Chapter 2

Textual production and performance

Unlike modern mass-produced books and documents printed on machine-made paper, each medieval book or document or note is unique, hand-made, and handwritten by a scribe with a feather-quill or reed pen and ink. Practice versions of texts or preliminary work might be inscribed with a stylus into a wax tablet, which could then be heated, smoothed and used again, or copied quickly onto scraps of membrane. Final versions of a text were usually the careful products of those who had been trained to write formally by teachers, who would most often be monks, priests, or nuns. Children and novices would be taught in ecclesiastical schools or aristocratic households. In the later centuries, secular schools emerged to teach those who already had sufficient social standing to attain an education. All the books and documents produced by those with training in writing were prepared in similar ways.

From around the 1st century bce, animal skin (and in the Mediterranean, papyrus) was used as the main substrate for textual production, though inscribed objects and large carved memorials exist too, ranging from stone crosses, to ivory combs, wooden tally sticks, embellished book-covers, woven textiles, and many other artefacts. Books and documents, though, were generally made from parchment (sheepskin), vellum (calfskin), or goatskin. It was a complicated, costly, and time-consuming job to manufacture skins for writing, but this in itself reveals a great deal about how valued textual production and curation was. Throughout the medieval period in the British Isles, and up until the 14th century when hand-made paper began to be increasingly employed in writing environments, books and documents were written on skin by highly trained scribes, to be read by the privileged literate elite. But as the centuries passed, those numbers of readers and writers grew significantly, and with that growth came a much greater demand for texts and books, increasing the scale of manufacture, changing the modes of production, and effecting new means of dissemination.

Making books

As is clear from looking at the earliest works that survive from the medieval British Isles, the majority of texts produced were religious or legal in nature. When Christianity arrived in the south of England in the last years of the 6th century, the missionaries probably brought with them books from Rome that would be used to preach conversion. Thereafter, sermons, the Gospels, and instructional and teaching texts were all essential in the spread of the new religion and were produced by religious scribes in writing offices known as scriptoria. These varied in size, depending on the institution’s wealth and population. The scribes regarded their work as part of their opus Dei, ‘God’s work’. This could be quite physical and arduous in the depths of a chilly winter, when scribes sat writing in drafty carrels, struggling to see their exemplar in the dimming light, as they wrote biblical and didactic works to venerate God.

From the very late 6th and 7th centuries, for example, a number of books influenced by Celtic Christianity survive. The Cathach of St Columba, though damaged, contains beautiful decorated initial capitals surrounded by red dots, an archetypal Celtic motif, seen also in other Celtic-inspired manuscripts. This Cathach, a Psalter or Book of Psalms, hung around the neck of a holy man and was used apotropaically; that is, to bless and seek protection for fighting forces before a battle. The Book of Durrow, written perhaps at Iona or in Northumbria in the 7th century, is the oldest complete gospel-book from the British Isles, and, like the few other famous books of the 7th and 8th centuries, it shows great influence from the Celtic tradition of illustration and decoration.

Monastic and other ecclesiastical institutions manufactured medieval books until at least the 12th century, and among the most highly venerated manuscripts to survive from the medieval period are the oldest, like London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. This large book was produced in early 8th-century Northumbria, and is fully digitized on the British Library’s website. Written by the scribe Eadfrith, the Gospels were richly illuminated in gold and coloured inks made from precious materials. Carpet-pages filled with geometrical decoration face the first folio of each Gospel, to create extraordinarily complex and visually demanding openings. A manuscript like the Lindisfarne Gospels was expensive and resource heavy, and the value of the book was deeply felt even at that time by the community of monks that produced it. When the monks fled from the Vikings’ attacks on Lindisfarne, they took the book, as one of their treasures, with them.

Gospel-books, and other major liturgical works, often belonged to the institution rather than a particular individual, and became showpieces for the religious establishments that made them. In the 12th century, very large, elaborately illuminated bibles were manufactured at great expense in what might be regarded as the apogee of book production within the monastic tradition. Sometimes, these may have been dedicated to wealthy patrons, or brought out on display in the church and shown to noble visitors to impress them. At this time, too, the production of some books became the responsibility of professional scribes and artists, like the famous 12th-century artist Master Hugo, who travelled between institutions to make a living in the expert manufacture of books.

