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You know, you could say, “If God had intended man to fly,
he would have given him wings”

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about almost anything these days, thanks to science and technology.

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We can talk, instantly, across oceans,
televise the surface of the moon,

4
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live under water, have a new heart and
a million other things and we do it all

5
00:01:38,332 --> 00:01:40,351
for the same reason I went up in that thing,

6
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because we trust the science that says
it will do what it is supposed to.

7
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And there is no way you could
check personally yourself, anyway.

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The fact is that a helicopter flies and that is that.

9
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And everything in life is like that: other people's facts.

10
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You don't have to do anything,
other people do with their expertise.

11
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They make things you use

12
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and somewhere, somebody knows all there is to know about whatever it is.

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You don’t have to.

14
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When was the last time you actually made
something yourself, completely from scratch?

15
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And the tools, of course, too.

16
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This modern farm for instance, doesn't need
generations of man-and-boy stuff to know what to do.

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It has got all the data it needs here, at the touch of a terminal.

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Everything from book keeping,
to what to feed and when, to market prices,

19
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to livestock management, you name it.

20
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You can have everything every farmer ever
learned about whatever it is you want to do.

21
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And then you don't do, technology does.

22
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The natural world has been mechanised, processed, packaged.

23
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Everything is either pasteurised for
protection or encapsulated for enjoyment.

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Altered to fit the machinery of
distribution or the method of production.

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Nothing is untouched anymore.

26
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Science and technology have taken away
the real thing from everything we do,

27
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because 500 years ago, something happened
that gave us today's artificial way of living,

28
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took away our memories and cut us
off from direct contact with the world.

29
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Before 1450, life was intensely local.

30
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Most people lived and died in the same cottage

31
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and never went further afield than 7 miles.

32
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The world around was like an almanac.
The west wind brought warmth,

33
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columbine cured sore throats,

34
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buttercup ground was too wet to cultivate,

35
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when the cranberries ripened the cranes would come.

36
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People were intimate with every sound and smell in nature,

37
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because they depended on the few square miles they knew, for survival.

38
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Here, in church, was where they got their word-of-mouth news about the mysterious

39
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and unreal world, out beyond the forest, where nobody ever went.

40
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The pulpit was their TV, newspaper, wire service, calendar,

41
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landlord, lawyer, teacher, timekeeper, social diary.

42
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The church, itself, was in most cases, a kind of teaching aid

43
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in stone, or glass, or paintings, like these 12th century ones here,

44
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of Bible stories for the illiterate.

45
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That's not art, it's information.

46
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But, just because these isolated peasants were illiterate,

47
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doesn't mean they were stupid.
They just knew different things from us.

48
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Facts, for them, were what you got from direct,
personal experience.

49
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Anything else was fairy stories.

50
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Writing, if they ever got a view of it in the church Bible,

51
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would have looked like this,

52
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just so many sacred squiggles.

53
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With, however, one vital power in a totally
oral world where everything was talked.

54
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It made people tell the truth.

55
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John Den.

56
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Our modern legal practice of hearing evidence comes
from a time when most people couldn't write it.

57
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I swear that I shall tell the truth, the whole truth.

58
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Being summoned to court and swearing the oath, pleading your case.

59
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The hearing itself. The whole process was an oral one.

60
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Now, John Den, how far do you reside from the
village of Shellow where Ralph says he was born?

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Ralph is claiming an inheritance.
Watch how, in an almost illiterate world,

62
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old peoples’ memories will decide what happens in court.

63
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And how old are you John Den?

64
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About 50, I think, Sir.

65
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They do say the year I was born,

66
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they had a great plague of Crossbills that ate all the fruit that summer.

67
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And the village pond dried up, too, they tell.

68
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That is true,

69
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I was new married that year.
That was the first summer in the reign of our liege Lord’s father,

70
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old King Edward, a blessed memory.

71
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A knight came here to proclaim the crowning before all the people of Sambolt.

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So, you are 52, John Den?

73
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Am I, sir?

74
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How do you know when Ralph of Shellow was born?

75
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Sir, my daughter Agnes,

76
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she will be 23 next Saint Lucy’s day.

77
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And the nurse who suckled her after she was born
then went on to suckle the baby boy, Ralph.

78
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So Ralph would be 21, now.

79
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As the aforesaid Ralph has sufficiently proved his age in this court,

80
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and appears likewise by the look of his body
to be of full age, namely 21 years,

81
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he is to have possession of his inheritance.
Be it so recorded.

82
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Most mediaeval courts were like this, parish pump affairs,

83
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where the law meant only what custom and practice said it was.

84
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This was where you heard the latest international goings-on,

85
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intrigue, scandal plus great entertainment.

86
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All set to music by the popgroup/newsmen of the day,
the troubadours.

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Even when it was normal to have a good memory,
these people were incredible.

88
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Some of them could repeat a thousand words after hearing them just once.

89
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And the news and stories went round the country fast,

90
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because from time to time, the troubadours would get together for a meet.

91
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Well, anywhere those mediaeval megastars went,

92
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they must have let everybody down
with an awfully dull thud when they left.

93
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After all that, you can imagine how local country life must have felt:

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Empty, drab, dull, banal, prosaic is the word that floats to mind.

95
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But “prosaic” is the last thing that it was.
There was no prose. Even everyday life was poetic,

96
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but not in our arty sense of the word.
Rhyme, in an oral world,

97
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was the best way to keep facts in your head.

98
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Calendar?  30 days hath September, April June and November.

99
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Health hints?  Ne’er cast a cloud till May be out.

100
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Weather forecast?  Red sky at night,
shepherds delight, red sky in the morning,

101
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shepherd's warning.

