Vikings, arson and mice: how medieval manuscripts survived against the odds

At Oxford 40 years ago, as postgraduates, we had to go to the University Press in Great Clarendon Street and learn about early printing and binding methods, pagination and the decipherment of Elizabethan Secretary Hand. All highly useful technical stuff, when my doctoral thesis was on Anthony Burgess.

But I enjoyed it all for its own sake – it delayed having to earn a living for another year – and Hidden Hands (a quite dreadful title: I thought it was going to be about fragrant skin crème or masturbation) brought it all back. For Mary Wellesley’s book concerns the mechanics of producing literature. She loves nothing more than a good poke around the Special Collections Room of the British Library, poring over original medieval texts and receiving a “tangible, smellable, visual encounter” with the past. You don’t quite get that browsing in a Sally Rooney pop-up shop.

Wellesley likes to handle the vellum or parchment, with their organic reek, the leaves made from cured and tanned goat hide or calfskin. Ink was manufactured from oak galls and soot. When the writings were decorated with lions, golden parakeets, dragons or “a ladybird clambering over a plump cucumber” (at least that’s what Wellesley says it looks like), coloured paints were mixed from egg yolk, gum arabic, lichens and woad. Paper was made from pulped rags poured into a sieve-like frame, which was then pressed between sheets of felt, fashioned wire creating distinctive watermarks.

Before printing arrived with Caxton from the Netherlands, in 1476, books were copied by hand – an immensely laborious task. It took years to copy out a Bible. A full-time scribe would perhaps manage only 20 projects in a lifetime. The scriptorium was “heated to prevent the scribes and artists from getting cold hands… Cold hands were something of an occupational hazard,” insists Wellesley considerately. (When was the mitten invented?)

These manuscripts were works of art in themselves. Amongst the intertwining ivy tendrils in The Luttrell Psalter are sketches of falconry, water mills and horses, which look a bit like sheep, maybe squirrels. “St Dunstan pinching the devil’s nose” sees St Dunstan tormenting a fox terrier with sugar tongs. In the Sherborne Missal, which abounds with rosy glazed chintz, there’s a bald man with a swan on his head.

Many early books were chained to the shelves, like spoons in a British Rail cafeteria. Anne Boleyn’s volume of the Psalms had a gold metalwork binding, which could be attached to her belt, preventing loss. Nevertheless, books were an endangered species. Vikings, “like stinging hornets”, destroyed everything they came across, monks and nuns included, when they raided the north east. Manuscripts were hidden in coffins for safety. The St Cuthbert Gospel, weighing 162g, 10 x 14cm in size, and made 1,300 years ago, found in a Durham tomb, was bought by the British Library in 2012 for ￡9 million.

Wellesley makes the point that only a fraction survives to the present day. “The vast majority of manuscripts produced in the medieval era perished through fire, flood, negligence or wilful destruction.” After the Reformation and Anne Boleyn’s execution, in 1536, the Protestant cancel culture was ferocious. The contents of monastic libraries were used as candlestick wedges, kindling, for boot cleaning and lavatory paper. (Imagine people wiping their bums on the Book of Kells.) There was further pious vandalism during the Civil War.

Other irreplaceable documents, located in the back of cupboards in deteriorating stately homes, were “eaten away presumably by a mouse”. In 1731, there was a catastrophic fire near Westminster Abbey. “Amongst other priceless treasures” placed on the 14 bookshelves that went up in flames were two original manuscripts of the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Beowulf, and the official state papers of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. As much singed material as possible was salvaged – “piles of cinder-like fragments” floated about for weeks. Vellum turned “the colour of milky coffee” in the heat. Relics eventually went for preservation to the British Museum, founded in 1753. Stray documents turned up for years – in a shop in Newcastle in 1882 and “among estate papers in Kingston Lacy” in 1982.

As for the contents of many of these ancient leaves, there’s the religious subject matter, of course, plus annotations and scribbles made by the anonymous monks and lay figures – glossaries, legal memoranda, itineraries, accounts of “visions of devils”, riddles, saints’ lives, and instructions on how to live as an anchorite – crazy nuns who were enclosed in cells the size of a coffin, yearning for an existence of “sensory deprivation, with limited light, fresh air, conversation, laughter or touch”. It wasn’t all gloom, though. Wellesley has found illustrations of jolly harvest scenes, depicting women with sickles and “upturned bottoms”. The cast sounds like it has stepped out of Monty Python – Queen Emma of Normandy, for example, or Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim.

To Wellesley, books are objects, tangible things, a million miles away from Kindles, which are inert. Her taste is not for “the sanitised, ordered blandness of the modern edited text”. Hidden Hands celebrates, in circular fashion, the fact that “there have been lovers of books for as long as there have been books to love.” When, for whatever reason, they are destroyed, Wellesley gets emotional – “voices are silenced, stories erased.” What has come through to us is the “flotsam and jetsam of a vanished world”.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say, so what? There is already far too much English literature. The thought of there being more Green Knights, maybe Pink Knights or Puce Knights, more battles against, say, Grendel’s mother-in-law, more punishing Camelot stories and failed Grail quests and Canterbury tales – it makes me grateful for Vikings, matches and mice.

Hidden Hands is published by Quercus at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop