Chapter One: The Gospels of Saint Augustine
Late sixth century
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, ms 286
At the end of this chapter I will recount how Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury both bowed down before me, on live television, in front of the high altar of Westminster Abbey. Before reaching that very unlikely moment, however, we must follow the footsteps of a manuscript as it weaves through a millennium and a half of English history, encountering several popes and other archbishops of Canterbury on its journey. One of these archbishops was Matthew Parker (1504-75), who owned the book itself. Parker had attended Cambridge University, and he had been ordained a priest shortly before the Reformation in England. By lucky chance, perhaps through a family connection in Norfolk, he became domestic chaplain to Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII and queen of England from 1533 until her execution for treason in 1536. It was in Anne's circle that the first intimations of Lutheran reform had infiltrated the English court, and Parker was evidently caught up in that heady intellectual excitement of the religious renaissance of the time. In 1544, on the recommendation of Henry VIII, he was appointed Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. Parker got married (a radical step then for the clergy), was deprived of his position under the reactionary Queen Mary, 1553-8, and in 1559 was summoned to London by the new queen, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, who made him the first archbishop of Canterbury of her reign, with instructions to make the English Reformation absolute and irrevocable.
The reformed Church of England, as confirmed by Parker in what is known as the Elizabethan Settlement, was at least initially very different from the Protestantism of continental Europe. Martin Luther had looked back to the apostolic times of early Christianity, rejecting the papacy and undermining the Roman Church from behind by fielding a translation of the Bible derived from texts which were older and apparently more authentic than the standard fourth-century Latin Vulgate edition of Saint Jerome. Matthew Parker, by contrast, embraced the very early popes and the traditional line of apostolic succession from Saint Peter. Gregory the Great, pope 590-604, was one of Parker's heroes, not least because he had sent the first organized Christian mission to England in 596, dispatching a party of Italian monks under the command of one Augustine, prior of the monastery of Sant'Andrea in Rome. Saint Augustine of Canterbury, as he is now called, had then landed in Kent in south-east England in 597 and had convinced Ethelbert, king of Kent c. 560-616, to adopt Christianity. The missionaries from Italy had established a cathedral in Canterbury nearby and they founded a monastery outside the town walls, initially as a burial church, originally dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, patron saints of Rome. Augustine himself became the first archbishop of Canterbury. The monastery he had set up was later renamed St Augustine's Abbey in his honour. It survived on the outskirts of Canterbury for almost a thousand years until its suppression under Henry VIII in 1538, in Parker's lifetime.
Matthew Parker was the seventieth archbishop in what he saw as a line of unbroken continuity back to Augustine. He persuaded himself that those early missionaries had intended to establish an entirely independent English Church, unfettered by Rome. As far as Parker was concerned, the development of religion in Europe was irrelevant after 597. Only England, in his interpretation, had managed to preserve the Christian Church in its primeval purity, as Saints Gregory and Augustine had intended. This, as he saw it, had been corrupted and subverted with the Norman Conquest (1066) and the centralization of the Catholic Church under the initiatives of Gregory VII, pope 1073-85. The Elizabethan antiquaries all looked back with nostalgia to the Anglo-Saxon era as a golden age of English national identity and independence. Parker decided that the supposedly radical practices of sixteenth-century reform, including the use of vernacular language in the liturgy and the central role of the monarchy in the Church, had actually all been established traditions in Anglo-Saxon England. In 1568 he obtained licence from the Privy Council to take into his own custody any original manuscripts in England which would justify the Anglican Reformation in these terms and would provide tangible precedents for the Elizabethan agenda. Parker eventually commandeered about 600 early manuscripts, mostly from the libraries of recently restructured medieval cathedrals or from former monasteries, including many of the oldest books then in England. He was the first truly great collector of the Elizabethan period, well ahead of Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), whose manuscripts are now at the core of the British Lib-
rary in London, and earlier too than Sir Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), whose acquisitions furnished the new Bodleian Library in Oxford, which we will visit in Chapter Six. About thirty early manuscripts were requisitioned by Parker from the abandoned monastery of St Augustine in Canterbury. The oldest of these was the so-called Gospel Book of Saint Augustine himself, the earliest surviving book known to have been in medieval England. It is the subject of this chapter.
