Gospel replicas fail to halt row

Date: 2003-05-14, Publication: The Journal

A row over a North art treasure kept in the South looks set to rumble on, despite attempts by its custodians to bring expensive new displays to the region as an alternative to the real thing.

Campaigners have been calling for the Lindisfarne Gospels to be permanently returned to Durham Cathedral, four-and-a-half centuries after they were snatched by Henry VIII and taken south.

The magnificent original work, which was handwritten and illuminated by a monastic artist-scribe during the early 700s on Holy Island in Northumberland, is displayed at the British Library in London.

But now two new state-of-the-art replicas of the manuscript, created by Swiss craftsmen at Faksimile Verlag in Lucerne, are about to be sent North as part of a new exhibition called Painted Labyrinth.

One copy of the facsimile will be presented to Durham Cathedral in a ceremony on Friday, while the second will go to Holy Island's Lindisfarne Heritage Centre. Experts from the British Library say the reproductions, worth £13,000 each, will enable more people than ever before to see in detail one of the most remarkable works of religious art ever created.

But last night the Northumbrian Association, which launched a campaign to return the Lindisfarne Gospels to their ancestral home, said second best would never be good enough.

"There's nothing like an upsurge of people pointing out the uncomfortable truth that they are sitting on property stolen from the shrine of a great saint to get scholars and museum curators throwing taxpayers' money into schemes to help them hang on to their booty," said association secretary Henry Kegg.

"I welcome the high profile given to the Gospels, but the British Library should rest assured that neither fandango nor facsimile will make the Gospels Campaign go away."

Written on 259 leaves of vellum, using more than 150 expensive hides of yearling cattle, in ink made from oak galls and iron salts, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are reproduced in St Jerome's Vulgate translation, probably copied from an Italian source.

In the mid-10th Century, Aldred, a member of the community of St Cuthbert, relocated to Chester-le-Street. He translated into Old English the text of the Gospels, thus creating the earliest known form of the Gospels in the English language, writing the Old English between the lines of the Latin on the original Lindisfarne Gospels. He also identified the artist-scribe as Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne in 698-721.

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