Can all those who want to hear me. So.
Then I'll begin. Let's show you something more interesting to look at.
In the first week of these lectures, I looked at two complex bodies of evidence for medieval libraries.
Books that carry marks of institutional provenance and library catalogues that seek to portray a whole collection of books at a particular time.
We are accustomed to using this evidence in a simple way,
but I urged that it has the potential to answer bigger, more general questions than we're used to asking.
Today without losing sight of libraries as institutional holders of book collections,
I want to invite you to think about the same evidence as also a reflection of books owned by individuals.
No. It's in the nature of a database to atomised information and hamper good visual communication.
Something that I tried to avoid with MLG Be3, which retains much of the layout on the page.
The chance provided by the database to open up on screen details behind the single line
entry means that online information from the original card can be made available.
That was something that was very difficult for care in the printed book.
So where he has an italic e fakes liberals, he sacrificed giving the wording of Exlibris inscriptions on the grounds that they are generic,
and Exlibris is a simple signification of institutional ownership.
Despite the fact that the pattern over time in a particular house can be crucial for conveying how well managed the library was over time.
He did include the wording of inscriptions referring to donors or those that provide other non generic evidence of provenance.
And this list of donor dominated inscriptions occupies 100 pages.
Towards the back of the book, it's organised at first level by institution.
You know, if you're going from Bury in the book, you go to Bury in the appendix.
But the second level is organised alphabetically by the name of the donor.
And you don't have that information as you go from the main entry.
You go with the shelf. Mark So you're reading down in alphabetical list, looking for a shelf mark.
These 100 pages represent a considerable body of evidence for personal ownership of what are, by definition, library books.
I'm not conscious that it has ever been used as a resource.
In MLG b three. The data is invisible on the virtual cards behind each line.
That's a convenient arrangement for going from the entry for the book in the main listing to the detail behind it.
But it makes it extremely difficult for a general appraisal of the donor inscriptions
over time or by the distribution of donors between one kind of institution and another.
Our library catalogues could also provide the same kind of information.
Naming the donors of individual books or even listing books under a heading for a particular donor who gave one or some or many books.
We should also see that among our thousand plus library records, a large class are not catalogues.
But records of accession in most cases by gift from a named donor.
And another large class of records of intention to give not necessarily fulfilled.
A list in a monastic context of books given by an abbot we take to represent accession.
Sometimes bequests are recorded in the same way as, in effect, a receipt record.
A testament that leaves books to a particular institution or institutions is evidence of books
in private hands and potential evidence that the books went to their intended beneficiary.
This can sometimes be proven by matching a document to a book bearing an inscription with the name.
But it was a warning constantly repeated by Ian Doyle on the Medieval Library Catalogues Committee that with only a testament to go on,
one did not know whether the books were ever delivered or supposing they were, whether they were accessioned rather than sold on.
Let me give you some unsophisticated numbers. The corpus has included some 560 accession records.
That's out of a thousand plus records, of which testaments represent the great majority.
The aggregate number of entries as itemised in the additions from this class of record is around 6600 now as a proportion of documents.
This is by far the most numerous species of record.
6602. I mean that.
I'm seeing a 560 out of a thousand.
But as a proportion of the entries, 6600 out of a little over 50,000.
Is quite small in proportion. Between MLG and the Corpus.
We have nonetheless quite a lot of data here about books that passed from personal ownership into institutional ownership.
Now let's look at a couple of books.
The two I'm going to show you are both from fall back in my personal history when I wrote a dissertation on the Latin Lives of Irish Saints.
Both these books include a copy of The Life of St Modena by Geoffrey Abbott of Burton on Trent,
who created a local saint for Staffordshire with aid from the life of an Irish saint called Mona.
I first looked at these books 40 years ago.
And it was almost 30 years ago that Robert Bartlett first quizzed me about them at a time when he was thinking of editing this life.
The first one is, to my eye, obviously a private book, the layout of the page almost square, quite small.
It's 180 millimetres by 165 millimetres.
The near lack of any margin, the small handwriting where there is no particular need for such economy.
The minimal ruling. We have verticals, but horizontals are quite hard to see.
Are all signs that this that say this was an unprofessional copy made simply by someone who wanted to own the work.
