The history of manuscripts first began with scribes. Scribes were writers who were trained in penmanship. When the need for books grew, manuscripts were being made by students of the Renaissance "writing master" as well. Scribes have created books from within scriptoria. It started in the fourth millennium BC. The first books were made on clay tablets. A scribe would write in the soft clay using a sharp knife. If there were any errors, they would smooth out the clay and rewrite. Once the clay dried, nothing could be fixed.

Along with clay, waxed boards were used. They were easier to handle and store. There was a slight advantage with using waxed boards. They could be corrected if any mistakes showed, and they could also be reused. After clay tablets and waxed boards, came papyrus, parchment, and paper books. Papyrus books took the shape of scrolls. Then, there was another advancement which was a loose-leaf manuscript. later on in the seventh and ninth centuries, parchment manuscripts from previous centuries were reused. They were shaved, scrubbed, and scoured for new writing. The reused parchments were called palimpsests. The person in charge of all the scribes was called an armarius. They served as a director, they gave instructions, gave out tasks, issued materials, and arranged all writing and art work.

The rubricator’s job was to add rubrics, initials, and elegant decorations. Before a scribe started to write, they needed to follow the client’s directions. They cut the parchment into a size ordered from the client. The size depended on the purpose of the book, and the style of the period and location. Books were all different sizes because they had different purposes. There were pocket-sized prayer books to large choir books used in church. In the late seventeenth century, parchment was being used for religious volumes and collectors’ books. The invention of the printing press was in the fifteenth century. Once printing started, the format of a page changed. For example, the style of script, position of text on the page, artistic designs, initial lettering, and marginal designs were added and changed. In the beginning of printing, the extra designs were done by hand until artwork was done with woodcut, metal-cut, and type forms.

The earlier manuscripts were written on vellum which could have been a layer of goat, calf, or sheep skin. Even though it was a constructive material, it was very expensive. The production of a Bible would take the scribe years to complete which would require several hundred animals. That is what made books rare and expensive. The skins were prepared in a certain way. First, they were taken from the animal and then soaked in clear water. Next, they would be absorbed in a strong lime solution, then scraped to remove all hairs, and then finally they were sun-dried. This process was done over and over again for several weeks, until the vellum was clean and flexible and ready for use. With velum pages, there were flaws in the skin, therefore, a scribe would work his text around the flaw. Due to the skin, the "inner" side of the vellum would be darker than the other because it was harder to clean the "inner" part than the "outer" part.

Paper-making began with the Chinese in the second century BC. However, paper was not available for the rest of the world until the eighth century. Italy became the first prosperous center of the paper-making industry. Factories began in 1276 and they supplied Europe until about the fifteenth century. Scribes used natural quills, plucked from geese, crows, or turkeys. Later on, they advanced to iron pens. There were two different kinds of inks. The first is a black encaustic which is an acidic iron gall mixture that engraved into the vellum. The second type of ink was a combination of common lampblack, which is a fixing agent, and also a medium such as oil or water. As for color inks, they were usually in red and blue. The oils were in all colors, however, they were used for expensive volumes for royalty and the clergy. They sometimes used gold accents to accentuate the text.

Illumination is the art of garnishing manuscripts with colors and metals usually in gold. Medieval bibles glittered with gold which literally lit up the text. The illumination of manuscripts began in Kent in the seventh century AD by monks. Before they started writing, the scribe would draw a grid of guidelines on the parchment. They would leave space in the guidelines for decorations that were later added. The scribe would first write the text and then they would do a sketch for the illuminated decoration. The illuminator’s job would be to add the designs and the color gold, painted on the artwork.

Most of the existing Old English manuscripts were made in the scriptoria of monasteries. They were written by members of the clergy. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were written exclusively on parchment or vellum. The result of this process was a thin membrane with one completely smooth side and another with a thin layer of leftover hair. Hundreds of animal skins were required to make a single book.

After the skins had been treated, they were folded into page-size squares. The result was a "quire," or section of pages. This process permitted the scribe to prick small holes through the pages of each quire, which could then be ruled, making uniformly straight lines of text on each page. Finally the quires would be bound together and covered. This method of book production meant that manuscripts could be easily unbound or rebound, permitting parts of texts to become separated, swapped or lost. For this reason, and because medieval writers frequently wrote wherever they could fit text, many manuscripts contain a wide assortment of different documents.

Keywords : Term Paper, History, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts

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