Chapter II: Part 2

It would have been correct enough to bracket Britain along with Spain and Gaul in a preceding paragraph, but we cannot venture to claim for this country any knowledge of writing before the arrival of the Romans. It is true that a great part of the south of the island was Gaulish, and that the Gauls of Gaul, who knew how to write, were in intimate relations with the Britons. Britania was probably a land of Celtiberian population like Spain, but without such traditions as the Turdetani. It was Romanised very effectively all over the south, and with the Latin language the people used Latin letters like their fellows in Gaul and Spain. Like other Roman citizens, the Britons became Christians, underwent subjugation by pagan barbarians, and lost their lives or their Latinity, those who escaped massacre being absorbed by the invaders. So far as writing is concerned, they have left nothing beyond some lapidar inscriptions; but these and whatever else they {28}produced in the form of MSS. during the first four centuries were no doubt as wholly Roman as anything of the kind in Italy.

At so short a distance from the shores of Roman Britain, it is not likely that the Irish remained letterless till the fifth century of the Christian era. It is almost certain that the labours of St. Patrick (about the middle of that century) were but complementary to those of earlier missionaries; and that the adoption of the Roman alphabet in Ireland may be dated from the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. The consummate ornamental beauty of the MSS. executed in Ireland during the seventh century, and the testimony given by St. Adamnan (writing about A.D. 670) to the expertness of St. Columba as a calligrapher (about 550) tend to prove that the art had been practised for a long time before it attained to such excellence. The particular merit of the Irish is that they seem to have developed (out of Roman semi-uncials) a handsome minuscule form of writing earlier than any other people. The cursive of the Romans had always been an ugly and ill-decipherable script; and it was only in the seventh century that even the Italians, under barbarian pressure, evolved a fairly good readable minuscule. The minuscules of Gaul and Western Germany, called Merowingian, were still in a formless and primitive rudeness at the time when the Irish had already attained the elegance of practised penmanship.

The Goths have next to be mentioned, as they and the Irish were the only two barbarian nations that adopted the Græco-Roman alphabet before the break-up of the Roman empire.

_The Goths and Germans_

The people who in the fourth century after Christ called themselves _Gut-thiuda_, _i.e._ Goth-people, had been for many centuries the most easterly branch of the Germanic race. {29}Down at least to the second century B.C. their tribes occupied the regions bordering on the Vistula and the Dniester, extending from the Bay of Dantzig to the Black Sea. At the north-western end of the line they were in the time of Tacitus known as Guthones; those at the other end were called Bastarnæ by Polybius and Strabo, and recognised as _Germans_. The latter people were the first of their race to become acquainted with civilisation. The amber-trade was already in the time of Herodotus a vigorous traffic, carried on between the Baltic and the Greek settlements on the Euxine. It passed through the lands of the Guthones and the Bastarnæ, and led undoubtedly to the growth of the form of notation called Runes. The Runic alphabet, inscriptions in which are numerous in Scandinavia, was evidently deformed from the Greek, and must have originated about the Dniester some five or six centuries before Christ. As time went on, that alphabet naturally drifted further and further north; the Goths and Germans, nearest to the Greeks, having, of course, less need of it according as their knowledge increased. From the shores of the Baltic it was carried into Scandinavia, and became the earliest form of writing in Northern Europe. Mr. George Stephens claims for the oldest of the extant Norse Runes an antiquity exceeding that of our era, but a more moderate Scandinavian writer sets the earliest date at about A.D. 300. In any case, it must be allowed that some form of writing was obtained by Gothic tribes from Greek traders before the time of Christ, and that it afterwards found a home in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The name of _Runes_ is equivalent to that of ciphers or riddles or mysteries, and we may infer that its real origin was in the cutting of strokes to express numbers. Runic letters never reached the pen-and-ink stage of other alphabets, and their records are hardly more than inscriptions upon tombstones. For that and similar purposes they continued to be occasionally employed, both in England and Scandinavia, long after the {30}use of Roman or modified Roman letters had been established in all countries. The singular variations in form and number and value between runes of different dates and different places, are easily accounted for by the circumstance that there can have been no continuous practise of such inscriptions in any country in which Christianity had already established a simpler script.

