Life in the Margins

The scribe sits back from the table, stretching stiffened fingers. The work is complete: a copy of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a history of Christianity in England in the Anglo-Saxon era, written by the Venerable Bede circa 731 CE. But with the final words copied out, there is precious parchment yet untouched, and so the scribe writes a series of chronological notes on events in Northumbria, where he is writing from. This is now known as the ‘Moore Memoranda’, and has helped scholars to date this manuscript, the ‘Moore Bede’, to around 737 CE, the earliest copy of the work. In paler ink, alongside some scraps of translation quandaries from Bede’s Latin text, the scribe writes the following lines in his vernacular Old English:

Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihwaes,
ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
hē ærist scōp aelda barnum
heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.
Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard,
eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ
fīrum foldu, Frēa allmectig.

Now we must honour the Guardian of heaven,
the might of the creator and his purpose,
the work of the Father of glory, as He
the eternal lord, established the beginning of wonders
He first created, for the children of men
heaven as a roof, the holy creator
then the Guardian of mankind,
the eternal Lord, afterwards appointed the Middle-earth
the lands for men, the Lord almighty.

This is ‘Caedmon’s hymn’. Caedmon was an illiterate herdsman who, as Bede recounts, heard these words in a vision. The poem, “a masterpiece of formal economy and musical alliteration”, has only been set down in a handful of manuscripts; this version, buried at the close of the Moore Bede in three cramped lines – later reformatted as above – is perhaps the first written record of Caedmon’s hymn. It is a modest setting for one of the oldest surviving examples of Old English verse.

Mary Wellesley’s new book Hidden Hands is replete with such examples, illuminating our understanding of different realms of medieval society through tales of unexpected authors, artists, and scribes, the latter two often unnamed or forgotten. The word manuscript comes from the Latin manus, meaning ‘hand’, and scribere, ‘to write’, and while often dealing with the anonymous makers of these handcrafted ‘objects’, or in her phrase, “cultural landmarks”, Wellesley shows how the maker’s identity can start to emerge via lingering traces on the parchment.

The hedows flawme of the fyr
(“The hideous flame of the fire”, The Book of Margery Kempe, c. 1430)
Vast swathes of manuscripts have inevitably been lost or damaged over the centuries, through neglect or tragic accident. Some of these incidents are detailed by Wellesley, among them a huge fire at Ashburnham House, Westminster, in 1731. At the time, Ashburnham was temporarily home to the Cotton library, a collection of manuscripts amassed by the antiquarian and bibliophile Sir Robert Bruce Cotton MP and, ironically, moved to Ashburnham House to be “safe from fire”. The fire saw 13 of Sir Cotton’s manuscripts lost to the flames, and over 200 damaged to varying degrees of destruction. One of these salvaged texts is the sole surviving manuscript of the Old English epic, Beowulf.

The Cotton collection had, in an Act of Parliament of 1701, been transferred to the nation “to be kept and preserved … for Publick Use and Advantage”. Two years after the fire, the remains of the Cotton library became part of the British Museum’s original literary collection, safely housed and freely accessible to the public – a silver lining among the ashes. The manuscripts have recently been digitised to prevent further damage from excessive handling, and to allow readers across the world to peruse their pages. While still beautiful objects, many are scarcely legible, though scholars have dutifully transcribed and translated what they can, with the assistance of ‘multispectral imaging’ for particularly degraded parchments. Of the surviving Ashburnham manuscripts, many pages are blackened, with singed edges obscuring letters and drawings in the margins, and the parchment – made from calf, goat or sheep skin, ordinarily durable and retaining iridescent colour – has long since contracted, buckled, and warped from fiery heat, or from water used to douse the flames.

Fortunately, however, some extraordinary texts have survived. Wellesley takes the reader through an impressive array of texts, the creators of which are rarely named, but whose identities scholars can sometimes piece together via fragments of clues, and recognisable styles – like the anonymous thirteenth-century monk from Worcester Priory known as ‘The Tremulous Hand’, whose shaky glosses, or explanatory annotations, adorn several manuscript margins. Alongside religious gospels, miraculous hymns, and epic poems, certain texts jump out in the book, those that reflect back at, or pierce into, our contemporary moment.

A chance discovery
In 1934, the Butler-Bowdon family were playing a game of pingpong at their home near Chesterfield. Searching for a replacement ball, the father opened a cupboard, but struggled to find one among an “entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather books”. Frustrated with the mess, he threatened to put the “whole — lot on the bonfire”. Fortunately, a visitor to the household wished to take a further look, and saved the manuscripts from another fiery fate. One manuscript was formally identified later that year, by the American scholar Hope Emily Allen, as the lost Book of Margery Kempe.

The Book of Margery Kempe is considered the first autobiography written in the English language. Prior to its rediscovery, knowledge of Margery Kempe was limited to some extracts published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501. In de Worde’s pamphlet, Margery’s first-hand experience and voice is eradicated, appearing as a pious and passive receiver of Christ’s teachings, rather than a creature with a complex, internal life and authorial control over the narrative.

