Francis L. Newton, Francis L. Newton, Jr., and Christopher R. J. Scheirer, “Domiciling the...

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Domiciling the evangelists in AngloSaxon England: a fresh reading of Aldred's colophon in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’

Francis L. Newton, Francis L. Newton, Jr and Christopher R. J. Scheirer

AngloSaxon England / Volume 41 / December 2012, pp 101 144DOI: 10.1017/S0263675112000026, Published online: 10 July 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0263675112000026

How to cite this article:Francis L. Newton, Francis L. Newton, Jr and Christopher R. J. Scheirer (2012). Domiciling the evangelists in AngloSaxon England: a fresh reading of Aldred's colophon in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’. AngloSaxon England, 41, pp 101144 doi:10.1017/S0263675112000026

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101

Domiciling the evangelists in Anglo-Saxon England: a fresh reading of Aldred’s colophon

in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’

francis l . newton, francis l . newton, jr and christopher r . j . scheirer

abstractThe Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, early eighth century) was glossed in Old English by the tenth-century priest Aldred. Aldred’s colo-phon purports to give information about the eighth-century makers of the manuscript, at Lindisfarne. What is actually reliable about this highly literary colophon is Aldred’s purpose in writing the gloss: to give the Evangelists a voice to address ‘all the brothers’ − particularly the Latinless. We propose new interpretations of three OE words (giha-

madi, inlad, ora) misunderstood before. Aldred was learned; his sources extend from Ovid through the Fathers to contemporary texts.

The famous and beautiful Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv) is now better known than ever, as a result of the full-colour facsimile published in 20021 and the richly detailed volumes of historical and artistic essays by Michelle Brown (2003, 2011).2 The manuscript is the product of an Insular or Insular-infl uenced centre at the end of the seventh century or in the fi rst half of the eighth; that is all that a modern palaeographer or art historian at this time can say defi nitively about the book.

Some two centuries or more after its creation, that is, around 950, the priest Aldred, at Chester-le-Street (between Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the north and Durham to the south) glossed the entire text of the manuscript interlinearly in Old English – the earliest Old English version of all four gospels that survives. Aldred tells us that he did this in the colophon he added in his own hand in Old English and in Latin at the end (259rb). The book is triply precious, for the history of book-making, for the text of the Latin Gospels and for the history

1 The Lindisfarne Gospels, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv., ed. M. P. Brown (Lucerne, 2002). 2 M. P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London, 2003), and The

Lindisfarne Gospels and the Early Medieval World (London, 2011).


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of the English language. But Aldred’s long colophon says a great deal more: he asserts that the book was written (by this he must understand the decoration also)3 by Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in the year 721, bound by Æthelwald, his successor as bishop there, and decorated with gold and gems by Billfrith the anchorite. This information has been generally accepted by his-torians of art and palaeographers – scholars such as E. A. Lowe4 and, recently, Michelle Brown.5 Through most of the history of discussion of the magnifi cent manuscript, those who studied it have drawn data piece by piece from Aldred’s colophon, taking at face value, for the most part, and literally the separate bits of information so obtained.6

It was only in 2003, in an article in Speculum, that Lawrence Nees looked at the colophon as a whole; he called attention to its artistic symmetries, such as the play upon the number four: the invocation of the triune God (3 + 1), the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and, of course, the four churchmen who are said to have worked on the gospel book: Eadfrith, Æthelwald, Billfrith and Aldred himself.7 Nees has also called for an investiga-tion of Aldred’s sources. This present study traces a background of inspiration

3 To separate, as many scholars do, script and decoration is to create a false dichotomy. We medievalists should bear in mind that, like the Greek verb ‘graphein’, whose root meaning is ‘to scratch / graze / mark’, the Latin verb ‘scribere’ means au fond ‘to draw, trace (a line, geometric fi gure or sim.)’ to quote the beginning of the entry for the word in the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1982). Aldred was not insensitive to the decoration of our manuscript.

4 E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores: a Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century. Part II: Great Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 1972), no. 187. But note that, whereas Lowe in his comment considers the colophon’s information as credible, at the summary heading at upper right of the entry he says simply, ‘Anglo-Saxon majuscule, saec. VII−VIII’. So in the end he is more cautious than many other scholars have been.

5 M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels, pp. 395−7 and passim; M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), pp. 63−70. Brown continues the view held by the editors of the Olten facsimile (cf. n. 11) and a host of other scholars. Of this school is also the thoughtful recent treatment by J. Roberts, ‘Aldred Signs Off from Glossing the Lindisfarne Gospels’ in Writing and Texts in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by A. R. Rumble (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 28−43.

6 Since this article was written, the monograph of Karen Louise Jolly has appeared: The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19, Columbus, Ohio, 2012. This valuable study of Aldred has corrected some of the palaeographical errors in the traditional transcription of the colophon.

7 L. Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon in the Lindisfarne Gospels’, Speculum 78 (2003), pp. 333−77. This pioneering article includes (pp. 334−9) a valuable section called ‘Notes on the History of Scholarship on Aldred’s Colophon’. Before Nees, only a handful of scholars raised the necessary critical questions about the colophon. See R. A. S. McAlister, ‘The Colophon in the Lindisfarne Gospels’, Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway, ed. E. C. Quiggan (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 299−305; and D. N. Dumville, A Palaeographer’s Review: the Insular System of Scripts in the Early Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Osaka, 1999), esp. pp. 76−80. J. E. P. Gilbert’s trenchant criticism (‘The Lindisfarne Gospels − How Many Artists?’ Durham University Journal 83 (1991), 153−60) led to his rejection of the concept of a single fi gure (Eadfrith) as artist.

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Domiciling the evangelists in Anglo-Saxon England

that includes, in the classical period the elegiac poet Ovid and, from the same century as Ovid, the Gospel writers, in the patristic period the father Jerome, and later Cassiodorus and Bede, in the Carolingian era the poets Alcuin and Theodulf, and in Aldred’s own day the law codes and charters of late Anglo-Saxon England. The result, we hope, is a clearer understanding of Aldred’s colophon as a literary creation.

Fundamental, however, to any discussion is the establishment of the text of the colophon. Palaeographical analysis shows that it has not been correctly edited in a number of details. We here off er a fresh edition (see Appendix 1). Besides, at various points the Latin has been misunderstood. More troubling still, some of the Old English words have never been correctly interpreted. There are three such key words / expressions in the colophon, including a nonce-word (gihamadi); and a word that is dis legomenon − only twice attested in the corpus of Old English − (inlad); as well as a third where interpreters have, in our opinion, identifi ed the wrong homonym (ora).

Most important of all, and tied in with these problematic words, no one has understood the poetic metaphor that runs throughout and dominates the colo-phon and reveals Aldred’s conception of what he was doing with this superb gospel book. We understand Aldred’s colophon as revelatory of Aldred’s personal perception of the Word-in-reality. A specifi c orientation, we believe, informs Aldred’s labour as glossator. Understood as a unifi ed artistic literary creation, the colophon’s poetry and prose in Latin and prose in Old English reveal the way in which Aldred thought about the book and the rôle of his gloss in opening the gospels to ‘all my brothers’.

What we are asking our readers to do is to open their ears to Aldred’s voice, to hear his message and understand, through his own words, Aldred’s piety – how he viewed and comprehended the magnitude of his labour, his portion of this holy project, and specifi cally how he regarded his gloss as contributory to the legacy of the gospel book. Aldred the scribe speaks, has been speaking for centuries, but are we listening?

What is needed is a modifi cation of the order of priorities in the assessment of Aldred’s motives and intention, indeed in our assessment of the colophon’s primary function. An account of the time, place, and agents of the gospel book’s creation has consumed modern scholarship to the exclusion of a sober consideration of how Aldred regarded the book, as a dynamic object within a living historical narrative, and how he saw himself as part of that narrative. We endeavour to approach the colophon without any preconceptions of its function, and to avoid picking and choosing just those elements of Aldred’s colophon that contribute to our prior notions of his message or the text’s primary objective. Our approach regards every word, even the most vexatious cruces, as signifi cant and attempts to provide an intelligible context in which


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they operate. Such an approach has not been undertaken before; it has often been strenuously avoided. Yet in our opinion a serious account of Aldred’s colophon must adopt some such method of inquiry.

the colophonic prayer

For the sake of completeness, and because it bears on Aldred’s end-colophon, we print the prayer on 89v at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, beside the last lines of the second column. Aldred there wrote, in nine lines in the right margin, in the black ink he used for glossing the fi rst three gospels, the prayer:

ðu lifi giende god gemyne ðu eadfrið & æðilwald & billfrið & aldred peccat[orem] ðas feowero mið gode ymb woeson ðas boc8

For the fi rst ðu, Aldred originally wrote ðe, then corrected it by expunging the ‘e’ and writing ‘u’ above. There is no fi nal punctuation.

the colophon

The end colophon (see Fig. 6)9 is written in Aldred’s hand in the same red ink with which he glossed most of John’s Gospel – a mark of special reverence for the fourth Evangelist.10 The colophon begins on 259r after the explicit near the top of the second column.11 It must be admitted that, whereas Aldred’s

8 ‘Thou living God, do thou remember Eadfrith and Æthelwald and Billfrith and Aldred sinner; these four, with God, were about the business of this book.’

9 Apart from the 2002 colour facsimile, the best colour reproduction of the colophon is in M. P. Brown, Painted Labyrinth: the World of the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, 2003), p. 15; M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 34.

10 Aldred’s colophon, whether one accepts its information or not, is a colophon in the tradition represented by the modern collection of the Benedictines of Le Bouveret, Colophons de manu-scrits occidentaux des origines au XVIe siècle, Spicilegii Friburgensis Subsidia, vols. 2−7 (Freiburg, 1965−82); the entry for our colophon gives only one brief sentence, under ‘Eadfrith’, as no. 3593 (tome II, p. 5). The Aldred colophon does not include any of the formulae studied in the pioneering work of L. Reynhout, Formules latines de colophons (Turnhout, 2006). For a broad picture of colophons in English manuscripts up to the early twelfth century, see the collec-tion of R. Gameson, The Scribe Speaks? Colophons in Early English Manuscripts, H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lectures 12 (Cambridge, 2002). Aldred’s colophon is Gameson’s no. 14, on p. 38. At the opposite end of Europe, colophons from the Beneventan script zone are edited by the senior author of this article, F. Newton, ‘Beneventan Scribes and Subscriptions, with a List of Those Known at the Present Time’, The Book Mark (Friends of the University of North Carolina Library) 43 (1973), 1−35; an unusually interesting colophon has been added to that list by V. Brown, ‘Pastorale, Mysticum, Peccatorium: a Beneventan Manuscript from Telese and the Normans in Southern Italy’, Scrittura e Civiltà 7 (1983), 113−40, reprinted in V. Brown, Terra Sancti Benedicti: Studies in the Palaeography, History, and Liturgy of Medieval Southern Italy, Storia e Letteratura 219 (Rome, 2005), 517−48.

11 The best recent discussions of the colophon are those of Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels, pp. 102−4 and literature cited there, Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), pp. 63−70, L. Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon’, C. E. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, Suff olk,

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Figure 6: London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv (‘Lindisfarne Gospels’), 259r. The ending of St John’s Gospel, and, beside and below the explicit, Aldred’s colophon in the same red ink with which he glossed most of the fourth Gospel. Beside the Explicit, the Hexameter Verses; below the Explicit, successively the Pedigree of the Gospels, and the Pedigree of This Gospel

Book; in the right margin beside the latter, the verse Pedigree of Aldred.


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interlinear glosses are discreet and orderly throughout the volume, the colo-phon runs past the vertical ruled boundaries and, in lieu of straight writing-lines, slides downwards to the right as it proceeds down the page. The eff ect is tipsy. The hand is the hand of a scholar, not of an artist. It seems clear that Aldred was determined to complete the colophon on this recto page, and crowding was necessary.

2011), pp. 32−7. The most philologically sound of earlier work, to which one must still return, is that in the 1960 commentary that accompanied the 1956−60 facsimile. That commentary is, however, uncritical and marred by errors of palaeography, of transcription, and of transla-tion; many of those errors have been perpetuated in more recent discussions, even in two volumes of 2011. This two-volume work, Evangeliorum quattuor Codex Lindisfarnensis, ed. by T. D. Kendrick, R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, H. Roosen-Runge, A. S. C. Ross, E. G. Stanley and A. E. A. Werner (Olten, 1956−60), includes as Tomus Primus the facsimile, and as Tomus Secundus (1960) the commentary. See Appendix 3.

Figure 7: Aldred’s colophon. London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv (Lindisfarne Gospels), 259r (detail). The Pedigree of This Gospel Book, and (right margin) the Pedigree of Aldred.

The former contains the three OE expressions for which we propose new interpretations: l. 12 “gihamadi,” ll. 16 and 17–18 “ora seo(v)lfres,” and l. 16 “inlade.”

