I have been to see
the Anglo-Saxons exhibition at the British Library which is full of
thousand-year-old books. The first thing I would like to say is that
the standard of handwriting has collapsed dreadfully in a millennia,
and you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Right, having got
that out of the way, onwards. Now I am partial to a bit of
Anglo-Saxon bling and very much enjoyed the exhibition of
Staffordshire treasures which came to Bristol in 2017. It’s an
under-explored bit of our history, and a fascinating one. Because the
Anglo-Saxons tended to build a lot in wood rather than stone, there
isn’t a huge amount of their remains in existance, and we have to
deduce their civilisation from other stuff they left behind, like
their metalwork and books, both of which were made to an enormously
high standard of art and craftsmanship. Both of these are on display
in the collection of precious books displayed at the British Library.
To start with, the
books on display are mostly bibles, some as old as the 7th
Century. But it’s as Anglo-Saxon society starts to cohere into
something that roughly resembles England that the stuff on show
becomes more interesting, varied and abundant, producing history
books, biographies, translations of popular European bestsellers,
legal treaties and even fiction. Some of which were allegedly or
reputedly the work of King Alfred the Great, or his grandson,
Athelstan, a prolific gifter or books. And it’s here that the
exhibition is both potentially most interesting and also somehow
fails to live up to that potential. It offers the books ordered by
the era and area of predominant Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and includes
very briefly, the process of how these separate realms became formed
into one: the Kingdom of England. And I couldn’t help feeling that
the curators, or whoever had written the explanatory panels, had
shied away from telling this fascinating, important and relevant
story, for fear of coming over a little bit Ukip. Instead it was all
about links to Europe and how it was a multicultural society, yes,
blah blah. I know there’s no such thing as an apolitical take on
history but I felt like this excesive squeamishness took away from
some of the marvels on show – as well as the marvels which weren’t
on show – which is the story of how the territories that became
England emerged from the post-Roman chaos of the dark ages and formed
themselves into a functioning, prosperous society with an
intelligentsia and centres of learning.
It was also obvious
how much at that time Christianity was a monastic religion, about
great houses of the church, and arcane debates about Easter. The
later kind of Chrsitianity which we associate with the middle ages,
with its enormous Cathedrals and glittering, popular saints and
miracles was a later, populist invention. Anyway, one of the jobs of
these early monasteries was to produce books, and by God they were
good at it. The artwork on display is stunning in its skill and
luxury, and makes you realise that there’s nothing to be ashamed of
in coveting a book as an item of art, rather than just to be read:
it’s been going on for centuries. It’s also interesting to see
how very good much of the art in the books is, with tiny fine line
drawings that have none of the lack of realism of later medieval art,
but show awfully real-looking people, sketched niftily in
pen-and-ink, doing awfully normal things.
The exhibition also
left me wondering about the technology of the book. Roman society ran
on scrolls and tablets, but by the end of the dark ages the
rectangular, bound manuscripts that we use today seemed normal. A
letter, dating from the 9th Century, contains the remains
of folds. I wondered how, and why, this technological shift had
happened.
The star of the show
was undoubtedly the only existing copy of Beowulf, and there was
certainly some fascinating items on display and some amazing artwork
to see. What it lacked was an easily understandable flow of the
history behind the exhibition, that fascinating emergence of the
state of England, a political edifice which still stands twelve
hundred years after it was first dragged from the marshes and wrested
from the hands of competing warlords. I could practically hear a
roomful of curators screaming ‘Nobody mention Brexit!’ in a
planning meeting, which seemed to slightly put a pall over things,
since the fact that we’re still wrestling with some of the same
issues around the boundaries and duties of the state, more than a
millennia later, make the nation-forming struggles of the
Anglo-saxons more relevant, not less.
A final note: it
really was very busy. If you want to spend hours leering at the rare
manuscripts, maybe try an early morning slot.
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