102
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There was a rhyme for everything from business to beekeeping. It was a talkative world.

103
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And if you were rich enough to get letters, they were read to you.

104
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Or if you could read, you read them to yourself aloud.

105
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If you ran a business, the auditing was just that,
hearing the accounts being read to you aloud.

106
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That's what “auditing” means.
Universities had a whole course on dictation.

107
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And in the middle of all this “blah, blah, blah”,
what little writing did get done,

108
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on animal skins that cost an arm and a leg,
was a very rare and special activity.

109
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And since most of it got done in church, the act of writing itself, was also--

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mystical.

111
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The people involved were very much aware that
what they were doing was keeping knowledge,

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above all, holy knowledge, alive by their copying.

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This was how books got done, you would get one copy and made ten.

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And by the 14th century, every monastery
would have these little cubicles

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where monks who could read and write,
spent months in cramped, frozen conditions,

116
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painfully performing what they saw as an act of worship.

117
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Even their tools and materials had holy meaning.

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The ruler - a straight line to God,

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the split nib - the love of God and your neighbour,

120
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the blank parchment - a clear conscience to fill with goodness,

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the penknife - the sharp fear of God.

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And as they mumbled the words they were copying to themselves,

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you could hear knowledge, sounding in the cold,
vaulted air of their churches.

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Small wonder all this ‘scribble scribble’ got hidden away in safe, dark corners,

125
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it could take a year to finish one book.

126
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And what with all the expensive illumination,

127
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not to mention the gold leaf for the extra special words,

128
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these manuscripts could end up more like sacred objects of veneration

129
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than just words on a page.

130
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So that is something else in the way they thought about writing.

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It wasn't something you would ever criticise or question.

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That was why so much of it was full of mistakes.
You copied any mistakes there were,

133
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as if the words were untouchable images.

134
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You know, the fact that this stuff survived at all
for me to hold in my hand is a miracle.

135
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Not just because there were so few,

136
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or because the manuscripts got written in monasteries lost, like this one,

137
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in some Godforsaken wilderness, if you will forgive the phrase, in Italy,

138
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but because the monks in these lost monasteries,
lost the manuscripts.

139
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Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say,
“they didn't know how to find them”,

140
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or “they didn't know they had them in the first place”.
Come in and I will show you why.

141
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Apart from the fact that your average monastery library

142
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was as likely as not to be just some kind of rumpus room
where anything spare got dumped,

143
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look at the dump.
Pens, scrolls, ink, parchment, manuscripts, books, cobwebs,

144
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mediaeval higgledy-piggledy.
It wasn't that they were untidy,

145
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they just didn't file things for logical reasons.

146
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There wasn't enough material to warrant alphabetical indexing.

147
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The sum total of their knowledge wasn't enough to divide up into separate subjects.

148
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So, to find what you were looking for, you had to hunt around a bit.

149
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Even then, it wasn't easy, you would have to open every scroll

150
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to find out what it was about.
And the books had titles alright,

151
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but they wrote them according to how the book usually got put down.

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On the spine, on the back, on the page edges.

153
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As a matter of fact, this one is a very good example of the bind they were in.

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It is called “Sermones Bonaventurae”.

155
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It means “The Sermons of Saint Bonaventure.”
Well, kind of.

156
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It could mean, “The Sermons of Saint Bonaventure,”

157
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or it could mean
“sermons written by an ordinary bloke called Bonaventure”

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or “sermons owned by a Bonaventure,”
or preached, or copied,

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or “sermons owned by a church of St Bonaventure”

160
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or, worse of all, none of that.

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The Sermons of Bonaventure might
just be the first thing in this book.

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What else is in here?  Who knows?
You see what I mean about things getting lost?

163
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How much got lost, just because it couldn't be retrieved?

164
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But even when it could, it was of very limited value.

165
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Take the Monastery Chronicle.
A kind of diary that they would update when anything happened.

166
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All the news that was fit to pen.

167
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And, since most people spent their lives in places
like this, this was everything there was to know.

168
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War, plague, famine, life, death. All the facts about the world.

169
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But, since nobody went further afield
than 7 miles and got home before dark,

170
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what people who could write, wrote about was a very small world,

171
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and that was true everywhere.

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There was one exception to all this isolationism.

173
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The monasteries got visited from time to time
by the fellow whose job it was

174
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to take the book of the dead around and
write in who had died since his last visit.

175
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And with no roads, that was likely ten years.

176
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But strangely enough, it was death that would change everything.

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The Black Death that turned every peasant’s life
upside down, if he had survived it, that is,

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because it made his labour a rare and much better-paid commodity.

179
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So few survived, they inherited extra land, they got more wages,

180
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so they had more kids.

181
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And as the population went up,
somebody had to feed all the extra mouths, no?

182
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Well, you don't have to be much of an economist
to guess what happened then.

183
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By the end of 14th century, there was an economic boom

184
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that had everybody reaching for their account books
to tot up the fortune they were about to make.

185
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All over Europe, everybody with anything to sell

186
00:15:29,721 --> 00:15:34,273
loaded up their wagon and headed off for the nearest built-up area.

187
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To where the money was, for a piece of the action.

188
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Along every country lane, as the demand rose
with the population and the spare cash,

189
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people started slipping people something new, the bill.

190
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For the local yokels, the biggest attraction in the big city,

191
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or, as we would describe it ‘tiny village’,
was a weird but very popular law of the time,

192
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that said “if you managed to stay long enough in town,

193
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your boss couldn't force you back to clod hopping,
you were a free man”.

194
00:16:14,406 --> 00:16:18,317
So towns took off like a rocket, roads got built.

195
00:16:30,348 --> 00:16:33,258
And as the produce and the goods flooded into the towns,

196
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they started having enough surplus wealth to pay for craftsmen

197
00:16:36,357 --> 00:16:39,954
who spent their time making things people didn't need, but wanted.

198
00:16:41,738 --> 00:16:44,616
Trade exploded, markets went up everywhere.

199
00:16:44,632 --> 00:16:48,402
They even started featuring exotic special offers from foreign parts.

200
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Above all, they got a boost from,

201
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well, what everybody had been doing since I started talking about it.

202
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Did you notice?  The paperwork.

203
00:16:56,945 --> 00:17:00,293
Amazing invention, paper, all over the place by 1400.

204
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Just in time to solve the problems of a world with everything going that way.

205
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Trade, the professions, banking diplomacy,
government, you name it.

206
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And especially, the reason why all this hoopla
was happening in the first place:

207
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the unfortunate matter of the Black Death

208
00:17:14,984 --> 00:17:17,566
and, the delicate business of inheritance.

209
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I mean everybody was a lot richer, sure.

210
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If you could get your hands on all the lovely money,
and we all know how difficult that can be.

211
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It was in the legal eagles’ interests to keep that as
complicated and lengthy as possible.

212
00:17:41,221 --> 00:17:43,568
So, with half the entire population of Europe

213
00:17:43,630 --> 00:17:48,074
rying to prove that they were the ones
Aunt Jemima meant to leave her money to,

214
00:17:48,168 --> 00:17:51,453
the demand for documentation was nothing short of a nightmare.

215
00:17:51,938 --> 00:17:55,818
You can imagine the pressure on those
unfortunate few around who could use a pen.

216
00:17:56,507 --> 00:17:59,338
And by the time they had worked out how to get the most out of them,

217
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writer’s cramp wasn't the word!

218
00:18:10,149 --> 00:18:14,718
Since one of the first things the towns
did when trade went up, was open schools,

219
00:18:14,764 --> 00:18:17,721
you no longer had to be religious to learn to read and write

220
00:18:17,800 --> 00:18:20,115
and get a job in the new manuscript factories,

221
00:18:20,319 --> 00:18:24,731
where scribes, on piece work, tried to keep up with that novel idea,

222
00:18:24,934 --> 00:18:27,015
filling in forms.

223
00:18:28,799 --> 00:18:32,851
And none more popular than this one. It is called ‘an indulgence’

224
00:18:33,023 --> 00:18:38,139
and, by the early 15th century,
everybody was passing them around like spiritual IOUs.

225
00:18:38,484 --> 00:18:42,067
The idea was that you bought them from the Church and they got you,

226
00:18:42,144 --> 00:18:44,397
or somebody you gave them to, kind of

227
00:18:44,569 --> 00:18:47,980
credit against penance you might have to do for sins confessed,

228
00:18:48,215 --> 00:18:50,875
or even for sins you hadn't yet committed.

229
00:18:53,034 --> 00:18:56,586
Well, with all the money and good times and general party atmosphere

230
00:18:56,587 --> 00:18:59,292
after the doom and gloom of the Black Death era,

231
00:18:59,402 --> 00:19:02,343
there was enough sinning, or thinking about it, going on

232
00:19:02,406 --> 00:19:06,192
to keep the indulgence writers busy until their ink ran out.

233
00:19:08,398 --> 00:19:12,247
From the Church’s point of view,
strictly speaking, the indulgences weren't

234
00:19:12,248 --> 00:19:15,235
supposed to be affected by the commercial side of life.

235
00:19:15,282 --> 00:19:18,379
But, considering they introduced a sliding scale of payment,

236
00:19:18,442 --> 00:19:22,823
the more you were worth, the higher the price,
it did look as if all you had to do,

237
00:19:22,854 --> 00:19:25,389
penance-wise, to cash in,

238
00:19:25,390 --> 00:19:27,032
was fork out.

239
00:19:33,368 --> 00:19:35,950
You could also get one by coming here to Rocamadour,

240
00:19:35,951 --> 00:19:39,376
in southern France, on a holy package tour.

241
00:19:40,424 --> 00:19:44,007
If you made it on this one, you popped into the Shrine of the Black Madonna here,

242
00:19:44,148 --> 00:19:48,231
said a prayer, popped back out again, and got your indulgence.

243
00:19:48,339 --> 00:19:51,625
And you got it because you had done what pilgrims all over the place were doing

244
00:19:51,672 --> 00:19:55,786
to earn forgiveness for some sin or other, you climbed all the way up here.

245
00:20:18,145 --> 00:20:22,604
Here, you got an indulgence by climbing to the shrine on your knees.

246
00:20:22,605 --> 00:20:26,750
And, besides your indulgence, you got something else.

247
00:20:29,206 --> 00:20:33,086
The pilgrim’s mirror, in which you were supposed
to capture the image of the holy shrine.

248
00:20:33,149 --> 00:20:36,622
Only this was offered by the local mafia,

249
00:20:36,779 --> 00:20:42,239
the petty crooks and hawkers that clustered like
flies around the sacred shrines of Europe,

250
00:20:42,395 --> 00:20:46,306
hoping to separate some sinful sucker from his money for,

251
00:20:46,557 --> 00:20:47,245
well,

252
00:20:47,589 --> 00:20:51,031
much the same kind of trash they try to palm you off with today.

253
00:21:06,076 --> 00:21:08,654
Oh, there was a fortune to be made out of pilgrims alright.