The copyist could not easily buy the work. The photocopier had not yet been invented.
So he did what readers did for many centuries. He made his own copy.
The book in which this. Booklet.
Is now bound. It's a tiresome library binding which is stepped the small boy folio to top and bottom of every booklet.
The bell taking the picture has used a piece of paper so that you don't see the pages overlapping.
The the book comprises 25 textual items, not all of them complete in 26 gatherings.
And they range from grammar through Euclid to excerpts from papal letters going beyond what would find its way into the decree clause.
That strikes me as something quite recondite to find to a life of do under the handwriting.
Spreads across probably more than a generation when they were first bound together, I cannot say.
But at the end of the Middle Ages, they were certainly a single book.
With a label on the back cover recognisable but barely readable as that of Worcester Cathedral Priory.
And you have the Worcester press mock a and Raymond 11.
My guess is that these booklets, which most likely have more than one personal origin but not 25, were bound together.
Most likely at Worcester on this evidence and most likely in the 13th century.
And they just stayed there. The volume was still at Worcester when Humphry Wanly compiled the cataloguing manuscript to Anglia Hibernia in the 1690s.
Unless his evidence for Worcester was a significantly older list.
But by 1734, the book was in the Royal Collection.
So reading the signs, this was a personal book that became an institutional book.
Possibly the result of more than one donor. The maker of the copy of the life of Modena may well have been a monk if it has a Benedictine provenance.
But the opportunity to copy the life of Modena is unexplained.
Right this way. The second example.
Is another rather better and rather more complete copy of The Life of Morwenna, beginning on the Rector.
It is perhaps a little older than the personal copy we've just looked at.
It is not earlier than January 1198.
For in the rubric dashboard the red here in the rubric to his day miserere Concepcion
Assoumani Pope innocent the third is referred to as in accounts use papa to use.
And he was elected eighths of January 1198.
It's not very much later. I've said beginning of the 13th century in print when I discussed the reception of Innocence work in England.
This copy is one of a dozen made in different places in England and still surviving that the paleo graphical.
I would date to a 12 stroke 13 or s 13 in.
What they represent is the circulation of the new pope's book.
Written as Cardinal Luke Torrio in the winter of 1194 five.
To prove that he was not just a clever lawyer, but could do spirituality and was therefore worth electing as pope.
He published the book early in 1195, I think,
to improve his chances of election when the very old Celeste and the third eventually popped
his clogs and he gave out copies as booklets to Cardinals or other influential figures.
His election as pope in 1198 meant international demand.
And one or more booklets containing just the one text circulated in England from religious house to religious house.
At some, perhaps at many. A copy was made to keep and the booklet passed on.
Now the contents of this volume are an odd mixture.
The only other thing I've got a picture of is the first item, which is El Red of Rivas.
Life of Saint Edward the Confessor. With the fanciest initial in the book.
The the second text is El Ridge Life of King David of Scotland, written a bit earlier than the Life of Edward,
which shows King David's and Henry the second's descent from the West, Sex and Kings.
There is then a version of The Miracles of the Virgin as found also in Bible College Manuscript 240
together with two sermons on the Virgin by full bore two shot that are clearly tacked on to the miracles.
And then fourth is in the third steamers area.
Each of these work continues in the same choir from the previous text.
So the whole thing is a book not divisible.
And then Jeffrey of Burton's Life of Midwinter written, I think by the same hand.
But starting a new choir. The life is completed in four choirs, three regular ones, and the fourth with one added leaf.
So it is a self-standing unit within the manuscript. But apart from some difference in the initials later, even on this page you see green ink,
which we don't see in the rest of the book, apart from some difference in the initials.
It looks exactly like it was meant to be the.
Knowing what I know about the demon Azaria I conjecture that wherever this was written,
there was a scribe at work with a book of diverse texts in progress, unbound on his writing desk.
When the Pope's booklet arrived, a decision was taken to copy it.
And the decision to copy this life may represent similar opportunism that a copy had come to hand.
Though the text was, in this case, 50 years old.
It's not a widely known work. Besides the two copies I've shown you,
I found a by a by folio from the text used to bind a booklet of acts passed by a single session of Parliament in the time of Edward the sixth.