Kempe (née Brunham) was born around 1373 in Bishop’s Lynn, now known as King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, into a family of wealthy merchants. At the age of 20, she married John Kempe, and soon fell pregnant with her first child. In her mediated account, committed to parchment by a scribe some 30 years later, she recounts how shortly after the birth she fell into a state of torment. Today, we might understand the sudden onset of hallucinations, delusions, and manic mood changes that she suffered as postpartum psychosis, but in Margery’s day her symptoms, which involved visions of demons and devils telling her to harm herself and forsake her faith, ensured several months of terrifying misery, at times with her wrists and hands bound. Some eight months passed with Margery in this state until, as she recounts, she has a visitation from Christ (“mercyfulle Lord Cryst Jhesu”) who asks, "Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?" His words break through and she comes back to herself. Thus restored, Margery’s first act, in a pleasingly down-to-earth detail, is to ask for the keys to the buttery, “to takyn hir mete and drynke” (to take her meat and drink).

She re-enters social life, undertaking two businesses, a brewery and a grain mill; these soon fail, however, which she interprets as a sign from God, and she resolves to live as a holy woman, which eventually involves striking a deal with her husband for a chaste marriage: in the Book, this is said to have happened one Midsummer Eve in 1413, with Margery formally requesting to be freed of their marital bonds. She makes a number of lengthy pilgrimages, across Europe and to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Closer to home, in around 1413, she seeks counsel from Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – after 1416), a medieval mystic and anchoress, who confirms Kempe’s visions and dialogue with God as genuine. In Hidden Hands, Wellesley also devotes a section to Julian of Norwich who, from her secluded cell, wrote a great number of manuscripts, among them her ‘Long Text’, Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest work in English known to be authored by a woman.

By contrast, Margery Kempe is a more unlikely character: though a self-appointed mystic, she was a laywoman with little education. The Book was told to an amanuensis – a scribe – and with phrases such as “þe creatur of whom þis book is written”, the reader is reminded that the words are not verbatim from Kempe’s lips, but inevitably somewhat altered, embellished, or edited by her amanuensis. Kempe is often assumed therefore to be illiterate, but some scholars have questioned the extent to which this might be true. Kempe appears to portrays herself in the manuscript as a simple “unlettered” woman, but this could have bolstered her image as a simple chosen recipient of Christ’s teaching, removing some of the agency that alarmed church officials and so perhaps protecting her from further heretical charges which mounted against her. She was not wholly uneducated, having had a number of religious texts read to her, and Lynn Staley, in Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (1994), argues that Kempe’s crafting of the text is inventive and deliberate, evincing her understanding of, and insertion into, the “conventions of female sacred biography”. She works within these bounds to her advantage.

This manner of recording a life is not merely to memorialise, but to attempt to set a course or scheme for how one is to be remembered. Another of Wellesley’s characters is a queen whose name is not widely known despite her powerful place within Anglo-Saxon history. Emma of Normandy was “twice queen of England”. Her first marriage was to Æthelred the Unready, and her second was to King Cnut of Denmark who seized power, claiming the nation, and Emma, for his own. As Æthelred’s widow, Emma was still the Queen of the ruling family, so could legitimise Cnut’s rule. Yet Emma was not merely a pawn in a bloody history of warring rulers, but influenced events, advising Cnut on his new territories, and holding considerable land and ecclesiastical sway herself. She also had some political power in her later position as mother to two jointly-ruling kings, the half-brothers Edward the Confessor, from her marriage with Æthelred, and her son by Cnut, Harthacnut. Such actions are recorded, with some license, in the Encomium Emmae reginae – ‘Praise of Queen Emma’. It appears that she commissioned this biography-of-sorts, (re)framing her actions in a wholly positive light.

As Wellesley writes, manuscripts are “forms of communication and memorialisation” of human stories, and these auto/biographical examples have an intriguing degree of self-memorialisation, reminding us of the intriguingly faulty nature of subjective historical accounts. The Encomium more radically rewrites elements of history – for one, Æthelred is completely written out of the narrative – while Kempe fashions a self in a way that borders on the fictional. The impetus behind these texts is moving, coming in part from a desire to be remembered, and in a particular way. There are many of these examples in Hidden Hands, with slightly sensationalised epithets – Leoba of Tauberbischofsheim, “the first named female poet from England”; the Cuthbert Gospel, “the earliest intact European book”. We must remember, in assigning such titles, that only a tiny proportion of manuscripts have survived – as Wellesley notes, two-thirds of the surviving Old English poetry exists in a mere four books. Nonetheless, a sense of humanity bursts forth from these manuscripts, whether in the determination to set one’s life to words, or in the layers of history within the parchment, often adorned with small notes or drawings in the margins from scribes or from later annotators. Wellesley’s study sets the mind alight with human stories, however fragmentary or unreliable.

Grace Crabtree is an artist and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. You can view her artwork at gracecrabtree.co.uk