"You know, you could say, "If God had intended man to fly, he would have given him wings"" "about almost anything these days, thanks to science and technology." "We can talk, instantly, across oceans, televise the surface of the moon, live under water, have a new heart and a million other things and we do it all for the same reason I went up in that thing," "because we trust the science that says it will do what it is supposed to." "And there is no way you could check personally yourself, anyway." "The fact is that a helicopter flies and that is that." "And everything in life is like that: other people's facts." "You don't have to do anything, other people do with their expertise." "They make things you use and somewhere, somebody knows all there is to know about whatever it is." "You don't have to." "When was the last time you actually made something yourself, completely from scratch?" "And the tools, of course, too." "This modern farm for instance, doesn't need generations of man-and-boy stuff to know what to do." "It has got all the data it needs here, at the touch of a terminal." "Everything from book keeping, to what to feed and when, to market prices, to livestock management, you name it." "You can have everything every farmer ever learned about whatever it is you want to do." "And then you don't do, technology does." "The natural world has been mechanised, processed, packaged." "Everything is either pasteurised for protection or encapsulated for enjoyment." "Altered to fit the machinery of distribution or the method of production." "Nothing is untouched anymore." "Science and technology have taken away the real thing from everything we do, because 500 years ago, something happened that gave us today's artificial way of living, took away our memories and cut us off from direct contact with the world." "Before 1450, life was intensely local." "Most people lived and died in the same cottage and never went further afield than 7 miles." "The world around was like an almanac." "The west wind brought warmth, columbine cured sore throats, buttercup ground was too wet to cultivate," "when the cranberries ripened the cranes would come." "People were intimate with every sound and smell in nature, because they depended on the few square miles they knew, for survival." "Here, in church, was where they got their word-of-mouth news about the mysterious and unreal world, out beyond the forest, where nobody ever went." "The pulpit was their TV, newspaper, wire service, calendar, landlord, lawyer, teacher, timekeeper, social diary." "The church, itself, was in most cases, a kind of teaching aid in stone, or glass, or paintings, like these 12th century ones here, of Bible stories for the illiterate." "That's not art, it's information." "But, just because these isolated peasants were illiterate, doesn't mean they were stupid." "They just knew different things from us." "Facts, for them, were what you got from direct, personal experience." "Anything else was fairy stories." "Writing, if they ever got a view of it in the church Bible, would have looked like this," "just so many sacred squiggles." "With, however, one vital power in a totally oral world where everything was talked." "It made people tell the truth." "John Den." "Our modern legal practice of hearing evidence comes from a time when most people couldn't write it." "I swear that I shall tell the truth, the whole truth." "Being summoned to court and swearing the oath, pleading your case." "The hearing itself." "The whole process was an oral one." "Now, John Den, how far do you reside from the village of Shellow where Ralph says he was born?" "Ralph is claiming an inheritance." "Watch how, in an almost illiterate world, old peoples' memories will decide what happens in court." "And how old are you John Den?" "About 50, I think, Sir." "They do say the year I was born, they had a great plague of Crossbills that ate all the fruit that summer." "And the village pond dried up, too, they tell." "That is true," "I was new married that year." "That was the first summer in the reign of our liege Lord's father, old King Edward, a blessed memory." "A knight came here to proclaim the crowning before all the people of Sambolt." "So, you are 52, John Den?" "Am I, sir?" "How do you know when Ralph of Shellow was born?" "Sir, my daughter Agnes, she will be 23 next Saint Lucy's day." "And the nurse who suckled her after she was born then went on to suckle the baby boy, Ralph." "So Ralph would be 21, now." "As the aforesaid Ralph has sufficiently proved his age in this court, and appears likewise by the look of his body to be of full age, namely 21 years, he is to have possession of his inheritance." "Be it so recorded." "Most mediaeval courts were like this, parish pump affairs, where the law meant only what custom and practice said it was." "This was where you heard the latest international goings-on, intrigue, scandal plus great entertainment." "All set to music by the popgroup/newsmen of the day, the troubadours." "Even when it was normal to have a good memory, these people were incredible." "Some of them could repeat a thousand words after hearing them just once." "And the news and stories went round the country fast, because from time to time, the troubadours would get together for a meet." "Well, anywhere those mediaeval megastars went, they must have