IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 264

The Lindisfarne Gospels is a manuscript of the four Gospels in Latin, written and decorated on Holy Island, off the coast of Northumbria, in the years around 700. It is the most celebrated survivor of the monastery of Lindisfarne, founded from Iona in 635. The book runs to more than 250 leaves, each of prepared animal skin rather than paper, and it is often described as the finest manuscript made in the British Isles before the Norman Conquest.

That the book was made at Lindisfarne, and by a single scribe, rests on a note added to it long afterwards. In the tenth century a priest named Aldred wrote a colophon, a short statement of how the work had come about, which names Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 until his death in 721, as the person who wrote it. The same note credits Æthelwald, who followed Eadfrith as bishop, with binding the book, and a hermit called Billfrith with making its metalwork cover. The cover has long since disappeared, but the names have generally been accepted, since no other writer is credited with the book anywhere.

Each page was cut from a calf skin prepared as vellum. The skin was soaked in lime, scraped free of hair and flesh, stretched on a frame to dry and then rubbed smooth with pumice. The craft made heavy demands on the herd: it has been estimated that the skins of well over a hundred calves were needed for this one book. What the scribe achieved with those skins is remarkable, because the leaves are thin and even in tone, and so well matched that a reader is rarely aware where one skin ends and the next begins.

Nothing about the book is modest. The text is written in a formal script known as Insular half-uncial, in two columns, and the pages are framed and filled with ornament. Before each Gospel stand several pages of pattern alone, known as carpet pages, in which spirals, interlace and animal forms are woven together. Each Gospel also opens with a portrait of its evangelist, and the first letters of key passages expand into panels of colour and knotwork that may occupy most of a page. The style, called Insular, draws together Celtic spiral ornament, Anglo-Saxon interlace and motifs from Mediterranean art.

The colours were made from minerals and from plants. For a long time the blue was thought to come from lapis lazuli, a stone found only in what is now Afghanistan. Analysis carried out in the early 2000s showed instead that the blue was indigo, a dye obtained from plants, and that most of the palette could have been made from materials available close to home. That does not mean Northumbria was isolated: its monasteries were in contact with Rome, with Francia and with the Mediterranean, and books and other goods reached them by the sea routes of the north. The range of colours used, and the skill with which they were laid on, point to an artist of exceptional ability rather than to a large workshop.

The monastery's fortunes ended abruptly. In 793 ships from Scandinavia attacked Lindisfarne, an event reported across Europe and remembered long afterwards. The community survived for a time, but in 875, fearing further attacks, the monks left the island, carrying with them the relics of their most famous bishop, Cuthbert, and their treasures, among them the Gospels. They wandered for years before settling at Chester-le-Street, and in 995 they moved again, this time to Durham, where the shrine of Cuthbert was established. Pilgrims came there in large numbers, and the book remained at Durham for the rest of the Middle Ages.

It was at Chester-le-Street, around the middle of the tenth century, that Aldred added the gloss for which the manuscript is also famous. Between the lines of Latin he wrote a translation into Old English, the language of ordinary people, so that a reader with little Latin could follow the text; it is the earliest surviving rendering of the Gospels in English.

Aldred worked with care. Where the Latin was ambiguous he sometimes gave more than one English word, and his gloss has been studied continuously ever since, both as a record of the language as it was spoken a thousand years ago and as evidence of how closely the text was read.

At the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s the priory at Durham was closed and its library scattered. The Gospels passed into private hands and by the early seventeenth century had reached the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, an antiquary whose library contained some of the most important manuscripts in England. Cotton's collection was given to the nation in 1702 and became one of the founding collections of the British Museum half a century later. When the British Library was created in 1973, the book went with the rest of the museum's manuscripts, and it is still kept there.

Because the book belongs to the nation rather than to Durham, its return to the north-east has always been temporary. It has been lent for exhibitions in the region, including a display in Durham in 2013, and the case for longer loans has been argued ever since. Those who care for the manuscript point out that a book of this age cannot be displayed indefinitely: light damages the pigments, and every journey is a risk. Whether it will one day go back to the place where it was made remains an open question.

