The origin and development of writing in early medieval western Britain c. 300-1100
Keywords: late Roman Britain
early medieval Wales
epigraphy
palaeography

In the last generation numerous examples of late (mostly fourth-century) Romano-British writing have been discovered throughout Britain, sometimes by archaeologists, sometimes as chance finds. Of particular importance are the curse-tablets recovered in 1979/80 from the Sacred Spring of Sulis Minerva at Bath. The scripts used on these artefacts are all expressions - or ‘treatments’ - of the ‘new’ Roman writing-system, generally known as ‘New Roman Cursive’, that replaced the ‘old’ system throughout the Empire for most purposes from c.240 onwards.
In parallel, most scholars of the last generation or so now understand that the Romano-British church not only survived into the fifth and sixth centuries but played a formative role in the conversion of Ireland, not to mention a significant role in the life of the western European church as a whole. The recently-recovered Romano-British writing now allows us to reconstruct the script-system inherited by that church, developed by it in the fifth and sixth centuries, provided by it to Ireland and which formed the basis of all subsequent early medieval Insular writing, to c. 1100 in Wales and even thereafter in Ireland.
The first ‘modern’ palaeographers of the late seventeenth century, Edward Lhuyd and Humfrey Wanley, aspired to write a seamless history of British writing commencing with the scripts of Roman Britain. With the advances in scholarship described above, the first stage of that story (in both its palaeographical and wider historical dimensions) has now emerged into the daylight. This thesis will describe the origin of the Insular writing-system in the fourth century, its subsequent development in the fifth and sixth and its endurance in Wales until the end of the native writing-tradition.
Any account of the history of writing in early medieval Britain must take into account epigraphic writing and in particular the inscribed early Christian monuments of western Britain and Ireland. This writing compensates us for the paucity of early medieval manuscripts surviving from Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. Continental palaeography and in particular the historical scholarship of Italian and French palaeographers, provides the approach and terminology that enable epigraphic inscriptions to be included alongside book-scripts in the history of Roman writing as it developed in the hands of early medieval Insular scribes, a body of evidence relatively neglected by traditional English-speaking palaeography.
An understanding of how early medieval writers saw the status and function of their texts and how they responded in the selection and use of the different writing-technologies available to them enables us to understand and explain the individual scribal treatments that they applied to their inherited ‘New Common Script’. Detailed analysis of these individual scripts, at the fundamental level of the ductus and the scribal treatment applied to it, permits meaningful comparisons to be made between different artefacts of writing. Where such comparisons point to correlations between the hand of a manuscript and the script of an inscription, the opportunity arises to identify and localise early medieval writing-traditions. In this context, this thesis will advance palaeographical arguments to connect the major monasteries of Glamorgan and Dyfed with CUL, MS Ff. 4. 42, the ‘Cambridge Juvencus’ and CCCC, MS 153, the ‘Corpus Martianus Capella’, respectively.
This thesis will further argue that distinctive writing-traditions arose and survived for considerable time in early medieval south Wales on a highly localised basis in two very different writing-provinces, namely: (a) a western writing-province consisting of Deheubarth and Brycheiniog, a region where Irish influence was dominant throughout the period; and (b) an eastern writing province comprising roughly the modern Glamorgan and Gwent, where cultural continuity with the highly-Romanised Severn-Cotswolds region resulted in the survival of increasingly archaic Romano-British writing traditions and where external influence, when it came, was late and Anglo-Scandinavian in character.