And we know from library catalogues of three copies tested Burton Abbey, where St Modwen was venerated.
All the catalogue is from the late 12th century.
There was one at Ramsay Abbey in the 14th century.
And copies were seen by Leland in Cistercian hands Revesby in Lincolnshire and by Bale in Benedictine hands at Glastonbury.
The nuns of Rumsey in Hampshire had an abbreviation in the 14th century.
It's in a collection of abbreviated saints lives that we find nowhere else.
It includes a significant proportion of female saints, and that may well have been a compilation made at Rumsey Abbey.
Now Care entered this manuscript initially under Burton in ML GB to galley proof stage.
He had been reading late in 1963 Roger Myners his new catalogue of the manuscripts in Balliol College.
And under manuscript to 40 miners mentioned that there was another copy of these of the miraculous of the virgin in.
A manuscript belonging to Francis Wormald, written from Bourton on Trent.
And correspondence survives between Wormald and care.
That refers to it as a bulletin book. You go to M two now and it's in rejects.
So this was rejecting something that had never been more publicly adverted to than in mind as entry for being little to 40.
But Care clearly was not satisfied with the idea that the life of Morwenna meant it was for Bourton, whereas Francis Wormald was.
Clearly the fact that we have copies from six of the places means that it's not evidence of provenance.
Now, coming a bit more recently, but still more than 20 years ago,
I was reading Tessa Webber's edition of the late 15th century Leicester Abbey catalogue in TypeScript.
In my capacity as general editor of the Corpus, when I recognised the ultimate itemisation of the rather mixed contents of this volume,
the Leicester catalogue uses second folios to your name was so demure that
some name was sent to your quote name most sublimely or in the Aylward text.
And at once I picked up the phone and called Michelle Brown in the British Library to ask her to check.
Did this match the manuscript? It did so great rejoicing.
The book could be proven to Leicester Abbey.
I could, and it had an annotation in the Leicester catalogue and reports another discovery about the manuscripts of Modwen as life to Robert Bartlett,
who was still at work on his edition. So it was at Leicester around 1490.
Soon after its entry in the Leicester catalogue, it went a wall.
It has an inscription by Hector reading Vicar of Radcliffe on saw who was vicar there between 1497 and 1509,
saying that it was his book and hands off. Ratliff once saw is in Nottinghamshire, but it's not very far from Leicester Abbey.
We don't know how it made the journey across the river.
But the manuscript remained in private collections until 1971.
So we've observed the differences between a personally made book and a professionally made book.
Both of them plausibly made in different circumstances within a monastic or possibly canonical context.
Is there any difference between a privately owned book and an institutionally owned book?
Not, I think one that can easily be seen.
Books without clear evidence of institutional provenance may nonetheless have been in libraries,
and lack of institutional marks does not mean private.
But that's ownership when we think about production. There is a long tradition of fusing into institutional ownership and institutional production.
I mean, the notion of the monastics scriptural.
It's a persistent idea in two senses. It has existed in the minds of antiquities for three or 400 years.
I suspect I haven't done the work to track it.
And the script torum itself is seen as having endured as a means of in-house production from the seventh century or earlier to the late Middle Ages.
I shall look at this notion in more detail in a moment, but contrast this approach to production within the context of the library,
with modern work on manuscript production in later medieval England,
which is focussed on professional often called commercial production from the late 14th century,
certainly to whenever the demand for manuscript books faded out in the face of
the spread of cheaper printed books in the second half of the 15th century.
Between those two phases of phase when we pay attention to monastic script, Toria, and a period when we believe firmly in commercial production,
there is a longish period of getting on for 200 years that receives a great deal less attention.
I should argue that commercial production can certainly be taken back into the mid 13th century.
If you push me, I might go back.
Well, I think I've got a good, strong case for the 12th century, and I'm prepared to believe significantly earlier than that.
The evidence of library records shows a similar phasing down to around 1162.
Major catalogues show foundation collections that we can equate with.
Monastic script. Toria But after that date, down to the time of the catalogues themselves in the second quarter of the 14th century,
accessions are almost entirely represented by donors.
The catalogues list books under headings for this or that donor.
