.--Again, Westwood's facsimile from the Golden Gospels of
Stockholm, bears the attribution "Sixth Century? Ninth Century?" while its
position in the book, as the first plate, tends to show that Professor
Westwood leaned to the earlier date. Yet the book is unquestionably not
Irish; its artistic illustration is a singularly fine development of
Anglo-Saxon art--think of Anglo-Saxon art and chrysography in the sixth
century! The writing cannot be {38}mistaken for Roman uncials of the sixth
century; it is plainly in Carolingian uncials of the latter half of the
eighth. The book seems to have been illustrated by an Anglian hand, and
written by a Frankish one,--probably on the continent rather than in
England.
Books in Irish or Saxon-Irish writing are found all over the continent. As
they were written in monasteries founded by Irish missionaries during the
seventh and eighth centuries, they only indicate that a succession of Irish
or of Saxon monks continued to make their way for a considerable period to
France, Germany, and Italy. The writing can hardly be said to have left any
traces in the various national hands of those countries, but the Irish
house at Bobbio probably transmitted the use of the interlaced
ornamentation which revived in Italy several centuries later.
Most of the motifs of decoration in the illuminated Carolingian,
Visigothic, and Lombardic MS. were derived from the Irish methods of
ornamentation introduced through monastic houses and schools established by
Irish monks on the continent. French writers deny their indebtedness to
foreigners for it, since, as they say, the pattern was always at hand in
the tessellated and mosaic pavements of Gallo-Roman architecture. But there
is something of unnecessary vanity in the denial. The Irish MSS. of the
seventh century are the first in Europe which contain decorative initials
of the kind. This fact is indisputable, and is not affected by the question
of original derivation, which in my opinion is to be sought for in the east
among those Hellenised Syrians and Egyptians who were the propagators of
Christian art as well as Christian religion in the west.
_Merowingian, Lombardic, Visigothic_
These names, applied to varying styles of writing, are without historical
exactness. Roughly speaking, the first {39}means the debased Roman used in
Gaul and Western Germany from the sixth to the eighth century, the second
was the script of the larger part of Italy (but chiefly the east and the
south) between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, the third was the
national hand of Spain and Languedoc during the eighth to the twelfth
century. The names are based upon erroneous historical assumptions. The
Frankish kings, supposed to be descended from Merowig, carried with them
across the Rhine no graphic system whatever. They found in Gaul the
identical styles of writing which were used in Italy, and such of their
people as gave up the trade of warriors to assume that of clerics and
councillors, were obliged to learn the arts of the Gauls. The circumstances
under which the new kingdom was established as a permanent institution,
were not such as to make the Franks a nation of penmen; and the influence
of their bad taste in calligraphy could hardly have been felt till the
beginning of the seventh century. Their Gallic underlings continued to
write as before, but in the absence of enlightened patronage, the schools
of art no longer produced good work, except in the monasteries of the
Provincia Romana, where less deterioration took place than elsewhere. The
Frankish monarchy was so widely extended throughout the territories
stretching from the Loire to the Main, and along the whole course of the
Rhine from south to north, even in "Merovingian" times, that the use of the
word to designate a special style of writing is hardly desirable. It is
probable enough that in the seventh century and the early part of the
eighth a kind of uniformity existed in the writing used in all the region
between Paris and Mentz, but it was nothing else than Roman uncials,
semiuncials, and minuscules written in more or less cramped and graceless
fashion; varying only in the degree of badness according to the locality.
It is Roman cacography with a Germanic stamp upon it. There was a decided
improvement in it when the eighth century was in progress.
{40}The Lombardic hand is also a Roman hand as written by or for barbarians
who lived nearer to the centre of civilisation than the Franks did. To
justify its name it would be necessary to show that it originated and was
practised in the region we call Lombardy in the seventh century. There is,
however, no trace of its existence before the ninth century, and very
little show of its having been used to any extent in Cisalpine Gaul. Most
of the surviving examples of its employment as a national or local script
indicate Eastern and Southern Italy as its home during the ninth to the
twelfth century; while most of the manuscripts produced in Lombardy and
northern Italy during that time belong rather to the Carolingian type. In
fact, the Carolingian minuscule, the Visigothic minuscule, and the
Lombardic minuscule all show at their beginning so much similarity that we
look for examples of the latter two sufficiently early to decide a doubt
which arises--which of the three was the fountain head of modern letters.