Runes do not seem to have come into use among the Western Germans, that is, the tribes which occupied the region which we now call Germany. Hrabanus Maurus, in the tenth century, wrote about the runes of the Marcomanni, and gave figures of them. This has led German writers to assert the existence of Runic letters among the Suevi in the early days of the Roman empire; but Hrabanus adds to "Marcomanni" the gloss "quos nos Northmannos vocamus." His Marcomanni were not the Marchmen of the Roman period. Bede is also said to have formulated a list of the runes of the Northmen. One reason which retarded the educational advancement of the Western Germans was that they never came into contact with the Romans till the beginning of the first century B.C., and even then only for a short time, in the invasion of the republic by the Cimbri and Teutones. They were shut away from the Roman frontiers by the buffer states of Celtic countries, and it was only after the conquest of Gaul, Rhætia, and Noricum that the Romans came into continuous conflict with Marcomanni and Suevi. It was Cæsar who first made the name of Germani historical, and Tacitus who invented Germania as the name of the country.

The name Germani is, as Zeuss suggests, Gallic for "Neighbours," and was pronounced _Gármani_ by the Gauls, who had first been asked by the Romans how their neighbours were called. It is curious that even in this country the Britons called the invading English _Garmani_, by what Bede supposed to be a corruption of speech. (The Celts in later days were not Latinised Britons, and knew nothing of {31}Germans. They made no distinction between Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but called them all Saxons.)

The name by which the Germans call themselves is not a race name, but merely the adjective meaning national, native, vernacular. Just as the Italians afterwards used the phrase _in volgare_ to mean "in Italian," as distinguished from Latin, so the Germans had the word _diutisc_ or _thiutisc_ (deutsch) to mean vulgar, as opposed to _walahisc_ or _walesc_ (welsch), which meant Latin. The two adjectives became in time proper names, with the sense of German and Roman. The Western Germans had nothing to do with writing till they conquered the Welshmen of Gaul. Consequently, we proceed to the Gothic alphabet.

After repeated attacks on the Roman empire in the third century, and repeated defeats, the Goths had extended their seats southwards, and were resident, in a partly Christianised state, in the lands north and south of the Danube. Wulfila, or Ulfila, a Goth, said to have been born in Cappadocia, a man of great ability, who was able to preach in Gothic, in Greek, and in Latin, thought the time had come to Christianise his countrymen completely. For that purpose he translated the Bible into the Gothic language, and created an uncial alphabet, derived partly from Greek, partly from Latin, and partly from Runic. Of his twenty-seven letters, two are merely numerals. In the twenty-five that were used for writing, the _c_ (g), _d_, _l_, _p_, and _ch_ have their Greek uncial shapes, the _a_, _b_, _e_, _f_, _h_, _i_, _k_, _m_, _n_, _r_, _s_, _t_, and _z_ may be called Latin uncials; the _q_ resembles our capital _u_, but is plainly an adaptation of the Greek _koppa_, the _th_ seems to be modified from the Greek _ph_, but may have easily been the Greek _th_; a Roman G is inserted in the alphabet in the place of the Greek _Ksi_, and seems to have been used as _gh_ or _Y_ consonant; a Greek Y is used for the Runic angular P which represented the Teutonic _w_; an o with a dot in the centre stood for _hw_; and the vowels O and U appear as [Symbol: 8 without bottom half-loop] and [Symbol: inverted U]. The Gothic _th_, _hw_, _w_, _o_, {32}and _u_ are found in the Runic alphabet, from which Ulfila must have borrowed them. So far as it was possible to him he avoided the letters of his pagan ancestors, but for certain sounds existing in Gothic, and not in Greek or Latin, he was compelled to fall back upon the Runes. Just in a similar way, the Anglo-Saxons two hundred years later, when adopting the Irish-Roman alphabet, were obliged to add the necessary _th_ and _w_ from the same Runic source.