Thousands of other books and documents were made besides these highly decorated, expensive volumes, typically made by wealthy institutions and nowadays seen in exhibitions in manuscript repositories around the world. The ‘average’ manuscript—as if any handmade object can be ‘average’—is a portable, plain artefact, containing texts that were essential for the needs of the user or owner. Ownership of books was restricted either to those who belonged to religious communities, or to those in noble households, or, by the 13th century, to students who attended the newly instituted universities of Oxford and Cambridge, who were often engaged in a religious life themselves. At this time, too, book production methods changed with many books becoming smaller, as handwriting became more compressed and the page layout changed. This made the production of books cheaper and more commercially viable. With the book becoming a commodity for wider audiences, writing shops came into existence to cater for the much greater demand for texts.

Textual communities

Traceable textual communities in the earlier Middle Ages tended to be dominated by religious communities of monks, nuns, and canons and those who were their congregations. Some form of literacy was expected of people in holy orders, since they were needed to pray, to practise pastoral care for those souls in their charge, and to be the producers of the books needed for the promulgation of a learned, Christian message. This remained true throughout the medieval period. But, as the centuries progressed noble secular households, including first and foremost the king’s court, became important patrons of and audiences for literature, often fostering an elite literate culture, and helping to establish new forms of textual production.

In the post-Conquest period, after about 1100, French literature (see Box 4) began to be produced in England, partly as a result of the precedent of a long English vernacular tradition, and partly as a result of the keen literary interests of aristocratic and religious women. Henry I’s second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, was a keen patron of literature: she was the dedicatee of one of the earliest French texts written in England in the first quarter of the 12th century, Benedeit’s Le Voyage de Saint Brendan, a poem in octosyllabic rhyming couplets (eight-syllable pairs of lines). The narrative was based on Latin legends of the 6th-century Irish saint, which told the story of his journeys and encounters with extraordinary creatures, people, and places, including a glimpse of heaven.

Box 4 French literature

Inspired perhaps by the long-standing literary tradition they discovered in England, the Normans who conquered in 1066 began to produce works in their own language from about c.1100. This vibrant corpus of literature is also known as Anglo-Norman, or insular French, or French of England, and it differs from continental French in having its own traditions and trends. Saints’ lives and histories predominated in the first part of the 12th century, but from the second half of the century, romances, lyrics, and lays proliferated.

From the 13th century until at least the 15th, there is an astonishingly innovative and varied corpus of prose, poetic, and dramatic texts written in French. Since French was the language of the monarchy, aristocracy, government, law, some clerical institutions, and scholarship, it had a major impact on the trajectory of British and Irish literature and culture. Its importance is seen in the very large number of French words taken into English between the 12th and the later 14th centuries.

After the 15th century, English began to displace French as the language of literary production in England, though French maintained its prestige. The relationship between the various languages and their late medieval written traditions is only now becoming clear with new research generating an appreciation for the importance of French.

The empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I and mother of Henry II, was keen to foster literature in the 12th century, too, as was Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II, and one of the most important figures in the cultural renaissance of the 12th century. Eleanor patronized Wace, the author of the French Roman de Rou, the Brut, and the verse lives of Saints Nicholas and Margaret. Constance, the wife of the Lincolnshire lord Ralf Fitzgilbert, was the patron of the French Estoire des Engleis, written by Geoffrey Gaimar in the mid-12th century. This Estoire was the first translation into the vernacular of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famous Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), completed in 1137. Evidence suggests a female interest in historiography and especially the history of Britain and its royal lineage, together with romance in its earliest phases.

In the later centuries, textual communities became more varied still. From university students to professional householders, as literacy became more widespread, so owners and users of books diversified. The main producer and first owner of the 13th-century multilingual manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 86, was a secular educated man who lived in the west of England. He copied most of the manuscript over a period of time, aiming to include literary and religious works, predominantly in French, that he might have read to his entire household. Thus, as was so often the case, one book probably had a large audience, who would have participated communally through listening, rather than through direct and personal reading.