The chief marks of distinction in the Lombardic through its whole career
are the _t_ shaped nearly like _a_, and the _a_ shaped like _cc_. The
Visigothic _t_ is identical with the Lombardic; and in the _a_ there is so
little unlikeness that the form of the letter seems to be something halfway
between _u_ and _cc_. (It is equivalent to _cc_ without their beaks or
initial knobs.) The circumstance that two scripts so widely removed in
place should retain common peculiarities, down to the very end of their
severed existence, leads to a suspicion that the so-called Lombardic was
probably a post-Ulfilan Ostrogothic. The peculiarities referred to, and
some others which need not be specialised, are also found in the "Merowing"
writing of books produced west of the Rhine in the seventh century. Now as
Carolingian writing is quite free from these peculiarities, we can safely
conclude that the Lombardic and the Visigothic are both older than the time
of Charles the Great. It is usually supposed by those who see the
difficulty attaching to the use of the name Lombardic, that the mode {41}of
writing so styled was used in the kingdom of the Longbeards, but died out
in its chief home after the conquest by the Franks, and only maintained a
continued existence in the Neapolitan duchies held by princes of Lombardic
origin. The suspicion hinted at above becomes stronger when we review these
facts. The Lombards were a far rougher and more uncultivated race than the
Goths, and found a Gothic-Roman script in use in Italy when they entered to
destroy the kingdom of Theodoric. It was probably in Ravenna that the
so-called Lombardic minuscule had its seat during the sixth century, side
by side with the declining Gothic uncial of Wulfila. From Ravenna, its
spread over the east and south of Italy would be much more easily effected
than from Milan or Pavia; and its undeniable similarity to the Visigothic
script of Spain leads to the belief that these two were the real Gothic
writing of the early Middle Ages, as distinguished from the Moesian
alphabet, which cannot have endured much longer than the reign of Theodoric
himself. The hand which is called broken Lombard belongs to a later time.
Its characteristic is an attempt to produce an ornamental wavy effect by
suspending the weight of the pen-stroke in the middle of each descent, but
the forms of the letters remain unchanged. It was a fashion of Neapolitan
writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and seems to correspond in
its own school with that tendency in the schools of northern countries
which produced the angular "gothic" of the thirteenth. As has been remarked
in another paragraph, the "Lombardic" flourished even in Italy, side by
side with the pure Carolingian, which had become the most favoured of all
handwritings since the Empire of the West was renewed in the family of
Charles the Great. The Carolingian, however, seems to have encroached to no
more southerly point than Rome itself, leaving all the region beyond to its
Lombardic rival.
Of the Visigothic, as of the Lombardic, it has to be said that, so far as
extant specimens are concerned, it might {42}well have been the offspring
of the Carolingian, rather than an elder form of writing. Its kinship,
however, to "Merowingian" and "Lombardic" is undeniable, and there is a
very fair show of probability that the Visigoths had something to do with
it, notwithstanding the fact that we only know it in examples later than
the destruction of the Gothic monarchy in Spain. What the term Visigothic
means we do not know. Most people think it meant West Gothic, and that is
how it was interpreted by Jornandes, who, as an Italian Ostrogoth of the
sixth century, ought to have been capable of understanding the sense of the
word. It is, however, very uncertain; for Jornandes, though intelligent and
well-informed, was not impeccable even as regards his Gothic kinsmen. Most
of his knowledge was derived from his Latin education, and to him probably
we owe a good many misconceptions, arising from his acceptance of various
geographical names in Latin and Greek writers as referring to his own
people and their kindred. Nothing which he has said has had a more enduring
influence upon opinion than the statement that Scandinavia, the "vagina
gentium," had bred all the barbaric tribes which overpowered the Roman
empire. Of course, he knew nothing of Scandinavia beyond the vague facts
that Goths, Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and Cimbri inhabited the
southern shores of the Baltic, and that there was a vast land beyond that
sea. Everything that descended from the north seemed to have come down from
Scania, or Scandinavia. He did not know, as we do, that the climate of
Scandinavia must have been at that time much more severe than now, and that
the population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark cannot have reached in the
fourth and fifth centuries to anything like its present numbers. The
movements of that age, which carried millions of warriors to Greece, Italy,
France, Spain, and Africa, represented a wave of emigration, caused by an
overflow of population, beginning in the far East, on the confines of
China, of which the typical originators, so far as {43}Europe is concerned,
were the Huns. No such overflow was possible from Scandinavia.
The Visigothic script had certainly not yet come into existence when the
kingdom of Alaric had its capital at Toulouse in the fifth century. After
the Franks had driven the Goths southward, and the monarchy was established
in Spain (incorporating the Suabians, who had held a separate state in
Portugal), we may suppose that the Visigothic hand was derived from that of
the Ostrogoths, and used in the service of the Gothic monarchs until their
dynasty was destroyed by the Saracenic conquest in 713. From that time
onwards to the twelfth century it was employed in all the Christian lands
of Spain, although, as in Italy, the Carolingian script began to be
introduced in the ninth century. The two kinds of writing went on side by
side, the Carolingian always gaining ground as time went on, until in the
thirteenth century Spain fell into line with the other countries of Europe
in adopting a sort of French "angular gothic."