The Gothic letters of Ulfila were used for about two centuries by the so-called Ostrogoths, all the extant manuscripts of the Gothic Bible having been written in Italy in the sixth century, the famous Silver Gospels of Stockholm included. Of the Visigoths who had preceded the Ostrogoths in Italy, but gone onward thence to fix their rule in Southern Gaul and Spain, we have nothing to show that they ever made use of the Ulphilan alphabet. Their coins of the sixth and seventh centuries bear inscriptions in debased Roman capitals; and the so-called Visigothic writing in manuscripts of the eighth to the twelfth centuries is simply Spanish-Roman. The use, in modern times, of the word Gothic to indicate special forms of writing and architecture is very absurd, but the phrase has become convenient. In so far as writing is concerned, we may continue to use the word gothic (with a small g) to denote the angular "black letter" of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

_Irish and British writing_

Of the various species of national writing which were evolved from Roman calligraphy, and which, from the seventh century onwards, are divided by palæographers into Lombardic and Visigothic, Frankish (Merowingian), and Irish (Hibernian and Anglo-Saxon), the Irish was probably the first to attain a distinct type of its own. There would be {33}inherent probability in the notion that the Irish alphabet and the Irish style of ornament were created in Britain and transferred to Ireland in the fifth century when the English arrived. Professor Westwood seemed to regard the idea with favour but hesitated in giving it full expression. He says "it may be observed that the earliest of the sculptured Christian stones of Wales exhibit the same system of ornamentation, _as well as the same style of writing_, as the Irish MSS. which are, in all probability, of a somewhat more recent date." One will naturally seek to test the value of this observation by examining the writer's Lapidarium Walliæ. In that work, however, no substantiation will be found. There are a couple of instances in which sculptured stones bearing names, which are assigned by Bishop Stubbs to the ninth century, are said by Prof. Westwood to be _perhaps_ of the sixth or seventh; and that is all. On the contrary, the one salient fact observable in the Lapidarium is, that all the inscriptions of the Roman and early post-Roman time are in pure Roman capitals, while the inscriptions upon sculptured stones in minuscules resembling the Irish alphabet, all belong to the period when the Angles and Saxons were in full possession of Irish calligraphic and artistic models--that is, _after_ the seventh century. The Britons of the fifth century, at least all over the Southern half of the island, were a Romanised people as much as the Gauls, and it would be ridiculous to expect Celtic provincial art in the home of Roman culture. They were exterminated or absorbed in the east and middle of the island by the Germanic invaders, and they were harried out of the west by their Cumri kindred from the north, and by pirate Scots from Ireland. The latter part of the fifth century and the whole of the sixth and part of the seventh, formed a period during which the inhabitants of Cambria can have produced little or nothing in the way of letters or art. It was probably not till the beginning of the eighth century that the Cumri began to identify themselves with the {34}ancient Britons, and to gather up the legends and historical traditions of the British remnant as their own. There is a clear testimony that the Cumri and the Britons were closely akin as a race, but not identical, in the fact that names beginning with V in British use down to the fifth century are found to begin with Gu (Gw) in the language of the Welsh. Guend and Vend were of course two phases of an old Celtic word, but the former is necessarily the older. Consequently the people who have used _Gw_ from the fifth to the nineteenth century cannot be the same as those who had already reached the _V_-stage in the first century. They were close relatives undoubtedly, but had little in common beyond their racial affinity and the original homogeneity of their speech. It may be surmised that the Briton found no more kindness in his Cumric stepbrother, or his Irish cousin, than in the fierce strangers who called him a Welshman (because they found him talking Welsh, _i.e._ Latin).

Bede, in spite of his Romanist tendency, and his Romanist aversion to the practice of the Celtic church with regard to the Paschal festival and the tonsure, gives clear evidence that in the middle of the seventh century "many Englishmen of the noble and the meaner sort" resorted to Ireland, and dwelt there for the purpose either of study or of leading a religious life (divinæ lectionis vel continentioris vitæ gratiâ), and states that "the Scots received them all most willingly, giving them their daily food without charge, _also books for reading_, and gratuitous instruction." The Angles were apt pupils. They learned to write and ornament books of their own in the Irish manner, and they had Irish monks in their new monasteries who fostered the art. By the close of the seventh century, there were expert penmen among the Anglian monks, and during the eighth century, although the very close adherence to Irish models is the feature of most of the ornamental manuscripts, they began to strike out a new and characteristic line of their own in which they soon surpassed their masters. This was in {35}figure-drawing, in miniatures painted with a mastery of design which was altogether unknown to the Irish. The heads or figures which appeared in Irish illuminations were merely accessory and subordinate to the scheme of decoration, utterly contemptible as delineations of human form. In the Anglo-Saxon miniatures of the period which began--say about 750 and continued to the eleventh century, there is a distinct national school, in which the over-anxious treatment of draperies and the striking addiction to light green pigment, are prominent characteristics. The style gives a sort of general impression that it had been formed upon a Byzantine model, but the probability is that the later classical survival in Italy in the seventh century had helped to form the Anglo-Saxon taste as well as the taste of the Carolingian school. A similar, but ruder, expression of the same Anglo-Saxon method of illustration appeared in German work of the tenth and eleventh centuries; and as this had its parentage in the French Carolingian art of the ninth century, we may suspect that the tendency which brought that art to its perfection in the time of Charles the Bald, had begun in Gaul before the time of Charles the Great, that is, earlier than the usual date of its sudden genesis. This conjecture would make the production of books illustrated with miniatures synchronise in France and England, and thus obviate the difficulty of supposing that the Anglo-Saxons invented the art and carried it to perfection within a century of their learning how to write. It is sufficient glory for them to have converted the artistic movement of the time into a national school of painting unmistakable with any other, at a time when the calligraphical schools of central and Southern France, under an enlightened Frankish emperor, and with far superior opportunities, were labouring for a Gallo-Roman renaissance.

