SYNOPSIS: The Discovery of the monastery of a 7th century Scottish princess helps make a connection between the alphabet, the writing of the Bible and the modern world.
And you shall write on them all the words of this law, when you cross over to enter the land that the LORD your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you.
– Deuteronomy 27:3 (ESV)
A Princess Helps save the Christian West
Archaeologists in Scotland announced on March 8th the discovery of remains that they believe to be the monastery of Princess Aebbe who left her pagan beliefs to convert to Christianity and spread the faith in Britain during the seventh century. The princess and the monastery are important links in the story of the alphabet, the Bible, and the spread of Western civilization.
Princess Aebbe (AD 615-683) was the daughter of a Northumbrian king who was killed, causing the princess and her siblings to flee to Dál Riata, a Gaelic kingdom that was a center of early Christianity. The family was converted to Christianity by the followers of Saint Columba while in exile. Aebbe accompanied her brother, Oswald when he went back to reclaim the Northumbria throne and convert his subjects to Christianity in 635. Northumbria was in present-day southeast Scotland and northeast England.
Oswald established the monastery of Lindisfarne and supported Aebbe in starting a monastery further north, near what is now Coldingham (in present-day Scotland) some time between 635-640. It would be an important center until destroyed by Viking attack in 870.
Archaeologists have been seeking the site of Aebbe’s monastery for decades, but as reported in Live Science, they now believe they have finally solved the mystery. Past searches have focused on a rocky headland known as Kirk Hill overlooking the sea, just south of St Abbs Head that was named after Aebbe. However, a lack of evidence there turned their attention to a location nearly 2 miles inland, next to Coldingham Priory that is still standing today.
Clues that led to the new site were the outlines of several possible archaeological structures and the discovery of several artifacts. These included the fragments of an Anglo-Saxon belt fitting, fragments of sculpture and possible early Christian burials.
How a Lost Monastery Linked to Today’s Discovery
The first new discovery was a narrow, circular ditch, which they think was the “vallum” or boundary surrounding a holy site in the settlement.
“Vallums weren’t necessarily deep, intimidating defensive structures, but more like a symbolic marker to show that you were entering a venerated or spiritual place,” Maiya Pina-Dacier, the head of community at DigVentures, told Live Science.
DigVentures is a U.K.-based group led by archaeologists, but also including citizen scientists that help carry out the projects. This dig was enabled by a crowdfunding campaign and with the help of members excavating the site.
A huge pile of animal remains outside the enclosure was another surprise find indicating the heavy use of the site. The bones of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, domestic fowl and red deer from the pile were radiocarbon dated to 664-864.
“This is pretty much exactly when Aebbe’s monastery was in existence,” Manda Forster, the program manager at DigVentures, said in a statement. “Originally built around A.D. 640, it is said to have burned down shortly after her death but was then rebuilt and thrived until it was destroyed once again by Viking raiders 200 years later.”
Princess Aebbe Helped Establish Christianity
The Excavations are pointing to the possibility that the main remains of Aebbe’s monastery are located under the priory. “And it makes sense that the later Benedictine monastery was built on the site of its Anglo-Saxon predecessor,” Forster said.
“Aebbe is an extraordinary figure — an example of a powerful Anglo-Saxon woman who played a big part in establishing Christianity in the region during the seventh century,” she continued. “Now that we’ve got evidence to pinpoint exactly where her monastery was, we can help bring her story back to life.”
The U.K. National Lottery Heritage Fund and Friends of Coldingham Priory also funded this DigVentures project.
By the Skin of Our Teeth
It was a bleak time in the history of the Christian West. Christianity had become the official religion of Rome in the 4th century AD and missionaries such as Saint Patrick had evangelized many in Ireland. But the power of Rome was fading as wave after wave of barbarian hordes invaded from the east. When the Romans left Britain around AD 410, they took their religion with them. Paganism returned, even as the Germanic Angles and Saxons invaded the British Isles.
The remnant of the Celtic Church was hard pressed and retreated west to the edge of the world where they sought refuge on isolated islands off the coast. This is the scene described by historian Kenneth Clark in the 1969 BBC documentary series Civilisation.
In the first episode of the series titled The Skin of Our Teeth, Clark tells of the century when Western Christianity survived these dark times by clinging to the most inaccessible fringes of Ireland, Cornwall, and the Hebridies.
One of these places was the Island of Skellig Michael located 7 miles off the southwestern tip of Ireland. This was the filming location for Luke Skywalker’s sanctuary in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and in Star Wars: The Last Jedi(2017). There were concerns about damage to this UNESCO World Heritage sitebecause of the film crews shooting there. Many fans of these films were unaware that the island was the site of one of the earliest Gaelic monasteries in the area from as early as the late 5th century (400s).