_The Carolingian Renewal_
The renewal of art and learning in Gaul in the second half of the eighth
century is ascribed to the patronage of Karl the Great and his descendants.
He was a man of extraordinary gifts, and few figures of equal majesty have
ever appeared on the stage of history. King of the Franks and the Lombards,
Roman Emperor of the West, a great conqueror, a wise statesman, and a man
of learning, he has left his name even in the annals of palæography. It can
hardly have been in the beautiful Roman handwriting which is called after
him that he transcribed the Frankish ballads or set down the rules of
Frankish grammar, as he is said to have done. He was fond of practising
with his pen, but, as Eginhart says, the study was begun too late in life
to be cultivated with success. He had excellent taste, however, {44}and
bestowed generous rewards upon the calligraphers who worked for him. His
usual home was at Aachen, and his palace there contained a library and a
scriptorium, in which scribes were always busy. A greater school of
calligraphy was in the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours, directed by the famous
Alcuin, under the Emperor's patronage. It was at Tours, undoubtedly, that
the Carolingian writing reached the stage at which it became the model for
all succeeding time, and Alcuin was almost certainly the man who introduced
the Irish-Saxon fashion of decorative ornament, as practised in York when
he resided there with Archbishop Egbert. A great deal of the learning which
(with some latitude of phraseology) has been attributed above to the
Emperor, was due to the frequent lectures upon all branches of science
which Alcuin was in the habit of delivering when he and his patron were
together--usually at Aachen. Karl did not spend much of his leisure time in
the France which regards him as her own prince. He is believed to have
founded the University of Paris, but he did not regard the city on the
Seine as equal to Rome or Arles. It was not included in the twenty-one
metropolitan cities of his empire.
Wherever the movement arose which produced the beauty of Carolingian work,
we can have no difficulty in declaring it to have been in central or
Southern France, not in the Rhenish territories. That contemporary
calligraphers would have followed the lead was to be expected, whether they
worked at Aachen or at Metz, or at Trier or elsewhere; but the real
perfection of the style must have been attained in those parts of France
which were most nearly connected with Provence. The uncials of Carolingian
work were imitated from Roman work of the fifth century, the capitals from
Roman inscriptions of the empire, and the minuscules were improved from the
two contemporary Italian scripts in which they were found, that is the
Papal Roman and the Gotho-Lombard. The art was cultivated (and we may allow
that it had been so cultivated for many years before Alcuin's {45}arrival)
so carefully that a fine æsthetic sense had arisen, and every letter of all
three kinds was drawn with an elegant simplicity and truth which the world
has never ceased to admire. The letters are upright and wholly without
angularities, and are quite free from the mannerisms by which in the two
Gothic hands of the time certain unessential portions of the outline were
dwelt upon and made over-prominent, to the deterioration of the graphic
form. Fine as the writing is in the time of the great Emperor, it is still
finer throughout the half century or so which followed his death, in all
the Gallic centres.
At the same time, the decoration of manuscripts, otherwise remarkable for
their calligraphical excellence, with illuminated initials, border
ornamentation, and miniatures resembling in character those of the
Anglo-Saxon school but infused to a greater degree with the feeling and the
style of late classical art, render the Carolingian French school of the
ninth century one of the most splendid in the history of palæography.
The scripts of Spain and Italy lived on for centuries uncorrected in
certain peculiarities by the example of Carolingian writing, but gradually
drawing nearer, and visibly improved in manner. This was brought about by
the introduction into both countries of pure Carolingian work, practised
simultaneously with the native styles, and constantly increasing in
influence. In England the Carolingian type won but little ground,
notwithstanding the Romanising tendencies of Winchester and Canterbury and
the Southern monasteries in general. It was not till the tenth century that
certain signs of Carolingian influence are seen in the writing of Latin
charters, and it was only in the twelfth century that the handwriting of
Northern France and of England began to take an identical character. In
Germany, of course, Carolingian writing was an inheritance, but it was
never cultivated with the same elegance as in France. The letters began
gradually to slope and grow {46}narrow, and to take small projections at
the extremities which by and bye became medieval gothic forms.