{36}_Origin of Mediæval Illumination_

Books in the classical period had of course been ornamented with illustrations, but the illumination of books (in the mediæval sense) did not originate with the Græco-Roman calligraphers of the Empire. We cannot suppose that it sprang into life in Ireland, but certainly its first European manifestation was in Irish MSS., and the art had not been received by the Irish from any of the European nations. The only alternative is, however, far fetched, that Christian missionaries from the East (or with Eastern training) had preceded St. Patrick and brought with them those characteristics of Syro-Egyptian art which are traceable alike in Irish and in Byzantine work. The documentary period of writing in Ireland is of course later than the actual practice of the art in that country, but it is earlier than amongst any other of the unromanised barbarians. Adamnan, writing about A.D. 670, relates the life of St. Columba (dead in 598) and describes the writing materials which that saint had used in his scriptorium in the island of Hy. As he had learned to write in Ireland and had begun his priestly career there before 540, we may place the historically ascertainable use of writing in Ireland as beginning with the early years of the sixth century. Irish monks carried the art to Britain, to Gaul, to Germany; and those elaborate and intricate patterns to which the French give the names of "lettres perlées, lettres brodées, spirales, noeuds, et entrelacs, initiales ophiomorphiques, ichthyomorphiques," &c., and which they claim as indigenous productions of Carolingian France in the early part of the ninth century--were fruits of the teaching of Irish missionaries, in the houses which they founded in Britain and all over the continent in the seventh century.

Some of the remarks in the preceding section will be found in strong disagreement with the authority of Professor {37}Westwood, whose work on the Anglo-Saxon and Irish miniatures is such a splendid testimony to his zeal and ability. His conjectural dates are, however, frequently misleading. An instance is that of the so-called Bible of St. Gregory, figured on his plates 14, 15. In the text he says that Sir Frederick Madden had declared the MS. to be "unquestionably of the eighth century," but he prefers to call it of the seventh, in agreement with Casley and Astle (who thought so in the last century!). He ought to have accepted the opinion of a recognised master in palæography like Sir Frederick, so far as the writing is concerned, in preference to that of two men living at a time before the science had attained anything like exactness in England. He ought also to have seen or felt, while making his elaborate facsimile, that the nearest parallel to the style of illumination of his "first page of Luke" is to be found in Carolingian work executed about 800; and that no great space of time could separate the two examples. The English work was probably the earlier, but it can hardly have been accomplished before 770. The purely Irish patterns in the columns supporting the arch, with the excellent picture of St. Luke that surmounts it, prove by their combination that the work is Anglo-Saxon of its second and finer period, that is after the phase in which it was merely and wholly imitative of the Irish. With these considerations in view, and a remembrance of Bede's words quoted above in relation to Anglian education in Ireland about A.D. 650, the assignment of the Bible of St. Gregory to the seventh century is a pure absurdity.--Again, Westwood's facsimile from the Golden Gospels of Stockholm, bears the attribution "Sixth Century? Ninth Century?" while its position in the book, as the first plate, tends to show that Professor Westwood leaned to the earlier date. Yet the book is unquestionably not Irish; its artistic illustration is a singularly fine development of Anglo-Saxon art--think of Anglo-Saxon art and chrysography in the sixth century! The writing cannot be {38}mistaken for Roman uncials of the sixth century; it is plainly in Carolingian uncials of the latter half of the eighth. The book seems to have been illustrated by an Anglian hand, and written by a Frankish one,--probably on the continent rather than in England.