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The colophon:12

Conventions:

Usage of ‘u’, ‘v’, and ‘�’ (wynn) modernized Abbreviations silently expandedModern word division and punctuation suppliedMS lineation indicated by vertical line ( | )Signe de revoi indicated by asterisk (*) asægd is vel þæt boc aefter io han nem

EXPLICIT LIBER | SECUNDUM | IOHANEN.|

† Litera me pandat | sermonis fi da | ministra; Omnes, alme, | meos fratres | [ex]13 voce saluta. ðe ðrifalde & ðe anfalde god ðis godspell ær worulda gisette

† Trinus et unus deus evangelium hoc ante | saecula constituit. | ærist aurat of muðe christes

† Matheus ex ore christi scripsit. | of muðe petres aurat

† Marcus ex ore petri scripsit. | of muðe paules aurat

† Lucas de ore pauli apostoli scripsit. | in deigilnisi vel in foresaga siðða rocgetede vel gisprant word

† IOHannes in prochemio deinde eructuavit (vel scripsit)14 | verbum,

miððy gode gisulde & halges gastes

deo donante et spiritu sancto (mið godes geafa & halges gastes mæht aurat iohannes). |

b

† EADfrið biscop Lindisfearnensis æcclesiæ | he ðis boc aurat æt fruma gimænelice

gode & sancte | cuðberhte & allum ðæm halgum ða ðe | in eolonde sint. biscop

& Eðilwald lindisfearneolondinga | hit uta giðryde & gibelde swa he wel cuðæ. | & billfrið se oncræ he gismioðade ða | gihrino ða ðe utan on sint, & hit gi-|hrinade mið golde & mið gimmum æc | mið sulfre ofer gylded

12 For layout and entire text see Figs. 6 and 7 (bottom part), and for diplomatic edition see Appendix 1.

13 Addition of ex proposed by Babcock; see below, pp. 111–12.14 Aldred’s crowded layout has confused editors. Immediately under the majuscule eructuavit at

line end stands minuscule ʈ (= vel) and below that minuscule sc ̅r ̅ı ̅p. This suspended gloss goes with eructuavit. The minuscule to left and right of the vel sign glosses the fi nal majuscule line: ‘verbum deo donante et spiritu sancto’.


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faconleas feh. | & [ic]Aldred presbyter indignus & misserrimus, | mið godes fultummæ & sancti cuðberhtes | hit ofer gloesade on englisc,

id est tilw[if]

& hine gihamadi* (*ælfredi natus aldredus uocor, bonæ mulieris fi lius eximius loquor),15 | mið ðæm ðriim dælum: Matheus dæl | gode & sancte cuðberhti; MARCUS dæl | ðæm biscope; & lucas dæl ðæm hiorode; |

u u

& æht ora seolfres mið to inlade. | & sancti iohannis dæl fore hine id est fore his sawle u

seolfne & feover ora | seolfres mið gode & sancti cuðberti. þætte he | hæbbe ondfong ðerh godes milsæ on heofnum, | seel & sibb on eorðo, forðgeong & giðyngo, | wisdom & snyttro ðerh sancti cuðberhtes earnunga. |

† Eadfrið, oeðilwald, billfrið, aldred | hoc evangelium deo & cuðberhto construxerunt.

vel ornaverunt

The colophon: Modern English translation

Conventions:

Roman (non-italic) = Old English in the original.Italic = Latin in the original.

Signe de revoi indicated by asterisk (*) told in full is or the book according to Iohannem

HERE ENDS THE BOOK ACCORDING TO JOHN

† May the letter, faithful servant of the Word, throw me open;

To all my brothers, O nourishing one, grant a greeting [from your] voice.

The threefold & the onefold God set this gospel before [the] worlds

† The three & one God set up this gospel before the ages.

fi rst wrote from the mouth of Christ

† Matthew wrote from the mouth of Christ;

wrote from the mouth of Peter

† Mark wrote from the mouth of Peter;

wrote from the mouth of Paul

† Luke wrote from the mouth of Paul the apostle. in the introduction or prologue narrated or uttered the word with God giving [it] and of the Holy Spirit

† JOHn in the preface then belched out the word (or wrote), with God and the Holy Spirit

15 Aldred’s delicate signes de renvoi have been misunderstood in earlier transcriptions; this mar-ginal note on his own pedigree, as those signs show, is tied to the word ‘gihamadi’ (to be discussed), and for a reason.

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giving [it] (with the gift of God and the power of the Holy Spirit John wrote).

† Eadfrith bishop of the Lindisfarne church wrote this book at the beginning jointly

for God and Saint Cuthbert and for all those holy men who are in the island. And Æthelwald bishop of the Lindisfarne-islanders pressed it on the outside and bound it as he well knew how. And Billfrith the anchorite smithed the ornaments which are on the outside, and adorned it with gold and with gems and with silver over-gilded – guileless goods. And [I] Aldred unworthy and

most wretched priest with the aid of God and Saint Cuthbert glossed it over in English and homed him* (*Of Aelfred born, Aldred I am called, famous [as a] good woman’s son I speak) with the [other] three parts. Matthew’s part for God and Saint Cuthbert; Mark’s part for the bishop; and Luke’s part for the community; and eight borders of silver with [it] by way of introduction, that is, for his soul

and Saint John’s part for himself and four borders of silver with [it] for God and Saint Cuthbert, that he might have acceptance in heaven through God’s mercy, happiness and peace on earth, advancement and honor, wisdom and sagacity through the merits of Saint Cuthbert. † Eadfrith, Æthelwald, Billfrith, Aldred constructed (or decorated) this gospel book for God and Saint

Cuthbert.

understanding the colophon

The hexameter verses

Dialogue and theme

We begin with Aldred’s elegant little Latin hexameters in the right margin beside the (original) explicit to the Gospel of John.

† Litera me pandat sermonis fi da ministra;Omnes, alme, meos fratres [ex] voce saluta

The letters in capitalis proclaim: HERE ENDS THE BOOK ACCORDING TO JOHN; in the right margin the two little verses (beginning Litera me pandat . . .) are to be understood as an exchange;16 the gospel writer John speaks fi rst: ‘May the letter, faithful servant of the Word, throw me open (throw open the door to my text)’. The ‘letter’, as has been understood in the past, is Aldred’s

16 A dialogue (one speaker being the scribe) is seen also in the Latin verses on the frame of Eadwine’s portrait in the twelfth-century ‘Eadwine Psalter’; see The Eadwine Psalter. Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury, Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association, vol. 14, ed. M. Gibson, T. A. Heslop, and R. M. Pfaff (London, 1992), esp. pp. 178−85 and pl. 32.


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gloss, a servant (ministra) to welcome readers/hearers, but the force of the verb has eluded readers. The second hexameter, the response of Aldred to the gospel writer, tells who the newcomers are: ‘To all my brothers, O nourishing one, grant a greeting [from your] voice’. (A syllable is missing; to complete the scansion we have adopted Robert Babcock’s emendation, supplying ex to govern voce.)17

The expression is poetic, but Aldred is addressing a grittily real fact of life at Chester-le-Street in his time: very few of the brothers were educated in Latin. Boyd thinks that ‘during their journeyings [between 875 and 995] the members of the community rarely boasted more than two or three monks.’18 The word Omnes, at beginning of the verse, is emphatic. Thanks to Aldred’s labour, the nourisher St John now has a tongue (Greek glossa) to address all the members of the congregation, learned or no.

It has not been observed that these little verses defi ne the terms in which Aldred is poetically describing the gospel book: the verb pandat and the noun ministra in apposition with the subject litera vividly represent the volume as a building to which the servant-gloss throws open the doors. And, in the second of the verses the imperative verb saluta bids St John greet all those who enter. The verses belong to the class of inscribed texts that C. Karkov has called, ‘speaking objects’.19 Paul Meyvaert has recently called attention to the Cassiodorian prologue in the Codex Amiatinus (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Amiatino 1), and more than one other passage in Cassiodorus comparing the bible to a palatium.20 The prologue speaks of being enabled to enter into the Scripturarum diuinarum palatia (‘the palaces of the Holy Scriptures’). Two examples from Cassiodorus’ commentary on the Psalms are equally strik-ing: on Psalm I he says, ‘Nunc claues psalmorum reserabiles apponamus, ut, praestante Domino, Regis nostri palatia introire mereamur;’21 and on Psalm XCIX, ‘Dicta enim illorum Domini constat esse palatia, quando ipse in eis invenitur, si deuota mente perquiritur.’22 This, or something very like, is in

17 Professor Babcock calls our attention to the presence of an echo from Theodulf on which his emendation is based; see below, pp. 111–12.

18 W. J. P. Boyd, Aldred’s Marginalia: Explanatory Comments in the Lindisfarne Gospels (Exeter, 1975), p. 28. See also Edmund Craster, ‘The Patrimony of St. Cuthbert’, EHR 271 (1954), pp. 177−99, esp. 197−8.

19 C. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (2011), pp. 135−178.20 P. Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus, and the Codex Amiatinus,’ Speculum 71 (1996), 827−83, esp.

866−7. It was Mary Garrison who drew our attention to this key passage of Meyvaert’s article. −The prologue, and our translation, are given below in Appendix 2.

21 ‘Now let us apply the keys that unlock the Psalms, so that, by the Lord’s grace, we may be found worthy to enter into the palaces of our King.’

22 ‘For, as we know, they are said to be the palaces of their Lord, since he himself is found in them, if one seeks him with devotion.’ It is clear that this commentary of Cassiodorus’s on the

111


Aldred’s mind: as in some stately aristocratic house or imperial palace of late antiquity, or some great hall in Anglo-Saxon England, a servant throws open the door and the master of the house greets (salutare) the throng that enters.

St John quotes Ovid; the gloss quotes Alcuin and Theodulf

But there were other, more distant sources for the hexameter lines. Ovid’s Tristia 3.7 opens with the address of the author, in exile in Tomi, to his poem:

Vade salutatum, subito perarata, Perillam,Littera, sermonis fi da ministra mei.23

Aldred has borrowed almost the whole of Ovid’s second line (in italics here) and put the words in the mouth of St John, who bids the Gloss (‘letter’), ‘the faithful servant of the word’, to throw open the doors of his text. And the word salutare is taken up by the Gloss in asking St. John to greet all his brothers. That Aldred should so loudly allude to Ovid here is fi tting. John is, after all, the Evangelist of Love: John III.16 ‘Sic enim Deus dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret, ut omnis qui credit in eum non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam,’24 and John XXI.15–17 ‘cum ergo prandissent, dicit Simoni Petro Iesus, Simon Iohannis, diligis me plus his? Dicit ei, Etiam Domine, tu scis quia amo te . . .’,25 where Jesus questions Peter repeatedly about his love for him; this passage, occupying almost the entire fi rst column of 258v, faces Aldred’s colophon. Besides, John is not only one of Jesus’s thegns (discipulus in the volume is regularly glossed as ðegn); he is the Beloved Disciple: John XXI.20 ‘vidit eum discipulum quem diligebat Iesus’;26 this passage, on 258vb, also faces Aldred’s colophon. The Evangelist of Love, the Beloved Disciple quotes from the ‘Playful Poet of Tender Loves’ (‘tenerorum lusor amorum’), as Ovid calls himself at Tristia 3.3.73 and 4.10.1, the latter the opening of the poem that is the envoi to that book.

The picture is still more complex. Robert Babcock has pointed out to us that

Psalms was known in Insular culture: see the Old Irish text published, from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B.512, by Kuno Meyer in Hibernica Minora: Being a Fragment of an Old-Irish Treatise on the Psalter, Anecdota Oxoniensia (Oxford, 1894); our passage and translation are on pp. 28−9, sect. 216.

23 ‘Go, just dashed-off as you are, go greet Perilla, O letter, faithful servant of my word’. Aldred would have had in mind also in the expression sermonis . . . ministra a privileged passage in Luke I.2: ‘Qui ab initio ipsi viderunt, et ministri fuerunt sermonis’ (KJV ‘which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers [i.e. servants] of the word’). The (major) allusion to Ovid and the (minor) one to St. Luke are inevitably and inextricably intertwined in these verses of Aldred’s.

24 ‘For so God loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’

25 ‘So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee . . .’ etc.

26 ‘He saw that disciple whom Jesus loved.’


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Aldred is aware of the envoi tradition not only in Ovid but also in the world of Carolingian poetry. As Babcock notes, Alcuin of York uses these themes. In poem IV in the MGH edition, ‘Ad amicos poetae’, Alcuin emphasizes the hospitable reception his cartula will receive in the houses of European scholars and ecclesiastics, and says specifi cally of Cologne and its bishop:

Urbs Agripina tibi pandit, scio, tecta benigne:Hic humili patrem Ricvulfum voce saluta;27

Here are the themes of the hall that is thrown open (pandit) and the greeting (voce saluta − only here it is the entering letter that (as in Ovid) is to greet the bishop). Aldred also knows the Carolingian bishop of Orleans, Theodulf. Addressing his poem (‘mea charta’),28 Theodulf speaks of its welcome in the house (this theme is emphasized in Theodulf) of St. Benedict at Aniane and ends with the distich (italics added):

Quid tibi plura canam? cunctos ex voce saluta

Hisque salutatis te mihi redde cito.29

It is upon the basis of this parallel that Babcock emends Aldred’s second hexameter line by supplying the missing syllable as ‘ex’, to read ‘Omnes, alme, meos fratres ex voce saluta’. The passages are linked verbally and themati-cally. The allusions reveal also an awareness on Aldred’s part of the genre, and the topos of the envoi, shared by the Ovidian, Alcuinian, and Theodulfan poems; no one has suspected this generic awareness and sophistication in Aldred before now.30 In his allusiveness, Aldred shows himself a ‘playful poet’ (‘lusor’) in the long and grand tradition. And we moderns catch a glimpse of the high culture of Aldred and his circle. As a result, we suggest the following translation:

[St. John]: Let the letter, faithful servant of the word, throw me open.[The Gloss]: To all my brothers, O nourishing one, grant a greeting from

your voice.

