illustrative pictures and borders which may have been entirely of native
production in the eighth century, as was seemingly the fact, or may have
originated from the artistic tendencies of Frankish Gaul, as has already
been surmised. They were, in any case, influenced to some degree by
examples of late Roman work, introduced by the Italian missionaries who
came to convert the Saxons of South England after the Angles of the north
had been converted by the Irish monks of Iona. It was really this English
phase of decorative art which blossomed into Anglo-Norman in the twelfth
century.
The French schools were still Carolingian and splendid, but their
pre-eminence was not maintained after the breaking up of the empire of
Charles the Great. The revolutions of the ninth century led to the making
of nations. France ceased to be the Gallo-Roman province of a Frankish
monarchy. A French language and a French nation emerged into existence in
the tenth century, but the grand ornamental and calligraphic work of the
Franco-Gallic time was no longer equalled. The Caroline writing, which
attained its greatest beauty about the middle of the {50}ninth century,
gradually lost its elegant boldness, tending towards angularity and
crampness when the eleventh century had begun.
_Scandinavian Writing_
The Scandinavian countries have not yet been alluded to specifically. The
immense quantity of Runic monuments found in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway,
of all ages, and in England, of and after the Norse period, proves that
Runic writing was almost exclusively Scandinavian. There is now no question
as to the actual origin of the Runic alphabets. They came into existence,
as already said, by reason of the necessities of the amber-traffic between
the coast of the Baltic and the Crimea long before the time of Christ; but
what has survived belongs to the monuments of the North. The real age of
the extant runes does not probably exceed the fifth century. That they were
prized as national characteristics seems to be proved by their continued
use among the Northmen, even after they had come into collision with a
superior civilisation in the British isles.
Christianity was not so easily adopted in Scandinavia as in some other
countries. From the time of the first mission to its ultimate triumph at
least two centuries elapsed, and the result might have been still further
delayed if it had not been for the example of two royal proselytes, Olaf
Trygvason and St. Olaf, who belong to the first half of the eleventh
century. With the first introduction of Christianity, the Norse people also
received the script which they had found in use in England. The colonisers
of Iceland, in the ninth and tenth centuries, carried with them the
language and the writing of Scandinavia; and it was probably the remoteness
of that island from Norway which has caused the preservation in it, down to
the present {51}day, of the old Norse tongue (little modified by age) and
the Anglo-Saxon letters of the tenth century.
In Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the influence of North Germany prevailed in
time over old national tradition, and the gothic hand of the thirteenth
century took the place of the special alphabet. By the time of the
Reformation the writing in Scandinavia had been wholly Teutonised (with
some exceptions too slight to need mention). The most remarkable part of
the change was the exclusion of the _th_ letter from the script of Sweden,
Norway, and Denmark. This tendency, which had for centuries been in growth,
had the remarkable effect of practically confining the old Norse literature
to Iceland, and of making it the apparent home of all the poems and Sagas
which Norway had produced. It was at least the home of most of the literary
men who in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries wrote for the
delight of their kinsmen, in both Norway and Iceland. The great literary
activity in Iceland, at that time and afterwards, produced a large quantity
of MSS., usually written on vellum, and rudely decorated with painted
initials; but of those which remained in the country most have perished. A
relatively considerable number were, however, carried to Denmark in the
sixteenth and later centuries, and have been preserved in museums. Very few
yet remain in circulation, unsecured by public appropriation.
_The Slavonic Alphabet_
Slavonic writing is said to have begun with St. Jerome. To him is ascribed
the invention of the Glagolitic alphabet, a set of symbols for Illyrian
use, which seem to have no affinity to any of the familiar scripts. It
cannot have obtained much currency, notwithstanding the ample sufficiency
of its twenty-eight letters; as otherwise the Cyrillic alphabet (derived
from the Greek, with necessary {52}additions) would never have come into
being. In any case, St. Cyril's alphabet, devised in the ninth century for
the use of the Slovenes in Moravia, quite overpowered the Glagolitic of
Dalmatia, and while the Croats and the Dalmatians, who came under the
influence of the Roman see, retained their Glagolitic only for liturgical
use, the Slavs to the east fell into communion with the Greek Church, and
employed the Cyrillic letters as their national type of writing. It has
lasted to the present time in its old form, in biblical and liturgical
books of which the texts are ancient, but a plainer type, more like the
Greek of to-day, has been adopted for modern literature. The Poles and
Bohemians, and the various Slavs in Germany, have always followed the
custom of Germany in writing. The Russian alphabet is more complex than
that of Servia; but it is only in modern time that the latter has been
simplified. The Bulgarians, since the establishment of their autonomy, have
given up the old Slovene alphabet, and adopted that of Servia.