Books in Irish or Saxon-Irish writing are found all over the continent. As they were written in monasteries founded by Irish missionaries during the seventh and eighth centuries, they only indicate that a succession of Irish or of Saxon monks continued to make their way for a considerable period to France, Germany, and Italy. The writing can hardly be said to have left any traces in the various national hands of those countries, but the Irish house at Bobbio probably transmitted the use of the interlaced ornamentation which revived in Italy several centuries later.

Most of the motifs of decoration in the illuminated Carolingian, Visigothic, and Lombardic MS. were derived from the Irish methods of ornamentation introduced through monastic houses and schools established by Irish monks on the continent. French writers deny their indebtedness to foreigners for it, since, as they say, the pattern was always at hand in the tessellated and mosaic pavements of Gallo-Roman architecture. But there is something of unnecessary vanity in the denial. The Irish MSS. of the seventh century are the first in Europe which contain decorative initials of the kind. This fact is indisputable, and is not affected by the question of original derivation, which in my opinion is to be sought for in the east among those Hellenised Syrians and Egyptians who were the propagators of Christian art as well as Christian religion in the west.

_Merowingian, Lombardic, Visigothic_

These names, applied to varying styles of writing, are without historical exactness. Roughly speaking, the first {39}means the debased Roman used in Gaul and Western Germany from the sixth to the eighth century, the second was the script of the larger part of Italy (but chiefly the east and the south) between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, the third was the national hand of Spain and Languedoc during the eighth to the twelfth century. The names are based upon erroneous historical assumptions. The Frankish kings, supposed to be descended from Merowig, carried with them across the Rhine no graphic system whatever. They found in Gaul the identical styles of writing which were used in Italy, and such of their people as gave up the trade of warriors to assume that of clerics and councillors, were obliged to learn the arts of the Gauls. The circumstances under which the new kingdom was established as a permanent institution, were not such as to make the Franks a nation of penmen; and the influence of their bad taste in calligraphy could hardly have been felt till the beginning of the seventh century. Their Gallic underlings continued to write as before, but in the absence of enlightened patronage, the schools of art no longer produced good work, except in the monasteries of the Provincia Romana, where less deterioration took place than elsewhere. The Frankish monarchy was so widely extended throughout the territories stretching from the Loire to the Main, and along the whole course of the Rhine from south to north, even in "Merovingian" times, that the use of the word to designate a special style of writing is hardly desirable. It is probable enough that in the seventh century and the early part of the eighth a kind of uniformity existed in the writing used in all the region between Paris and Mentz, but it was nothing else than Roman uncials, semiuncials, and minuscules written in more or less cramped and graceless fashion; varying only in the degree of badness according to the locality. It is Roman cacography with a Germanic stamp upon it. There was a decided improvement in it when the eighth century was in progress.