27 ‘The city of Agrippina [Roman Colonia Agrippinensis = modern Cologne] in kindness throws open its halls to you, I know; there give greeting with respectful voice to father Ricvulfus.’

28 MGH, PLAC I (Munich, 1978), pp. 520−2.29 ‘Why should I sing at greater length to you? Greet them all together with your voice, / And, having

greeted them, bring yourself back swiftly to me.’30 In the 1960 commentary, ch. 1, p. 5, the authors remark: ‘Sermonis fi da ministra sounds like

a tag (it is apparently not from classical literature) and indeed the whole line may well have been taken from the opening of some epistle in verse’. It seems, from the fundamental work of M. Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), that no other attestation of the Tristia has so far been discovered in Anglo-Saxon England.

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The Pedigree of the Gospels

Continuing down the column, under the explicit with its elegant little Latin verses in the margin, stand the ‘Five Sentences’,31 describing the source that inspired each of the four gospel writers. We call this the Pedigree of the

Gospels.32

ðe ðrifalde & ðe anfalde god ðis godspell ær worulda gisette

† Trinus et unus deus evangelium hoc ante | saecula constituit. | ærist aurat of muðe christes

† Matheus ex ore christi scripsit. | of muðe petres aurat

† Marcus ex ore petri scripsit. | of muðe paules aurat

† Lucas de ore pauli apostoli scripsit. | in deigilnisi vel in foresaga siðða rocgetede vel gisprant word

† IOHannes in prochemio deinde eructuavit (vel scripsit) | verbum, miððy gode gisulde &

deo donante halges gastes

et spiritu sancto (mið godes geafa & halges gastes mæht aurat iohannes). |

The text, in a version of majuscule noticeably larger than the minuscule of the Latin verses above or the Old English prose below, is in Latin, with Old English glosses above each line. The scribal activity of the Evangelists had been depicted earlier in the manuscript in the portraits of the four of them that precede each of their gospels. Now here, on this last page of the Johannine Gospel, the colophon echoes the discussion of writing with which that text ends (John XXII.24–5), so that the words (Lat.) scripsit and (OE) aurat in the colophon added by Aldred join those words in the text in dominating the page. As in his composition of the hexameters, Aldred was infl uenced in composing the Pedigree of the Gospels by the text on this very page.33

31 This is the name given by the authors of the 1960 commentary, ch. 1, p. 5 and adopted by M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 103, and M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 66.

32 Our term relates to the Insular Gospel Book in general. In discussing what he calls “The Incarnation Initial’, the famous Chi-Rho initial page, C. Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting. Book Illumination in the British Isles 600−800 (New York, 1977), p.68, Pl. 18, says, ‘A noble lineage was highly esteemed among the Celts and Anglo-Saxons. Consequently they attached a special importance to the genealogy of Christ with which the Gospel of Saint Matthew begins.’

33 The closing verses of John’s text, beginning on 258va14 are: ‘Hic est discipulus qui testimo-nium perhibet de his, et scribit haec. Et scimus quia verum est testimonium eius. Sunt autem alia multa quae fecit Iesus, quae si scribantur per singula, nec ipsum arbitror mundum capere


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The fi rst of the fi ve sentences may derive the phrase ‘trinus et unus Deus’ from the conclusion of the prayer, of doubtful authorship, found in some manuscripts of Augustine’s De Trinitate.34 The commentators of the 1960 fac-simile suggested that Aldred might have based the four sentences that follow, on the four gospel-writers, on Jerome’s prologue (‘Plures fuisse’) found in this very manuscript beginning on 5v.35 But that is only part of the story. In truth, the major source is a great deal more recherché. The sentences on Matthew, Mark and Luke are based on a brief text uncovered by Bernhard Bischoff in a Munich manuscript from Freising (clm 6235), a text published by Robert McNally.36 The Frisingensis reads: ‘Matheus scripsit euangelium ex ore Christi, Marcus ex ore Petri, Lucas ex ore Pauli.’37 But it is true that, to honour St. John, Aldred borrows the description of his action from the Jerome text: ‘[Iohannes] saturatus in illud proemium caelo veniens eructavit: In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum, hoc erat in principio apud Deum’.38

The text in the Freising manuscript is of particular signifi cance for another

eos qui scribendi sunt libros.’ Before Aldred added his colophon, the page already contained the word scribere in three forms, each with its Old English gloss above. Another clause that may have infl uenced Aldred’s choice of words is John XXI.23: ‘Exivit ergo sermo iste in fratres quia discipulus ille non moritur’ (259ra5−8). The verse perhaps produced an echo in the hexameters’ expressions ‘sermonis fi da ministra’ and ‘Omnes . . . fratres’, which stand on the same lines in the margin beyond the second column.

34 Augustinus, De Trinitate, ed. W. J. Mountain, CCSL 50A (Turnhout, 1968), pp. 550−5, esp. p. 555: ‘Deus trine et une, scientiae lumen accende in me per quod te intellegere et uidere merear trinum et unum deum sicut es trinus et unus deus.’

35 Ross et al., ‘On the Gloss’, p. 5. The ‘Plures fuisse’ is now edited by D. Hurst and M. Adriaen, Commentariorum in Matheum libri IV, CCSL 77 (Turnhout, 1969), pp. 1−6.

36 B. Bischoff , ‘Wendepunkte in der Geschichte der lateinischen Exegese im Frühmittelalter’, Mittelalterliche Studien I (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 205−73. Edited by R. McNally, Scriptores Hiberniae Minores, CCSL 108B (Turnhout, 1973), 209−19. In addition to the Freising manuscript, a manuscript in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 1841) contains the text; both manuscripts are of the ninth century and assigned to Northern Italy; see now M. Gorman, ‘The Myth of Hiberno-Latin Exegesis’, RB 110 (2000), 42−85, esp. 67, no. 13.

37 ‘Matthew wrote his gospel from the lips of Christ, Mark from the lips of Peter, Luke from the lips of Paul.’ The Freising-Paris text has an iconographic parallel. A. Baumstark, ‘Eine antike Bildkomposition in christlich-orientalischen Umdeutungen’, Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft VIII (1915), showed that the motif is also attested in Greek and Oriental manuscripts, for example in a Coptic manuscript in the Institut Catholique de Paris, MS Copte-Arabe 1, showing the Evangelist Mark receiving the Gospel from the hands of St Peter (65b). p. 118 (compare Aldred’s Pedigree of the Gospel Book). See also J. Weitzmann-Fiedler, ‘Ein Evangelientyp mit Aposteln als Begleitfi guren’, ADOLPH GOLDSCHMIDT zu seinem Siebenzigsten Geburtstag (Berlin, 1935), pp. 30−4; and C. Nordenfalk, ‘Eastern Style Elements in the Book of Lindisfarne’, Studies in the History of Book Illumination (London, 1992), pp. 88−91.

38 ‘[John], fed to the full, coming from heaven belched forth that prologue: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God, this was in the beginning with God.”’

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reason. Nees has called attention to the tetrads that dominate Aldred’s colophon;39 he seems to have sought them out. Running through the Freising text on the gospel writers is also an emphasis, quite naturally, upon the number four. The series of topics includes, for example (no. 7 in McNally’s text), ‘De loco conscriptionis euangelii: Matheus in Iudea, Marcus in Italia, Lucas in Achaia, Iohannes in Asia minore conscripsit’,40 and repeats this pattern over and over. Toward the end, there is an unusually rich list of the symbolic attributes of the gospel writers. Apart from the traditional ‘animalia’ (no. 17 here) derived from Jerome’s ‘Plures fuisse’, the Evangelists are here associ-ated (no. 15) with the four elements, (no. 16) with the four rivers of Paradise, (no. 18) with the four men who carried the paralytic on his bed (Mark II.3), and with the four soldiers at the Cross (John XIX.23), (no. 19) with the four seasons, and with the four corners of the earth, (no. 20) with the four ‘quali-tates’ or types of message (‘precepta’, ‘mandata’, ‘testimonia’, and ‘exempla’), (no. 23) with even the four divisions of the canons, and, fi nally, (no. 24) with the four ‘documenta’ or teachings (the ‘speciale documentum’, the ‘generale documentum’, the ‘primitiuum documentum’, and the ‘dirivatiuum documen-tum’). Since Aldred seems certainly to quote from this work, it is most likely that he was inspired in his search for tetrads (see Fig. 10, p. 138) in creating the narrative of the manuscript that is found in the colophon.

The Pedigree of This Gospel Book

What we call the Pedigree of This Gospel Book begins below that. It is sometimes called the ‘Colophon proper’.41 But Aldred’s entire work on this page is the colophon, a unifi ed artistic production.

† EADfrið biscopb Lindisfearnensis æcclesiæ | he ðis boc aurat æt fruma

gimænelice

gode & sancte | cuðberhte & allum ðæm halgum ða ðe | in eolonde sint. biscop

& Eðilwald lindisfearneolondinga | hit uta giðryde & gibelde swa he wel cuðæ. | & billfrið se oncræ he gismioðade ða | gihrino ða ðe utan on sint, & hit gi-|hrinade mið golde & mið gimmum æc | mið sulfre ofer gylded faconleas feh. | & [ic]Aldred presbyter indignus & misserrimus, | mið godes fultummæ & sancti cuðberhtes | hit ofer gloesade on englisc, &

39 Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon’, pp. 367−9.40 ‘On the place where the Gospel was written: Matthew wrote in Judaea, Mark in Italy, Luke in

Greece, and John in Asia Minor.’41 See the 1960 commentary, ch. 1, p. 5.


116

id est tilw[if]

hine gihamadi* (*ælfredi natus aldredus uocor, bonæ mulieris fi lius eximius loquor), | mið ðæm ðriim dælum: Matheus dæl | gode & sanctecuðberhti; MARCUS dæl | ðæm biscope; & lucas dæl ðæm hiorode; | &

u u id est fore his sawle

æht ora seolfres mið to inlade. | & sancti iohannis dæl fore hine seolfne u

& feower ora | seolfres mið gode & sancti cuðberti. þætte he | hæbbe ondfong ðerh godes milsæ on heofnum, | seel & sibb on eorðo, forðgeong & giðyngo, | wisdom & snyttro ðerh sancti cuðberhtes earnunga. | † Eadfrið, oeðilwald, billfrið, aldred | hoc evangelium deo & cuðberhto construxerunt. vel ornaverunt

This part is in prose. It is written in a compact unit of twenty-three lines, to the foot of the page. Two warnings. First, it is often said that the text of this part is all in Old English. In fact, line 1 is chiefl y in Latin, and lines 10 and 23 are entirely in Latin. So the fi rst line of all, introducing Eadfrith, is largely in Latin, the line introducing Aldred is wholly in Latin,42 and the fi nal line, summing up the activity of the four historical fi gures who are said to have worked on the manuscript, is all in Latin as well. Secondly, it has been suggested that the last two lines are separate from what precedes (so printed by Michelle Brown).43 There is no palaeographical reason for this. No space separates those lines from what precedes.44 They form part of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book: ‘† Eadfrith. Æthelwald. Billfrith. Aldred / For God and Cuthbert this Gospel constructed.’ Below the last word is the variant vel ornaverunt, as in the Latin line at the end of the Pedigree of the Gospels, where the fi nal verb (eructuavit) is

42 M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), pp. 102 and 146, nn. 56 and 57 reads the line ‘7 [ic] Aldred presbyter indignus 7 misserrimus’ with a Caroline interrogation sign at its end. Such a reading makes no sense (see her translation on p. 104) and is a palaeographical misunder-standing. The upper part of the ‘question mark’ is the abbreviation sign for the ending -us of ‘misserrimus’ [sic]. The dot in brown-black ink at upper right of this complex is not part of Aldred’s colophon, which is written in red; the dot is a spatter, like those on the gloss ‘bisc’ above. This misreading is repeated in Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 66 and nn. 62 and 63 on p. 164. Also – another palaeographical misreading – the signe de renvoi for the mar-ginal verses about Aldred’s parents does not stand at the end of this line (pace M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 104, and Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67).

43 M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 104, and M. P. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67.

44 It is true that the last line but one, beginning with Eadfrith’s name, is preceded by a cross set in the left margin. But this ecthesis is also found for the fi rst line of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book, also beginning with ‘Eadfrith’, and for every line of the Pedigree of the Gospels. It is wrong to separate the last two lines from the rest; here, as elsewhere, we emphasize the unity of the whole colophon on this page.

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also given a subscript gloss or variant, also in Latin (scripsit) and introduced by vel.45 The layout of verbs and their variants is artistically similar and both are in a smaller minuscule. The Pedigree of the Gospels contains in the last sentence, describing John’s work, the striking metaphor, eructuavit verbum (‘he belched forth the Word’). The fi nal sentence of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book ends with the strong metaphor of the four English churchmen who construxerunt this gospel book. Each of the two metaphorical verbs is glossed / modifi ed in Latin minuscule at the lower right below its sentence.