I am thinking now of the E Street catalogue from Christchurch, Canterbury of 1326, and the later catalogue from Ramsay Abbey, not before 1328.
After the mid to late 14th century. We do not have catalogues organised in this way.
Inventories are less likely to record donors names and the shape of the evidence shifts.
We do have catalogues that will mention donors names in association with particular books,
but the books are organised differently from under the names of the donors.
Now between the 1320s and the third quarter of the century, when we see the new sophistication in catalogues.
It's possible that Benedictine libraries at least were woken up from intellectual quietude with the papal bulls
swarming ministry that required the ritual monasteries to send a monk or two to study at the university.
And books and libraries began to matter more. The fact of accession simply through the accident of domination by mostly members of the community.
Suggests no great interest in collection development, and it leads to multiple copies of very basic books.
Now against this background, in brief, I want to spend some time on two modes of collection development.
The two that I've indicated from library records. The.
The first of them very much centred on the 12th century date to around 1160 and dominated by the idea of planned library expansion.
By means of a monastic script. Torum.
The second dominant in Benedictine evidence from 1160 onwards to the Mid-14th century, when accession mostly arrived through gifts,
most of them the transfer of personal books held by individual monks to the Abbey in line with the principle that monks had no private property.
We mentioned a late and large example of this transfer in the first lecture,
when more than 200 of Cardinal Adam Easton's books were shipped back to England and Accessioned at the house of his first profession,
Norwich Cathedral Priory. One can see the same, for example, with Cardinal Langham books, the Priory of Westminster, his Abbey of profession,
headed to Avenue to get his hands on the cardinal's possessions before those thieves in Avignon had done their worst.
During much of the 14th and 15th centuries.
The library records show a pattern that I spoke about in the second lecture,
and I mean an increasing preponderance of secular information on the record rather than monastic preponderance,
accompanied by the large change in the proportion of secular owned books in MLG b three
that will result from the inclusion of books from and in the university colleges.
The university setting is one in which we see personal or quasi personal books dominate within college collections.
The collections were often built up by gifts from previous members of the college or by patrons of the college.
Books went on loan to individuals. Individuals sometimes forgot that they should be given back.
So college collections or. In a close relationship with personal books.
Now the books of the monastic colleges are far less visible to us,
but there is a suspicion that the university provided an environment for them to to drift away from monastic
ownership into the hands of students or from monastic students into the hands of secular students.
If time allows. We could look at a very late monastic example from Zion Abbey,
founded in the reign of Henry the Fifth, where there is evidence of rapid growth in the library.
But our dating of that growth comes from the record in the catalogue of the individual donors whose dates can,
in some cases, be worked out quite closely, sometimes quite broadly.
So if a donor only gave manuscripts rather than only gave printed books, you have a broad division.
But accession comes in through by donor roles and through the community, putting their heads together and saying, What books do we need?
Shall we put in a big order? How are we going to pay for it?
What may persist in these various contexts is the underlying fact that different contexts have different needs.
But in each case, the needs of the individuals associated with the institution,
whether Benedictine monks, secular clerks in the universities, Bridgestone brethren at Syon.
And the needs of their institutions tended to align.
So that unplanned accession. Did not lead to a great deal of unsuitable or unwanted accession.
Barring the occasional batch of French romances given to the Cistercians, as I mentioned last Tuesday, that does change in the university context.
In the 15th century, when we find university colleges being given books that bear no relation to the needs but possibly do relate to new interests
or possibly to an increasing sense that these are old books that shouldn't just be scrapped and they need to be found a home.
I certainly think that some colleges in the 15th century were acquiring the kind of role that broadly
acquired in the 17th century that was completely absent from the university in the 16th century.
Now behind all this is the fundamental question where do library books come from?
Well made books were made by scribes with professional skills.
And a question one step further back is where do professional scribes come from?
To the first question, there are five possible answers.
Domestic production by members of a community. Hired scribes from outside the community.
A bespoke order sent out to producers not connected with the institution at all.
Playing Putschists from outside the institution and gift or bequest from within or without.
If from within, there's a question behind it.
How did the monk or Canon acquire personal books?
I don't have a clear answer to that question.
