It was pure coincidence that Bede was born so close to Wearmouth-Jarrow, but it put this extraordinary mind in exactly the right place. Thanks to the travels of Benedict Biscop, and the outstanding library he built up by collecting books from across Europe, information on all kinds of things – religious scholarship, history, scientific thinking, poetry, music – flowed into the twin monastery, creating an environment which inspired the young Bede.
And from Wearmouth-Jarrow, that information flowed out again – analysed, catalogued and ordered by Bede and others. In a way, the monastery was like the web server of its day, storing and collating information ready to be 'downloaded' by students all over medieval Europe…
…Except, of course, that there were no broadband lines. The written word was the only means of communicating this information, using a shared international language – Latin. Books were the data stores of the 8th century, painstakingly created by hand. This made them incredibly valuable – although Benedict Biscop library had around 600 books, a collection of even a dozen was a remarkable thing!
The beautiful volumes were, of course, hand–written in stunning script, the finest with rich and detailed illustrations. Today, 50 copies of the Bible are printed every minute; then, creating just three copies – one of which survives as the Codex Amiatinus - took Wearmouth-Jarrow's monks many years.
enough land to support the animals needed for vellum. The size of the Codex Amiatinus shows how rich the Wearmouth-Jarrow community was: the pages are so big that each double page would have taken a whole animal hide; so over 1500 animals would have been needed to produce the three Bibles, with other manuscripts being produced by the scriptorium at the same time. The Codex Amiatinus weighs in at over 30kg, about the same as a Golden Retriever.