It has been suggested that the presence of large crosses at the line begin-nings in the Pedigree of the Gospels and at the beginning and end sentences of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book is like that of the crosses that ‘mark the beginnings of inscriptions on metal work and stone, which may refl ect a source’.46 But we have demonstrated above that the upper, former Pedigree is based upon a liter-ary source represented in the Freising text. This fact casts doubt upon the con-nection of any of the cross-marked parts as derived from inscriptions. Another of the arguments for a piecemeal quality in the colophon is that the ‘inclusion of Latin elements within the Old English text (hoc evangelium deo, lindisfearnensis

aecclesiae and [sic] construxerunt vel ornaverunt) may also refl ect the copying of parts of the text from another source’.47 This is based upon a misunderstanding. A closer examination shows that it is whole lines, or virtually, in the colophon that are written in Latin: the fi rst line (except for the word ‘biscopb’), introduc-ing Eadfrith, the entire tenth line, introducing Aldred, and all of lines twenty-two and twenty-three, naming the four who constructed this gospel book. The presence of Latin is a structural device, which gives form and shape to the colophon as a whole.

In fact, the question of structure has never been fully addressed. As we have noted, the fi rst and last sentences of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book are (a) preceded by crosses. They are also (b) in Latin. And − a palaeographical feature which has never been discussed – they are (c) written in a somewhat larger module and a script approaching majuscule. These three characteristics

45 This is one of the errors in earlier published transcriptions of the colophon.46 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 95 and Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67 refers to the

layout as ‘erratic’. It is one of the arguments used to show that the Colophon could contain embedded pieces of earlier text. A part of the ‘erratic’ quality is stated to be the indentation of most of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book. But this entire section is not indented; the body of the column does indeed narrow for this more densely-written Pedigree, just as it is set apart from the Pedigree above it by a blank space, but the beginning element and ending element of the lower Pedigree are marked by ecdosis with a cross that puts the head and foot of this lower text, roughly, on a line vertically with the upper text. On the question of the crosses, and other aspects that link the whole, see our discussion above, p. 116.

47 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67; cf. Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 95.


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link this beginning and ending with the Pedigree of the Gospels. Aldred has used the introductory crosses, the Latin language, and the more generous script to emphasise a ring-composition both within the Pedigree of This Gospel Book and in the larger framework of both these Pedigrees. Nothing in this symmetrical, balanced text points to an extraneous, older element or elements embedded in the colophon. Quite the contrary.

The Pedigree of Aldred

In the right margin beside the line ending ‘gihamadi’ are two non-quantitative, rhyming verses in Latin, tied to the text by signes de renvoi at end of that line and at beginning of the verses.48 They concern Aldred’s parentage, the Pedigree of

Aldred:

ælfredi natus aldredus uocor, id est tilw[if]

bonæ mulieris fi lius eximius loquor.49

If the emphasis in the Pedigree of the Gospels was the ‘mouth’ from which each Evangelist derived the message that he ‘wrote’, Aldred’s Pedigree tells from whose mouth he himself had learned the English language that served him in writing his gloss.

The little verses beside the explicit introduced Aldred’s conception of the whole gospel book as house, and the Pedigree of This Gospel Book continues this poetic metaphor. And it runs to the very end; apart from the variant/gloss in the bottom margin, the last word on the page (line 23) is the Latin construxerunt used of the work of the four churchmen. And the house that they constructed is a holy house. The parts are dedicated to diff erent saints and personages. Or perhaps, if we are to think of a church, the parts of the four gospels represented four altars, each with its own dedication. An understand-ing of the metaphor is useful in resolving the most perplexing mysteries of Aldred’s text.

the problematical old english words

The hapax legomenon: gihamadi; and the reference of hine

It is the Old English parts of the Pedigree of This Gospel Book that present the gravest problems in the colophon. These Old English elements involve the interpretation of rare or unique words. In the fi rst of these Aldred tells the

48 The verses on Aldred’s parents are not linked to the prose line that gives his name, as has been stated; see n. 42 above. See also the section that follows here on ‘gihamadi’.

49 ‘Of Aelfred born, Aldred I am called, famous [as a] good woman’s son I speak.’

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reader (line 12) that he: ‘hit ofer gloesade on englisc, 7 hine gihamadi mið ðæm ðriim daelum’. ‘He over-glossed it [over the text words] in English’ – so much is clear, but gihamadi is a hapax legomenon. It obviously derives from the root word ham for ‘home’. As Bosworth and Toller translated the clause, ‘he made himself familiar with the three parts’.50 In the 1956−60 facsimile commentary, A. S. C. Ross, E. G. Stanley, and T. J. Brown concluded that the meaning is, instead, ‘And, by means of the three “sections”, he made a home for himself [in the Foundation]’,51 and this translation is accepted by M. Brown (2003, 2011)52 and Nees (2003).53 But both translations are unsatisfactory in various ways. For instance, why, given the presence of four sections, that is, four gospels, would Aldred connect making a home for himself with only three?

In the fi rst place, in our view the accusative hine should be understood not as referring (refl exively) to Aldred himself, but to the Evangelist John. It may seem surprising that the bare accusative pronoun hine should represent John. But, as Nees has emphasized, the fourth gospel writer is given pride of place in Aldred’s colophon. The colophon stands on the same page as the last words of John’s Gospel, words which underscore John’s unique standing among the disciples, and it begins in the column directly beside and under the explicit of that gospel. In the Hexameters beside the St John explicit, it is this gospel writer who speaks to the gloss and who is surely addressed, in the vocative, as ‘O nourishing one’. In the Pedigree of the Gospels John’s name is written about twice as large as the names of the other three. Furthermore, in The Pedigree of

This Gospel Book the beginning of the statement about St John’s part is privi-leged by extension of the 7-shaped ‘and’ abbreviation sign into the left margin (it is true that this extension seems to be an afterthought of Aldred’s), and, in the next word, John is given the honorifi c ‘Saint’ before his name − the only one of the four to be so singled out. Furthermore, John is the only Evangelist given a vivid reference to his own text: ‘In his prologue he belched forth the Word.’ The ‘Word’, of course, is the Logos of the opening sentence of John’s famous proem. And the stunning verb is derived from Jerome’s Prologue to the Four Gospels (the Plures fuisse), the source of the Pedigree of the Gospels. Jerome’s words explain54 the seemingly barbarous metaphor: ‘. . . [Iohannes] reuelatione saturatus in illud prohemium caelo ueniens eructauit “In principio erat uerbum, et uerbum erat apud deum, et deus erat hoc uerbum: hoc erat

50 Bosworth and Toller, p. 398.51 1960 commentary, p. 8.52 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 104; Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67.53 L. Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon’, p. 341.54 See the edition of Hurst and Adriaen, Commentariorum in Matheum libri IV, 2−3.


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in principio apud deum”’.55 Aldred is summarizing, and in part repeating, Jerome’s statement.56

As for the verb gihamadi (‘homed him’/‘domiciled him’), it is in keeping with the colophon’s pervasive metaphorical theme of the gospels as structure, whether house, palace, or church. And, although this verb (gihamadi) is unique, another, competing, denominative formed upon the root word ham is attested. It is gehamettan, found with direct object (specifi cally, also hine) and meaning ‘to domicile [someone]’. Gehamettan appears in the section of Athelstan’s Grately Code (II As) dealing with lordless persons: ‘ðaet hi hine to folcryhte gehamette & him hlaford fi nden on folcgemote’ (‘that they [kinsmen] settle [him] in a fi xed residence where [he] will become amenable to public law, and fi nd for [him] a lord in the public assembly’).57 Nor is this the only parallel.58 In the case of the gospel book, Aldred made St John a native speaker and thus ‘homed’ him or domiciled him in Anglo-Saxon England. Or, to be more precise, he

55 ‘[John] being fi lled full of that revelation, belched it forth into that proem coming from heaven, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.”’ In fact, there is a broader interpretation of the eruct(u)avit available in this NT passage and in Jerome. John is the disciple who at the Last Supper reclined at Jesus’ breast, as recorded in John XXI.20: ‘Conversus Petrus vidit illum discipulum, quem diligebat Iesus, sequentem, qui et recubuit in cena super pectus eius’ (‘Peter turned and saw that disciple whom Jesus loved and who at dinner reclined at Jesus’ breast’) that passage on 258v faces Aldred’s colophon. In Jerome’s quasi-mystical understanding, the repletion and the eruct(u)are are the result.

56 Aldred’s emphasis upon St John is in keeping with the original manuscript itself; among the Evangelist portraits, the iconography of St John, facing the reader, is totally at variance with that of the other three. And it should be remembered that Aldred glossed the fi rst three gospels in black ink, while most of St John’s is glossed in red. For the importance of St John in the culture in general, see M. P. Brown, ‘“In the Beginning was the Word”: Books and Faith in the Age of Bede’, The Jarrow Lecture 2000, pp. 11−12.

57 For text and translation, see F. L. Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, (New Jersey, 2006) p. 129; also Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903) I, pp. 150−1 (laws go across the opening). Michael Elliott has kindly pointed out to us that the phrase ‘hine to folcryhte gehamette’ appears in two other versions of Æthelstan’s Grately Code as ‘to rihte gehamette’, and additionally as ‘ad rectum adducant’ in the twelfth-century Latin Quadripartitus. It is our understanding that the latter case represents an idiomatic ren-dering of the vernacular, which elliptically privileges the intended eff ect of the law above the literal elements of the whole phrase. That is to say, while the Latin may indeed express the law’s intention to ‘bring to justice’ certain individuals, it collapses the full nuance and cultural situation of the original construction. For our purposes, we are concerned here only with the literal force of the verb gehamettan, as denoting the settling or homing of an individual within the community.

58 Yet another denominative, hamettan, with hi accusative, appears in a charter of 902 from Bishop Denewulf to Beornwulf: ‘Bisceop lyfde Beornulfe his mege þæt he moste þa inberðan menn hamettan to Eblesburnan’ (‘The bishop gave Beornwulf his kinsman leave to house those native-born men at Ebbesbourne’); see P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal Hist. Soc. Guides and Handbooks 8 (London, 1968), S 1285.

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‘homed him along with the [other] three parts’, that is, along with the other three Evangelists.

Aldred, with his fondness for vivid verbs (compare eructuavit), seems to have been thinking of the contemporary process in English society which domiciled or found a home for those who had no place. And it was contem-porary; Athelstan ruled from 924 to 939, and the laws will have very likely been promulgated in Aldred’s lifetime. In speaking of ‘lordless men’, Athelstan’s law provides a method by which such persons may be inserted into the structure of the realm, by attaching them to a lord.

It is interesting that precisely beside the word ‘gihamadi’ Aldred has placed the signe de renvoi that links, via the corresponding signe de renvoi, the marginal note that we call The Pedigree of Aldred with this Old English word. At this legal moment and beside this (as we consider it) legal word Aldred identifi es himself in full, with his parentage that sets him in the legal system.

The wrong homonym: æht ora seolfres (and feover ora seolfres); the dis legomenon: inlade

The second and third problematical words are linked. Aldred, after naming the dedications of Matthew, Mark and Luke, continues: & aeht ora seolfres mið to

inlade. Nineteenth-century scholars, reading the colophon for bits and pieces of history, thought they knew at once what was being said, namely, ‘and eight ores [a Danish coin] of silver besides for [by way of] induction’.59 That is, they took it Aldred was ‘buying his way in’ (einkaufen, as the Germans say) into the monastic community by paying eight ores of silver. This is the interpretation of Bosworth and Toller for ora and for to inlade (which occurs only once besides here in Old English texts).60 A. S. C. Ross, E. G. Stanley and T. J. Brown,61 and, in turn, M. Brown, saw this as fi tting with their understanding of gihamadi as ‘made himself at home’ in the religious community.

There are diffi culties of various kinds with this interpretation of ora. One dif-fi culty, recognized since the nineteenth century, is that Aldred himself, in this very book, in a marginal note on 45r on Matt. X.8 (‘Freely ye have received; freely give’ − the Old English gloss for ‘freely’ is unboht) is quite fi rmly opposed to such buying and selling – the simony that was a curse of the medieval church.62 How can Aldred speak in the same volume of his scorn for those

59 Bosworth and Toller, p. 594; Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 104; Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67.

60 The Toronto Dictionary of Old English does not yet extend to the words ora and inlad.61 Ross et al., ‘On the Gloss and the Glossator’, p. 8.62 ‘/unboht sellas / Cueð to ðæm apostolum & biscopum æfter him forðmest ge had fengon

& unboht vel unceap buta eghuelcum worðe seallas ðæm ðe sie wyrðe vel worð bið in lare & in ðæwum & in clænnise & in cystum & in lichoma hælo forðon biscop scæl cunnege & leornege ðone preost georne buta ær geleornade’ (‘He [Christ] said to the apostles and the


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who enter religious communities or offi ces in this way, and at the same time state openly that this is how he entered the community at Chester-le-Street, by paying? The problem led Boyd to write a discussion of several pages, in a desperate attempt to reconcile Aldred’s ideals with his (supposed) actions.63

Aldred’s integrity is at stake. But there is something of more immediate importance for the reader in examining 259rb. It is the integrity of the colophon. Everywhere else Aldred’s words are focused upon the manuscript, its creation and what he has done to enhance the book. In the traditional interpretation, he suddenly throws in the price he paid, presumably some time before – perhaps years before – to be allowed to join the community.

But, it could be argued, simony was so common in the church in Aldred’s day that to mention it here was (so to speak) no moral solecism. It probably would have passed virtually without notice. Such an interpretation, however, still constitutes an off ence against the colophon’s integrity. To understand an interruption to the fl ow of the narrative (note that in his translation Nees brackets these phrases, and M. Brown puts them in parentheses)64 with this gratuitous factoid supposedly from Aldred’s biography is to pay no attention whatsoever to the ethos, the artistic and spiritual dimension, of Aldred’s state-ment, and even to aff ront it.