{40}The Lombardic hand is also a Roman hand as written by or for barbarians who lived nearer to the centre of civilisation than the Franks did. To justify its name it would be necessary to show that it originated and was practised in the region we call Lombardy in the seventh century. There is, however, no trace of its existence before the ninth century, and very little show of its having been used to any extent in Cisalpine Gaul. Most of the surviving examples of its employment as a national or local script indicate Eastern and Southern Italy as its home during the ninth to the twelfth century; while most of the manuscripts produced in Lombardy and northern Italy during that time belong rather to the Carolingian type. In fact, the Carolingian minuscule, the Visigothic minuscule, and the Lombardic minuscule all show at their beginning so much similarity that we look for examples of the latter two sufficiently early to decide a doubt which arises--which of the three was the fountain head of modern letters. The chief marks of distinction in the Lombardic through its whole career are the _t_ shaped nearly like _a_, and the _a_ shaped like _cc_. The Visigothic _t_ is identical with the Lombardic; and in the _a_ there is so little unlikeness that the form of the letter seems to be something halfway between _u_ and _cc_. (It is equivalent to _cc_ without their beaks or initial knobs.) The circumstance that two scripts so widely removed in place should retain common peculiarities, down to the very end of their severed existence, leads to a suspicion that the so-called Lombardic was probably a post-Ulfilan Ostrogothic. The peculiarities referred to, and some others which need not be specialised, are also found in the "Merowing" writing of books produced west of the Rhine in the seventh century. Now as Carolingian writing is quite free from these peculiarities, we can safely conclude that the Lombardic and the Visigothic are both older than the time of Charles the Great. It is usually supposed by those who see the difficulty attaching to the use of the name Lombardic, that the mode {41}of writing so styled was used in the kingdom of the Longbeards, but died out in its chief home after the conquest by the Franks, and only maintained a continued existence in the Neapolitan duchies held by princes of Lombardic origin. The suspicion hinted at above becomes stronger when we review these facts. The Lombards were a far rougher and more uncultivated race than the Goths, and found a Gothic-Roman script in use in Italy when they entered to destroy the kingdom of Theodoric. It was probably in Ravenna that the so-called Lombardic minuscule had its seat during the sixth century, side by side with the declining Gothic uncial of Wulfila. From Ravenna, its spread over the east and south of Italy would be much more easily effected than from Milan or Pavia; and its undeniable similarity to the Visigothic script of Spain leads to the belief that these two were the real Gothic writing of the early Middle Ages, as distinguished from the Moesian alphabet, which cannot have endured much longer than the reign of Theodoric himself. The hand which is called broken Lombard belongs to a later time. Its characteristic is an attempt to produce an ornamental wavy effect by suspending the weight of the pen-stroke in the middle of each descent, but the forms of the letters remain unchanged. It was a fashion of Neapolitan writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and seems to correspond in its own school with that tendency in the schools of northern countries which produced the angular "gothic" of the thirteenth. As has been remarked in another paragraph, the "Lombardic" flourished even in Italy, side by side with the pure Carolingian, which had become the most favoured of all handwritings since the Empire of the West was renewed in the family of Charles the Great. The Carolingian, however, seems to have encroached to no more southerly point than Rome itself, leaving all the region beyond to its Lombardic rival.

Of the Visigothic, as of the Lombardic, it has to be said that, so far as extant specimens are concerned, it might {42}well have been the offspring of the Carolingian, rather than an elder form of writing. Its kinship, however, to "Merowingian" and "Lombardic" is undeniable, and there is a very fair show of probability that the Visigoths had something to do with it, notwithstanding the fact that we only know it in examples later than the destruction of the Gothic monarchy in Spain. What the term Visigothic means we do not know. Most people think it meant West Gothic, and that is how it was interpreted by Jornandes, who, as an Italian Ostrogoth of the sixth century, ought to have been capable of understanding the sense of the word. It is, however, very uncertain; for Jornandes, though intelligent and well-informed, was not impeccable even as regards his Gothic kinsmen. Most of his knowledge was derived from his Latin education, and to him probably we owe a good many misconceptions, arising from his acceptance of various geographical names in Latin and Greek writers as referring to his own people and their kindred. Nothing which he has said has had a more enduring influence upon opinion than the statement that Scandinavia, the "vagina gentium," had bred all the barbaric tribes which overpowered the Roman empire. Of course, he knew nothing of Scandinavia beyond the vague facts that Goths, Heruli, Burgundians, Lombards, and Cimbri inhabited the southern shores of the Baltic, and that there was a vast land beyond that sea. Everything that descended from the north seemed to have come down from Scania, or Scandinavia. He did not know, as we do, that the climate of Scandinavia must have been at that time much more severe than now, and that the population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark cannot have reached in the fourth and fifth centuries to anything like its present numbers. The movements of that age, which carried millions of warriors to Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Africa, represented a wave of emigration, caused by an overflow of population, beginning in the far East, on the confines of China, of which the typical originators, so far as {43}Europe is concerned, were the Huns. No such overflow was possible from Scandinavia.

The Visigothic script had certainly not yet come into existence when the kingdom of Alaric had its capital at Toulouse in the fifth century. After the Franks had driven the Goths southward, and the monarchy was established in Spain (incorporating the Suabians, who had held a separate state in Portugal), we may suppose that the Visigothic hand was derived from that of the Ostrogoths, and used in the service of the Gothic monarchs until their dynasty was destroyed by the Saracenic conquest in 713. From that time onwards to the twelfth century it was employed in all the Christian lands of Spain, although, as in Italy, the Carolingian script began to be introduced in the ninth century. The two kinds of writing went on side by side, the Carolingian always gaining ground as time went on, until in the thirteenth century Spain fell into line with the other countries of Europe in adopting a sort of French "angular gothic."

