Against the Heritage Myth
The British press's enthusiastic celebration of a
ninth-century copy of Caedmon’s Hymn found in Rome highlights the supposed
'earliest English poem,' heralded as the “birth of English literature' and the
“first voice of the nation.' However, these assertions are not just
surface-level claims; they are rooted in ideological perspectives. They tend to
conceal the underlying material conditions of cultural creation, the class
dynamics of early medieval England, and the international networks that
facilitated manuscript circulation long before the rise of modern
nation-states.
This article challenges that mythology by arguing that
Caedmon’s Hymn should be seen not as a national origin story, but as a result
of labour, church authority, and global exchange. Rooted in Marxist materialist
historiography, it warrants a more comprehensive examination.
Caedmon and the Social Relations of Early Northumbria
Bede’s narrative situates Caedmon firmly within the
labouring classes. He is described as “an agricultural labourer – a cowherd”
who lacked the courtly skill of poetic recitation and withdrew from the feast
in shame. This detail is not incidental. It reveals the class stratification of
seventh‑century Northumbria, where poetic performance was an aristocratic
cultural practice, inaccessible to those outside elite circles.
The miracle story—Caedmon’s dream-vision where he receives
the divine gift of song—is a well-known example of ideological mystification.
It turns a social marginalisation, such as a labourer being excluded from elite
culture, into a religious story of divine intervention. However, behind this
pious appearance lies a crucial material reality: the oldest surviving Old
English poem was created by a worker.
This does not make the Hymn “proletarian literature.” As the
document notes, its content reflects “the ideological dominance of the Church
in early feudal England.” The Church monopolised literacy, manuscript
production, and cultural transmission. The poem survives only because it is
embedded within Latin ecclesiastical texts — “the vernacular breaks through,
but only within the framework of ecclesiastical Latin.”
This is an important point. In early medieval Europe, the
rise of vernacular literature was not a spontaneous expression of national
identity but a controlled, clerically overseen process. The Church decided what
was written, copied, and kept. Caedmon’s Hymn is therefore the result of
effort, but it is also influenced by an ideological framework that shaped its
form and content.
Manuscripts as Material Objects Under Capitalism
The manuscript’s history provides a condensed overview of cultural property amidst the evolution of capitalism. It traces its journey from a Benedictine abbey to private collectors and ultimately to the Italian state, with each transfer signifying a change in the social relations surrounding cultural artefacts.
Monastic Production: The
manuscript was produced at the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, a feudal
religious community where scribes created manuscripts as part of monastic work.
These texts were not viewed as commodities but as instruments of church authority.
Post-Dissolution Dispersal: After monastic institutions dissolved, the
manuscripts entered private collections via collectors.
It is worth noting that Thomas
Phillipps’s vast collection was “a form of nineteenth‑century cultural
commodification.” Phillipps illustrates the bourgeois tendency to turn cultural
heritage into private property. The manuscript from Phillipps travelled through
various hands—first to Martin Bodmer, then to H.P. Kraus, a New York rare-books
dealer. During this period, it became a commodity in the international art
market, subject to capitalist speculation. Eventually, the manuscript was
acquired by the Italian state. However, it remained “virtually unstudied” for
fifty years afterwards. Its neglect reflects the austerity conditions of modern
cultural institutions, where archival work depends on precarious labour and
inconsistent funding.
The digitisation project that eventually made the manuscript
accessible is part of a broader, uneven process of democratising archival
access. But as the document notes, this process remains “contingent on the
funding priorities of state institutions and the unpaid or precariously funded
labour of scholars like Magnanti.” Even the most progressive developments in
cultural access occur within the constraints of capitalist austerity.
International Cooperation vs Nationalist Mythology
The final section of the document exposes the irony of
nationalist uses of Caedmon. The Hymn is routinely invoked as “the beginning of
English poetry,” yet the earliest integrated copy was found in Rome, produced
in an Italian scriptorium, and identified through collaboration between Irish
and Italian scholars.
This fact alone challenges the nationalist story. The
manuscript highlights the significance of the English vernacular in the ninth
century. Still, it does so via the global networks of the medieval Church,
rather than through isolated national growth. The Church was a transnational
entity, with its scribes sharing texts across languages and regions.
The material history of culture has always been
international, whatever nationalist mythologies later generations construct
around it. This is a profoundly Marxist insight. Culture is not the property of
nations but the product of human labour operating within global systems of
exchange, power, and communication.
Historiographical Context
This argument aligns with a
long-standing Marxist historiography tradition emphasising the material basis
of cultural production. Scholars like Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and
Christopher Hill have shown that cultural forms are inseparable from class relations
and institutional structures. In early medieval England, this involves viewing
the Church as both an ideological and an economic entity, monastic scriptoria
as sites of labour, manuscripts as objects whose circulation indicates shifting
property regimes, and vernacular literature as a product of clerical mediation
rather than a sign of national awakening. The rediscovery of the Nonantola
manuscript offers an opportunity to challenge nationalist narratives and
reinforce a materialist view of cultural history.
Culture, Labour, and the World System
