leedsmuseumsThis small room was used as a library, it may seem tiny but books were rare and took a long time to produce, a decorated bible could take one monk 3 years to produce by hand.
Bibles and other religious works were written on specially prepared calf skin called vellum and inks were produced by the monks in the abbey, some monks would have their own special recipes to produce different colours using natural ingredients such as plant and vegetable extracts, soot and metals mixed with egg white for shine and depth of colour. Precious stone such as lapis lazuli were used to make inks and for decoration as was real gold particularly for the production of bibles.
Because books were so time consuming to produce they were rare and precious, and they were kept very carefully. Medieval monasteries invented the library system for cataloguing and signing out books. Some books would be too precious to be kept in the library and would have been locked away separately.
The Victorians used the library as a grotto or summer house, they added the fireplace and lined the walls and roof with lead which gives the room its green tinge. The soft metal also made this room easy to graffiti and there are lots of names scratched into the walls probably in Victorian times.
Walk through the archway into the church. A punishment for pride was to lie in this doorway and let the other monks walk over you to teach you humility.
leedsmuseumsWelcome to the life on Earth Gallery. I’m Joe Botting, the Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences, and I look after the geology collections. As you come into the gallery there’s an enormous case on your left – walk around the back of that and you will find the partial articulated skeleton of a hippopotamus.
This is one of the most famous fossils to be found in Leeds itself and was discovered in 1852 in Armley at Mssrs. Longley brickworks. The people cutting the clay for the bricks started to find large number of pieces of bone and, after a while, they started finding very big bits of bone which, in their own words, “could not be Christian bones”. These were quickly sent to Philosophical Hall, where the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society was based, and Henry Denny came out to examine the bones and got quite excited. He spent quite a long time digging and collecting further bones and eventually recovered the remains of five hippos, one elephant and an aurochs. What you see in front of you are some of the bones which have been assembled to make a semi-complete skeleton. They’ve been stained very dark brown by a varnishing technique and you can see the original labels are still preserved in a lot of cases.
The bones themselves are 125,000 years old, they’ve been dated by carbon dating. This shows us that, 125,000 years ago, Leeds was actually a lot warmer than it is now. We’re used to thinking in terms of there being an ice age in the past - and it’s true - but we’re still in the ice age. The ice age has warm and cold periods, we’re in a warm period at the moment, and this hippo lived in Leeds during the last warm period.
There’s undoubtedly much more to be discovered in the sediments underneath Leeds.
leedsmuseumsCurator Joe Botting talks about Leeds's famous hippopotamus fossil.