Walk through the centre of almost any old English town and you will pass buildings whose walls are crossed by a lattice of dark timbers. Many thousands of timber-framed houses are thought to survive in England alone, ranging from great manor houses to modest cottages. Most of them were put up between the fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. Because few come with building accounts, contracts or drawings, historians have had to learn to read the structures themselves, treating the frame as a document.

The material was almost always oak, the strongest timber readily available. Carpenters preferred trees that had grown slowly in dense woodland, because the resulting wood was hard and closely grained. Contrary to a common belief, the timber was not left to season for years before use. Green oak was worked while it was still full of sap, which made it easier to cut, and as it dried the joints tightened. The frame was held together entirely by carpentry, without nails or metal bolts. Mortise-and-tenon joints, in which a projecting tongue on one timber fits into a slot cut in another, were secured with tapered wooden pegs driven through both.

Two traditions of framing can be distinguished. In the box frame, upright posts carry horizontal beams at floor and roof level, and the spaces between them are filled with smaller timbers. In the cruck frame, found mostly in the west and north of England and in Wales, the principal supports are pairs of long curved timbers, known as blades. These were cut from trees that had grown with a natural bend. The two blades meet near the top of the building to form an arch, and the weight of the roof rests on them. Cruck-built houses are often among the oldest surviving structures in a village.

Carpenters worked from a drawing scratched on a plaster floor or a plank, and cut the components in a yard before transporting them to the site. Each piece was marked with a simple symbol, chopped with a chisel, so that it could be matched with its partner during assembly. Raising a frame took only a few days and drew on the labour of neighbours, since the heavy timbers had to be lifted into place by hand. In some places the raising was celebrated with food and drink once the last joint had been pegged.

The panels between the timbers carried no weight, so they could be made of cheap local materials. The commonest method was wattle and daub. A hurdle of woven hazel or willow, known as wattle, was fixed between the upright timbers that divided the wall. It was then covered with daub, a mixture of clay, animal dung and straw, which was pressed into the weave and later whitened with lime. From the late sixteenth century, bricks were increasingly used for the panels instead. The wall was divided by thinner upright timbers, called studs, set at regular intervals between the main posts.

From about the fourteenth century, town houses began to grow upwards. The upper storeys were often made to oversail the one below, so that the building gained floor space without taking any more ground. Each projecting floor is called a jetty, and the fashion gave narrow streets their characteristic overhanging fronts. Structurally, a jetty works by extending the floor joists beyond the front wall of the lower storey, and the weight of the rooms behind them acts as a counterbalance. Many frames were later encased in brick or hung with tiles, which protected them from the weather but concealed them from view. Timber framing continued into the seventeenth century, but after the Great Fire of London in 1666 new buildings in the City were required to be of brick or stone.

Dating these buildings was once a matter of style. From the 1970s, however, laboratories in Britain began to apply dendrochronology — the matching of tree-ring sequences — to standing buildings in England. Oak is ideal for the technique, because a single tree may contain two hundred or more rings, and because the pattern of wide and narrow rings reflects the weather of each growing season. By comparing these patterns with a master sequence built up from timbers of known date, a felling year can be estimated with considerable precision. Since the outermost rings survive only if the sapwood has not been trimmed away, a result is often expressed as a range giving the earliest possible year of felling. Reused timbers complicate the picture, since they may be decades older than the house they now support. Dendrochronology has shown that many houses are older than their front wall suggests.

The results have also reopened an old argument. In a celebrated essay of 1953, the historian W. G. Hoskins argued that rural England was transformed by a 'great rebuilding' between about 1570 and 1640. During that period even modest households replaced their open hearths with chimneys and their flimsy walls with framed and glazed houses. Hoskins linked the change to rising prosperity and a new desire for comfort. Later researchers have accepted that much building took place in that period, but they have questioned the sharpness of the dates. Tree-ring evidence shows substantial work both before 1570 and after 1640, and fashion may have mattered as much as wealth. The argument continues, and each newly dated house has the potential to shift it.

