AN ILLUMINATED MASTERPIECE FROM THE DARK AGES
A page from the Lindisfarne Gospels is depicted in the first plate section.
During the fourth century, Christianity spread throughout Britain. Tolerated by the Roman occupiers from AD 313, following the emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan, it was the state religion by 382. The test, however, was whether it could survive the legions’ departure in 410.
It fell to the new generation of Romano-British chiefs – among them perhaps a leader later mythologized as King Arthur – to defend the faith against pagan invaders: the Germanic tribes that poured into the country from the mid-fifth century onwards. In the sixth century, as the Britons largely lost the fight, the tenets of Christianity were rubbed out in the wake of the incomers.
In the lands they now occupied, the Germanic immigrants established regional kingdoms. Tribes of Angles settled in the Midlands and the North, giving their name to a new geographical expression – England. Their intermingling with Saxon settlers first led Europeans in the seventh century to coin the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to distinguish them not only from Britain’s Celtic inhabitants but from the Saxon tribes remaining on the continent. In turn, Anglo-Saxons described the Celtic Britons they displaced as wealas, the Old English word for ‘stranger’ from which the modern English word ‘Welsh’ is derived.
During this bleakest period of the ‘Dark Ages’, Christianity survived only where it lay out of the Anglo-Saxons’ reach. St Patrick (c.385–461), a Romano-Briton by birth, took the Christian message across to Ireland. In turn, the Irish missionary St Columba established his monastery on the southern Hebridean island of Iona in 563. From such outposts, the faith was spread throughout the Irish kingdom of Dalriada in western Scotland and to the native Picts beyond.
Christianity returned to England by two routes, one Celtic, the other Roman. In 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent (St) Augustine on a mission from Rome to Canterbury where he baptized the Anglo-Saxon king of Kent, Æthelbert. Converting royalty proved a shrewd ‘top-down’ means of securing powerful protectors for the Roman Church. Æthelbert’s daughter, Æthelburga, married Edwin, king of the Deiran dynasty in Northumbria. At Easter 627, this most powerful of northern rulers followed his wife’s example and converted to Christianity along with his court. After Edwin’s death, the Northumbrian throne passed to Oswald, a member of the rival Bernician dynasty. Oswald had previously been exiled on Iona and he encouraged its missionaries to settle in Northumbria.
Among Oswald’s gifts to them was Lindisfarne. This small island, which twice daily is both connected to and cut off from the Northumbrian coast by the tide, became one of the focal points for the Columban mission spreading out from Ireland and Scotland. While the Church in northern England was staffed largely by Celtic monks, the doctrine became more identifiably Roman during the later years of the seventh century and, in particular, after 664 when the Synod of Whitby pronounced against the Celtic calendar for Easter. Like the other monastic settlements, the monastery at Lindisfarne acclimatized itself to the universal claims of the Roman Church. Over a period of years, a specifically Celtic Christian tradition in the British Isles began to wane.
Lindisfarne was particularly fortunate in enjoying the strong patronage of Northumbria’s monarchs. When the relics of St Cuthbert, its former bishop, were brought there in 698, it became a place of pilgrimage. It was probably with the intention of their being set on the high altar next to St Cuthbert’s shrine that the Lindisfarne Gospels were written.
AD 63 According to the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury, Jesus’ disciple, Joseph of Arimathea, reaches Glastonbury.
c.209–304 St Alban becomes Britain’s first Christian martyr, although the exact date is disputed.
313 The emperor Constantine legalizes Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.
314 The bishops of London, York and Lincoln attend the Council of Arles.
382 Christianity becomes the state religion throughout the Roman Empire.
5th century Christianity in Britain is in decline following the withdrawal of Rome and the invasion of pagan Germanic tribes.
563 The Irish missionary St Columba establishes his monastery on Iona. The conversion of Scotland follows.
589 St David, a Welsh preacher who founded monastic settlements in Wales and Cornwall, dies.
597 Pope Gregory the Great sends Augustine on a mission to England. Augustine becomes the first archbishop of Canterbury and converts the Kentish king, Æthelbert.