let everybody down with an awfully dull thud when they left." "After all that, you can imagine how local country life must have felt:" "Empty, drab, dull, banal, prosaic is the word that floats to mind." "But "prosaic" is the last thing that it was." "There was no prose." "Even everyday life was poetic, but not in our arty sense of the word." "Rhyme, in an oral world, was the best way to keep facts in your head." "Calendar?" "30 days hath September, April June and November." "Health hints?" "Ne'er cast a cloud till May be out." "Weather forecast?" "Red sky at night, shepherds delight, red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning." "There was a rhyme for everything from business to beekeeping." "It was a talkative world." "And if you were rich enough to get letters, they were read to you." "Or if you could read, you read them to yourself aloud." "If you ran a business, the auditing was just that, hearing the accounts being read to you aloud." "That's what "auditing" means." "Universities had a whole course on dictation." "And in the middle of all this "blah, blah, blah", what little writing did get done, on animal skins that cost an arm and a leg, was a very rare and special activity." "And since most of it got done in church, the act of writing itself, was also-- mystical." "The people involved were very much aware that what they were doing was keeping knowledge, above all, holy knowledge, alive by their copying." "This was how books got done, you would get one copy and made ten." "And by the 14th century, every monastery would have these little cubicles where monks who could read and write, spent months in cramped, frozen conditions, painfully performing what they saw as an act of worship." "Even their tools and materials had holy meaning." "The ruler - a straight line to God, the split nib - the love of God and your neighbour, the blank parchment - a clear conscience to fill with goodness, the penknife - the sharp fear of God." "And as they mumbled the words they were copying to themselves, you could hear knowledge, sounding in the cold, vaulted air of their churches." "Small wonder all this 'scribble scribble' got hidden away in safe, dark corners, it could take a year to finish one book." "And what with all the expensive illumination, not to mention the gold leaf for the extra special words, these manuscripts could end up more like sacred objects of veneration than just words on a page." "So that is something else in the way they thought about writing." "It wasn't something you would ever criticise or question." "That was why so much of it was full of mistakes." "You copied any mistakes there were, as if the words were untouchable images." "You know, the fact that this stuff survived at all for me to hold in my hand is a miracle." "Not just because there were so few, or because the manuscripts got written in monasteries lost, like this one, in some Godforsaken wilderness, if you will forgive the phrase, in Italy, but because the monks in these lost monasteries, lost the manuscripts." "Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say, "they didn't know how to find them", or "they didn't know they had them in the first place"." "Come in and I will show you why." "Apart from the fact that your average monastery library was as likely as not to be just some kind of rumpus room where anything spare got dumped, look at the dump." "Pens, scrolls, ink, parchment, manuscripts, books, cobwebs, mediaeval higgledy-piggledy." "It wasn't that they were untidy, they just didn't file things for logical reasons." "There wasn't enough material to warrant alphabetical indexing." "The sum total of their knowledge wasn't enough to divide up into separate subjects." "So, to find what you were looking for, you had to hunt around a bit." "Even then, it wasn't easy, you would have to open every scroll to find out what it was about." "And the books had titles alright, but they wrote them according to how the book usually got put down." "On the spine, on the back, on the page edges." "As a matter of fact, this one is a very good example of the bind they were in." "It is called "Sermones Bonaventurae"." "It means "The Sermons of Saint Bonaventure." Well, kind of." "It could mean, "The Sermons of Saint Bonaventure,"" "or it could mean "sermons written by an ordinary bloke called Bonaventure"" "or "sermons owned by a Bonaventure," or preached, or copied, or "sermons owned by a church of St Bonaventure"" "or, worse of all, none of that." "The Sermons of Bonaventure might just be the first thing in this book." "What else is in here?" "Who knows?" "You see what I mean about things getting lost?" "How much got lost, just because it couldn't be retrieved?" "But even when it could, it was of very limited value." "Take the Monastery Chronicle." "A kind of diary that they would update when anything happened." "All the news that was fit to pen." "And, since most people spent their lives in places like this, this was everything there was to know." "War, plague, famine, life, death." "All the facts about the world." "But, since nobody went further afield than 7 miles and got home before dark, what people who could write, wrote about was a very small world, and that was true everywhere." "There was one exception to all this isolationism." "The monasteries got visited from time to time by the fellow