_A Review at the standpoint of the Ninth Century_
The middle ages began with the establishment of barbarian monarchies over
the area of the Roman empire of the west; and with the middle ages began
the final and the most important chapter in the history of manuscripts. The
study of manuscripts, for most persons, is confined to the period between
the twelfth century and the sixteenth; since it is not given to everyone to
make pilgrimages to the museums scattered over Europe, for the purpose of
looking at the earlier and rarer examples of writing. Besides, the chief
interest of the study lies rather in the decoration than the calligraphy of
manuscripts; and it was not till the fourteenth century that the production
of such work became so large and general as to leave a sufficient number of
specimens readily accessible to modern inspection. The history of
illuminated manuscripts begins in Ireland in the sixth century, that first
phase being the application to written books of a system of Oriental
decorative ornament which had previously been confined to architectural
work. It spread into England in the seventh century, a little later into
Gaul and Germany, and a new phase began in the eighth century by a happy
combination of Romanesque pictorial design with the more purely decorative
features of barbaric art. In the ninth century England and central France
were easily ahead of all the other barbarian states. In Germany, in
Aquitaine, in Spain, and in Northern Italy, the same system was followed,
but with a prevailing stamp of barbarism, especially in the design of the
human figure, which affords a striking contrast to the refined luxury of
Carolingian art and the more sober splendour of English work. The only
parallel was in Byzantium and Alexandria, where a similar combination had
led to a nearly similar {47}effect, with this difference however, that the
decorative illumination was a far less prominent feature than the pictorial
designs. Roman Italy and Roman Provence still kept aloof from the new
movement. The classical traditions which survived there permitted the
production of MSS. written in gold, and perhaps also illustrated with
pictures, such as had constituted the splendour of books in the first five
centuries; but the immixture of decorative patterns from architectural
design, which formed the art of _illumination_, was a thing of alien
character to the taste of the older school. Examples of course were
produced both in Rome itself and in Provence of the new mode of
illumination, but they are to be ascribed to the barbarian element which
was encroaching there as elsewhere, and which finally triumphed.
_Byzantine Work_
The traditions of classical art, which had begun to grow weaker in
Byzantium even before the seventh century, had faded away when the Eastern
Emperor lost all hold upon Italy. Not Athens, nor Rome, but Memphis, seemed
to inspire the later æstheticism of Byzantine art; and the Greek emperors,
from the ninth century onwards, appeared to be the successors rather of a
line of Ptolemies than of Cæsars. When we contrast the sculptures of
ancient Greece, the designs upon Græco-Roman coins, and the pictures in
Pompeii, with the work of Byzantine illuminators, we are inevitably
reminded that the word Greek is rarely appropriate in connexion with MSS.
There is very little of true Greek in the artistic features of
Thraco-Græcian or Ægypto-Græcian work; and it is not to real Greeks or to
real Romans that we owe the handsome Roman and the handsome Hellenic type
in which the texts of the ancient classics are now printed.
In the minuscule writing of Greek, which is usually {48}supposed to have
come into use about the end of the eighth century, there never was the same
calligraphical character as the uncials of an earlier time had exhibited,
nor the same desire to attain symmetrical beauty as was shown over and over
again in the manuscripts of Western Europe. The best writing of Greek
minuscules belongs to the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, in which a
sufficient amount of practice had been gained to ensure regularity of form.
A specimen of such writing, executed towards the end of the tenth century,
probably in Cyprus, will be found in Plate 6. From the eleventh century to
the sixteenth all minuscule writing in Greek looks like a free cursive
written without any calligraphical ambition, and it became more and more
ungraceful as time went on. The value of Greek MSS., however, depends more
upon their contents than upon their beauty, and frequently the
roughest-looking piece of work may command an interest far greater than
attaches to the splendid penmanship of the west.
The recently discovered "Gospel of Peter" is in a curious primitive
minuscule hand, which the editor of the facsimile, Oscar von Gebhardt,
ascribes hesitatingly to the eighth or ninth century, as had already been
done by H. Omont. It would not be surprising if other scholars were to
assign it to the seventh century, and thereby throw back the age of Greek
minuscule writing to a century or more behind the date usually fixed for
it. The mingling in that curious Christian document of many uncial forms,
with a set of minuscular letters that betray a want of familiarity with set
minuscules, seems to prove that the book is older than the eighth century.
This observation is made, not from any desire to be critical, but simply in
order to show that the question of age, mentioned in the preceding
paragraph, is a thing which is still not finally settled.
{49}_The Tenth Century_
The Irish school of writing, after its triumphs of the seventh, eighth, and
ninth centuries, lost much of its home-life in the midst of the struggles
with the Norsemen. In England and on the continent its influence was still
felt for some time longer; even in the thirteenth century many of the
Psalters produced by English illuminators have the initial letter B
decorated in the style adopted from the Irish six centuries before. Irish
MSS. of any age are excessively rare; even the comparatively worthless
transcripts of the eighteenth century are in no inconsiderable request.