254
00:21:09,068 --> 00:21:11,334
And if something hadn't gone disastrously wrong

255
00:21:11,421 --> 00:21:13,412
with similar profit-making plans

256
00:21:13,687 --> 00:21:18,243
by certain German gents to sell trinkets
and these special mirrors and such

257
00:21:18,244 --> 00:21:21,798
to the tourists at the centenary fair in the Holy city of Aachen

258
00:21:22,135 --> 00:21:24,904
(the disaster being they got the date of the fair wrong by one year),

259
00:21:25,233 --> 00:21:29,770
the fellow whose mistake it was wouldn't have had
to think up an alternative way of making money

260
00:21:29,864 --> 00:21:34,558
to pay his partners back the money he had borrowed
from them for the ill-fated venture, in the first place.

261
00:21:36,263 --> 00:21:39,861
This, err, idiot with the world's worst sense of timing

262
00:21:40,284 --> 00:21:42,270
was a goldsmith from Mainz.

263
00:21:42,427 --> 00:21:48,153
And when in, um, 1439, the full horror
of his financial predicament came home to him,

264
00:21:48,482 --> 00:21:52,284
he hurriedly told his partners not to worry,
they would make a million a different way,

265
00:21:52,597 --> 00:21:55,069
out of another great idea he had been thinking about,

266
00:21:55,350 --> 00:21:58,917
a goldmine of an idea, so secret,

267
00:21:59,120 --> 00:22:03,626
that each of the partners couldn't even pass it on to his heirs when he died.

268
00:22:04,674 --> 00:22:07,209
Well, it was a gold mine

269
00:22:07,475 --> 00:22:11,105
and one of the greatest secrets in Western history, as it turned out.

270
00:22:11,386 --> 00:22:15,548
Because at one stroke, it was to solve everybody's problem.

271
00:22:15,752 --> 00:22:19,084
Lawyers, bankers, beaurocrats, merchants, everybody.

272
00:22:19,397 --> 00:22:23,402
And it was also to take away that extraordinary memory of theirs,

273
00:22:23,935 --> 00:22:24,780
forever.

274
00:22:41,334 --> 00:22:45,652
This was the secret process that was to
change the course of Western civilisation:

275
00:22:46,121 --> 00:22:50,721
File a shape on one end of a small, iron block,
place the block shape down,

276
00:22:52,755 --> 00:22:56,635
hammer the pattern of the shape into a small bar of soft metal, like copper.

277
00:22:56,823 --> 00:23:00,516
Then, slide this metal mould into the bottom of a frame,

278
00:23:00,609 --> 00:23:02,565
spring loaded to hold it tight.

279
00:23:03,270 --> 00:23:05,945
Turn the frame over, and pour a small amount of hot,

280
00:23:05,946 --> 00:23:09,481
alloy metal into the hole containing the mould.

281
00:23:13,235 --> 00:23:15,598
The hot metal fills the tiny moulded shape.

282
00:23:15,832 --> 00:23:19,806
Leave to cool for a minute and there

283
00:23:20,026 --> 00:23:23,921
is the secret that its goldsmith inventor
Johann Gutenberg was so paranoid about,

284
00:23:24,094 --> 00:23:26,472
the secret that would change everything.

285
00:23:26,659 --> 00:23:28,975
A letter you can print with.

286
00:23:40,630 --> 00:23:45,887
All the letter blocks are the same size,
so you can set them in any order and they fit equally.

287
00:23:46,059 --> 00:23:49,204
Standardised, interchangeable typeface.

288
00:23:49,376 --> 00:23:53,491
And, since they are all the same size,
it is easy to line them up in rows

289
00:23:53,492 --> 00:23:57,111
to make a neat, straight edged square or an oblong of print

290
00:23:57,112 --> 00:24:00,225
to set, face up, on the press.

291
00:24:04,949 --> 00:24:08,939
Cover the upturned letter shapes with ink,
and then use a screwdriven plate

292
00:24:08,940 --> 00:24:12,334
to press a sheet of paper down on to the letters.

293
00:24:19,061 --> 00:24:21,455
And there, inside the paper frame,

294
00:24:21,580 --> 00:24:25,695
instant writing you could reproduce exactly,
as many times as you wanted.

295
00:24:25,789 --> 00:24:30,670
Goodbye clerical error, hello the letter-perfect work
of the travelling printer.

296
00:24:44,171 --> 00:24:48,677
By 1490, printers had arrived and set up shop in Cologne,

297
00:24:48,678 --> 00:24:53,245
Bahl, Rome, Venice, Paris, Nurenburg, Utrecht,

298
00:24:53,246 --> 00:24:57,000
Milan, Naples, Florence Augsburg, Lyons,

299
00:24:57,001 --> 00:25:00,865
Valencia, Krakow, Bruges, Westminster and a dozen more.

300
00:25:01,224 --> 00:25:03,461
And, wherever they unpacked their gear,

301
00:25:03,696 --> 00:25:06,278
the last straw for the handwriting hacks

302
00:25:06,325 --> 00:25:09,829
was that these guys filled a page 400 times cheaper.

303
00:25:10,251 --> 00:25:13,145
That turned the screw for good on old-fashioned penmanship.

304
00:25:37,616 --> 00:25:40,182
This was the first door the printers knocked on, the Church’s.

305
00:25:40,370 --> 00:25:44,203
It was, after all, a kind of gigantic
book-of-the-month club, waiting to happen.

306
00:25:44,438 --> 00:25:47,410
Hundreds of thousands of priests, with sermons

307
00:25:47,411 --> 00:25:50,227
and prayers and services and teaching to do, all year round.

308
00:25:50,649 --> 00:25:55,953
The market for their reference books:
Bibles, missals, breviaries was colossal.