whose job it was to take the book of the dead around and write in who had died since his last visit." "And with no roads, that was likely ten years." "But strangely enough, it was death that would change everything." "The Black Death that turned every peasant's life upside down, if he had survived it, that is, because it made his labour a rare and much better-paid commodity." "So few survived, they inherited extra land, they got more wages, so they had more kids." "And as the population went up, somebody had to feed all the extra mouths, no?" "Well, you don't have to be much of an economist to guess what happened then." "By the end of 14th century, there was an economic boom that had everybody reaching for their account books to tot up the fortune they were about to make." "All over Europe, everybody with anything to sell loaded up their wagon and headed off for the nearest built-up area." "To where the money was, for a piece of the action." "Along every country lane, as the demand rose with the population and the spare cash, people started slipping people something new, the bill." "For the local yokels, the biggest attraction in the big city, or, as we would describe it 'tiny village', was a weird but very popular law of the time, that said "if you managed to stay long enough in town," "your boss couldn't force you back to clod hopping, you were a free man"." "So towns took off like a rocket, roads got built." "And as the produce and the goods flooded into the towns, they started having enough surplus wealth to pay for craftsmen who spent their time making things people didn't need, but wanted." "Trade exploded, markets went up everywhere." "They even started featuring exotic special offers from foreign parts." "Above all, they got a boost from, well, what everybody had been doing since I started talking about it." "Did you notice?" "The paperwork." "Amazing invention, paper, all over the place by 1400." "Just in time to solve the problems of a world with everything going that way." "Trade, the professions, banking diplomacy, government, you name it." "And especially, the reason why all this hoopla was happening in the first place:" "the unfortunate matter of the Black Death and, the delicate business of inheritance." "I mean everybody was a lot richer, sure." "If you could get your hands on all the lovely money, and we all know how difficult that can be." "It was in the legal eagles' interests to keep that as complicated and lengthy as possible." "So, with half the entire population of Europe rying to prove that they were the ones Aunt Jemima meant to leave her money to, the demand for documentation was nothing short of a nightmare." "You can imagine the pressure on those unfortunate few around who could use a pen." "And by the time they had worked out how to get the most out of them, writer's cramp wasn't the word!" "Since one of the first things the towns did when trade went up, was open schools, you no longer had to be religious to learn to read and write and get a job in the new manuscript factories," "where scribes, on piece work, tried to keep up with that novel idea, filling in forms." "And none more popular than this one." "It is called 'an indulgence' and, by the early 15th century, everybody was passing them around like spiritual IOUs." "The idea was that you bought them from the Church and they got you, or somebody you gave them to, kind of credit against penance you might have to do for sins confessed, or even for sins you hadn't yet committed." "Well, with all the money and good times and general party atmosphere after the doom and gloom of the Black Death era, there was enough sinning, or thinking about it, going on to keep the indulgence writers busy until their ink ran out." "From the Church's point of view, strictly speaking, the indulgences weren't supposed to be affected by the commercial side of life." "But, considering they introduced a sliding scale of payment, the more you were worth, the higher the price, it did look as if all you had to do, penance-wise, to cash in, was fork out." "You could also get one by coming here to Rocamadour, in southern France, on a holy package tour." "If you made it on this one, you popped into the Shrine of the Black Madonna here, said a prayer, popped back out again, and got your indulgence." "And you got it because you had done what pilgrims all over the place were doing to earn forgiveness for some sin or other, you climbed all the way up here." "Here, you got an indulgence by climbing to the shrine on your knees." "And, besides your indulgence, you got something else." "The pilgrim's mirror, in which you were supposed to capture the image of the holy shrine." "Only this was offered by the local mafia, the petty crooks and hawkers that clustered like flies around the sacred shrines of Europe, hoping to separate some sinful sucker from his money for, well, much the same kind of trash they try to palm you off with today." "Oh, there was a fortune to be made out of pilgrims alright." "And if something hadn't gone disastrously wrong with similar profit-making plans by certain German gents to sell trinkets and these special mirrors and such to the tourists at the centenary fair in the Holy city of Aachen" "(the disaster being they got the date of the fair wrong by one year), the fellow whose mistake it was wouldn't have had to think