Holy Hierarch Éadfrið of Lindisfarne

Illuminated page from the Lindisfarne Gospels

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate the monastic scribe (and later bishop of Lindisfarne) who actually did much of the artistic work in the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, Bishop Saint Éadfrið of Lindisfarne. At least three Northumbrian saints are known to us primarily for their devoted and loving work on this beautiful piece of religious art: not only Éadfrið but also Venerable Billfrið and Bishop Saint Æþelwold of Lindisfarne. There is a good reason that this project is associated with several saints, whose monastic and episcopal careers span a period of a good sixty years between them.

So he wrote a book, the modern reader might find himself thinking – big deal! Well, actually, it was very much a big deal. In our age of tree pulp and commercial publishing, we tend to forget that producing books before the advent of movable type was a matter of exhaustive hard work and dedication, with each stroke meticulously traced out beforehand and laboriously inked in the appropriate colour. Considering the lives of the monks at the time, and the regularity with which they were expected to undertake both prayer and manual labour, the making of the Lindisfarne Gospels appears to us an even bigger feat of artistic ingenuity and effort. The creation of this beautiful and precious book was both a work of ascesis and a work of public Gospel witness, an ‘active portal of prayer’ undertaken on behalf of all and for all. Also, this project was intimately associated with the cult of Saint Cuðberht of Lindisfarne, to whose blessed memory Éadfrið had a particular devotion. As Dr Janet Backhouse at the British Library, commenting on the making of the Lindisfarne Gospels, puts it:

The making of the Lindisfarne Gospels is different, this is opus dei, the work for God elevated to a new level. And when you think about some of the works that these people would have been reading at the time, possibly Cassiodorus's words that every word written was a wound on Satan's body, this is the miles Christi, the Soldiers of Christ, spiritual frontlineism of the first order. Cassiodorus, again quoting the psalmist and other biblical sources, said that the scribe preaches with his fingers, that this is the most active form of preaching and ministry that somebody who focuses their life upon service to God and the bigger community can actually achieve.

The skins of at least one hundred and fifty young cattle – and those of the absolute finest quality – would have been used for the vellum. Undoubtedly these came from gift-exchanges with perhaps dozens of different Yorkshire hamlets over at least two decades. Tanning and curing the vellum from these hides would have been a long, labour-intensive and smelly affair (as manure played a key rôle in the process); then the hides would have to be scraped until they were a suitable colour, texture and thickness. Only then could the process of tracing and inking the book begin – this process took at least ten years of team labour by the monks.

The ink that was used in the Lindisfarne Gospels was a dense, carbon-heavy near-black probably made from soot or black from lamp-oil. For the illuminations which Saint Éadfrið commissioned, somewhere around 90 different pigments were used. These were created from different mixtures, salts and lead compounds prepared mostly from a half-dozen local minerals and vegetable extracts; however, some of the dyes may have come from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, and the lapis lazuli used in preparing the deep blues may have come from as far afield as Afghanistan or China. Egg whites or fish glue were used as binding agents for the dyes. The tracing, as Dr Backhouse has found, was done in lead point – perhaps an early version of the pencil which, before her research, was thought to have been a much later invention. The lines were ruled with a stylus. The ‘light box’ technique, which had been used for illumination in the Islamic world – whereby the manuscript was vertically framed and backlit by a candle or lamp – was employed in the creation of these Gospels. Certain stylistic elements of Germanic rune-work were used, apparently, after some experimentation with uncial and Roman capital lettering, producing a work that is unmistakeably English. The Lindisfarne artists were certainly fond of both the overlapping, ‘snaking’ gæometric forms common to the Nordic countries of an earlier time, as well as of Celtic motifs.

By the way, the painstaking and labour-intensive mediæval process of preparing vellum and binding books, though slightly different from the Lindisfarne method described by Dr Backhouse, is admirably described in Edith Pargeter’s novel The Heretic’s Apprentice, one of the Brother Cadfael series of historical-fictional crime thrillers. William of Lythwood – the wool and leather merchant whose death on pilgrimage prompts the events of the novel – has a brother, Jevan, whose own business is making vellum which is then sold to the Benedictine monastery in Shrewsbury to be used in illumination. Pargeter lavishes a good deal of attention on the description of Jevan’s workshop in the book, as well as the stages of the work that is done there.

Despite this not being the only holy text so produced in this time period – others being known to exist in Durham and Echternach – this was indeed a great effort which required massive discipline, dedication and collaboration. It is very little wonder that, in later decades after the repose of Saint Éadfrið, Saint Billfrið the goldsmith would seek to produce a cover worthy of such a work, enameled with precious metals and studded with gemstones. The exquisite artwork bears witness to the unique spirituality of the Lindisfarne hermits and monks – who owed the establishment of their holy isle to saintly Celtic Fathers, and who lived at the confluence of both Norræne and English cultures, which were then also exposed to Greek and Ægyptian influences from the Desert Fathers. Saint Éadfrið was soon after venerated alongside the father to whom he and his disciples expressed such devotion, and all of his relics, those of his predecessor and the holy book which he had commissioned, were saved from the ravages of the Danes in the 870s.

The history of the Lindisfarne Gospels themselves after the Norman Conquest is fairly murky. It was supposed to have ended up in Durham, but this apparently cannot be proven. It did, however, end up in London sometime after Henry VIII’s iconoclastic rampages – but not necessarily because of them. In the seventeenth century it was in the collection of a private London book collector named Robert Bowyer, and passed into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection became one of the foundational resources of the British Library.

Holy father Éadfrið, binder and illuminator of Holy Writ and mighty foe of ignorance, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!