MANUSCRIPT MAKING IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

 

·        Most of the existing Old English manuscripts were made in the scriptoria of monasteries by members of the clergy.

·        Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were written exclusively on parchment or vellum–originally made out of calf, goat or pig skins which had been stretched, shaved and treated. The result of this process was a thin membrane with one completely smooth side and another with a thin layer of leftover hair. Hundreds of animal skins were required to make a single book. This meant that the cost of creating literature during the Anglo-Saxon period was staggering – and hence the value of the finished product.

·        After the skins had been treated, they were folded into page-size squares (one fold created a folio, two folds a quarto, four folds an octavo, and so on – denoting the number of pages created by the folds). The result was a “quire,” or section of pages. This process permitted the scribe to prick small holes through the pages of each quire, which could then be ruled, making uniformly straight lines of text on each page. Finally the quires would be bound together and covered. This method of book production meant that manuscripts could be easily unbound/rebound, permitting portions of texts to become separated, swapped or lost. For this reason, and because medieval writers frequently wrote wherever they could fit text (in blank spaces, on flyleaves, etc.), many manuscripts contain a wide assortment of different documents.

·        The dominant script of the Old English manuscripts is Anglo-Saxon (also called Insular, a Latin word meaning “island”; in this context, the term means “from England or Ireland”). It stemmed from the Uncial script brought to England by Augustine and his fellow missionaries, and incorporated the initially Irish Roman Half-Uncial. The Anglo-Saxon hand was generally miniscule (a calligraphic term meaning smaller, lower-case letters), reserving majuscule characters (larger, upper-case letters) for the beginnings of text segments or important words (this developed into the norm for modern writing – beginning sentences and “important” words with capital letters).

Evidence of Mercian literacy’s effects on written Old English:

·        The Epinal, Erfurt, and Corpus inter-linear English glosses were vernacular additions to very expensively produced religious texts in Latin, produced in the Mercian period. The texts were psalters, such as the Vespasian Psalter. The texts themselves have wide margins, use the best materials, spacious and uneconomical hands, and illuminated capitals of subtle and intricate design. The presence of English in these texts indicates that the addition of the vernacular was considered an adornment—powerful testimony of the privileged position of the written English word in A-S culture. Because of the costs of production, they were probably produced at centers that enjoyed royal patronage, where political influences would have been most felt.

 

·        Expansion of literacy under the Mercians, not only in the charters, production of psalters, but development of libraries that encouraged the flourishing of Latin and English learning. Attention was paid to the production of genealogies (Offa) and the codification of laws. With the establishment of a royal Mercian scriptorium, peculiarly Mercian orthographic practices developed, while the production of charters mushroomed. From the same period in which all charters exhibit Mercian letter forms, the Vespasian Psalter gloss, also with its own Mercian letter forms.

 

·        The influence is that as Mercian practices become entrenched, so the frequency of Mercian forms increases. So we see a steady increase in o spellings in words like lond (o before a nasal), by comparison with the non-Mercian a-spellings. While Epinal (c. 700) has 0, Erfurt has  o 50% of the time, Corpus has it 70% of the time. The VP has o, all the time.