St John's Gospel. Shelfmark Cotton Nero D. IV. folio f.210v
©The British Library Board. By Permission of The British Library

Around 130 calves had to be killed and skinned to make the pages on which the Gospels were written. Their skins required careful preparation. The monks soaked the skins in lime and water to loosen the flesh and hairs. After stretching the skins over a wooden frame, they scraped them using knives with curved blades. The skins were slowly dried, and then given a second scraping.

The monks trimmed each skin to make a rectangular sheet, around 2ft x 15in. Four sheets of vellum were placed one above the other and folded in two, making a ''gathering'' of eight leaves, or 16 pages. The whole book contains 258 leaves, mostly in gatherings of eight, sewn together using leather cords.

Sketches

Through close examination of the manuscript, Michelle Brown, curator of manuscripts in the British Library, has made fascinating discoveries about how it was created by its scribe, Eadfrith. The biggest surprise was that the preliminary sketches for each decorated page are on its reverse side, including backwards writing.

To paint the pages, Eadfrith must have lit them from behind in some way, so that he could see the sketches on the back. He probably placed each sheet on a transparent writing desk, perhaps made from animal horn, with candles placed behind - the Anglo-Saxon version of a modern lightbox.

Another surprise was that the sketches were made using a lead graphite point. This was the forerunner of the lead pencil, and its earliest known use in history.

St Mark, seated, with his symbol, a winged lion blowing a trumpet and carrying a book. Shelfmark Cotton Nero D. IV. page folio f.93v
© The British Library Board, by permission of the British Library

A rainbow of colours

Before the Lindisfarne Gospels, it was the custom for Anglo-Saxon monks to use black ink, made from soot, alongside just three colours: red, from red lead; green, from verdigris, and yellow, from a mineral called orpiment.

In contrast, Eadfrith was able to use more than 40 pigments. Locally produced colours include a range of pinks and purples made from the fruit and flowers of the turnsole plant. There were also imported pigments, such as a bright red from an insect found on evergreen oak trees in the Mediterranean. The most expensive colour Eadfrith used was blue, from lapis lazuli, which must have come all the way from the Himalayan foothills. Such pigments would have been ground and mixed with a binding agent of egg white.

Eadfrith wrote his text using pens cut from the feathers of geese, which were found in abundance at Lindisfarne. Tiny hairs found sticking to some of the pages show that he applied the paint with a fine brush, using animal hairs, probably set in a wooden handle.

Text with decorated letters, St John's Gospel. Shelfmark Cotton Nero D. IV. folio f.211
©The British Library Board

Unfinished work

Eadfrith died in 721, leaving the Gospels unfinished, for some of the larger letters have not been coloured in. This shows just how much the book was seen as the work of one man, for it would have been an easy matter for another monk to finish these pages.

The book was bound together by Eadfrith's successor, Bishop Ethewald, and at some point given a magnificent outer casing, ornamented with silver, gold and jewels, by an anchorite (hermit) called Billfrith.