Christ Church Canterbury’s Scribe 7 and Latinity following the Viking Sack

Following the Viking sack of Kent in 851, the kingdom’s scribal centers suffered from a decline in levels of Latinity, literacy, and written competency. This is perhaps most explicitly displayed through the charters of Christ Church Canterbury, of which, compared to other scribal centers, a large number survive (only eight ninth-century charters on single sheets have been preserved by other English houses).¹ Although information on Viking raids in Kent is relatively sparse, surviving evidence suggests that pillaging and destruction was particularly intense in 850 and 851 when a Viking army wintered on the island of Thanet. Christ Church was one of their primary targets, and members of its scribal community were either killed or driven to seek refuge elsewhere.² For Nicholas P. Brooks, the “charter evidence suggests that the Danish raid had made it necessary to introduce scribes to the Canterbury community who were demonstrably less adequately trained in the Latin language, and in spelling and script, than their predecessors.”³ Brooks singled out one scribe in particular for his poor charters: Scribe 7.⁴ Scribe 7 was a scribe of Christ Church who is thought to have produced seven extant charters: S 316 (855 for 853?), S 1195 (ca. 850), S 328 (858), S 1196 (859?), S 1197 (863 text b: Lufu’s confirmation), S 332 (863), and possibly S 344 (873).⁵ From his first charter, the scribe struggles with grammar and diplomatic formulae, and, compared to other scribes of the scriptorium, his writing style is brash and unrefined. By 873 his already sloppy work had deteriorated further, leading Brooks to conclude that he must have suffered from the onset of “longsightedness.”⁶ The work of this scribe has come under scrutiny because he was the “principal scribe,” to use Brooks’s turn of phrase, at the Canterbury scriptorium during the turbulent period after the Viking sack in 851—a fact that suggests that the scriptorium had no better options in the mid-850s, 860s, and early 870s, and that the levels of written competency were facing a low point.⁷ Certainly there are charters produced in Kentish centers that demonstrate a poorer understanding of diplomatic formulae and skill,⁸ but their scribes did not have such long and prolific careers as Scribe 7. Of all the scribes that Brooks identifies, Scribe 7 produced the largest number of surviving charters.⁹ As a consequence, his career has been used to highlight a decline of Latinity; his charters are not anomalies produced as one-offs due to a lack of concentration or inexperience, but rather a series of consistently substandard documents produced over an eighteen-year career.

Much of the characterization described above is, of course, accurate. Yet as I will argue, Scribe 7’s position may be ameliorated in part by removing the worst document that has been ascribed to him from his oeuvre—S 344, produced in 873. In 2013, in fact, Brooks and Susan E. Kelly raised doubts as to whether this charter was produced by Scribe 7.¹⁰ I claim unequivocally, however, that Scribe 7 had nothing to do with its production. If we remove this charter from his portfolio, we are left with a weak scribe, but one who could get by in this period. Indeed, the mistakes of Scribe 7’s charters can largely be attributed to the conventions of ninth-century Vulgar Latin and do not approach the incompetence of charter S 344.¹¹ This study, therefore, looks to complicate the view of Latinity at Christ Church Canterbury, contending that the work of its chief scribe of the 850s and 860s was neither abysmal nor particularly good, but competent, aligning with other charters of the tumultuous historical moment.

SCRIBE 7 FROM CA. 855–63

Christ Church’s scribes immediately preceding the Viking sack, especially Scribes 5 and 6,¹² demonstrate the potential of charter scribes of the period. Their charters feature a high standard of calligraphic decoration, hairline embellishment, and a generally neat and regular aspect. There is a large gulf between these charters and those produced after...