Throughout rural communities and towns, one important form of literacy was not necessarily highly expert; rather, it was ‘functional’ or pragmatic. Tradespeople and those with some rudimentary education knew enough to get by and might have been able to write their name, or understand significant phrases. These textual communities grew in number and in proficiency by the end of the Middle Ages, paralleling the emergence of a large and productive middle class. Evidence for this kind of literacy comes from many texts, including Chaucer’s late 14th-century Canterbury Tales. This engaging and animated work depicts a diverse group of fictional pilgrims each of whom is meant to tell a story to the other assembled characters as they make their way to Canterbury on their pilgrimage. Among these figures are the Summoner, a minor cleric, who can parrot Latin phrases; a Reeve, who manages his lord’s estates; and other professional characters including the Guildsmen, the Wife of Bath, and the Merchant all of whom would have some access to texts, even if, like the Wife of Bath, they were not that proficient as readers themselves.

Composing and performing

As well as accessing texts through reading, medieval textual communities functioned without tangible books. These were oral or auditory cultures; that is, audiences who participated in the telling of tales and singing of songs through performance, or who heard the narration of secular literature and religious messages in different kinds of environments through the words of poets and preachers, storytellers and teachers. Many labels exist to describe the oral performers of a particular medieval cultural group: scops and bards were the early tellers of tales for the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts; skalds were the poets of the Old Norse traditions. By the 12th century, the French troubadours and trouvères travelled through European courts and noble households singing the love lyrics and lais that played such a major role in literary composition in the late Middle Ages. Later, in the 14th and 15th centuries, highly organized and collaborative dramatic performers emerged onto the streets of the city or village, filling the open spaces with spectacle and noise.

Within the oral and auditory community, one text or one image could have far greater impact than can be measured by surviving instances of that text. Or, single surviving texts, like the single early Welsh riddlic text, Kat Godeu, ‘The Battle of the Trees’, from the Llyfr Taliesin (Book of Taliesin), attest to what might have been a much more prolific literary tradition. Moreover, with performance, the transient mode of delivery to a crowd that is live and present, but then disperses, often leaves no physical trace of its happening. This appears to be the way in which early textual traditions functioned in all societies: through oral dissemination of a text only much later recorded in writing.

In the case of the early medieval British bard, Taliesin, poems attributed to his authorship date from the late 6th century, but are not found in manuscript form until the 14th century, when they were copied into the Llyfr Taliesin (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 2, which is fully digitized on the National Library’s website). Quite what the ‘original’ compositions of this bard and his fellow British poets (known as Y Cynfeirdd) were really like is impossible to deduce and ‘authorship’ becomes an impossibly difficult concept to prove. In the form in which they survive, these poems concern themselves with the heroic ethos in which they were culturally situated, but they clearly also speak to the 14th-century audience that produced and received these works. In Gwaith Argoed Llwyfain (The Affair of Argoed Llwyfain), Taliesin writes in praise of the British king Urien Rheged and his son Owain, ‘the wounder of the east’, relating their battle victories:

Atorelwis Uryen vd yr echwyd,

Then Urien, the lord of Yrechwydd, shouted out,

‘O byd ymgyfaruot am gerenhyd

‘If there’s to be gathering to talk of peace,

dyrchafwn eidoed oduch mynyd

let us raise our banners on the mountain

ac am porthwn wyneb oduch emyl.

and raise our faces above the shield’s edge.

A dyrchafwn peleidyr oduch pen gwyr

Let us raise spears above men’s heads

a chyrchwn fflamdwyn yny luyd

and fall on Fflamddwyn among his hosts

a lladwn ac ef ae gyweithyd!’

and kill both him and his company!’

This rousing speech, which apparently took place in battle during the later 6th century, is clearly a poetic affirmation—rich in rhyme and alliteration—of Urien’s warrior prowess and leadership over his men. In Taliesin’s poem, Urien’s speech insists on the literal and metaphorical rising up of his men and their weapons in order to crush the enemy from a moral and physical height. Taliesin proclaims that until the day he dies he will praise Urien, and such ancient eulogy, known as hengerdd in the Welsh tradition, survives in all the Celtic and Germanic cultures in the medieval period. Professional poets from the earliest to the latest time in medieval society were paid by patrons to regale the whole community with skilful narrations of war-deeds, the better to encourage the listeners in their resolve and desire for victory. They were deeply knowledgeable about history, poetic formulas, and style, and about communities, their ancestry, and their affiliations.