In 1574, towards the end of his life, Archbishop Parker made arrangements to send his collection from Lambeth Palace, his official residence in London, up to his old college of Corpus Christi in Cambridge. The indenture of the bequest outlined two principal conditions. One was an assumption of public access, which the college has largely ignored, and the other was that there should be an annual audit of the library every August, and that if even a few volumes were unaccounted for or lost through carelessness or neglect, the entire bequest would be forfeit and would revert instead to Gonville and Caius College, further up the street in Cambridge, together with wonderful pieces of Tudor table silver given also by Parker, which are very desirable. It was largely from fear of this awful penalty clause that relatively few outsiders were ever allowed in to see the books. For more than 400 years the Parker Library was notoriously (even scandalously) inaccessible to scholars, or at best it was quixotically and inconsistently available. It is with a certain inverted pride that I report that when I myself first asked to see a manuscript there in the mid-1970s, I was refused permission, and this is still the only library in the world to which I have ever been declined admittance. Excluding readers has meant, however, that every one of Parker's books remains safely on the shelves, and many are in astonishingly fresh condition, almost exactly as they were at the Reformation. They have been in their current possession longer than any other principal manuscripts we will encounter in this book.
In the late 1990s, the governing body of Corpus Christi College resolved to reverse this isolationism and to open up and to exploit their greatest tangible asset. They raised money from various sources, principally the Donnelley Foundation in Chicago, to endow a full-time curator. That same man who had been refused entrance twenty-five years earlier then duly applied and he was appointed in 2000. The fact that the Parker Library has become one of the most accessible and widely used rare-book libraries in the world, both in reality and through comprehensive digitization, is not remotely to my credit, but simply because times have changed and that was an expectation of the new position.
Corpus Christi is one of twenty-nine independent colleges which make up the University of Cambridge. At any one time, it has about 260 undergraduate students. The oldest parts of the buildings date from its foundation in the mid-fourteenth century. Most readers with appointments to study manuscripts in the Parker Library now enter the college up several steps through the over-sized medieval-looking gatehouse in Trumpington Street, usually checking in first in the porters' lodge on the left, so that the library staff can be alerted. Ahead is what is known as New Court, a large quadrangle of manicured grass, striped by constant mowing, enclosed on four sides by pale stone buildings in regency gothic style built in the 1820s by the architect William Wilkins (1778-1839). ('New' in England is always a relative term; the New Forest is eleventh century.) Tourists often gather around under the archway, photographing themselves and peeping in, curious for glimpses of undergraduates and employees of the college who live and work in rooms off staircases around the sides. Straight ahead is the entrance to the chapel, flanked by niches with statues of Nicholas Bacon, benefactor, dangling a purse of money, and Matthew Parker, with both hands on a book. The bursary is to the left of the chapel, Bacon's side, and the master's lodge on the right. The college dining hall is behind high lancet windows along the north side of the courtyard. The Parker Library fills most of the upstairs floor on the right-hand (southern) facade. Ring the buzzer at the tall gothic door in the far corner of New Court and you will be admitted into a dark lobby with a choice of a stone staircase rising up in front of you or an entrance immediately off to the right. Members of the public usually proceed in organized groups to the magnificent long high-ceilinged library at the top of the stairs, with walls lined with Elizabethan and later printed books and with bright-lit glass cases down the length of the room, displaying some of the lib-
rary's finest manuscripts. Those who have come to study rare books will be let instead into the secure reading-room on the ground floor.
This room is not as large as upstairs. It was formerly the furthest extremity of the undergraduate library. It has pale green walls and a grey carpet. Mullioned windows on the south wall, generally shielded by blinds to reduce direct sunlight, look out over Saint Botolph's churchyard; those on the north face into New Court. The room is furnished with oak bookcases salvaged from the 1930s and with new purpose-built pale oak tables and fourteen matching chairs all inset with bright scarlet leather, a gift from the manuscript collector Gifford Combs. A glass plaque on the wall, designed by Lida Kindersley, records the opening of the reading-room by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on 21 June 2010.