309
00:25:56,438 --> 00:25:58,738
So, the first bulk orders came from the bishops.

310
00:25:59,160 --> 00:26:02,133
Made sense, printing was a great chance to crack the whip,

311
00:26:02,243 --> 00:26:06,264
standardise worship and keep it standard with approved texts.

312
00:26:06,732 --> 00:26:11,786
But for the printers, the real smash bestseller was the indulgencies.

313
00:26:11,926 --> 00:26:14,414
Thanks to Gutenberg, they were now, more than ever,

314
00:26:14,570 --> 00:26:17,480
what we would call a license to print money.

315
00:26:24,536 --> 00:26:27,086
By 1517, the presses were churning out

316
00:26:27,087 --> 00:26:31,029
an even more lucrative indulgence.
A kind of ‘bonus issue’:

317
00:26:31,030 --> 00:26:35,033
same price, double the credit.
The plan was to use the money

318
00:26:35,034 --> 00:26:39,570
to brighten up the churches, build theological colleges,
pay Michelangelo’s bill.

319
00:26:39,711 --> 00:26:43,075
And, above all, to give the Pope a place worthy of his position,

320
00:26:43,246 --> 00:26:46,751
and use indulgence money to build a new Saint Peter’s.

321
00:26:46,752 --> 00:26:49,504
No expense was to be spared.

322
00:27:14,881 --> 00:27:18,260
Well, with all that lovely money around, it was bound to go rotten.

323
00:27:18,400 --> 00:27:21,530
In Wittenburg, East Germany, an indulgence sale con,

324
00:27:21,531 --> 00:27:23,845
dreamed up to pay-off the Archbishop’s debts,

325
00:27:23,846 --> 00:27:26,567
got the local professor of theology flaming mad.

326
00:27:26,770 --> 00:27:31,135
A hardline reformist, anti-Rome anyway,
he decided to do something about it all.

327
00:27:31,339 --> 00:27:34,343
On October 31, 1517,

328
00:27:34,499 --> 00:27:37,973
Martin Luther nailed up a few comments.

329
00:27:52,319 --> 00:27:56,653
Luther listed 95 complaints, things like “forgiveness shouldn't be sold,

330
00:27:56,654 --> 00:28:00,080
the Pope should have no power, we need a wholesale cleanup”,

331
00:28:00,126 --> 00:28:05,790
and so on. He sent one copy to be Archbishop, one to his boss, and sat back.

332
00:28:09,627 --> 00:28:15,212
And then, because of printing, something happened
that was to shake Europe to its foundations,

333
00:28:15,322 --> 00:28:18,216
and kick-off one of the major institutions we live with today.

334
00:28:18,686 --> 00:28:23,098
You see, Luther sent a few extra copies
of these complaints to his friends,

335
00:28:23,285 --> 00:28:25,883
and the friends promptly had them reprinted and sent on.

336
00:28:26,101 --> 00:28:29,497
Within a fortnight, what Luther had expected to be

337
00:28:29,512 --> 00:28:33,189
a private, academic, Church discussion was all over Germany.

338
00:28:33,533 --> 00:28:36,005
Within a month, all over Europe.

339
00:28:37,914 --> 00:28:40,151
Before he knew what had happened, Luther found himself in

340
00:28:40,152 --> 00:28:42,451
a head-on confrontation with the Pope.

341
00:28:42,717 --> 00:28:45,893
And, also because of printing, there was no turning back.

342
00:28:46,268 --> 00:28:48,787
Other people took up the fight for or against him,

343
00:28:48,788 --> 00:28:50,618
and had their views printed.

344
00:28:51,025 --> 00:28:56,032
Within one year, the first full-scale propaganda war was on.

345
00:28:59,332 --> 00:29:03,917
Printing spread the rebellion like wildfire
and they soon dropped the well-mannered theology.

346
00:29:04,167 --> 00:29:09,001
The broadsheets, going onto the streets,
were vitriolic, blood and guts stuff.

347
00:29:10,753 --> 00:29:13,663
These cheap handouts represented the greatest threat

348
00:29:13,664 --> 00:29:16,213
the Roman church had ever faced.

349
00:29:18,404 --> 00:29:22,988
Here, in his study in Wittenburg,
Luther became the first person to use printing

350
00:29:23,019 --> 00:29:28,025
as a mass medium. In three years,
his books have sold over 300,000 copies.

351
00:29:28,480 --> 00:29:32,907
He triggered the first real nationalism by writing in German for Germans

352
00:29:33,064 --> 00:29:36,302
about how German princes should get involved in reform

353
00:29:36,490 --> 00:29:38,728
to save Germany from the evils of Rome.

354
00:29:40,011 --> 00:29:43,844
He gave the language a shot in the arm with his great Bible,

355
00:29:44,438 --> 00:29:49,288
written in German, not Latin.
He became the first recognisable public figure,

356
00:29:49,382 --> 00:29:51,995
when his face appeared in printed illustrations.

357
00:29:53,434 --> 00:29:57,189
His techniques all came together in the pamphlets:

358
00:29:57,611 --> 00:30:01,929
coloured anti-Pope cartoons for the illiterates,
German for the locals,

359
00:30:02,131 --> 00:30:07,388
Latin for the churchmen. But in any form,
the message was clear. Pppppht!

360
00:30:08,984 --> 00:30:12,098
Luther gave people something they had never had before:

361
00:30:12,316 --> 00:30:17,683
the chance to have their say, in safety, to a wide audience,

362
00:30:17,745 --> 00:30:23,471
on the printed page. His Protestant Reformation,
born of the printing press,

363
00:30:23,596 --> 00:30:25,363
knocked Authority for six.