Consider a familiar situation. A former hospital, closed for more than a decade, stands empty behind a fence, its roof patched with tarpaulin. A few streets away, families are waiting for social housing. When a developer proposes to demolish the building and put flats on the site, the local paper prints two letters. One is about the scandal of leaving a fine building to rot, the other about the scandal of placing bricks before people. The quarrel is real, but it is rarely the straight choice it appears to be, and in most such disputes the two causes turn out to be entangled rather than opposed.

Protection in England works through two main devices. A building of special architectural or historic interest can be listed, a power that dates from the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. An area of special character can meanwhile be designated a conservation area, which has been possible since the Civic Amenities Act of 1967. Listing does not freeze a building: it means that any alteration needs consent. Where a proposal would cause substantial harm to a listed building of the highest importance, national planning policy says that permission should be granted only in exceptional circumstances. Decision-makers are also instructed to give great weight to the conservation of historic assets. In practice, most cases are decided by local authorities advised by conservation officers, and the great majority of applications are approved.

The numbers are large but often misunderstood. England has roughly 370,000 listed buildings, of which more than nine out of ten are graded II — the category for buildings of special interest rather than outstanding importance — and some 10,000 conservation areas. Yet the great majority of new homes are built on land where no historic building stands. Heritage is therefore rarely the reason why houses are not built; the shortage of sites with planning permission, the cost of new infrastructure and the availability of skilled builders matter far more. To present conservation as the main obstacle to housebuilding is a convenient exaggeration.

That is not to say the conflict never arises. Some historic buildings are genuinely difficult to convert. A small terrace of cottages with low ceilings and no garden may cost more to repair than it will ever be worth. An isolated barn far from any road, meanwhile, may have no viable use at all. There is also an opportunity cost, since money spent on rescuing one listed structure is money not spent on several new ones. Developers argue, reasonably, that a derelict building can hold back a whole street, and that delay itself has a price measured in years of someone's housing wait.

The arguments on the other side are stronger than they are usually allowed to be. Construction and demolition together produce a large share of the waste generated in developed countries. Every structure that is kept saves the carbon that would have been released in making its replacement — a saving now discussed under the heading of embodied carbon. Conversion is often quicker than new build, since the frame, the floors and the foundations already exist. Above all, old buildings have proved adaptable: the warehouse turned into flats, the chapel turned into a nursery and the mill turned into offices are familiar successes rather than rare exceptions.

Critics of the system raise a different objection, and it deserves a hearing. What is protected reflects the taste and power of those who compile the lists, and for decades that meant country houses and parish churches rather than factories, markets and terraced streets. Industrial buildings and the places associated with minority communities were under-represented for a long time, and some were lost before anyone thought to record them. The answer, however, is to broaden the list rather than to abandon the principle; the argument that a register is incomplete is not an argument for having no register at all.

My own view is that the choice should be reframed. Reuse should be the starting assumption for any historic building, and demolition should require independently gathered evidence that conversion has been seriously attempted and has failed. Where a building is of modest merit, and the need for homes is acute, a well-designed scheme that keeps the façade may be a better outcome than a museum piece that nobody can use. Policy also sends the wrong signal: in the United Kingdom, repairs to an existing building attract value added tax, while most new construction does not, so the tax system quietly rewards demolition. Removing that anomaly would do more for old buildings than any number of letters to the local paper.

None of this means that heritage should override the need for housing. It means that the two are less often in competition than the headlines suggest. When they are, the decision should rest on evidence about the building and about the homes that would replace it, rather than on a preference for either the old or the new. What should be overridden is the assumption, still powerful in planning departments and boardrooms alike, that a cleared site is a fresh start. Usually it is simply a loss. A town that keeps nothing of its past has not solved its housing problem; it has merely given people fewer reasons to visit it.