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This codex was created in the first decade of the 12th century at Thorney Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Cambridgeshire. It is a compilation of texts, tables, maps and diagrams, and its importance for the cultural and intellectual history of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England has been recognized since the 16th century by historians, philologists, and scholars working in the fields of medieval science, monastic culture, and the history of the book.
In medieval thinking everything in the Universe consisted of the four Elements - Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. In the human body these corresponded to the four fluids - blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile - which in turn, according to the proportions in which they were mixed, produced four Humours - sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. The fact that there were also four cardinal directions, four winds, four seasons only confirmed the theory. Put into diagrammatic form, the whole scheme was perfectly symmetrical, convincing evidence that it must be true.
The Byrthferth diagram (named after the monk who set forth it) on folio 7v is the most famous part of the codex. It is a schematic diagram linking the Elements, the directions, the seasons and the Zodiac. From top clockwise: Earth (East), Water (South), Air (West), Fire (North).
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