364
00:30:25,755 --> 00:30:28,148
Of course, Authority struck back with the same weapons.

365
00:30:28,430 --> 00:30:31,262
The Church produced a hit-list of prohibited books,

366
00:30:31,763 --> 00:30:35,846
kings made people sign loyalty oaths, bureaucracy flourished,

367
00:30:36,190 --> 00:30:39,335
central control was much easier when you could print the laws.

368
00:30:39,710 --> 00:30:43,825
And, if all else failed with something you didn't like,

369
00:30:45,984 --> 00:30:47,595
you could always burn it.

370
00:31:33,030 --> 00:31:36,503
Well, there just weren’t enough bonfires to burn all the books,

371
00:31:36,504 --> 00:31:38,991
and the new kind of thinking they encouraged.

372
00:31:39,210 --> 00:31:43,309
The printing houses were bringing people
together that had never met before.

373
00:31:43,387 --> 00:31:45,171
The craftsmen who did the printing,

374
00:31:45,405 --> 00:31:50,334
the tradesmen and bureaucrats and intellectuals
who all wanted to buy the books they needed,

375
00:31:50,506 --> 00:31:53,494
the scholars who did the writing and the editing of the material.

376
00:31:53,650 --> 00:31:57,499
These printshops became centres for the exchange of new ideas.

377
00:31:57,546 --> 00:32:00,425
Full of political refugees, foreign translators,

378
00:32:00,426 --> 00:32:04,353
people who would bring a wide variety of experience to the decision

379
00:32:04,462 --> 00:32:06,371
about what should be printed.

380
00:32:06,464 --> 00:32:10,000
You know the surprising thing?

381
00:32:10,094 --> 00:32:12,472
No instant intellectual revolution.

382
00:32:12,722 --> 00:32:16,415
Bibles first, then the old favourites, including a lot of rubbish.

383
00:32:16,416 --> 00:32:20,248
And then the classics people had been reading before,
in manuscripts.

384
00:32:20,967 --> 00:32:26,537
Saved a lot of them, printing.
I mean, one rare manuscript can go astray,

385
00:32:26,803 --> 00:32:30,277
but not thousands of printed versions.
And there were that many.

386
00:32:30,480 --> 00:32:32,999
Everybody but everybody wanted the new books.

387
00:32:33,124 --> 00:32:35,502
A bit like the high-technology craze today.

388
00:32:38,522 --> 00:32:40,102
Now, with a market like that,

389
00:32:40,274 --> 00:32:44,139
it won’t surprise you to learn that the first
printers weren't egg-head academics.

390
00:32:44,264 --> 00:32:48,316
And that they set up their shops, not at the universities,
but where the money was,

391
00:32:48,426 --> 00:32:50,882
because somebody was going to make a fortune.

392
00:32:51,226 --> 00:32:55,075
All he had to do was find the investors, buy the plant,

393
00:32:55,231 --> 00:32:58,751
hire the labour, fix the production schedules, analyse the market,

394
00:32:58,783 --> 00:33:01,521
advertise the goods, and undercut the competition.

395
00:33:01,646 --> 00:33:06,152
So, the first printers were what they sound,
they were the first real capitalists.

396
00:33:06,511 --> 00:33:10,939
And, boy, did they ever produce?
8 million books in the first 40 years,

397
00:33:11,174 --> 00:33:13,427
and then the revolution started.

398
00:33:13,693 --> 00:33:18,324
Vast amounts of information moving
around for the first time in a mass market:

399
00:33:18,511 --> 00:33:22,188
do-it-yourself books on building, accountancy, design, surveying,

400
00:33:22,189 --> 00:33:26,788
pottery, tool handling, you name it.
And fashion became international,

401
00:33:26,898 --> 00:33:30,199
or rather, “if the Italians did it, so did you”.

402
00:33:30,747 --> 00:33:35,440
It was printing, after all, that gave Europe the Florentine Renaissance.

403
00:33:36,050 --> 00:33:40,009
Above all, printing made information a commodity for the first time.

404
00:33:40,025 --> 00:33:43,545
With maps and calendars and almanacs
and weights and measures and so on,

405
00:33:43,655 --> 00:33:46,893
daily life took a rather practical turn, after that.

406
00:33:47,503 --> 00:33:51,681
But the biggest shock to the system was
what happened to knowledge, itself.

407
00:33:51,962 --> 00:33:55,342
Once the ancient traditional authority on
something or other was down in print,

408
00:33:55,592 --> 00:33:59,629
then for the first time, a whole mass of people could go out and check up on it.

409
00:33:59,863 --> 00:34:03,118
Which, of course, a whole mass of people promptly did.

410
00:34:17,417 --> 00:34:20,843
It all started with the Herbalists, for a very good reason.

411
00:34:20,984 --> 00:34:23,910
Out in the fields was where medicine came from.

412
00:34:23,972 --> 00:34:28,352
A pharmacist would take his new
printed copy of some classic on plants,

413
00:34:28,446 --> 00:34:31,904
and see how it compared with the real thing.

414
00:34:33,985 --> 00:34:38,209
From 1550 on, the science of ‘direct observation’ flowered,

415
00:34:38,350 --> 00:34:39,821
because there was some point to it.

416
00:34:40,227 --> 00:34:43,638
Now you could get easy access to what nature was supposed to be like,

417
00:34:43,639 --> 00:34:49,270
thanks to printing, you could, as easily,
produced an updated version of the facts.

418
00:34:49,301 --> 00:34:54,182
From the early 16th century on, every scientific discipline

419
00:34:54,323 --> 00:34:56,576
was reaching for its pencils.