Skellig Michael gets its name from the archangel Michael. The small population of monks who inhabited the hermitage originally made a series of rock-hewn steps up the island’s steep 700-foot height. They led to the valley known as Christ’s Saddle that lies between the twin peaks that define the shape of the island.
There were only three acres of flat grassland on which to grow vegetables. Here they built their dry stone huts. Stones of white crystal on the island were used to make a rough cross above the doorway of one of the huts. Over a hundred stone crosses have been found on the island, some with ends broken off over the centuries.
Clark described the island’s buildings and stairways as “an extraordinary achievement of courage and tenacity.” He stated that for 400 years Christians found it a place of refuge where devoted transmitters of the Bible worked as the tides of barbarians ebbed and flowed across Europe. The hordes were not interested in order and permanence but were always on the move in search of gold and glory. This lost monastery linked the history of several missionaries to the spread of the gospel.
Skellig Michael and the other isolated bases became the launch pads that sent missionaries into the coastal areas of the British Isles, then into the interior, and eventually to the mainland of Europe to convert the Germanic tribes.
The evangelist, Saint Columba, founded the main center of Iona in AD 563. It was located on a small island in the Inner Hebrides off Scotland’s west coast. The monastery played a vital role in converting the Picts of present-day Scotland in the late 6th century and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria beginning in 635 with the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and Aebbe’s monastery.
All these sites became famous centers of Christian preaching and learning, producing many highly important documents in the unique Irish style, including illuminated Gospels such as in the Book of Kells. The pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes and others would become the leading carriers of the alphabet, their faith, and civilization into the West as they entered continental Europe.
A Milestone in History: Intent to Convert Subjects to Christianity
A milestone in the history of Western civilization was reached with the reign of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, who ruled from 768-814. He set out to convert all of his subjects to Christianity as his father, Pepin had been. Charlemagne would become the first Holy Roman emperor after uniting much of central and western Europe. A tireless administrator, he had a keen interest in education and writing. He also had a gift for languages and learned to read – unusual, even for kings in his day. His military success allowed him to reestablish contact with the ancient Mediterranean world, gaining access to many ancient documents.
Charlemagne brought in Alcuin of York from Anglo-Saxon-controlled Britain as his teacher and librarian. Alcuin and other scholars collected as many ancient manuscripts as they could find, and then copied them. Over 7,000 manuscripts from this effort still exist today; many of these were Roman texts that had been completely forgotten. Most works of classical Latin that survive today were collected, copied and preserved by Carolingian scholars.
Part of Charlemagne’s educational and religious reforms included a mandate that every church and monastery should have a copy of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible. A uniform script was developed to make the Vulgate more readable for clergy and easier for scribes to copy. This would also aid the spread of literacy and help run the empire efficiently.
Alcuin derived the script largely from the Irish style used in the British monasteries. Since the script was created under Charlemagne’s patronage, it is known as Carolingian minuscule. This became the standard alphabetic script in Europe that still survives in adjusted form today as the basis of our modern lowercase script. ‘Carolingian minuscule’ is a style of typeface that maintains this heritage.
The Alphabet’s Path from Egypt to the Christian West
A thread that winds through this entire sequence is the strong influence of the Bible and the alphabetic scripts that preserved its writings. As seen in Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy, the world’s first alphabet can be traced to the Hebrews when they were in Egypt before the Exodus. This was in the same era as the writing of the first books of the Bible by Moses, beginning at Mount Sinai. The genius of the alphabet spread from those early Semites to their Phoenician neighbors and then on to the Greeks and Romans contributing to the intellectual transformation of those societies.
How the Alphabet Helped Spread Christian Faith
The common and widespread use of the Greek language and its alphabet allowed the Christian faith, and the Bible it was based on, to be rapidly spread across the world in the first centuries AD, eventually becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire.
When Rome eventually succumbed to the barbarian hordes, the transmitters of literacy and biblical faith held on in isolated islands of the British Isles as they copied their sacred texts. The spread of writing and learning went with the missionaries as they formed new monasteries that converted most of Europe. One of those converts was the father of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne’s promotion of literacy and education, fueled by a new legible and standardized alphabet, ignited a cultural and intellectual revival that ensured the survival of Christian faith in the West and would eventually lead to the rise of the modern world.
The pattern continued when the path to modernity took a great leap forward with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in about 1440. The first book printed on that transforming technology was the Bible. This was just decades before the birth of the Reformation and another great wave of energy that would help spread the impact of the alphabet and the Bible further afield.
It is a long way from the mines of Sinai and Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, to Skellig Michael and Aebbe’s monastery, to the modern world. The journey of the alphabet and the words it transmitted continues to impress us today. – Keep Thinking!
TOP PHOTO: The team excavating part of a settlement that may be associated with Princess Aebbe’s monastery. (credit: DigVentures/Aerial-Cam)