up an alternative way of making money to pay his partners back the money he had borrowed from them for the ill-fated venture, in the first place." "This, err, idiot with the world's worst sense of timing was a goldsmith from Mainz." "And when in, um, 1439, the full horror of his financial predicament came home to him, he hurriedly told his partners not to worry, they would make a million a different way, out of another great idea he had been thinking about," "a goldmine of an idea, so secret, that each of the partners couldn't even pass it on to his heirs when he died." "Well, it was a gold mine and one of the greatest secrets in Western history, as it turned out." "Because at one stroke, it was to solve everybody's problem." "Lawyers, bankers, beaurocrats, merchants, everybody." "And it was also to take away that extraordinary memory of theirs, forever." "This was the secret process that was to change the course of Western civilisation:" "File a shape on one end of a small, iron block, place the block shape down, hammer the pattern of the shape into a small bar of soft metal, like copper." "Then, slide this metal mould into the bottom of a frame, spring loaded to hold it tight." "Turn the frame over, and pour a small amount of hot, alloy metal into the hole containing the mould." "The hot metal fills the tiny moulded shape." "Leave to cool for a minute and there is the secret that its goldsmith inventor Johann Gutenberg was so paranoid about, the secret that would change everything." "A letter you can print with." "All the letter blocks are the same size, so you can set them in any order and they fit equally." "Standardised, interchangeable typeface." "And, since they are all the same size, it is easy to line them up in rows to make a neat, straight edged square or an oblong of print to set, face up, on the press." "Cover the upturned letter shapes with ink, and then use a screwdriven plate to press a sheet of paper down on to the letters." "And there, inside the paper frame, instant writing you could reproduce exactly, as many times as you wanted." "Goodbye clerical error, hello the letter-perfect work of the travelling printer." "By 1490, printers had arrived and set up shop in Cologne," "Bahl, Rome, Venice, Paris, Nurenburg, Utrecht," "Milan, Naples, Florence Augsburg, Lyons," "Valencia, Krakow, Bruges, Westminster and a dozen more." "And, wherever they unpacked their gear, the last straw for the handwriting hacks was that these guys filled a page 400 times cheaper." "That turned the screw for good on old-fashioned penmanship." "This was the first door the printers knocked on, the Church's." "It was, after all, a kind of gigantic book-of-the-month club, waiting to happen." "Hundreds of thousands of priests, with sermons and prayers and services and teaching to do, all year round." "The market for their reference books:" "Bibles, missals, breviaries was colossal." "So, the first bulk orders came from the bishops." "Made sense, printing was a great chance to crack the whip, standardise worship and keep it standard with approved texts." "But for the printers, the real smash bestseller was the indulgencies." "Thanks to Gutenberg, they were now, more than ever, what we would call a license to print money." "By 1517, the presses were churning out an even more lucrative indulgence." "A kind of 'bonus issue':" "same price, double the credit." "The plan was to use the money to brighten up the churches, build theological colleges, pay Michelangelo's bill." "And, above all, to give the Pope a place worthy of his position, and use indulgence money to build a new Saint Peter's." "No expense was to be spared." "Well, with all that lovely money around, it was bound to go rotten." "In Wittenburg, East Germany, an indulgence sale con, dreamed up to pay-off the Archbishop's debts, got the local professor of theology flaming mad." "A hardline reformist, anti-Rome anyway, he decided to do something about it all." "On October 31, 1517," "Martin Luther nailed up a few comments." "Luther listed 95 complaints, things like "forgiveness shouldn't be sold, the Pope should have no power, we need a wholesale cleanup", and so on." "He sent one copy to be Archbishop, one to his boss, and sat back." "And then, because of printing, something happened that was to shake Europe to its foundations, and kick-off one of the major institutions we live with today." "You see, Luther sent a few extra copies of these complaints to his friends, and the friends promptly had them reprinted and sent on." "Within a fortnight, what Luther had expected to be a private, academic, Church discussion was all over Germany." "Within a month, all over Europe." "Before he knew what had happened, Luther found himself in a head-on confrontation with the Pope." "And, also because of printing, there was no turning back." "Other people took up the fight for or against him, and had their views printed." "Within one year, the first full-scale propaganda war was on." "Printing spread the rebellion like wildfire and they soon dropped the well-mannered theology." "The broadsheets, going onto the streets, were vitriolic, blood and guts stuff." "These cheap handouts represented the greatest threat the Roman church had ever faced." "Here, in his study in Wittenburg, Luther became the first person to use printing as a mass medium." "In three years, his