Ezra the Scribe, from the Codex Amiatinus
Ezra rewriting the scriptures before a cupboard of books, painted about 700 at Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria. The inscription reads that when the sacred books had been consumed in the fires of war, Ezra repaired the damage — which is how the monastery that made it understood its own work.
Literacy in the post-Roman west did not vanish; it contracted into the institutions that had a use for it. Lay administration, which had produced the tax registers and law reports of the empire, largely stopped; the church, which needed accurate texts for the liturgy and the calendar, did not. The Codex Amiatinus is the whole Bible in one volume, written in Northumbria and carried to Italy as a gift — a book made at the far edge of the former empire and better than anything then available at its centre. See the decline of literacy outside the church.
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