And we don't really look at the monastic library catalogues as vestiges of personal collections held by monks.
I've done it when writing had notes to collections at Ramsey.
I can say that when you think about production roles and ownership, a community had three areas of need for books,
service books for the church, library, books for study, and books kept and used in the management of the house and its business affairs.
The means of production need not all be the same, but by and large, professional quality was usual in all three areas.
Now the business of monastic script Toria.
I was thinking, especially in the anglo-norman period, has been so dominated by monastic books.
That's my perception. And by the idea that they were produced in hopes that we risk seeing a book economy in which libraries played the central role.
For reasons that will emerge in next Tuesday's lecture.
I think that's false.
Studies have homed in on those libraries represented by good numbers of early to mid-20th century books listed by provenance in ML GB.
They've been studied as evidence of integrated ebook production and learning
that you know what you want to read and you produce the books that you want.
A key example would be Canterbury Cathedral Priory.
Where the distinctive spiky hand is a house script associated only with the cathedral priory and with other religious houses closely connected to it.
St Augustine's Abbey and Rochester Cathedral. Priory.
New care in his first lawyer lecture taught us that exemplars from Patristic for Patristic
Texts came into Canterbury from Normandy and were shared around for copying in this period.
Tessa Webber taught us that the spiky hand was very likely designed and taught by Brother Adama in the Cathedral Priory.
He was presenter of the Cathedral with responsibility for the books of church and library, but he was also a biographer of Anselm and Anselm's.
Correspondence from time to time refers to getting something copied by brother this or brother that.
So we have a sense that Christchurch had a house script and could turn out books in house or for neighbours,
or perhaps sharing the exemplars with neighbours. Where the monks do the writing.
Both earlier and later. When the first practice of the spiky hand at Canterbury.
Tessa Webber revealed the planned production of books to meet modern needs
Bible study in the Patristic under the patronage of the bishops of Salisbury.
Bishop Osmond in the 1080s and nineties had a group of scribes working for him.
One of them, the scribe of great doomsday, who needs to be thought of in relation also to the team of clocks who worked on that project.
Francisco Jose ALVARES Lopez work on Ex on Doomsday, a manuscript now helpfully disposed in Exeter so that you can see what it really is.
Shows a score of scribes working together,
some much more engaged than others on the extensive parchment work that lay behind the final synthesis of great doomsday.
The number of clocks in the King's Service,
very likely in offices in Salisbury to do the work on the six Southwestern counties, is no doubt surprising.
It would certainly have astonished my predecessor, Pierre SHAPLEY.
6 to 8 scribes working on books at Salisbury Cathedral in a secular environment.
And then another group, more than 20 years later, working for Bishop Roger, who from 1121 was the king's chief minister.
Tells a story of systematic collection development for the new cathedral, but cannot be disputed.
But at Salisbury, the scribes were certainly secular.
Possibly members of the Episcopal household, but possibly simply hired to work on texts over an extended period of time.
Are we correct then to extrapolate from Edward and so that monks were the main labourers in the script forum?
I suspect that we may have been misled.
I'm going to give you just a few pictures stolen from the Internet and.
We have in mind depictions of writers in monastic environments like Lawrence of Durham in Durham.
A rather late medieval depiction of Vincent of Beauvais, surrounded by books and scribbling away.
Or the famous ad winner at the back of the Edwin Salter, now in Trinity College, Cambridge.
Universally known and subject to parody.
The monk, slowly writing with lavishly decorated initials, has become a standard cartoon figure with the joke often based on the slow pace of writing.
But one does get analogies with more recent technologies.
With the monk slumped over his desk and brother Robert behind says that's the third time the coffee has broken down this morning.
Well. It is a wide a widely shared picture.
The tradition of depicting writers writing in copies of the books is not, I think, necessarily true to the environment of the script tourism.
I know I shouldn't be opening my mouth on this sort of thing since I really don't study pictures of scribes.
But how often do we find depictions of the scribe actually copying with an
exemplar opened and the leaves of a new book in front of him at the same time.
The pictures that I could find were all of a writer writing from his head.
Now, the evidence that there were monk scribes or canon scribes is incontrovertible but sporadic.