_The Labour of Mediæval Scribes from the Ninth Century onwards_
The literature which was to afford material for the exercise of the
penmen's skill was restricted within Christian boundaries. It was rarely
that a scribe condescended to make copies of any of the literary work
produced in pagan Rome or Greece. Occasional instances are found which
offer exception to the rule, but as in the ninth century all the men who
knew how to write were, in one form or another, servants of the Church, it
was not to be expected that many among them would help to perpetuate the
pernicious books of the dead heathens. Consequently many of the treasures
of ancient literature perished. The Bible was the substitute; and
innumerable copies were made in the East and the West of the book which has
influenced the world more powerfully {53}than any other production of the
wit of man. In the East, there was a more logical tendency to neglect the
Old Testament and to copy only the New; in the West, it was the custom to
multiply transcripts of the complete Latin Scripture as left by St. Jerome.
Besides the Bible, there were the liturgical monuments. The Sacramentary
which contained the order of sacrifice and adoration in the most solemn
office of the Church, with all the prayers that preceded and followed the
acts of offering and worship, required careful and frequent copying, so
that it should not deviate in the smallest degree from the established
model. The slight changes which constituted differences of use in this part
of the liturgy, and which have distinguished the so-called Gallican,
Mozarabic, Milanese, and Celtic churches as at least co-æval with (and
possibly older than) the Latin church of Rome, began to lose their historic
distinctness in the ninth century and soon faded away. The survival of
belated and rare examples (by the grace of papal sanction) at Toledo and at
Milan, is but an antiquarian curiosity without any significance. Rome
triumphed in the ninth century, and the diversities in certain respects
which have been dignified in England and elsewhere with the name of "use"
since then, are simply local varieties in unimportant particulars.
Beyond the establishment of the supreme rite of sacrifice on certain holy
days, the Church began, at an early period of its existence, to treat every
day as consisting of so many hours of which some were necessarily to be
yielded up to religious service. The use of the Psalms, and of set prayers,
for that purpose, and the fact that the anniversaries of saints' and
martyrs' deaths had to be borne in remembrance, led to the creation of the
Breviary. Besides this, the office of the Mass itself became requisite for
celebration on every day as well as on the more solemn days, and thus a
variable portion (according to the character of the day) had to be added to
the invariable. Thus enlarged, the volume of the {54}Sacramentary, with all
its lessons from the Bible, and its accumulations of antiphonal phrases,
grew into the Missal as we know it. The Breviary underwent similar
increase, and the result was to make the Liturgy so extensive and so
complex that it gave continual employment in the scriptorium of every
church and monastery all over Europe. There were Psalters, Sacramentaries,
Missals, Breviaries, Lectionaries of several kinds, Hymnals, Graduals
(Books of the chanted antiphonal portions of the Mass), Antiphonaries
(Books of the chanted antiphonal portions of the Hours-offices),
Martyrologies, Homilies, and (at a later time) Rituals, Processionals, and
Pontificals (offices to be performed by Bishops). St. Gregory had been the
latest official arranger of the Sacramentary or Missal, in the seventh
century; but its text was hardly settled till the twelfth century, and the
same may be said of the Breviary. In the ninth century, however, the texts
had grown to something not very different from their ultimate state. Here
was plenty of work for the priestly and monkish scribes.
Besides the Bible and the Liturgy, there were the works of the fathers, and
by-and-by the treatises of the schoolmen and the chronicles of monkish
historians; quite enough, in all conscience, to render useless the heavy
lucubrations of Livy and Trogus Pompeius, and the absurd conceits of the
heathen poets.
Things were not dissimilar in Byzantium. The Liturgy there was even more
complex and extensive than in the West, and the foolish literature of old
Hellas was generally ignored by the men who were engaged in daily study of
the Euchologium, the Horologium, the Menologium, the Archieraticon, the
Synaxarium, the Octoechos, &c. The Bibliotheca of Photius shows, however,
that the race of students who cultivated the old literature was not wholly
extinct.
At all times, both in the East and the West, the letters and charters of
Kings, and diplomatic documents of every {55}kind, needed the service of
trained penmen. This department of graphic labour was not completely in the
hands of churchmen; and it led to the creation of a caste of writers in
every country who were not under the influence of the monkish schools. They
could not afford to spend so much time as the book writers over their work,
and thus a hand of cursive character was established in every chancellery
in Europe, devoted only to the service of the State and never employed for
any other purpose. It was nearly always ugly, sometimes fantastic,
sometimes difficult to be read except by the officials engaged in such
work. From the earliest days of diplomatic writing, in the sixth century in
Italy, down to the seventeenth century in England, it preserved a strange
and fanciful style, first long, thin and narrow letters looking like a
congeries of wandering parallel lines indistinguishable without a glass,
and finally letters of proper size, but so disguised in shape as to be
indecipherable without a special training. At only one period, that is, in
the late eleventh and in the twelfth century, was diplomatic writing fair
and readable. That was in England and Northern France; but even here, the
upright strokes of letters like l, and d, and b, were elongated to an
enormous extent, and in their sweep offered to the scribe his few
opportunities of ornamentation. As our business, however, is with books we
leave the charters and the rescripts on one side, and proceed to the
consideration of the main character of the calligrapher's work.