books have sold over 300,000 copies." "He triggered the first real nationalism by writing in German for Germans about how German princes should get involved in reform to save Germany from the evils of Rome." "He gave the language a shot in the arm with his great Bible, written in German, not Latin." "He became the first recognisable public figure, when his face appeared in printed illustrations." "His techniques all came together in the pamphlets:" "coloured anti-Pope cartoons for the illiterates, German for the locals," "Latin for the churchmen." "But in any form, the message was clear." "Pppppht!" "Luther gave people something they had never had before:" "the chance to have their say, in safety, to a wide audience, on the printed page." "His Protestant Reformation, born of the printing press, knocked Authority for six." "Of course, Authority struck back with the same weapons." "The Church produced a hit-list of prohibited books, kings made people sign loyalty oaths, bureaucracy flourished, central control was much easier when you could print the laws." "And, if all else failed with something you didn't like, you could always burn it." "Well, there just weren't enough bonfires to burn all the books, and the new kind of thinking they encouraged." "The printing houses were bringing people together that had never met before." "The craftsmen who did the printing, the tradesmen and bureaucrats and intellectuals who all wanted to buy the books they needed, the scholars who did the writing and the editing of the material." "These printshops became centres for the exchange of new ideas." "Full of political refugees, foreign translators, people who would bring a wide variety of experience to the decision about what should be printed." "You know the surprising thing?" "No instant intellectual revolution." "Bibles first, then the old favourites, including a lot of rubbish." "And then the classics people had been reading before, in manuscripts." "Saved a lot of them, printing." "I mean, one rare manuscript can go astray, but not thousands of printed versions." "And there were that many." "Everybody but everybody wanted the new books." "A bit like the high-technology craze today." "Now, with a market like that, it won't surprise you to learn that the first printers weren't egg-head academics." "And that they set up their shops, not at the universities, but where the money was, because somebody was going to make a fortune." "All he had to do was find the investors, buy the plant, hire the labour, fix the production schedules, analyse the market, advertise the goods, and undercut the competition." "So, the first printers were what they sound, they were the first real capitalists." "And, boy, did they ever produce?" "8 million books in the first 40 years, and then the revolution started." "Vast amounts of information moving around for the first time in a mass market:" "do-it-yourself books on building, accountancy, design, surveying, pottery, tool handling, you name it." "And fashion became international, or rather, "if the Italians did it, so did you"." "It was printing, after all, that gave Europe the Florentine Renaissance." "Above all, printing made information a commodity for the first time." "With maps and calendars and almanacs and weights and measures and so on, daily life took a rather practical turn, after that." "But the biggest shock to the system was what happened to knowledge, itself." "Once the ancient traditional authority on something or other was down in print, then for the first time, a whole mass of people could go out and check up on it." "Which, of course, a whole mass of people promptly did." "It all started with the Herbalists, for a very good reason." "Out in the fields was where medicine came from." "A pharmacist would take his new printed copy of some classic on plants, and see how it compared with the real thing." "From 1550 on, the science of 'direct observation' flowered, because there was some point to it." "Now you could get easy access to what nature was supposed to be like, thanks to printing, you could, as easily, produced an updated version of the facts." "From the early 16th century on, every scientific discipline was reaching for its pencils." "And, for the first time, what they were describing wasn't a rehash of what somebody else had said." "And, it was time to carve out new careers in technical drawing, thanks to the fact that printing presses were just as good as printing pictures as they were at reproducing words." "This is the beginning of modern science, here, with the 16th century woodblock illustrations." "Because, although the printing press was able to produce the collected opinions of every expert in the field on something, there was no substitute for the mechanical reproduction of what it was that you were looking at." "The new catchphrase in printing circles became" ""Never mind the fancy chat, show me"." "One picture worth a thousand words?" "Well, the new illustrations did get rid of a lot of verbal diarrhoea." "Style, in general, became less purple, more down to earth, exact, informative." "That is why poetry became poetic, and prose took over the facts because you didn't need rhyme to remember any more." "You didn't need to remember." "If you read the latest, most definitive book on something, well you were up to speed with the best in the