‘The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death we are either drowned or killed.’ So wrote the British monk Gildas in his 6th-century proto-polemic On the Ruin of Britain, recording the arrival of the hated ‘Germans’ to the island. Bad news for the Britons, but fantastic for visitors to the British Library, now running perhaps the most significant exhibition of recent times, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms.
Historians dislike the term ‘Dark Ages’, but by any measurement western Europe saw a collapse in living standards, literacy, population, trade and significant cultural output from 500 ad. Yet that only makes the flame that appeared all the more striking, and the exquisite art so inspiring.
The first thing that greets you is a small figurine called ‘Spong Man’, dating to the 6th century and unearthed at a pagan burial site in Norfolk. Carved on to the lid of an urn, he looks like a middle-aged man sat down in his chair contemplating his worries. Spong Man represents a quite mysterious, distant world and the page only lights up with the arrival of Christianity from 597, which brought with it the written word and institutionalised learning. It was in far-off Northumbria where this culture burned brightest, King Oswald bringing over Irish churchmen to Christianise the kingdom, with the priory at Lindisfarne founded by St Aidan; the gorgeous Lindisfarne Gospels was one result.
Nearby Monkwearmouth-Jarrow monastery gave us Bede and his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. Remarkably these items can now be viewed in the same room alongside the Codex Amiatinus, an absolutely gigantic bible made at Jarrow but taken to Rome as a gift in 716 by St Ceolfrith, an enormous undertaking that killed him.
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