And then there is the further problem: the eight ora of silver are connected only with the fi rst three gospels, and, in speaking of his work on St John’s Gospel, he adds, ‘and four ora of silver’. Were the eight ora of silver only the down payment? But why so connected, eight to the three gospels and four to the one gospel?65

bishops foremost after him: “Freely have you received orders; give [them] freely,” at no cost, and without any payment, to those who are worthy in learning and in conduct and in chastity and in bodily health and in virtue; Since the bishop must test and instruct the priest rigorously, unless he has learned beforehand’). See the article ‘Simony’ by Joseph H. Lynch in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer, 13 vols. (New York, 1982) XI, 300−2; and the same author’s Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life From 1000 to 1260 (Columbus, OH., 1976). Lynch would perhaps not have agreed with the noun we have used in our text for this practice.

63 Boyd, Aldred’s Marginalia, pp. 24−9. Brown’s argument on the supposed simony (Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 69) and on Aldred paying an additional four ores of silver and ‘transcending the simoniacal demands of the contemporary episcopacy’ is hard to understand. The assump-tion of simony also seems to underlie Brown’s assertion (Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 63) that Aldred had newly joined the community at Chester-le-Street. The assertion rests on no evidence.

64 Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon’, p. 337; Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 104; Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), p. 67.

65 We considered earlier in our study that perhaps the eight ores of silver (if a coin) represented the price of the black ink used for the glosses in the fi rst three gospels, and the four ora the price of the red ink used predominantly (after John X.10) for the fourth gospel. But scholars who understand the economics of book-production in the period assure us that the ink could

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It is our conclusion that we scholars have been barking up the wrong tree. It is a matter of homonyms. In Old English there are three entries that begin ora (Bosworth and Toller, p. 763): (1) ora, oran: border, edge, margin; (2) ora, oran: metal in an unreduced state, ore; (3) ora, oran: a species of money introduced by the Danes. We propose, in lieu of the third, to consider the fi rst, the word for ‘border, edge, margin’, presumably derived from Latin ora, orae, with this meaning (as in ‘the border of a garment’).66 With this reading, what Aldred did was to add edges of silver to selected pages of the gospels, eight in the texts of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and four in the text of John. These would be particularly important pages, such as opening text pages or incipit pages, and the silver, we propose, was intended to enhance and privilege the ‘introduc-tion’ (the dis legomenon ‘inlade’) or ‘beginning’ of a new gospel or new section.

There are parallels that have never been discussed. Lawrence Nees has called our attention to the magnifi cent fragments of the early-eighth-century Qur’an, produced perhaps at Damascus and preserved at Sanaa, in which the opening pages have a fi ne border around the text of the fi rst sura (compare the ‘borders of silver by way of introduction’).67

In fact, there is a parallel much closer to home, that is, much closer to Aldred and to the Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’. It is the handsome, large gospel book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. D. 2. 19 (see Fig. 8). This volume was written and decorated, it is thought, in Ireland, by MacRegol, perhaps identifi able as the abbot of Birr in County Off aly (+821 or 822). It is known as the MacRegol, or Rushworth, Gospels68 and forms a close parallel to the Sanaa Qur’an fragments;

not possibly have been so expensive as all that. Richard Gameson states (personal communi-cation Dec. 2008): ‘I’m not aware of any specifi c discussion of the cost of ink in relation to Lindisfarne, but then there is no documentary evidence for the price of inks and pigments in A[nglo-]S[axon] E[ngland]. That said, my feeling is that 12 ores of silver is vastly more than it can possibly have cost. The materials to make a range of black inks were widely & freely available (oak or hawthorn for the pigment, water, plus a gum probably from a tree of the prunus family): it was easy to make − the cost was negligible. Red (lead) would have been more “expensive” in terms of time and materials, but again the latter were readily available & the ubiquity of the pigment attests to its economy.’

66 For the parsing of Aldred’s word ‘ora’ (any of the meanings), it is perhaps worth noting that in his Northumbrian dialect there was no distinction between the singular and plural of ‘ora’ in the nominative and accusative. This syncretism is clearly shown in A. S. C. Ross, ‘Standard Paradigms’, in Tomus Secundus, bk II, pt II, pp. 37−44 (second pagination) of the Olten facsimile’s commentary volume (see Appendix 3 for full citation of this volume). On Aldred’s art work, see Addendum below, p. 139.

67 See M. B. Piotrovsky and J. Vrieze, Heavenly Art, Earthly Beauty: the Art of Islam, ed. M. B. Piotrovsky, Amsterdam, 1999, pp. 100−5, discussion and plates of Dar-al-Makhtutat, Sanaa, inv. no. 20−33.1, and related manuscripts.

68 Splendid full colour images of the entire MacRegol codex may be found at the Bodleian Library’s Digital Collections website: (http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/media/book/showBook/ODLodl~24~24~127350~142891)


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the openings of works are distinguished by frames around the text. The frames of the Oxford book are clearly original, that is, due to MacRegol himself. They are found on 1v−2r (opening of Matthew after the Initial page), 2v−3r (begin-ning of the Christmas story) and 50v (end of Matt.); 52v−53r (opening of Mark); 85v−86r (opening of Luke); 168v−169r (end of John); and 169v (MacRegol’s colophon). That is, nine pages have frames in the Synoptic Gospels, and three pages have frames in the Gospel of John and at the end, all marking key points in the texts. This is a virtually exact fi t: Aldred speaks in ‘Lindisfarne’ of his eight borders for the fi rst three gospels and four borders for the Gospel of John. Both books would have had a total of twelve framed or bordered pages. In other words,

Figure 8: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. D. 2. 9, MacRegol (sometimes Rushworth) Gospels, 3r. The original script (s. ixin) and the red-orange and yellow decoration are by MacRegol, as well

as the frame that enhances the opening. The Old English gloss (s. x) is by the priest Farmon.


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the MacRegol volume shows us in the fl esh what Aldred talks of having added in ‘Lindisfarne’. And the conjecture that ‘to inlade’ in Aldred’s colophon refers to the opening pages of the gospel books is confi rmed by MacRegol’s frames.69

This correspondence is the more remarkable when one observes that the two codices have a close historical connection. ‘Lindisfarne’ and MacRegol are the only two existing gospel books completely glossed in Old English. Furthermore, both sets of glosses are from the mid-tenth century. And they must once in that century have lain in the same writing-centre − presumably Chester-le-Street − inasmuch as the gloss in MacRegol is partially copied from that of ‘Lindisfarne’.70 The overall relationship between the two manuscripts is the subject of an ongoing investigation on our part.

And yet, for all that they occur at the same type of place in the two manu-scripts and served the same purpose, Aldred’s ‘borders’ and MacRegol’s frames were not the same. No trace of Aldred’s borders is to be found in the area immediately around the text – the position of MacRegol’s frames (see again Fig. 8). The ‘borders’ of silver added to ‘Lindisfarne’, we conclude, have been placed at the outermost edge of their respective leaves. And these have disappeared.

No student of manuscripts familiar with the appearance of medieval display books would suppose that ‘Lindisfarne’ possessed its original margins today. The proportions are wrong. Besides, it is demonstrable that the margins in ‘Lindisfarne’ have been cropped since Aldred’s day, because some of Aldred’s marginal notes are no longer complete. We count at least eight examples of his marginalia that have suff ered cropping. More shocking than this, on 137v part of the original frame of St Luke’s portrait – only a small part, to be sure – has been lost in trimming of the leaf. In addition to the ordinary tendency to crop all the leaves in the rebinding process, there may have been a reason connected

69 We understand that ‘to inlade’ might imply, by shorthand, closing pages (‘utlada’) as well as opening ones, as in the Sanaa Qur’an and the MacRegol Gospels. Two other once-splendid gospel books, now mutilated, show frames in places, for the same purpose. In Durham Cathedral, A. II. 17 on 383r, the end of Matthew’s text is enclosed in a handsome frame; see EMFF 20 (Copenhagen, 1980). In addition, the Lichfi eld Gospels (Lichfi eld Cathedral, s. n.) show frames not only for the last page of Matthew (p. 141; the manuscript is paginated), but for the opening pages of that gospel (pp. 2−4) as well; the result is that there are continu-ously framed pages from the incipit page through Christ’s genealogy and to the Chi-Rho or Incarnation page. The best discussion of frames that we have found is that of G. Henderson, From Durrow to Kells. The Insular Gospel-books 650−800 (London, 1987), especially pp. 57−60 and 131−50 and pls. 74 and 188. The earliest Latin manuscript with framed text known to us is the Vergilius Romanus (Vaticanus latinus 3867); see D. H. Wright, The Roman Vergil and the Origins of Medieval Book Design (Toronto, 2001), p. 27 (78r, beginning of the Aeneid).

70 A. S. C. Ross, ‘Lindisfarne and Rushworth Two’, N&Q 226 (1981), 6−11; and P. Bibire and A. S. C. Ross, ‘The Diff erences Between Lindisfarne and Rushworth Two’, N&Q 226 (1981), 98−116.


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with Aldred’s silver margins themselves: to judge from surviving manuscripts such as the famous Durham Liber vitae, silver in manuscripts in its oxidized state can be disfi guring. An aesthetic purpose may have led to trimming away Aldred’s silver edges. Even if traces survive today, it seems that at this stage we have no reliable machines to test for silver as the Raman machine can do for gold and colours.71 Without more sophisticated machines, it seems there is no evidence for the ora of silver that, we propose, once adorned pages in the manuscript. But then, there is no surviving evidence for the simoniacal ora of silver of the traditional interpretation; indeed, for that there is counter-evidence in Aldred’s own words (on Matt. X.8).

In putting forward this solution, or cluster of solutions, we suggest that two questions might be resolved: the new reading would restore the integrity of the colophon; its focus is visible once more, a focus exclusively on the mag-nifi cent manuscript. And in the process, we suggest we can absolve Aldred of the charge of simony as well. The troubling hypocrisy disappears, and Aldred’s integrity is restored.

It is interesting to note that the mistaken notion of a reference to simony has coloured interpretation of virtually every part of the colophon. It is as though, once a single commercial reference was identifi ed, in the eyes of twentieth- century scholars, the whole colophon took on a decidedly worldly tone. In the case of the hapax gihamadi, Aldred is telling us that − it was assumed − ‘he made a home for himself’ in the community by paying a very specifi c price (in fact, two sums) for admission, and in that environment he has carved out a career for himself. As a result, the glossing of the book is a step deliberately under-taken for career advancement. And, by a curious refl ex, Aldred’s hero, Eadfrith the alleged scribe of the wonderful manuscript, also went in for book-work as ‘an astute career move’.72 This all seems to grow out of the problematic words of Aldred’s colophon, the problematic words interpreted as ‘eight ores of silver for his induction’. The cynical picture may represent the facts of Aldred’s life, but there is no support for it in the colophon, at least in the present writers’ understanding of it.73 All this grows out of a certain wooden literalism that has plagued interpreters of the colophon for more than a century, a literalism

71 See the full discussion by K. Brown, M. P. Brown and D. Jacobs in Appendix 1 of Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), pp. 430−51.

72 M. P. Brown, ‘The Lindisfarne Scriptorium from the Late Seventh to the Early Ninth Century’, St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to 1200, ed. B. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliff e (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 151−63, esp. p. 154. For some useful comments on this, see R. Gameson, ‘Why Did Eadfrith Write the Lindisfarne Gospels?’ Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser (Oxford, 2001), pp. 45−58, esp. 55−8.

73 There has, to be sure, been a protest against this baseless cynicism; see Roberts, ‘Aldred Signs Off ’, p. 35, n. 39, on ‘ungenerous interpretation’.

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that would have shocked scholars if anyone had applied it to the gospel texts themselves in this volume.

excavating an ur-text?

M. Brown suggests that the last two lines of the colophon might have been an earlier bit of information preserved by being written on a fl yleaf now lost, or engraved or inscribed on a metal book-box also gone.74 As is clear in what has been said earlier in this paper, however, these two lines were written as an integral part of the colophon, and there is no space to separate them from what precedes.

More recently, Jane Roberts has ingeniously sought to fi nd a source for Aldred’s information in an Old English poem that she ‘excavates’ from the colophon by pruning away phrases and clauses that she regards as merely ‘Aldred’s spin’.75 The method can be demonstrated by quoting that passage of the colophon, with cancellation marks through the parts that Roberts has discarded:

† EADfrið biscop Lindisfearnensis æcclesiæhe ðis boc aurat æt fruma gode & sancte cuðberhte & allum ðæm halgum ða ðe

biscopin eolonde sint. & Eðilwald lindisfearneolondingahit uta giðryde & gibelde swa he wel cuðæ.& billfrið se oncræ he gismioðade ða gihrino ða ðe utan on sint, & hit gi-hrinade76 mið golde & mið gimmum æcmið sulfre ofer gylded77 faconleas feh.

Both approaches follow the method of Baldwin Brown of almost a century ago,78 who deliberately excluded a great deal of the text of the colo-phon, saying,

74 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), pp. 103; Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2011), pp. 67−70 and notes. Brown reiterates her interpretation in a more nuanced form, with more careful atten-tion to Nees’ arguments than was possible in 2003. As will be clear, we remain skeptical of this excavating of an Ur-Text. The suggestion goes back at least to E. H. Zimmermann, Vorkarolingische Miniaturen (Berlin, 1916), p. 113.

