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April 23, 2012

The best of books, 1,300 years old

Sacred Mysteries: Christopher Howse asks why a book sold for £9 million was made in the first place.


A section of the St Cuthbert Gospel, the 7th-century manuscript acquired by the British Library

The price of £9 million that the British Library paid for the Cuthbert Gospel is surely not too much, if Cezanne’s Card Players went for £156 million. Both are irreplaceable. I hope the British Library succeeds in looking after the Gospel book. It is to be taken backwards and forwards between London and Durham, and accidents do happen.

For the first 400 years of its life, from 698 to 1104, it lay in St Cuthbert’s coffin, a fine and private place, but not at all secure, for, although the coffin was not buried in the ground, it was carried from place to place by the monks of his monastery, seeking refuge from the Vikings, from the Derwent to the Tweed, from Crayke in Yorkshire to Whithorn in Galloway.

Why was the book placed in the coffin in the first place? An anecdote told by St Bede throws light on this. In 661 at Melrose, where Cuthbert, then aged about 25, was a monk, the prior, Boisil, was dying. He recommended that the young monk learn from him while there was time left; he expected to die in a week. Cuthbert asked what book they should study together. “John the Evangelist,” said Boisil. “I have a copy containing seven quarto sheets: we can, with God’s help, read one every day, and meditate thereon as far as we are able.” And so they did.

The story comes in the life of Cuthbert by Bede, who was a teenager when the saint died. Bede too was engaged in a translation of the Gospel of St John when he himself died. St John’s Gospel was regarded as a sort of emblem and epitome of the Christian faith. Laying it beside the revered body of St Cuthbert identified him with what it stood for.

More than that, the making of the physical book was an act of piety. Everyone is struck by how small and neat the book is. Boisil’s must have been bigger if the Gospel fitted on its seven sheets (making 56 sides when folded). Cuthbert’s totals 88 usable sides. On each vellum page the area that is covered in writing measures 3.6 by 2.5 inches. There is only space for three, four or five words on each line. The Gospel book is distinguished not by the intricate display of “carpet pages”, as in the Lindisfarne Gospels, but by simplicity, accuracy and poise.


It is written in a very legible, small, expert uncial hand. Every scribe makes mistakes, but there are hardly any here, though there are some careful corrections. Manuscripts habitually made use of conventional abbreviations. This scribe does not. The name of Jesus is rendered ihs, but that is as much an icon as an abbreviation.

The whole thing is now to be seen online at the British Library site, but even these images do not do justice to the original, which looks less yellowed, and less marked by show-through from the other side of the leaf. The sentence pictured here reads: Erat autem et Iohannes baptizans in Aenon iuxta Salim – “And John also was baptising in Aenon near to Salim” (John 3:23). The proper names are not capitalised, there is no punctuation and of course no verse numbers, which hadn’t yet been introduced.

Since the book was intended to possess dignity, it was beautifully, if again reticently, bound. The Lindisfarne Gospels, meant for liturgical use, had a cover with jewels set into it. The Cuthbert Gospel is covered in deep red dyed goatskin, with a raised pattern of vines (referring to the Eucharistic content of this Gospel) on the front, made by tooling the leather over cords on the board (of thin birch wood). The gatherings of pages are sewn into holes in the wooden boards with flax thread. There are no separate cords across the spine. The technique is known in early Egyptian codices from the first centuries of Christianity.

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