The Bible and the Liturgy for churchmen have been spoken of as the chief
objects of reproduction among the scribes for many centuries. It was not
till the twelfth century that their labours required to be augmented for
the service of laymen. Men (and women) who could afford the expense, or
whose position demanded that they should have prayerbooks for their own
use, whether they could read ill or well or not at all, were furnished with
Latin Psalters, to which were added, at the end, the Athanasian {56}Creed,
a Litany of Saints, some general prayers, and the office for the Dead. They
were extracts from the Breviary for the use of persons who only prayed
occasionally. The growth of something like education, and a religious
desire to share to a somewhat greater extent the communion with Heaven
which was monopolised by monks and priests, caused a further extension of
calligraphic labour towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The
Psalter with its scanty additions was no longer sufficient for pious
laymen. A larger selection of prayers and lessons from the Breviary was
concocted; the offices of the Virgin, of the Cross, of the Holy Ghost, and
of some special saints were united to form the Book of Hours. It was
nothing like the severe and frequent task of orisons with which the monks
performed their duties at the canonical Hours of the day and night, but it
was sufficient for the most zealous laymen and laywomen; and it became the
private Prayerbook of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth
centuries. During that period it was produced in countless thousands of
manuscripts in England, France, Flanders, Italy, and to a less extent in
Germany and Spain. In England it was called Horæ Beatæ Mariæ Virginis, or
Book of Hours, or Primer; in France always Horæ, or Livre d'Heures; in
Italy it was Officium B.V.M., and in Flanders and Holland Ghetijden. The
Gebetbuch of Germany belongs chiefly to the fifteenth century, and was
nearly always in German, while in France, Flanders, and England, prayers in
the vernacular only crept in gradually here and there. (In Italy the book
always continued to be written in Latin only.) In the English Hours or
Primer the vernacular portions became at last so important that it was
found advisable to issue many of the printed Primers in the sixteenth
century in bilingual form, Latin and English; and it was undoubtedly this
tendency both in England and in Germany which produced the Reformation. It
was not so much the desire for a Reformation of the Church--even Boccaccio,
himself a churchman, {57}and many others of his kind had wished for
_that_--as an invincible demand for a vernacular liturgy, which widened
through opposition into an eagerness to sweep away everything that opposed
it. Hence the break with Rome, which still imperiously demanded the
uniformity that could only be maintained by the use of a single language
throughout Europe. The few exceptions to the rule which ecclesiastical
policy had ever allowed were in the concession to the affiliated Greek,
Slavonic, and Oriental congregations of a right to use their own vernacular
liturgies. The antiquity of the Greek and Syriac formulas, on the one hand,
the utter impossibility of making Latin familiar even to the priests of the
Slavic and Oriental churches, and the certainty that a denial of their
needs would throw them into the Byzantine fold--account for Papal
acquiescence in that respect. But the Popes could not see that England and
Germany, which had from so early a time been the seats of Roman colonies
and the homes of Latin churches, likewise needed a liturgy that the people
could understand; and that the Teutonic speech of the north had no such
generic sympathy with the language of the Roman liturgy as the rustic Latin
tongues of Italy, Spain, and France.
The Canon Law, deriving from the remains of the apostolical constitutions
and the acts of the Councils, the Penitentiaries which had been formulated
by bishops for the government of Christianised barbarians, and the decrees
of Popes, began to take shape as a Code in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. The existence of forged documents among the decretals was a
matter of no great importance. Everything was sufficiently old to be
respectable; and the schools of law, which had never given up the study and
cultivation of the Civil Code (digested in Justinian's time from the
various works of the old Roman jurists), set to work to arrange and gloss
the Canon Law. The two Codes, especially the Ecclesiastical, provided the
scribes of Western Europe with an enormous amount of work. Bologna,
{58}Padua, Paris, and Oxford were renowned for their lawyers and their
schools of law; with the accompanying armies of students and copyists.
Christian poets, too, were not lacking. From the time of Lactantius
onwards, the quantity of metrical Latin work done by churchmen was very
large; and the lyrical yearning inherent in all societies had produced an
immense hymnology, which comprised a great deal of real poetry--most
poetical and most charming when least Ciceronian. Here, again, was rich
material for the copyists of the scriptorium; and both Hymnals and Lawbooks
lent their aid towards the gradual tendency of students to go back and
investigate the ancient sources of literature and philosophy and history.
