When Albanus of Verulamium came to the river on his way to martyrdom, its waters parted miraculously, and he was executed on the green hill beyond, the site of the modern cathedral and city of St Albans. The Roman town he left behind was ultimately abandoned, and by the eleventh century its ruins had become a subterranean slum infested by thieves and prostitutes. To abolish this eyesore and to salvage bricks to rebuild their church, the abbots of St Albans started demolition. In one of the buildings, in a wall recess, the workmen found ‘along with a number of lesser books and rolls, a strange book-roll which had suffered but little in spite of its great age’. It was written in the language of the ancient Britons, in a peculiar script which only an elderly priest could read; he found it was the History of St Alban. When this had been translated into Latin and published, the original crumbled miraculously into dust. But ‘the other books’ found here and elsewhere, ‘in which the inventions of the devil were contained’, were discarded and burnt; they contained details of pagan cult.

This moral tale, with its implication that ancient manuscripts when found are always religious, is harder to accept than the eleven witnesses to the discovery and punctual disappearance of the gold tablets of the Book of Mormon. But the setting is circumstantial, and perhaps the monks elaborated an actual discovery of buried Roman manuscripts.

As this famous Riddle from the Exeter Book of Old English poetry teasingly records, medieval books were made from sheets of parchment which were cut to size, folded and gathered into groups to form quires. The sheets were marked with prickings to guide the rulings, which in their turn guided the script. When the sheets had been written, rubricated and (if appropriate) decorated, the quires were finally sewn onto cords which were laced into wooden boards, to form a codex. Each stage of this process was subject to variations according to the time and place of manufacture, and to the nature and grade of the manuscript itself. The volume described in the Riddle was probably a gospel-book (as the text goes on to reveal): accordingly, its functional binding of wooden boards clad in leather was ornamented with a treasure cover of gold and filigree work. The same luxurious process is described in the Life of St Wilfrid (d. 709), who ‘ordered jewellers to make for [his gold-on-purple gospel-book] a casing fabricated entirely of the purest gold and [adorned] with the most precious gems’, and is alluded to in the colophon of the Lindisfarne Gospels: ‘Æthelwald … impressed [the book] on the outside and covered it, as he well knew how to do. And Billfrith the anchorite forged the ornaments which are on it on the outside and adorned it with gold and with gems and also with gilded-over silver – pure metal.