field." "All of which led to one modern institution without which we would all grind to a halt." "That literary masterpiece known as 'the expense account'." "Already by the early 16th century, if you had literary leaning, or you wanted to get rich, or pick up an author or two for your literary agency, or get yourself published, or just get drunk at an international get together," "you did, then, what you still do today, you came here to the Frankfurt book fair." "It was the first and the biggest of the international book fairs they started to hold all over Europe, where, by 1500, the presses were churning it out all the way from Iceland to Italy." "The effect?" "Well, for a start, printing gave Europe its national frontiers when the dictionaries and the grammars froze the languages pretty much into their modern form because they fixed the spelling and the syntax." "And, as linguistic nationalism grew, the previous form of international communication," "Latin, began a long, slow, decline." "Everybody's sense of identity, national as well as personal, was boosted." "People now knew who wrote something, because they started putting his name on it." "And the publishers started doing the same thing with their trademarks." "They started promoting like crazy, with posters, mail order lists and catalogues." "The boost to education, in general, from reference books was enormous and now people no longer had to go through years and years of apprenticeship to learn something, thanks to an avalanche of do-it-yourself manuals that taught them industrial skills." "These modern examples of high tech gobbledygook, are the direct descendants of those 16th century first attempts to provide easy handbooks for every kind of craft and discipline." "Starting, as you might expect, with the systems that would increase production in every field." "With books that gave information like this to anybody, the age of reliance on old peoples' memories, was gone for good." "This is a list of what was in the first, big, private library of printed books in Elizabethan England." "Look, it says "two great books of statutes"." "There's one." "This is a printed book of the Law of the Land." "Not oral tradition any more." "Down in black and white to refer to, without the aid the old peoples' recall." "Definitive." "With this, you can't plead ignorance anymore." "Sir William Moore, this is his house and family still live here, also had printed books on history, pharmacology, medicine, the classics, and maps, almanacs, ballads, surveying, geometry, surgery, how to cure horses and a lot more, 140 in all." "Only two generations after the inventing of printing." "In 1556, Moore was a rare example of a short-lived phenomena." "The man who, because of printing, could know everything." "Because it was collected here for him to reach out and take." "Where once you needed the physical presence of people who knew things, now you could hold their minds in your hand." "I said Moore was a temporary phenomenon because the very existence of print libraries all over Europe, was to trigger something that would explode what was known, beyond any one man's ability to understand." "That trigger was indexing." "See, with hundreds of books, each one in the specialist subjects that printing permitted, you had to catalogue." "And with an index, you can cross-index, like this." "Here is one of the new 16th century books, all about how to aim cannons more accurately using surveying instruments." "With a cross-index, you can see how surveying is also related to other things." "Let me show you using a modern cross- index, why cross-indexing is such a tremendous step forward." "Start with surveying," "range finders range finders...." "Michelson .. naval gunnery...photography" "Photography...art.... children's literature...ballistics" "ballistics... and then all that stuff." "The way going through that exercise, shows you how things and ideas might interrelate, is at the root of the process of change itself." "Because when you put together two ideas that you never thought fitted together before, you get a third idea." "Thanks to cross-indexing, one and one make three." "That's what our kind of change is all about, in the modern world." "Go back to ballistics, there, when I left off from the index." "Here's a "one and one make three", with ballistics." "In the 1930s, the newly invented aeroplanes made life hard for the gunners trying to shoot them." "In order to get the ballistics right in the few seconds they had, and so hit the planes, they came up with a machine for doing sums fast." "Ballistics and arithmetic, just for shooting at planes." "This is what we got as a result." "The computer." "And with a computer, I can tap the databanks of the world for my facts." "And because of the computer-generated rate of change with which we live, those facts are obsolete, almost in the instant I access them." "In here: cross-indexing at the speed of light." "So, thanks to printing, we have a world where 'fact' doesn't mean the same thing it did before." "Not definitive, checkable through your own experience, but fluid, one stage removed, transient." "And if that is true of facts, what happens to standards, values, ethics when the facts they are based on, ren't?" "What can you trust in a world where nothing, in the old sense, is real?" "Nothing." "Roll Credits and Mix"