_The Carolingian Renewal_

The renewal of art and learning in Gaul in the second half of the eighth century is ascribed to the patronage of Karl the Great and his descendants. He was a man of extraordinary gifts, and few figures of equal majesty have ever appeared on the stage of history. King of the Franks and the Lombards, Roman Emperor of the West, a great conqueror, a wise statesman, and a man of learning, he has left his name even in the annals of palæography. It can hardly have been in the beautiful Roman handwriting which is called after him that he transcribed the Frankish ballads or set down the rules of Frankish grammar, as he is said to have done. He was fond of practising with his pen, but, as Eginhart says, the study was begun too late in life to be cultivated with success. He had excellent taste, however, {44}and bestowed generous rewards upon the calligraphers who worked for him. His usual home was at Aachen, and his palace there contained a library and a scriptorium, in which scribes were always busy. A greater school of calligraphy was in the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours, directed by the famous Alcuin, under the Emperor's patronage. It was at Tours, undoubtedly, that the Carolingian writing reached the stage at which it became the model for all succeeding time, and Alcuin was almost certainly the man who introduced the Irish-Saxon fashion of decorative ornament, as practised in York when he resided there with Archbishop Egbert. A great deal of the learning which (with some latitude of phraseology) has been attributed above to the Emperor, was due to the frequent lectures upon all branches of science which Alcuin was in the habit of delivering when he and his patron were together--usually at Aachen. Karl did not spend much of his leisure time in the France which regards him as her own prince. He is believed to have founded the University of Paris, but he did not regard the city on the Seine as equal to Rome or Arles. It was not included in the twenty-one metropolitan cities of his empire.

Wherever the movement arose which produced the beauty of Carolingian work, we can have no difficulty in declaring it to have been in central or Southern France, not in the Rhenish territories. That contemporary calligraphers would have followed the lead was to be expected, whether they worked at Aachen or at Metz, or at Trier or elsewhere; but the real perfection of the style must have been attained in those parts of France which were most nearly connected with Provence. The uncials of Carolingian work were imitated from Roman work of the fifth century, the capitals from Roman inscriptions of the empire, and the minuscules were improved from the two contemporary Italian scripts in which they were found, that is the Papal Roman and the Gotho-Lombard. The art was cultivated (and we may allow that it had been so cultivated for many years before Alcuin's {45}arrival) so carefully that a fine æsthetic sense had arisen, and every letter of all three kinds was drawn with an elegant simplicity and truth which the world has never ceased to admire. The letters are upright and wholly without angularities, and are quite free from the mannerisms by which in the two Gothic hands of the time certain unessential portions of the outline were dwelt upon and made over-prominent, to the deterioration of the graphic form. Fine as the writing is in the time of the great Emperor, it is still finer throughout the half century or so which followed his death, in all the Gallic centres.

At the same time, the decoration of manuscripts, otherwise remarkable for their calligraphical excellence, with illuminated initials, border ornamentation, and miniatures resembling in character those of the Anglo-Saxon school but infused to a greater degree with the feeling and the style of late classical art, render the Carolingian French school of the ninth century one of the most splendid in the history of palæography.

The scripts of Spain and Italy lived on for centuries uncorrected in certain peculiarities by the example of Carolingian writing, but gradually drawing nearer, and visibly improved in manner. This was brought about by the introduction into both countries of pure Carolingian work, practised simultaneously with the native styles, and constantly increasing in influence. In England the Carolingian type won but little ground, notwithstanding the Romanising tendencies of Winchester and Canterbury and the Southern monasteries in general. It was not till the tenth century that certain signs of Carolingian influence are seen in the writing of Latin charters, and it was only in the twelfth century that the handwriting of Northern France and of England began to take an identical character. In Germany, of course, Carolingian writing was an inheritance, but it was never cultivated with the same elegance as in France. The letters began gradually to slope and grow {46}narrow, and to take small projections at the extremities which by and bye became medieval gothic forms.