75 Roberts, ‘Aldred Signs Off ’, pp. 39−43. Accepted by R. Gameson, ‘From Vindolanda to Domesday: the book in Britain from the Romans to the Normans,’ in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1: c. 400–1100, ed. R. Gameson (Cambridge, 2011), p. 8; and K. L. Jolly, The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: the Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 (Columbus, 2012), p. 54.

76 For the excavated poem, Roberts emends to ‘gigyrede hit’.77 Another emendation, to “ofergylde.”78 G. B. Brown, The Arts in Early England (London, 1921), pp. 334−43, esp. p. 335.


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The colophon, and a short note of similar purport on fol. 88v, run to nearly 200 words, but much of the matter is personal to Aldred, or is to us of purely secondary import, and it presents diffi culties in interpretation, so that attention may in this place be confi ned to those words which apply to the questions of the date, artistic character, and provenance of the work, with which alone we are concerned

It should be clear that the present authors, on the other hand, share Nees’s view79 that Aldred’s colophon must be studied as a whole, without excising parts regarded as ‘personal’ or as presenting ‘diffi culties in interpretation’ or as amounting merely to ‘Aldred’s spin’.80

Roberts’ study is, however, of great value in calling attention to the poetic qualities of Aldred’s prose style. This present study has tried to explore Aldred’s delicate allusiveness in the Latin verses. But the prose is poetic too. Roberts is quite right to hear the ring of poetry in such expressions as ‘facon-leas feh’ (‘guileless goods’). In keeping with this are the forceful verbs such as ‘gismioðade’ (‘he smithed it’), or, of course, the brilliantly metaphorical ‘giha-madi’ (‘he homed him’), whose legal implications we have explored. These verbs correspond to the vivid Latin ‘pandat’ (cf. Virgil, Aen. 7.641: ‘Pandite nunc Helicona, deae’),81 the even more striking ‘eructuavit’, evoking not only the Jerome passage quoted earlier, but also the opening of Ps. XLIV.1, with its association of scribal activity, ‘Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum: dico ergo opera mea regi. Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis’−;82 and the culminating verb ‘construxerunt’, evoking the ‘stately house’ that the four

79 See Nees’s analysis (pp. 337−9) of Baldwin Brown’s ‘defense’ of the historicity of the colo-phon against the ‘attack’ of R. A. S. Macalister.

80 One striking aspect of the six lines of earlier Old English poetry that Roberts (p. 40) ‘recov-ers’ from Aldred’s colophon is that, to create her reconstructed poem, she has cut out the most important single phrase, the reference to St. Cuthbert (his name occurs fi ve times in the colophon as it stands). This seems doubtful to us. Cuthbert was central to the whole tradition within which Aldred was writing. Cuthbert cannot be discarded as ‘Aldred’s spin’. Symeon of Durham, who Roberts suggests (per Michelle Brown) may or may not have been using a source separate from Aldred, himself twice identifi es Cuthbert as the gospel book’s raison d’être. Indeed, Symeon goes farther out of his way than Aldred to make this point, stating not only that Eadfrith wrote the book in honour of blessed Cuthbert, but that, infl amed with love for the saint, Eadfrith, Æthelwald, and Billfrith jointly in this labour left behind for all later generations a manifest token of their devotion towards him (cf. Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, bk ii, ch. xii; ‘Eadfridi videlicet venerandae memoriae episcopi, qui hunc in honorem beati Cuthberti manu propria scripserat, successoris quoque eiusdem venerabilis Ethelwoldi, qui auro gemmisque perornari iusserat, sancti etiam Bilfridi anachoritae, qui vota iubentis manu artifi ci prosecutus, egregium opus composuerat . . . Hi pariter amore dilecti Deo confessoris et pontifi cis ferventes, suam erga ipsum devotionem posteris omnibus innotescendam hoc opere reliquerunt’).

81 ‘Throw open now Helicon, O ye goddesses.’82 ‘My heart hath belched forth a good word: wherefore I speak my works to the king. My

tongue is the writing-reed of a scribe writing swiftly.’

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churchmen have built between them (cf. the doubled verb in the account of the building of the Temple at I Esdras VI.14−15: ‘et aedifi caverunt et construxerunt iubente Deo Israel, et iubente Cyro, et Dario, et Artaxerxe regibus Persarum: et compleverunt domum Dei istam.’83 Beyond the lexis, there are Aldred’s structural echoes, such as the parallelism between the work of Billfrith the anchorite who ‘over-gilded’ the book’s silver cover, and the work of Aldred the priest, who ‘over-glossed’ [the Latin] in English. In addi-tion, in the little marginal Latin verses, Aldred shows a sensitivity to metre; the exchange between St John and the gloss at top of the page is in skilful classical dactylic hexameters.84 By what we may call metrical progression, the second marginal Latin couplet, on his parents, seems to us to be cast in non-quantitative, very rough rhyming verses − a more homely, perhaps more intimate, metre.85

Roberts goes on to cite a poetic phrase from Aldred’s marginal annota-tions in our manuscript (255r); it is his mention of Bede: ‘ðus beda ðe broema boecere cuæð’86 (‘so said Bede the renowned scholar’).87 The phrase, she contends, could be derived from an Old English poetic source. Certainly the expression is poetic, but to the present writers, the phrase from the marginalia has the same kind of ring as many elements in the colophon, a ring that is due to Aldred’s characteristic style.

83 ‘and they built and constructed at the command of the God of Israel, and at the command of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes kings of the Persians: and they completed this house of God . . .’

84 For this reason we do not agree with Roberts’s emendation in ‘Aldred Signs Off ’ of ‘alme’ to unmetrical ‘alma’ (abl.) in the second hexameter. The metrical fl aw in the line that led to our suppletion ‘ex’ before ‘voce’ is due, in our opinion, to Aldred’s miscopying of his own brouillon of the Latin verses. On the other hand, The Pedigree of This Gospel Book contains (line 9) an erasure: ‘7 [ic] Aldred presbyter indignus 7 misserrimus’. This pentimento (as students of painting would say), in the shift from fi rst person to third person, seems to point to that text’s having been composed on the spot, unlike the Latin hexameters. In the Colophonic Prayer also, Aldred repented him of the opening pronoun. That must have been composed on the spot as well (see Jolly, pp. 54−5).

85 We have observed this type of ‘metrical progression’ from classical quantitative verse to sub-classical / medieval accentual verse in an episode of a miracle of St Wenceslaus’: a crowd invokes the saint fi rst in the more formal metre, and, with growing fervour, in rhythmical verse. See the early eleventh-century hagiographer Lawrence of Amalfi , Passio Sancti Wenzeslai Regis (Laurentius Monachus Casinensis, Archiepiscopus Amalfi tanus, Opera, ed. F. Newton, MGH, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 7 (Weimar, 1973), p. 41.)

86 J. Roberts, ‘Aldred Signs Off ’, p. 40; see Boyd, Aldred’s Marginalia, p. 52. Roberts has good authority for her interpretation: F. C. Robinson, ‘Old English Literature in its Most Immediate Context’, Old English Literature in Context, ed. J. D. Niles, (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 11−29, esp. p. 24, makes this suggestion.

87 Boyd, Aldred’s Marginalia, p. 52.


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the book as building

In summing up, three things may be noted. In the fi rst place, the colophon is an artistic whole, a construct of considerable interest, subtlety, and imagina-tive power. Lawrence Nees has called attention to the numerical patterns in which it is drawn up.88 Our chart (Fig. 10) shows the ways in which Aldred insists upon a fundamental structure in the world, where God One in Three laid down the gospel book before time began. The four gospel writers owed their inspiration to four sources. There were (beginning of the Pedigree of This Book) four fi gures who were involved in the creation of the volume as it stands, and these four (ðas feowero) names were given in the prayer on 89v and repeated at the end of the colophon on 259rb. Each of the four gospels is dedicated to, or homed with, its own one of four entities. And, in the body of this section, Aldred is described as having endowed the book with eight borders of silver (for the fi rst three gospels) and four borders (for St John’s Gospel). This complex and artifi cial construct is, it seems, Aldred’s elaboration upon the simple fact that the text consisted of four gospel accounts. It was no doubt inspired, again, by Jerome’s preface (the ‘Plures fuisse’), the origin of the Western set of symbols for the four gospel writers, and by the Freising text elaborating the same subject. Nees has convincingly shown, without recourse to ‘lost’ works, Aldred’s probable sources for the three historical fi gures who preceded Aldred; the sources are the Durham Liber vitae manuscript (for Billfrith); Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and lives of St. Cuthbert (for Æthelwald); and the dedication and title, and the textual references of Bede’s prose life of Cuthbert (for Eadfrith).89

In the second place, the very layout of the colophon is designed in accord with a clear paradigm. Aldred’s fl awed execution, with its down-slanting lines of writing as one reads down the second column, lacks fi nesse. The entire artistic text, however, essentially imitates the appearance of the two hundred and fi fty-eight leaves that preceded, when Aldred’s work was done: a column of text with interlinear Old English glossing for the Latin lines, and learned marginal notes for fuller, sometimes more personal, explication at irregular intervals. The colophon strives to attain to the auctoritas of the gospel texts that preceded.

And, apart from structure and layout, the colophon is poetic. A number of the terms in the colophon, as we have wished to show, are metaphorical and serve the artistic whole. The gospel book in its magnifi cence is a Cassiodorian

88 Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon’, pp. 345−8 and 367−9.89 Ibid. pp. 352−7. Nees’s approach to the question of Aldred’s sources is fundamentally new

and, to the present writers, altogether convincing.

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imperial palatium or an Anglo-Saxon king’s brightly-lighted hall (we may compare Bede’s famous simile),90 which Eadfrith, Æthelwald, Billfrith, and Aldred have ‘constructed’ or adorned (last line); the gloss is to throw open its doors; and the nourishing St John is to greet (salutare) all the brothers (the Hexameters); his words provide the nourishing feast (he is addressed as “alme,” from the verb alere). The palatium has at least four parts or chambers edged or bordered in silver at the entrance (inlad), and in each one of these parts or chambers, an Evangelist has been ‘homed’ or ‘domiciled’ (gihamadi) as a native speaker.

Throughout its various parts, Aldred’s end-piece had insisted upon order (the Gospels − Godspell − that God the Three and One had established or constituted91 before all ages), upon context (the transmission of the Word that came from Heaven to the Evangelists through the lips of Christ, of Peter, of Paul, and of God and the Holy Ghost), even upon kinship (Aldred’s parents, who guaranteed his place in this ordered world) and upon home (the hall to which the servant-gloss throws open the doors). So it is fi tting that Aldred’s metaphorical ‘homing’ of St John, with the other three parts or gospels, by dedicating each of them to a sacred entity, in his mind parallels the process laid down by the secular prince for fi nding a home for those who had no place in English society. The four Evangelists now speak English, and now they have a home in the structure of Anglo-Saxon England.

weighing aldred’s evidence for the pedigree of this gospel book

More important about the colophon than what it tells us regarding the origins of the manuscript in the late seventh or fi rst half of the eighth century, is what it tells us about Aldred’s piety and purpose in his own day, in the mid-tenth century. The ‘homing’ of St John and the other Evangelists seems to link Aldred’s translation work to the spirit ordering English society in King Athelstan’s day, and the educational tradition begun by King Alfred. That tra-dition of late Anglo-Saxon education and culture was eloquently described by the late Donald Bullough in 1971: ‘In its stress on the vernacular, on fi nding ways of communicating Christian truths to the laity, it was profoundly original and indeed, when we think of it in terms of the aggiornamento of the Church in

90 Historia ecclesiastica II.13. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), pp. 182−4. Bede’s account of the priest Coifi ’s famous simile depicts the image of a warm and brightly lit mead-hall, where secure from winter’s chill the king feasts among his thegns. It is this same welcoming and nourishing edifi ce, evoked by the Cassiodorian palatium, that Aldred in turn evokes in his hexameters.

91 The fi rst translation given by Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003) p. 103 (from the 1960 com-mentary volume bk II, p. 10), is erroneous; the one on p. 146 n. 59 is accurate.


132

the past two decades, “modern”.’92 The motive for Aldred’s immense labour93 (and the immense labour of Farmon and Owun in glossing the MacRegol Gospels − but that is the theme of another paper) is heard in the missionary zeal and urgency of the verse that Aldred’s gloss addresses to St John: ‘To all my brothers, O nourishing one, grant a greeting [from your] voice.’94

To return to what may be the most surprising discovery in this fresh reading of the colophon. There are many poets in the long tradition of the envoi. Why did Aldred choose to open his colophon with an unmistakable borrowing from this particular envoi in Ovid’s Tristia? Once this question has been posed, there are two themes in the Tristia that immediately come to mind. The Tristia, with the epistles Ex Ponto are poems of exile: Ovid, forced by the decree of Augustus to live in Tomi on the Black Sea, on the very outermost edge of Roman civilization, writes poetic messages to friends and supporters back in Rome. The mourning for what he has lost is painfully summed up in a line of the same elegy from which Aldred took a verse (Tristia 3.7); at line 45 Ovid says poignantly: ‘ego, cum caream patria vobisque domoque’ (‘Look at me: deprived of my country, and all of you, and my home’).

