15 - The book in Roman Britain

Summary

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.