420
00:35:02,129 --> 00:35:03,538
And, for the first time,

421
00:35:03,569 --> 00:35:07,652
what they were describing wasn't a rehash
of what somebody else had said.

422
00:35:07,917 --> 00:35:11,625
And, it was time to carve out new careers in technical drawing,

423
00:35:11,719 --> 00:35:13,940
thanks to the fact that printing presses

424
00:35:14,065 --> 00:35:18,540
were just as good as printing pictures
as they were at reproducing words.

425
00:35:23,045 --> 00:35:25,689
This is the beginning of modern science, here,

426
00:35:25,705 --> 00:35:28,584
with the 16th century woodblock illustrations.

427
00:35:28,710 --> 00:35:31,495
Because, although the printing press was able to produce

428
00:35:31,496 --> 00:35:34,749
the collected opinions of every expert in the field on something,

429
00:35:34,920 --> 00:35:37,752
there was no substitute for the mechanical reproduction

430
00:35:37,893 --> 00:35:39,864
of what it was that you were looking at.

431
00:35:40,006 --> 00:35:43,135
The new catchphrase in printing circles became

432
00:35:43,136 --> 00:35:46,577
“Never mind the fancy chat, show me”.

433
00:35:56,574 --> 00:36:00,250
One picture worth a thousand words?  Well, the new illustrations

434
00:36:00,391 --> 00:36:02,519
did get rid of a lot of verbal diarrhoea.

435
00:36:02,676 --> 00:36:07,541
Style, in general, became less purple,
more down to earth, exact, informative.

436
00:36:07,979 --> 00:36:10,357
That is why poetry became poetic,

437
00:36:10,544 --> 00:36:14,769
and prose took over the facts because
you didn't need rhyme to remember any more.

438
00:36:14,926 --> 00:36:19,040
You didn't need to remember.
If you read the latest, most definitive book on something,

439
00:36:19,166 --> 00:36:21,387
well you were up to speed with the best in the field.

440
00:36:24,046 --> 00:36:28,537
All of which led to one modern institution
without which we would all grind to a halt.

441
00:36:28,538 --> 00:36:32,557
That literary masterpiece known as ‘the expense account’.

442
00:36:33,590 --> 00:36:37,564
Already by the early 16th century, if you had literary leaning,

443
00:36:37,565 --> 00:36:41,960
or you wanted to get rich, or pick up
an author or two for your literary agency,

444
00:36:41,961 --> 00:36:45,449
or get yourself published,
or just get drunk at an international get together,

445
00:36:45,622 --> 00:36:50,394
you did, then, what you still do today,
you came here to the Frankfurt book fair.

446
00:36:50,582 --> 00:36:52,005
It was the first and the biggest

447
00:36:52,006 --> 00:36:54,649
of the international book fairs they started to hold all over Europe,

448
00:36:54,806 --> 00:37:01,048
where, by 1500, the presses were churning it out
all the way from Iceland to Italy.

449
00:37:04,866 --> 00:37:10,389
The effect?  Well, for a start,
printing gave Europe its national frontiers

450
00:37:10,623 --> 00:37:14,347
when the dictionaries and the grammars froze the languages

451
00:37:14,348 --> 00:37:17,914
pretty much into their modern form
because they fixed the spelling and the syntax.

452
00:37:18,461 --> 00:37:20,605
And, as linguistic nationalism grew,

453
00:37:20,777 --> 00:37:23,374
the previous form of international communication,

454
00:37:23,375 --> 00:37:26,926
Latin, began a long, slow, decline.

455
00:37:28,897 --> 00:37:32,151
Everybody's sense of identity,
national as well as personal, was boosted.

456
00:37:32,198 --> 00:37:36,078
People now knew who wrote something,
because they started putting his name on it.

457
00:37:36,109 --> 00:37:38,894
And the publishers started doing the same thing with their trademarks.

458
00:37:39,129 --> 00:37:42,477
They started promoting like crazy, with posters,

459
00:37:42,633 --> 00:37:46,357
mail order lists and catalogues.

460
00:37:46,498 --> 00:37:49,502
The boost to education, in general, from reference books was enormous

461
00:37:49,611 --> 00:37:54,821
and now people no longer had to go through years
and years of apprenticeship to learn something,

462
00:37:54,915 --> 00:37:57,419
thanks to an avalanche of do-it-yourself manuals

463
00:37:57,420 --> 00:37:59,765
that taught them industrial skills.

464
00:38:04,161 --> 00:38:08,135
These modern examples of high tech
gobbledygook, are the direct descendants

465
00:38:08,136 --> 00:38:12,218
of those 16th century first attempts to provide easy handbooks for

466
00:38:12,219 --> 00:38:16,208
every kind of craft and discipline.
Starting, as you might expect,

467
00:38:16,209 --> 00:38:19,901
with the systems that would increase production in every field.

468
00:38:59,954 --> 00:39:03,021
With books that gave information like this to anybody,

469
00:39:03,052 --> 00:39:07,949
the age of reliance on old peoples’ memories, was gone for good.

470
00:39:22,576 --> 00:39:27,426
This is a list of what was in the first, big, private
library of printed books in Elizabethan England.

471
00:39:27,661 --> 00:39:33,418
Look, it says “two great books of statutes”.
There’s one.

472
00:39:33,731 --> 00:39:37,110
This is a printed book of the Law of the Land.

473
00:39:37,173 --> 00:39:40,442
Not oral tradition any more.
Down in black and white to refer to,

474
00:39:40,443 --> 00:39:43,462
without the aid the old peoples’ recall. Definitive.

475
00:39:43,634 --> 00:39:47,139
With this, you can't plead ignorance anymore.