We are about to look at ms 286, the oldest and by far the most precious book in the library. This is a privilege of being escorted by the librarian: the Gospel Book of Saint Augustine is not brought out easily for casual readers. It is immensely fragile and vulnerable and for many people it still has a sacred and spiritual significance. For Archbishop Parker it would have had a primary value in his search for the foundation of Christianity in England in 597. The manuscript is stored in a burglar-alarmed and air-conditioned vault, where it is shelved horizontally in a stout fitted oak box, made in 1993 at the expense of an architect and old member of the college, Roger Mears, whose name is recorded on a leather label. Wait in the reading-room for a moment while I fetch it, carrying the box in with both hands and placing it on the table. We unclip the brass clasps and lift off the heavy lid, relieving the subtle pressure which keeps the book tightly closed when it is not in use. The volume nestles inside in a bed of firm archival thermoplastic grey foam. Lift it carefully out and lay it on one of the orange-covered padded book-rests on the library tables.
Those who meet famous people often remark afterwards how unexpectedly small the celebrated personage was in reality. For all its stature in English history, this is not a large manuscript, and it is even mildly disappointing to some visitors who see it for the first time. It is about 10 by 8 inches, about 3 inches thick, quite light, insubstantial, and easy to hold in one hand. It is bound in plain oak boards slightly bevelled on their inner edges, with a spine of creamy alum-tawed goatskin, in the style beloved of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, especially championed and promoted by the binder Douglas Cockerell (1870-1945). The spine, which is now shadowed from handling, is ruled into six rectangles, one stamped in gold "ms 286" and another with a Maltese cross; at the foot are the letters "C.C.C.C." (for Corpus Christi College Cambridge). There is no other title. The manuscript was rebound for the college at the British Museum bindery in 1948-9 (it was returned to Cambridge in July 1949). The loan to London had one consequence. Attached to an end flyleaf is a standard British Museum note about the number of leaves dated July 1948, in the distinctive handwriting of Eric Millar (1887-1966), then Keeper of Manuscripts. The Assistant Keeper was at that time Francis Wormald (1904-72), who took the opportunity of examining the Gospel Book seriously when it was in the temporary custody of his department. Wormald subsequently gave his Sandars Lecture about it in Cambridge beginning on 29 November that year, a major step in the book's road to fame in the twentieth century.
The British Museum binders stitched the gatherings onto the tips of separate and protruding paper guards, fanning them outwards, so that the manuscript can be opened safely at 90 without bending the original parchment. This was fashionable conservation practice at the time, now no longer recommended because it rather unnaturally alters the original integrity of a book and, as the pages are turned, it can result in friction between gatherings. The binding has modern paper endleaves and it responsibly preserves an earlier paper leaf at the back from the previous rebinding in the mid-eighteenth century, together with a number of medieval flyleaves on parchment. The first two of these are plain, perhaps from the late Middle Ages. One, at least, has clearly been transferred from the end, where it served as the last leaf of the book up against the original back cover. Both it and the present final leaf have matching rectangular indentations and small rust holes at the extreme top imprinted from what was must have been a riveted chain-hasp once attached to the upper edge of the lower board of the medieval binding. At some time the manuscript was evidently secured by a chain, with the front cover upwards.
We will come back later to a more detailed description of ms 286, but no one could resist a preliminary look inside the book itself. This is a chance which will not recur often. The manuscript comprises the four Gospels from the New Testament, in the Latin translation of Saint
Jerome, taken from the original Greek of its four authors and rendered by him into the spoken language of Western Europe. The term 'Vulgate', which since the Reformation has carried critical overtones of being
arcane and inaccessible to the common people, originally simply meant that it was the normal vernacular of the period. When this manuscript was made, Latin was still generally spoken, and Jerome, who died in 420, was then no more distant in time than (say) Walter Scott or Emily Bront‘ are to us. The Roman Empire had recently imploded. Rome had been sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and again by the Ostrogoths in 546, within living memory. It saved its identity by reinventing itself as a Christian empire. Saint Augustine's mission to England was the first conscious imperial initiative of the Roman papacy.
Copyright © 2019 by Christopher de Hamel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