Among the accession lists in the corpus, I can mention the lists of books written by particular scribes.
Brother Alexander Rochester, who by 1203 had written 19 books for the library.
Some of which are credited to him as donor in the catalogue of the library from 1202.
The books in the list include both library books and surface books,
but they do not overlap with the medical books added under the name of Alexander sometime presenter at the end of the 1202 catalogue.
I'm not sure that I understand the heading of Buffalo's medical books.
Brother. Brother John De Bruges, Coventry Cathedral Priory has left us a list of 33 books written by him.
These are mostly church books, but they include a book of charters and a few books for study,
including what seems to be a copy of Gregory the Nine Sticks Beetles.
That would be a big copying job for a monk in house.
This was around 1240.
Not many years after that, brother William of Wickham, a monk Reading Abbot, has left us a list of 16 books, most of them liturgical,
which he wrote at the behest of sometimes the presenter, sometimes the supplier,
sometimes others during a four year stay at the reading cell of Lympstone in Herefordshire.
The books include except for example, from the letters of Jerome and Augustine, which brother William compiled.
So Brother William is a reader as well as a copyist.
His name is perhaps best known from a list of polyphony in Bell Hall in 1978, which includes the famous English song Sumer.
Is he coming in? One of his tasks was to cop two and a copy of Pseudo Augustine's Day Spiritual Animal.
To the copy of the whole Bible in quite a small format.
That Alfred of Dover bought the list of his books seized, put it in the Bible of Alfred of Dover.
And we have a long account of that book in the form of an open letter from Alfred, who was Sacristy of Redding Abbey,
in which he gives a detailed description of this augmented Bible, augmented with various texts which had been stolen from the cloister in 1253.
And the letter was appealing for its return. In this library.
Act f38 is part of another book acquired by Alfred of Dover with his name in it,
so that we have here a rather evocative little cluster of monastic books connecting Redding and Leicester much later.
William Charity, who compiled the late 15th century catalogue from Leicester Abbey,
referred to in the context of this book and of John Nichols thinking that these medieval books only had two leaves.
The list included books commissioned by him.
Books commissioned by him, but in which he personally ended the musical notation, books he wrote or compiled himself, and books he bought for the MP.
The total is 81 books, of which the largest component is 33 books bought.
Most of which can be found in their proper places in the catalogue.
Only one of these can be matched with a survivor.
The survivor is unless advocates library 18 513,
which was written in the late 12th century and has a 15th century inscription per acquisition and Fratellis will tell me charity.
It's one of a group of classical texts, school books no doubt acquired by him that are listed together in the catalogue.
One wonders whether the others which don't survive, were also late 12th century books.
And one can only wonder where he was going to buy such quite basic books already 300 years old.
But I wondered from my point.
Occasional monk scribes or in Williams case, canon scribe, do not amount to planned collection, development or a monastic scriptural.
For English historians. A classic account of the Monastic Script forum is provided by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy in 1870.
Introducing the third volume of his catalogue of the many of the manuscript sources for medieval English history.
Hardy's catalogue was an important piece of work in his time. Here.
He gives us several pages in rich detail about the management of the monastic strip.
Taurean As if describing some ideal.
All of it taken from the 12th century liberal ordinance of the Paris Abbey of Sir Victor.
Which had been printed by Edmund Martin at the beginning of the 18th century.
Hardy did not so much as hint that there may have been something ideal about this or that few houses saw themselves as
having a central place in making books available to the devout and learned of Europe as the Abbey of Sandvik tall.
Hardy, I think, was unaware that. Portions of this account.
Of the well regulated scrip torum were incorporated in the customs of Barnwell Priory near Cambridge.
But the editor of those customs, John Willis Clarke, certainly knew that they echoed most, that they echoed the sandvik tall labour ordinance.
He printed chunks of sandvik tor in parallel with Barnwell.
And he seems to have imagined that they were applied most improbably in Barnwell.
Hardy had been reading the three volumes of the guest to a bottle of St Albans printed.
For the World Series, of which she had oversight as keeper of the public records.
And in Riley's introduction to the third volume there, he found valuable references to what is actually called the script forum at St Albans.
The word generally means a writing desk, and it's rare to find it used of a writing house.