Similarly, then, legend and the careful remembrance of national narratives going back for generations played a major part in the survival and transmission of the great Irish prose saga, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), which survives in manuscripts from the 12th century, though its historical context is perhaps a millennium earlier. These early texts, in both poetry and prose, survive principally because they were passed from teller to teller, evolving and transforming as they continued to entertain and teach. This method of dissemination and the communal understanding that texts were not fixed, as they tend to seem through print, means that medieval literature can be thought of as part of a fluid, changing, and dynamic process. This is true whether one or more versions of a work exist in written form. And because texts were regarded as still-living and authors were often not known, many scribes became part of the authorial process, editing texts both deliberately and inadvertently as they effectively created new versions of the words they had received from an exemplar.

This shifting literary culture seen in Welsh and Irish literary production is also witnessed in all other literary contexts in the Middle Ages. In terms of manuscript variation, a most dramatic example is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which exists in over eighty unique manuscripts and fragments, dating from c.1400 onwards. None of these versions is the same as any other and, indeed, some of the variations between the manuscripts’ texts and sequences of texts are very notable. Since not one manuscript is written by Chaucer himself, scholars of the Tales research how close to Chaucer’s authorial intentions the texts in these manuscripts might be, and how much scribe-editors influenced the production of their respective versions. The same issues of ‘who wrote the manuscript’ and ‘how close is the text to authorial intention’ affect many texts, including those that exist in only one manuscript. With the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, no one knows who the author of the poem was, or when or how it was written. Later literary categories of ‘originality’, ‘date of composition’, ‘authoritative text’, and ‘authorship’ are thus more complex for medieval literature, but, interestingly, such openness gives readers a great deal of interpretative flexibility, too.

Textual settings

Just as the circumstances surrounding the ‘origin’ of a literary work are very murky, either because no ‘original’ exists and the author is unknown, or because we do not know where or when a work’s life began, so, too, the environments in which texts were accessed are often unclear. It is likely that medieval communal audiences were privy to public performances of heroic works and romances, mythical tale-tellings, magnificent oral recitations, and spiritual declamations that lived on in the mind and collective memory.

In the mead-hall of Germanic society, which lasted well into the 11th century in England, or the courtly hall of the regional nobleman, audiences gathered over a meal to be entertained and inspired by works like, respectively, the satirical 12th- or 13th-century Welsh prose Breuddwyd Rhonabwy (The Dream of Rhonabwy), or the 15th-century romance, The Awyntyrs of Arthure (Adventures of Arthur). Some literary works contain a self-representational moment, where their own origins are declaimed. Widsith, an Old English fragmentary verse about the poet whose name means ‘far-journey’, begins with the narration of himself in the third person which illustrates the reception he can expect from listeners in the lord’s hall, who would reward him with treasure and patronage:

Widsith spoke, unlocked his word-hoard,

he who had travelled most of all men

through tribes and nations across the earth

had often gained great treasure in hall.

Widsith’s story is a good reminder of the importance of the social gathering as the place of critical information exchange and communal recollection.

The gathering of the community to hear texts read aloud continued into the modern era, particularly because books were expensive and relatively rare and because levels of literacy ranged variously from exceptionally low to only partial to accomplished until the mandatory education of children in the 19th century. A picture of Geoffrey Chaucer on the first folio of a 15th-century manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 61 (see Figure 3), shows him reading his great romance, Troilus and Criseyde, from a raised dais to King Richard II and an assembly of some two or three dozen courtiers. Obviously, in all performance circumstances like this, some would hear or see better than others, depending on seating or vantage point. In the case of medieval dramas like the York Corpus Christi Plays, or the Chester Mystery Plays performed in the streets from at least the 15th century, if not earlier (and, for the last few decades, performed live in the streets of these modern cities once more), audience participation matters for the plays’ literal, social, and spiritual success. From this physical and real-time participation in re-enacted moments of Christ’s life, the opportunity for a personal engagement with the key episodes in New Testament history are obviously a critical element of the event and it is to the reader’s responses that Chapter 3 will turn.

3. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 61, folio 1 verso.