627 The Northumbrian king, Edwin, is converted to Christianity.
635 Aidan of Iona founds the Lindisfarne monastery.
664 The Synod of Whitby accepts the Roman rather than the Celtic calendar for Easter.
735 Bede translates the Gospel of St John into Old English.
793 Vikings sack Lindisfarne monastery.
c.990 Alfric, an English abbot, translates part of the Old Testament into Old English.
Bound together after completion in a metal-framed cover (subsequently lost), the book contains the gospels of the four evangelists. It is written in Latin, the source for which was an edition, probably Italian in origin, of the Vulgate. In this respect it was far from unique, but what made it one of the highest manifestations of Anglo-Saxon culture was the rich artistry with which it was illustrated.
Remarkably, it appears to be the work of one hand. If we are to believe the assurance of Aldred – a monk who, in the mid-tenth century, inserted between its Latin lines a word-for-word translation into Old English – we even know the identity of this gifted and extraordinarily patient artist-scribe. He was Eadfrith, Lindisfarne’s bishop from 698 to 721.
Although we cannot be certain that Aldred’s attribution is accurate, subsequent scholarship generally supports the book’s likely provenance as Lindisfarne in the period of Eadfrith’s bishopric. Certainly, the monastic community there was sufficient to support him in his undertaking. An extensive library of books, gathered from across Europe, was also available for consultation in the nearby monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. Familiarity with such sources may also help explain the Lindisfarne Gospels’ eclectic borrowing from different artistic styles. The result was a work that developed a new English art form, which harmonized influences from Celtic, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Byzantine, Middle Eastern and even Coptic art.
Each of the four gospels is introduced with a portrait of the evangelist and his symbol (a man for Matthew; a lion for Mark; a calf for Luke; an eagle for John). A ‘carpet page’ follows in which the symbol of the cross is contained within a pattern. This form of decoration was common to the Coptic art of the Egyptian Christians, but is augmented in the Lindisfarne Gospels by especially elaborate interwoven rhythmic patterns, with geometrical knots and depictions of birds and animals in the Celtic style. Next comes the ‘incipit page’. Here the opening capital letter and the first words of each gospel are surrounded by rich ornamentation, with the first words transcribed in runic fashion. The attention to detail is astounding. For instance, in the incipit page (folio 139r) of the Gospel of Luke, there are 10,600 individually painted red dots in the adornment surrounding the initial.
This level of laboriously executed intricacy is all the more remarkable given that much of it would have been done with relatively primitive implements, without means of magnification and by candlelight. The personal cost of creating such a visual masterpiece must surely have been considerable eye-strain for its lone artist-scribe. Given Eadfrith’s other burdensome monastic duties, it represented an extraordinary dedication to art and devotion to faith.
Costs of a different kind were incurred in the luxurious nature of the materials. The Lindisfarne Gospels were written on 259 folio sheets of vellum, whose quality of calfskin far exceeds that generally found in other important documents of the period. Nor were the pigments exclusively derived from local sources. Among the colours used appears to be lapis lazuli, which was quarried in Afghanistan.
The fact that a monk, working on a tiny windswept Northumbrian island, could draw on the resources of much of the known world demonstrates the extent to which this corner of Anglo-Saxon England not only connected itself with the visual remnants of Celtic faith but also fully acknowledged its place within the Roman orthodoxy of European Christendom.
Just as it was not cut off from that greater community, so neither was it spared from its assailants. In 793, Vikings launched a surprise attack on Lindisfarne, sacking the monastery. Further assaults followed, forcing the bishop and most of his monks to flee to the greater safety of the mainland. With them, they took St Cuthbert’s remains and the Lindisfarne Gospels, first to Chester-le-Street and later to Durham. It was probably at Chester-le-Street that Aldred added his between-line textual translation into Old English. In doing so, he gave the work an additional importance as the oldest surviving example of the gospels in the English language.
The Lindisfarne Gospels eventually became part of the Cottonian Library after its removal from Durham during the Reformation, and at length found their way, first to the British Museum, and later to the British Library, where they remain to this day.