476
00:39:48,672 --> 00:39:52,286
Sir William Moore, this is his house and family still live here,

477
00:39:52,333 --> 00:39:55,869
also had printed books on history,

478
00:39:56,540 --> 00:40:02,470
pharmacology, medicine, the classics, and maps, almanacs,

479
00:40:02,752 --> 00:40:10,199
ballads, surveying, geometry, surgery,
how to cure horses and a lot more, 140 in all.

480
00:40:10,200 --> 00:40:13,109
Only two generations after the inventing of printing.

481
00:40:13,625 --> 00:40:18,663
In 1556, Moore was a rare example of a short-lived phenomena.

482
00:40:18,851 --> 00:40:22,512
The man who, because of printing, could know everything.

483
00:40:22,652 --> 00:40:26,016
Because it was collected here for him to reach out and take.

484
00:40:26,141 --> 00:40:29,396
Where once you needed the physical
presence of people who knew things,

485
00:40:29,583 --> 00:40:31,852
now you could hold their minds in your hand.

486
00:40:32,728 --> 00:40:35,075
I said Moore was a temporary phenomenon

487
00:40:35,076 --> 00:40:38,001
because the very existence of print libraries all over Europe,

488
00:40:38,126 --> 00:40:39,628
was to trigger something

489
00:40:39,629 --> 00:40:43,789
that would explode what was known,
beyond any one man's ability to understand.

490
00:40:44,306 --> 00:40:45,354
That trigger was indexing.

491
00:40:51,048 --> 00:40:53,285
See, with hundreds of books,

492
00:40:53,286 --> 00:40:56,524
each one in the specialist subjects that printing permitted,

493
00:40:56,775 --> 00:41:01,156
you had to catalogue.
And with an index, you can cross-index,

494
00:41:01,328 --> 00:41:04,645
like this. Here is one of the new 16th century books,

495
00:41:04,646 --> 00:41:08,760
all about how to aim cannons more
accurately using surveying instruments.

496
00:41:08,822 --> 00:41:14,048
With a cross-index, you can see how surveying
is also related to other things.

497
00:41:14,251 --> 00:41:18,131
Let me show you using a modern cross- index,

498
00:41:18,554 --> 00:41:22,293
why cross-indexing is such a tremendous step forward.

499
00:41:22,294 --> 00:41:24,140
Start with surveying,

500
00:41:24,969 --> 00:41:28,395
Surveying..compass..geodesy..

501
00:41:29,177 --> 00:41:30,632
range finders

502
00:41:33,479 --> 00:41:37,907
range finders….Michelson .. naval gunnery…photography

503
00:41:41,991 --> 00:41:46,809
Photography…art…. children's literature…ballistics

504
00:41:52,739 --> 00:41:55,837
ballistics… and then all that stuff.

505
00:41:56,291 --> 00:41:58,747
The way going through that exercise,

506
00:41:58,748 --> 00:42:02,017
shows you how things and ideas might interrelate,

507
00:42:02,158 --> 00:42:04,849
is at the root of the process of change itself.

508
00:42:05,115 --> 00:42:09,198
Because when you put together two ideas
that you never thought fitted together before,

509
00:42:09,390 --> 00:42:10,688
you get a third idea.

510
00:42:11,158 --> 00:42:16,055
Thanks to cross-indexing, one and one make three.

511
00:42:16,418 --> 00:42:19,960
That's what our kind of change is all about,
in the modern world.

512
00:42:23,299 --> 00:42:26,178
Go back to ballistics, there, when I left off from the index.

513
00:42:26,491 --> 00:42:29,395
Here's a “one and one make three”, with ballistics.

514
00:42:35,603 --> 00:42:40,309
In the 1930s, the newly invented aeroplanes
made life hard for the gunners trying to shoot them.

515
00:42:40,722 --> 00:42:44,953
In order to get the ballistics right in the few
seconds they had, and so hit the planes,

516
00:42:45,354 --> 00:42:48,321
they came up with a machine for doing sums fast.

517
00:42:48,822 --> 00:42:52,914
Ballistics and arithmetic, just for shooting at planes.

518
00:42:53,277 --> 00:42:56,331
This is what we got as a result.

519
00:43:05,743 --> 00:43:06,820
The computer.

520
00:43:07,634 --> 00:43:11,939
And with a computer, I can tap the databanks of the world for my facts.

521
00:43:12,188 --> 00:43:15,332
And because of the computer-generated
rate of change with which we live,

522
00:43:15,593 --> 00:43:19,578
those facts are obsolete,
almost in the instant I access them.

523
00:43:20,161 --> 00:43:23,666
In here: cross-indexing at the speed of light.

524
00:43:25,749 --> 00:43:27,751
So, thanks to printing,

525
00:43:28,072 --> 00:43:31,656
we have a world where ‘fact’ doesn't mean the same thing it did before.

526
00:43:31,926 --> 00:43:35,411
Not definitive, checkable through your own experience,

527
00:43:35,541 --> 00:43:39,116
but fluid, one stage removed, transient.

528
00:43:39,596 --> 00:43:41,519
And if that is true of facts,

529
00:43:41,869 --> 00:43:45,234
what happens to standards, values, ethics

530
00:43:45,454 --> 00:43:47,226
when the facts they are based on,

531
00:43:47,857 --> 00:43:48,418
ren’t?

532
00:43:49,609 --> 00:43:53,274
What can you trust in a world where nothing, in the old sense,

533
00:43:53,454 --> 00:43:54,486
is real?

534
00:43:55,567 --> 00:43:56,428
Nothing.

535
00:43:57,910 --> 00:44:00,614
Roll Credits and Mix