In exile he is homeless. And in this strange land, where no one speaks or understands Latin, he has − stunningly − learned to speak the native languages (Tristia 5.12.57−8): ‘ipse mihi videor iam dedidicisse Latine;/ nam didici Getice

92 D. A. Bullough, ‘The Educational Tradition in England from Alfred to Aelfric: Teaching utriusque linguae’, SettSpol 19 (1971), 453−94, esp. 493. See also D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar: Six Essays on Political, Cultural and Ecclesiastical Revival, Stud. in AS Hist. 3 (Woodbridge, 1992), esp. the chapter (pp. 141−71) on Athelstan. Bullough’s words raise the question: just how was Aldred’s gloss to be used? The fullest and most sensitive dis-cussion of this issue is that of Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 48−54. Stanton emphasizes the paradox that Aldred’s vernacular glosses were entered into such a ‘high-status’ book. (Perhaps the paradox is not so sharp as one might imagine it to be; our present work, while not focused on the gloss per se, has emphasized the high-culture nature of the colophon, also of Aldred’s composition. Though we moderns might not expect a quotation from Ovid in the margins of a splendid gospel-book, this, and Aldred’s other learned borrowings from and allusions to patristic and medi-eval literature, clearly do honour to the original text and, in our view, are in keeping with it.) One might on the face of it suppose that a manuscript of this quality would have been shown only to the élite in Anglo-Saxon society, to abbots and bishops, or among the laity, to princely persons. Yet we remind our readers, once again, of Aldred’s goal to address ‘all my brothers’; this points to an audience, somehow, of the entire Chester-le-Street community from highest to lowest. When Stanton sums up (p. 53) the role of the gloss, he says, ‘by performing the gospels in English, the gloss becomes like a domestic servant imitating his master in his own language’; the simile, perhaps unconsciously, echoes Aldred’s own graceful marginal verses.

93 For the care Aldred expended upon the gloss, see S. M. Pons Sanz, ‘Aldredian Glosses to Proper Names in the Lindisfarne Gospels’, Anglia 119 (2001) 173−92.

94 The verse perhaps echoes Matt. XI.28, ‘uenite ad me omnes’; see the context of hearing an invitation in the passage of Cassiodorus cited in the appendix.

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Sarmaticeque loqui’ (‘I really think that by now I have unlearned Latin; for I have learned to speak Getic and Sarmatian.’) Ovid, with his brilliant command of verse, has made music of these barbarous names, but, with its gutturals and labiovelars, it is a deliberately rough and un-classical music. Ovid liked this theme and this verse so much that he repeated it at Ep. ex Ponto 3.2.40, and he varied it in another brilliantly guttural verse (Tristia 5.8.56): ‘Sarmatico cogor plurima more loqui’ (‘I am compelled to say much of what I say in Sarmatian fashion’).

It will be obvious to the discerning reader that we consider that it was the exiled Ovid, fi nding himself homeless (‘cum caream . . . domo’) at the very out-ermost edges of the Roman world and driven to learn a new tongue, that led Aldred to think of the allusion. St John fi nds himself alone at the outermost fringes of Christendom − he is therefore hamleas in Aldred’s tongue − and deprived of speech. Aldred, in glossing the text (his term is ‘ofer gloesade on englisc’), has enabled John to speak, like Ovid, in a Germanic language and has homed (‘hine gihamadi’) the Evangelist. John could now have said, in guttural Latin, ‘didici Anglice loqui’. It is some such chain of thought that led Aldred to Ovid, and, endowed as he is with a high version of Anglo-Saxon culture, Aldred, with the stunning clue of the Ovidian line transported from Tomi on the Black Sea to Northumbria on the North Sea, expects us − his readers − to follow him.

By way of conclusion, we suggest that Aldred’s paradigm may bear a further implication. For that purpose, we ask the reader to step back and look at the larger picture. From this point of view, Aldred’s colophon may have given us, albeit unwittingly, an account of what he has done.

As far as we know, when this masterpiece of the art of ‘scribere’ came into Aldred’s hands, it bore no indication whatsoever of a connection with Lindisfarne or St Cuthbert, or even with Northumbria. Nor would there have been, as far as we know, any pointer to Eadfrith, Æthelwald or Billfrith. The manuscript would have given, as it gives today when shorn of Aldred’s tenth-century additions, no evidence of its original eighth-century home. It was homeless (Old English ‘hamleas’). While not an outlaw, in the legal terminol-ogy of the time it was lordless (‘hlafordleas’). It was this condition that Aldred set himself to remedy. He constructed (‘construxit’, the verb he used of his glosses) a narrative, the colophon, whose purpose was to fi x the book’s home at Lindisfarne. Like the other members of the community at Chester-le-Street, wandering in exile since 875,95 he looks back in nostalgia to Lindisfarne and creates a haunting account of how the beautiful manuscript was made there

95 For the ‘wanderings of St. Cuthbert’, see W. M. Aird, St. Cuthbert and the Normans: the Church of Durham 1071−1153 (Woodbridge, 1998), ch. 1, esp. pp. 32−7.


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‘for God and St Cuthbert and for all the holy ones jointly who [that is, whose relics] are in [the] island’ (‘gode & sancte cuðberhte & allum ðaem halgum gimaenelice ða ðe in eolonde sint’). Through this quasi-legal construct Aldred ‘homes’ (‘gehamian’) the manuscript as King Athelstan’s laws provided should be done for the lordless. And this act of devotion to St Cuthbert and to Lindisfarne, like the glossing, was a facet of Aldred’s piety.

And the Athelstanian model would not have been only the king’s laws.96 A well-known miniature preserved in a Cambridge manuscript (Corpus Christi College 183, 1v) depicts Athelstan himself presenting the book in which it stands to God and St. Cuthbert. The fi rst text in the book, beginning on the facing page (2r), is none other than Bede’s prose life of St Cuthbert, dedicated to Bishop Eadfrith. Athelstan is shown in the act of ‘homing’ (‘gehamian’) the volume, and, as we read the miniature, the architectural details framing king and saint lend weight to this act of domiciling this most Lindisfarnian text in the physical structure of the successor community at Chester-le-Street.

In this broadest picture, therefore, as we see it, Aldred in the fashion of King Athelstan provided a quasi-legal and metaphorical paradigm, fi rst for the gloss he constructed, to ‘home’ the four gospel-writers in the Anglo-Saxon speech-world; and second for the colophon he constructed, to ‘home’ the entire manu-script at Holy Isle − Lindisfarne − and the powerful Cuthbertian tradition going back to the Venerable Bede. Is it any wonder that the words, legendary though they seem to us to be,97 that Aldred used to lodge or domicile the book within that glorious tradition have persuaded so many generations of readers?

the gospel book through aldred’s eyes

In the light of this fresh reading, let us consider how Aldred may have looked at the volume as a whole. He poetically saw the book as a kind of sacred building; the building metaphor runs from the little verses at the top of 259rb beside the explicit down to the last word in the last full line of the colophon. Recently M. Brown has observed that the famous and exquisite painted ‘cross-carpet pages’ that precede each of the incipit pages are like the woven mats that lay before the altars of churches known to the eighth-century creators of

96 For Athelstan, see now S. Foot, Æthelstan: the First King of England (New Haven, 2011). On his manuscripts, see S. Keynes, ‘King Athelstan’s Books’, Learning and Literature in Anglo−Saxon England. Studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-fi fth Birthday, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 143−201.

97 We use the term ‘legendary’ in contradistinction to ‘factual’. But we do not use it disparag-ingly. Aldred’s ‘legend’ is true in that the codex was the creation of a religious community motivated by profound devotion and carried out by fi gures heroic in their skill and discipline. A reminder, once more: aside from Aldred’s colophon (259rb) and prayer (89v), there is nothing whatsoever in the manuscript to connect it to Northumbria, or to Lindisfarne, or to St Cuthbert, or to Eadfrith, Æthelwald, or Billfrith.


135

this book.98 This fi ts with Aldred’s poetic concept of four altars, each dedi-cated to a saint or saints, as the whole building is dedicated to God and St Cuthbert.99

There are, besides, two other ways in which Aldred may have seen his meta-phor brought to life. The volume opens with the traditional canon tables under their handsome arcades. In Aldred’s eyes, these sixteen pages may have evoked (as M. Brown has observed) the colonnaded atrium that served as anteroom to the great palaces or churches of late antiquity.100

Probably more to the point, we would suggest that looking at the book through Aldred’s eyes might solve a problem that has vexed scholars. After the classical beauty of the ‘atrium’, and after the prefaces of St Jerome and other introductory material, the reader comes to the entrance proper with the miniature of St Matthew (25v; see Fig. 9). The seated Evangelist with his pen and open book is labelled in Greek Ō AGIOS MATTHEUS. Nor is there any doubt about his traditional symbol, the winged man above his head. What is mysterious is what Michelle Brown calls ‘the enigmatic “Polonius” fi gure peeping from behind the curtain’.101 He has been compared to the Muses of late-antique manuscripts of the classics. Brown herself has put forward a variety of other interpretations.102

In keeping with the aim of this paper, we have been trying to travel back a thousand years and look at the manuscript through Aldred’s eyes. No one has attempted that before, and certainly not in interpreting this miniature. But it deserves consideration. At this point, on the threshold of the gospels proper a man stands beside a curtain which has been pulled back. Who can he have been, in Aldred’s eyes, but the doorkeeper, the servant (minister) who throws open the entrance-way to the reader? It was this enigmatic fi gure, understood as doorkeeper, who inspired Aldred to his opening verse, ‘Let the letter [=Aldred’s gloss], faithful servant of the Word, throw me open’. (The verb, pando, pandere, could as easily refer to a curtain as to a solid door.)

In Brown’s interpretation of the ‘multivalent’ image behind the curtain, she

98 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), pp. 319−21. 99 Note that the fourth gospel is dedicated, like Matthew’s, again to God and St Cuthbert (in

the dative, like the other three dedicatees). This grammatical detail has been overlooked by earlier commentators, who took the fourth dedicatee to be ‘for himself’ (for hine seolfne – id est fore his savle). The grammatical parallelism rules this interpretation out. Aldred’s self-regard is obvious in the colophon, but not quite so blatant as this interpretation has had it.

100 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 304. The association is that of the great authority on the subject: C. Nordenfalk, Les grands siècles de la peinture: le haut moyen âge, du quatrième au onzième siècle, ed. A. Grabar and C. Nordenfalk (Geneva, 1975), p. 98, says, ‘ “arcs de canons”, qui s’ouvrent au commencement des Évangiles comme la colonnade d’un atrium conduisant au Verbe divin.’ His classic work on the subject is Die spätantiken Kanonentafeln (Göteborg, 1938).

101 Brown, Lindisfarne Gospels (2003), p. 356.102 Ibid. pp. 359−66, with original suggestions of her own.


136

Figure 9: British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv (Lindisfarne Gospels), 25v (detail). The Evangelist Matthew, with the mysterious personage behind the curtain; we suggest how Aldred might

have understood this latter fi gure.

137


has, among other interpretations, followed Bruce-Mitford in identifying the fi gure as Christ.103 This identifi cation would be highly appropriate in this book, since Aldred asserts in the Pedigree of the Gospels that Matthew wrote with inspira-tion from the lips of Christ (ex ore Christi).

Furthermore, there is strong evidence that the original painter of the Matthew miniature – whoever he was or wherever he worked – understood the mysterious fi gure (26v) to represent Christ. At the top of the facing incipit page (27r) for the gospel itself, the three fi gures of the miniature are named in gold:

+ ih ̅s xp ̅s. Matheus homo.104

The other three incipit pages also bear gold inscriptions at the top, but each with only two names: the name of the Evangelist and that of the animal that is his symbol. Only the Matthew incipit page has three names, and that is because only the Matthew miniature has three fi gures to be identifi ed. Aldred will have observed this identifi cation on that incipit page, and it will have corresponded with his own conception embodied in the colophon.

Now there is a point at which this interpretation of Bruce-Mitford’s and Brown’s, on the one hand, and our interpretation (Aldred’s implied reading of the miniature), on the other, converge. In the sister book, the MacRegol Gospels, at John X.9 (149r), Christ’s words, ‘ego sum ostium; per me si quis introierit salvabitur’105 are glossed: ‘ic am duraword ðerh mec gif hwelc ingæð gihæled bið’. It appears that Owun − it is he who glosses this part − is inter-preting rather than strictly translating. But in taking the fi gure of Christ as doorkeeper (duraword) he precisely parallels the Bruce-Mitford/Brown inter-pretation and the present authors’ suggestion of Aldred’s understanding of the ‘enigmatic Polonius fi gure’ who draws back the curtain for the brother, or sister, who opens this book.

As this paper has argued, the colophon contains a delicately wrought mosaic of allusions drawn from the gospel texts themselves, from Jerome’s prefatory texts found beside the gospels in this very book, from the catechetical text on the gospels, perhaps of Irish (?) origin, in the Freising codex, from the envoi in

103 Ibid. pp. 356−63.104 This connection was fi rst observed by R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford in pt IV, ‘Decoration and

Miniatures’, of the 1960 commentary; see his brilliant and detailed argument on pp. 162−8, ‘Excursus on the “Third Figure” in the Matthew Portrait’. We consider the presence of the gold title naming Christ as a conclusive argument for the intentions of the painter; as Bruce-Mitford says trenchantly, ‘The head represents Christ.’ At the same time, it should be remem-bered that the iconography goes back to a tradition preserved not only in the ‘Lindisfarne’ miniature of Matthew, but also in the text found in the Freising and Paris MSS, both of the ninth century; Aldred’s colophon depends upon that textual tradition.

105 ‘I am the door. Whosoever enters through me shall be saved.’