_A Review at the standpoint of the Ninth Century_

The middle ages began with the establishment of barbarian monarchies over the area of the Roman empire of the west; and with the middle ages began the final and the most important chapter in the history of manuscripts. The study of manuscripts, for most persons, is confined to the period between the twelfth century and the sixteenth; since it is not given to everyone to make pilgrimages to the museums scattered over Europe, for the purpose of looking at the earlier and rarer examples of writing. Besides, the chief interest of the study lies rather in the decoration than the calligraphy of manuscripts; and it was not till the fourteenth century that the production of such work became so large and general as to leave a sufficient number of specimens readily accessible to modern inspection. The history of illuminated manuscripts begins in Ireland in the sixth century, that first phase being the application to written books of a system of Oriental decorative ornament which had previously been confined to architectural work. It spread into England in the seventh century, a little later into Gaul and Germany, and a new phase began in the eighth century by a happy combination of Romanesque pictorial design with the more purely decorative features of barbaric art. In the ninth century England and central France were easily ahead of all the other barbarian states. In Germany, in Aquitaine, in Spain, and in Northern Italy, the same system was followed, but with a prevailing stamp of barbarism, especially in the design of the human figure, which affords a striking contrast to the refined luxury of Carolingian art and the more sober splendour of English work. The only parallel was in Byzantium and Alexandria, where a similar combination had led to a nearly similar {47}effect, with this difference however, that the decorative illumination was a far less prominent feature than the pictorial designs. Roman Italy and Roman Provence still kept aloof from the new movement. The classical traditions which survived there permitted the production of MSS. written in gold, and perhaps also illustrated with pictures, such as had constituted the splendour of books in the first five centuries; but the immixture of decorative patterns from architectural design, which formed the art of _illumination_, was a thing of alien character to the taste of the older school. Examples of course were produced both in Rome itself and in Provence of the new mode of illumination, but they are to be ascribed to the barbarian element which was encroaching there as elsewhere, and which finally triumphed.

_Byzantine Work_

The traditions of classical art, which had begun to grow weaker in Byzantium even before the seventh century, had faded away when the Eastern Emperor lost all hold upon Italy. Not Athens, nor Rome, but Memphis, seemed to inspire the later æstheticism of Byzantine art; and the Greek emperors, from the ninth century onwards, appeared to be the successors rather of a line of Ptolemies than of Cæsars. When we contrast the sculptures of ancient Greece, the designs upon Græco-Roman coins, and the pictures in Pompeii, with the work of Byzantine illuminators, we are inevitably reminded that the word Greek is rarely appropriate in connexion with MSS. There is very little of true Greek in the artistic features of Thraco-Græcian or Ægypto-Græcian work; and it is not to real Greeks or to real Romans that we owe the handsome Roman and the handsome Hellenic type in which the texts of the ancient classics are now printed.

In the minuscule writing of Greek, which is usually {48}supposed to have come into use about the end of the eighth century, there never was the same calligraphical character as the uncials of an earlier time had exhibited, nor the same desire to attain symmetrical beauty as was shown over and over again in the manuscripts of Western Europe. The best writing of Greek minuscules belongs to the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, in which a sufficient amount of practice had been gained to ensure regularity of form. A specimen of such writing, executed towards the end of the tenth century, probably in Cyprus, will be found in Plate 6. From the eleventh century to the sixteenth all minuscule writing in Greek looks like a free cursive written without any calligraphical ambition, and it became more and more ungraceful as time went on. The value of Greek MSS., however, depends more upon their contents than upon their beauty, and frequently the roughest-looking piece of work may command an interest far greater than attaches to the splendid penmanship of the west.

The recently discovered "Gospel of Peter" is in a curious primitive minuscule hand, which the editor of the facsimile, Oscar von Gebhardt, ascribes hesitatingly to the eighth or ninth century, as had already been done by H. Omont. It would not be surprising if other scholars were to assign it to the seventh century, and thereby throw back the age of Greek minuscule writing to a century or more behind the date usually fixed for it. The mingling in that curious Christian document of many uncial forms, with a set of minuscular letters that betray a want of familiarity with set minuscules, seems to prove that the book is older than the eighth century. This observation is made, not from any desire to be critical, but simply in order to show that the question of age, mentioned in the preceding paragraph, is a thing which is still not finally settled.

{49}_The Tenth Century_

The Irish school of writing, after its triumphs of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, lost much of its home-life in the midst of the struggles with the Norsemen. In England and on the continent its influence was still felt for some time longer; even in the thirteenth century many of the Psalters produced by English illuminators have the initial letter B decorated in the style adopted from the Irish six centuries before. Irish MSS. of any age are excessively rare; even the comparatively worthless transcripts of the eighteenth century are in no inconsiderable request.

The English school continued to blend its Irish style of writing with the 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.