Pliny had never been wholly forgotten, even in the most anti-pagan times,
and the treatises on natural science which had appeared among the
schoolmen, all stimulated curiosity to learn what had been written before
the days of Constantine. The result of these intellectual tendencies made
the fourteenth century a dawn of the Renaissance, and with the beginning of
the fifteenth a large body of heathen literature was annexed to the
libraries of universities, scholars, and monasteries, giving increased
employment to the transcribers who were at that time busy all over Europe.
It was in the thirteenth century that the monks and the priests lost their
monopoly of the practice of ornamental writing; in the fourteenth century
every great city had its ateliers of calligraphers unconnected with the
Church; and when the fifteenth century arrived the trained citizen penmen,
who formed crafts throughout Europe, were probably not inferior in number
to the scribes who worked in ecclesiastical edifices.
_The Illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages_
This division of our matter is the largest, and is also the most
interesting to the majority of students and {59}collectors. In beginning
it, some repetition will be necessary in order to bring the subject as a
whole before the reader.
Between the ninth century and the sixteenth, the multiplication of MSS. in
Europe was very great, but comparatively few of the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh have been preserved. Beautiful examples of blended writing and
decoration were produced in England in the ninth century by Anglian and
Irish calligraphers in the north, and by Saxon writers in the south. In
York and Durham, and Lindisfarne, the style and the motifs of ornament were
still thoroughly Irish; in the south, although the late Roman had conquered
the Celtic, their collision had produced a singularly fine type of
illumination, reminiscent of Byzantine work, but much more free and
natural. That art had already beautified the Carolingian French school; in
the Carolingian German its influence appears in a weaker and ruder form.
When with the tenth century France and Germany emerged as two distinct
nations from the chaos of the Frankish empire, their modes of
book-decoration began to diverge. The rudeness of an earlier time remains,
with a good deal of spirit, in the illustrative designs produced in
Germany; the beauty of French work began to decay, while the English was at
its best. Winchester, Canterbury, and Glastonbury were the real centres of
English art at the middle of the tenth century; the Norsemen having
destroyed the Anglo-Irish monasteries in the north. This south English
school is considered to have benefited materially by the technical
superiority of French methods. What the north English schools of York and
Lindisfarne had given to Tours in the eighth century, came back to
Winchester at the end of the ninth, refined and embellished. Thus the
supremacy of English art was assured at a time when French art was
declining. The great variety, however, in all countries, of work done by
different men, renders it difficult to draw general deductions. The
calligraphic decoration of "Visigothic" and "Lombardic" manuscripts during
the ninth, {60}tenth, and eleventh centuries is visibly Celtic in origin
and style. Their pictorial illustration is sometimes very striking, and
indicates the existence of several central schools of design in Europe. The
English, the French, the German, the Spanish, and the Italian, had all
certain qualities in common, but the first two were most nearly akin. The
other three schools produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries books
containing pictures, in which the composition is more remarkable than the
drawing, and the painting is full of barbaric contrasts of colour. At all
times, fine work was to be found in Italy, but only in isolated examples,
and Italy as a whole underwent the same barbarisation as the other
countries. From that stage the English and the French were the first to
emerge. They can hardly be said to have _revived_ any former state of art
in connexion with books. It was with them a real creation. The frequent
reference to Byzantium as having supplied the models for European
illuminated work is misleading. The first sign of actual contact with
Byzantium is in the early part of the ninth century, when certain pictures
produced in Carolingian MSS. show that the painters had been made aware of
the existence of similar Byzantine work. And that is actually all that can
be referred to as direct imitation of Byzantine art. The magnificent early
examples of chrysography on purple vellum were not Byzantine but
Eastern-Roman, and the Roman traditions of the Eastern capital lingered on
into the ninth century, having begun to grow weaker at the end of the
sixth. Italy was nearer and more potent in its influence upon barbaric art
than Byzantium, and there was little difference in book-decoration between
East Rome and West Rome till after the time of Justinian; so far as the
cultivation of the arts was concerned. Consequently there is no need to
look to Byzantium as having supplied models for the rest of Europe to
follow. There is a difference of kind, not merely of degree, between the
_livres de luxe_ of the two Roman empires, and those of the new nations
which began {61}with Irish work about A.D. 600, and ended with Italian and
French work about 1550. The former were books written in gold, perhaps;
perhaps decorated with red ink only; illustrated, maybe, with a picture or
with pictures. The latter were books of which the principal characteristic
was not their bookishness but their decorativeness. A set scheme of
ornament sustained from beginning to end, with due proportion in the
intervals, in which even the pictorial designs were subordinate to the
decorative plan, constituted the value of the illuminated books of the
European middle ages.