138

Ovid’s Tristia and from the medieval verse epistle tradition derived from Ovid that is found in Alcuin and Theodulf. Throughout runs the conception of this magnifi cent volume as a palace or hall with doors opened to the faithful. But perhaps this theme, and especially the doorkeeper represented here, may evoke one further text; we suggest that Aldred would have identifi ed himself with St Paul’s words in a passage from the Epistle to the Colossians. The Apostle, writing from his prison in Rome, concludes (Col. IV. 2) with greetings to the brothers (‘Salutate fratres’), reminiscent of Aldred’s verses. But, more importantly, in this envoi Paul beseeches those who receive his letter to pray; he

Figure 10: Pattern of tetrads in Aldred’s colophon and prayer.

Fol. 259rb Colophon

The Threefold and One God

The Father The Son The Holy Ghost One God

FourEvangelists Matthew Mark Luke John

FromFour Sources

from the lips of Christ

from the lips of Peter

from the lips of Paul

with aid of God & Holy Ghost

Four Makers of this Gospel

Book

Eadfrithwrote/deco-

rated it

Æthelwaldbound it

Billfrithadorned it

outside

Aldredglossed it

‘Homing’ the Four

Gospels

Matthew’s part Mark’s part Luke’s part John’s part

Dedicated tofor God & St Cuthbert for the bishop for the

communityfor God & St Cuthbert

Borders of Silver

eight borders for fi rst three Gospels four borders for John

At the End:Summary of those who

constructed/ adorned this Gospel Book

Eadfrith Æthelwald Billfrith Aldred

Fol. 89v Colophonic Prayer

ðas feowero:The Four who lived with this

Book

Eadfrith Æthelwald Billfrith Aldred

139


says (Col. IV.3) ‘orantes simul et pro nobis, ut Deus aperiat nobis ostium sermonis

ad loquendum mysterium Christi’.106 The eighth-century creator of the book had left at the opening of the gospels, the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel, a powerful visual expression of Godhead (ih ̅s xp ̅s) opening the door of utterance to the faithful, though − sadly − , only to those who could read or understand its Latin. But the tenth-century priest Aldred inhabited a new world, the world of Athelstan, ‘fi rst King of England’.107 He glossed virtually every page of this book in the vernacular and, on the last written page, at the end of St. John’s Gospel, wrote his envoi; his colophon dedicates this text, previously closed to most of the faithful, to the Cuthbertian (and Pauline) goal of opening the door to the mystery of Christ to all the brothers.108

addendum

In connection with our argument above (pp. 121–6) that Aldred tells the reader that he has added borders of silver to pages in the ‘Lindisfarne Gospels’, it is relevant to note that in the Durham Ritual (Durham Cathedral Library, A. IV. 19) Aldred added initials where they were missing in the original Collectar. See The Durham Ritual, ed. T. J. Brown, EEMF 16 (Copenhagen, 1969), 29, citing as examples, 3r, 23v, and 50v. Aldred’s work went beyond interlinear glossing and writing brief marginal comments.

106 ‘withal praying also for us, that God would open to us a door of utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ’.107 We take the description from D. Dumville’s chapter title, “Between Alfred the Great and

Edgar the Peacemaker: Aethelstan, First King of England’, in his Wessex and England (above, n. 92).

108 Colossians III.18−25, just before Paul’s envoi, contains a famous set of commands (as it were, a fountain of divine iussiones) for those in every rank and station in the Roman world.

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appendix 1the colophon of the ‘lindisfarne’ gospels : diplomatic

transcription (old english and latin)

Transcription Conventions

Written in this transcription Stands for the following in the original

ú v with acute accent abovew wynn (rune) asægd is . ł . � bóc

EXPLICIT LIBER _

aeft’ † Lita me pandatSECUNDUM sermonis fida io han nem ministra.IOHANEN Omnes alme meos fratres [ex] [<==Addition of ex proposed by voce salvta :, [ Babcock]

gisette

stitvit pell | vorulda

ðeðrifalde 7 ðeanfalde god ðis gods | sæcvla con _ ær

† Trinus & unvs ds evangelivm hoc ante _ ærist avrat ofmvðe crist

_† Mathevs ex ore xpi scripsit ofmvðe petres avrat

_† Marcus ex ore petri scrips ofmvðe pavles avrat

_ _† Lvcas deore pavli ap scrips

_ indeigil nisi ł ifesagu siðða rocgetede ł gisprant

_† IOh inprochemio deinde ervctvavit word miðgode gisulde 7 halges gastes ł mið godes geafa

dy _ __ _ __ 7 halges gastes _

verbvm do donante &spv sco scrip mæht avrát ioh

141


__ b

† EADFRIð biscop Lindisfearnensis æcclesiæ _ he ðis boc avrát æt frvma gode 7 sce gim ænelice

cvðberhte 7allvm ðæm halgvm . ða . ðe ---

bisc

in eolonde sint. 7 Eðilvald lindisfearneolondinga

hit vta giðryde 7gibélde sva he vel cuðæ .

7 billfrið se oncræ he gismioðade ða

gihríno ðaðe útan ón sint 7 hit gi

hrínade miðgolde 7miðgimmvm æc _ mið súlfre of gylded faconleas feh :, s__

7 [ic] Aldred pbr indignus 7misserrim’. [<= ic written in the MS, and then erased]

_ _ :. ælfredi

mið godes fvltvmæ 7sci cvð berhtes natvs

_ aldredvs _ hit of glóesade ón englisc . 7hine gihamadi:. uocor .i. tilw

.. bonæ mvlieris

mið ðæm ðríim dælv . Mathevs dæl fi livs eximivs

_ __ loquor :,

gode 7sce cvðberhti . MARC dæl _ ðæmbisc . 7 lvcas dæl ðæm hiorode v v

7 æhtora seolfres mið tó inláde . :_ - _ .i. fe his savle

7 sci ioh dæl fhine seolfne 7feover óra v _ _

seolfres mið gode 7 sci cvðberti . �te he ..

hæbbe ondfong ðerh godes milsæ onheofnv .

142

séel 7 sibb oneorðo forðgeong 7giðyngó _ visdóm 7snyttro ðerh sci cvð berhtes earnvnga :,

† EADFRIð . OEðILVALD . BILLFRIð . ALDRED . __ _ _ hoc evange do 7cvðberhto constrvxert :, ł ornavervnt.

appendix 2the prologue preserved in the codex amiatinus

A bible prologue composed, as it seems to us, by Cassiodorus is preserved in the Codex Amiatinus (fol. 4r). The whole is given here, with emended text and our transla-tion, to illustrate the author’s metaphorical understanding of the bible as a ‘palatium’ or ‘palatia’ and the implications of the metaphor as it runs throughout the prologue. The architectural frame befi ts that metaphor.

Si diuino, ut dignum est, amore fl ammati ad ueram cupimus sapientiam peruenire et in hac uita fragili aeterni saeculi desideramus imaginem contueri, Patrem luminum deprecemur ut nobis cor mundum tribuat, actionem bonae uoluntatis inpertiat, perseuerantiam sua uirtute concedat, ut Scripturarum diuinarum palatia, ipsius misericordia largiente, possimus fi ducialiter introire, ne nobis dicatur: ‘quare tu enarras iustitias meas et adsumis testamentum meum per os tuum’ [Ps. XLIX.16]. Sed inuitati illud potius audiamus, ‘uenite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis, et ego uos refi ciam’ [Matt. XI.28]. Magnum munus, inaestimabile benefi cium, audire hominem secreta Dei, et quemadmodum ad ipsum ueniatur institui. Festinemus itaque fratres ad animarum fontem uiuum, salutaria remedia iussionum. Quisquis enim in terris scripturis talibus occupatur, paene caelestis iam regni suauitate perfruitur. Nec uos moveat quod pater Augustinus in septuaginta unum libros testamentum uetus nou-umque diuisit, doctissimus autem Hieronymus idem uetus nouumque testamentum XLVIIII sectionibus comprehendit; in hoc autem corpore utrumque testamentum septuagenario numero probatur impletum, in illa palmarum quantitate forsitan praesagatum [praesagatum: our emen-dation, to modify ‘utrumque testamentum’; praesagatus: reading of Amiatinus, printed by Gorman; praesagato, to modify ‘numero’: Courcelle’s emendation], quas in mansione helim inuenit populus hebraeorum; nam licet haec calculo disparia uideantur, doctrina tamen patrum ad instructionem caelestis ecclesiae concorditer uniuersa perducunt [sic Amiatinus]. Amen. If, kindled with divine love, we desire, as is meet, to attain to true wisdom and long in this frail life to gaze upon the image of eternity, let us entreat the Father of Lights to grant us a pure heart, to bestow upon us the action of a good will, and by his own strength to grant us perseverance, so that by his lavish gift of mercy we may be enabled to enter by faith into the palaces of the divine scriptures, lest it should be said to us: ‘Wherefore do you [but] talk of my acts of justice and take up my witness [only] in your mouth?’ [Ps. XLIX.16] But rather, being invited, let us instead hear those words, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.’ [Matt. XI.28] It is a great gift, an inestimable benefi t, for a man to hear the hidden things of God, and to


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be taught how one may come to him. Let us therefore hasten, brothers, to the living fountain of souls, the healing remedy of his commands. For whosoever busies himself with such scriptures on earth, well nigh does he enjoy already the sweetness of the heavenly kingdom. Nor let it trouble you that Father Augustine divided the Old and New Testaments into seventy-one books, while the very great scholar Jerome embraces the same Old and New Testaments in forty-nine sections; but in this present corpus [=the text presented in the Amiatinus] both Testaments demonstrably make up the number seventy, perhaps having been foretold in that famous number of palm trees that the Hebrew people found in the oasis of Helim; for, though these versions may seem unequal in reckoning, nevertheless, through the teaching of the Fathers they all together lead us harmoniously to the building-up [edifi cation, from ‘aedifi care’] of the heavenly church. Amen’ The full form and ending of the verse from Exodus (XV.27) reveals the underlying thought: ‘Venerunt autem in Elim fi lii Israel, ubi erant duodecim fontes aquarum, et septuaginta palmae: et castrametati sunt iuxta aquas’ (KJV: ‘And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters’). The prologue in Amiatinus evokes from the reality of Cassiodorus’ day the entrance to a house or palatium, whose courtyard off ers water from a well, or from a fountain, or in a great ewer, for those invited in. Paul Meyvaert, whom we consulted, agrees with this and suggests its source; he says (personal com-munication, April, 2010): ‘my impression . . . is that Cassiodorus very much has the benefi ts and refreshing sense of water in mind while he writes. But I think that it may have been reinforced by Ambrose. Note that in the Institutions (I.4) on the Psalms he shows he knows Ambrose’s comments. Here is the passage that caught my attention. In commenting on the Hebrews’ arrival at the mansio called Mara, Ambrose says (CSEL 62, pp. 84-85), ‘Sequitur mansio in Mara [CSEL: Myrrha], hoc est in amari-tudine. Non omnes mansiones aequales sunt. Inde ventum est in Helim, ubi fontes duodecim erant, et septuaginta arbores palmarum. Post amaritudinem, ne populus defi ceret, debuerunt amoena et fecunda succedere’ (‘Then follows the lodging-place at Mara, that is, at bitterness [amaritudo]. For all lodging-places are not equal. From there they came to Helim, where were twelve springs and seventy palm trees. After bitterness, that the people might not grow faint, loveliness and fruitful-ness had to follow’ [authors’ translation].) This would certainly have reinforced Cassiodorus’ own feelings as shown in his Preface.’109

109 On the Codex Amiatinus, see M. Gorman, ‘The Codex Amiatinus: a Guide to the Legends and Bibliography’, SM 44 (2003), 860−910. His text and translation of the Prologue are on pp. 908−9. Gorman sees the prologue as composed by a writer at Wearmouth−Jarrow who was familiar with Cassiodorus. For a reproduction of the manuscript, see La Bibbia Amiatina: riproduzione integrale su CD-Rom del manoscritto, ed. Luigi Giovanni Giuseppe Ricci, Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (Florence, 2000).

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appendix 3organization of the 1956−60 olten facsimile volumes

Given the bibliographic intractability of the Olten facsimile’s commentary volume (due to its two Latin title pages, the fi rst being for the two-volume work and the second just for Tomus Secundus; its lengthy roster of authors; the fi rst title page’s long-windedness, with snippets translated into English on the title page verso; its complex subdivision into parts individually credited to various overlapping subgroups within the author roster; and its dual pagination), it will perhaps not be amiss to put this information into outline form, and spell out the fact that Book II is only the second half of Tomus Secundus, thus:

> Evangeliorum Quattuor Codex Lindisfarnensis: Musei Britannici Codex CottonianusNero D.IV etc., etc.

>> Tomus Secundus: Commentariorum Libri Duo, quorum unus de textuEvangeliorum Latino et codicis ornatione, alter de glossa anglo-saxonica [1960].

>>> Book II: The Anglo-Saxon Gloss. >>>> Part I: Some Observations on the Gloss and the Glossator, by Ross, >>>> Stanley and Brown, including chapter I ‘The Colophon Group’ (pp.

5−11), ch. II ‘The Palaeography’ (12−21), ch. III ‘Variation’ (22−4), and ch. IV ‘Other Writings by Aldred’ (25−33).

The pagination starts over again at Book II


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Francis L. Newton, Francis L. Newton, Jr., and Christopher R. J. Scheirer, “Domiciling the...

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