In the 6th century, a wandering monk from Ireland known as St Gall settled down at a monastery in Switzerland. The Medieval account of his life written about three hundred years later tells much of the saint’s holiness, which brought him the ability to do miracles (like – order a bear to put a log on a fire! Scare away some demons that looked like naked ladies!) and made him extremely sanctimonious (wrecking pagan shrines much to the dismay of many onlookers). But nowhere in the Saint’s life did it mention drinking-binges undertaken by the fellow monks.
Except here it does. The tiny lines you see scrawled on the top of the manuscript are a form of Irish writing known as “ogham”. Hard to tell when the ogham alphabet was first invented, but in the 400s and 500s it was used to record the language Old Irish upon stones, mostly with personal names. (See second picture.) However, the Irish monks who emigrated to Switzerland wrote the manuscript you see here, the Codex Sangallensis 904, in the mid-ninth century, using Latin, Old Irish, and ogham — in fact, it’s a major source for Old Irish used by historians today.
But it’s the tiny little scrawl of ogham on the top of this page that gives a particularly human touch: translated into Old Irish, it spells out “Laitheirt”. And that translates into English as “ale has killed us”. Or, in other words, “massive hangover.” Probably not easy being a monk.
Sources: @angkandicus.bligspot.com/2014/12/massive-scribal-hangivers-one-ninth.html. Anglandicus, “Massive scribal hangovers: one ninth-century confession” Sunday Dec 7, 2014. Taylor institution library, a Bodleian libraries weblog, “Ancient scripts: ogham – Old Irish inscriptions,” Nov 2017, Dominique Santos.