The medieval Latin Dictionary offers no example and had missed these from the bottom.
No from the guest.
A bottle in which for the 12th century may have been written by contemporaries, but was worked over by Matthew Parris in the 13th century,
a monk who presided over quite a writing establishment and continued by Thomas
Walsingham titled Scriptural Abuse at St Albans at the end of the 14th century.
From this source, Hardy finds that Abbot Poole set up the script for him around 1080.
And brought in the best scribes from far away to write noble books for the AP, which embarked on its Norman rebuilding.
28 books are referred to all of them service books,
though it is unusual and noteworthy that the text mentions that exemplars were loaned to St Albans by Archbishop Len Frank.
He was Abbot Paul's uncle. This is not, I suspect, meant to on the problem of exemplars.
How does one build a collection in-house if one can only copy what one already has?
But to show that the service books came from an authoritative source, the archbishop, who was the promoter of the new Benedictine customs in England.
Under Abbot after Abbot Mention is made of the writing of books, usually with specific reference to church books.
By the middle of the 12th century. The script scriptural was stood down because the Abbey had enough books.
But after 1166, Albert Simon, a scholar, restarted the arrangement, keeping always two or three scribes in his chamber.
And providing that future Abbotts should keep at least one.
He revived the practice of earlier days that they should have daily rations provided by
the Celera so that their work should not be impeded by the need to go out and buy lunch.
Had they been monks, their rations would have been automatic.
And the reason why the rule of Gilbert's prohibited hired scribes was not to ensure that books were written by canons,
but to keep non canons out of the house.
St Albans had these outsiders.
Working in a room above the chapter house and then in the Abbot's Chamber.
That's, I think, larger than a single room.
Whichever way one reads the evidence from St Albans, it does not provide evidence for a large, airy room like its Viktor full of monks copying books.
It shows hired scribes evidently paid for, usually by the abbots rather than by another officer with a dedicated funding stream.
With hired scribes. I have no problem.
Wherever our manuscript here was written, I imagine there was a scribe on the payroll to write and copy as need demanded and opportunity allowed.
That they might be directed by the presenter on behalf of Abbots and chapter is entirely plausible.
But it's equally plausible that an Abbott may choose to direct the work himself.
At Abingdon, under the Italian abbot. Fabrizio At the beginning of the 12th century,
there was a campaign of library expansion referred to simply in terms of many books in various subjects.
In the history of the Abbots of Abingdon. But we are told specifically that Fabrizio brought in six hired scribes for this work.
Pretty strong ladies in addition to those belonging to the house.
The monk scribes were either not suitable for the work of library building,
or perhaps were men already occupied in other writing work for the Abbey, whether on service books or on business in the Writing House.
It seems to me that this is what our evidence mostly points to that during a period of library expansion.
Scribes are hired. Where do scribes come from?
Where do you go to? To higher scribes.
Our sources do not mention either where scribes come from far away in that one case from the late 11th century, nor where exemplars come from.
And I do wonder whether hiring scribes may actually have meant that the scribes have exemplars and you get the benefit of their exemplars.
By paying the scribes. Now that would imply a level of organisation that is being bought in.
And I don't want to go to the steak over that as a suggestion, but I think the the business of exemplars is very difficult.
The less challenging question remains, where in 1100 did SEO go to hire six scribes?
And. My answer. It's not one I have time to develop.
No. Is probably London.
The idea that there was a period of collection development around the country
between around 1080 or 1090 and around 1160 appears to be perfectly well-founded.
The first phase was devoted to the renewal of collections with books that fitted a modern agenda for theology,
the Bible, the emerging gloss, and the church fathers, particularly the Latin fathers.
After 1140 or so, the second phase of this period of collection development included building up collections,
the books of canon law, and towards the end of the period, 1160 or so books of civil law.
But this was, in a sense, an externally imposed collection development.
Canon Law was going through a period of serious change.
All of that was happening with secular clocks in the service of the church,
and its impact on monastic libraries was strictly secondary abbots and chapters were corporately affected by canon law.
And naturally they like to have the means to keep up. The study of civil law, likewise, was not necessary for monastic life.
In both areas of law,
we can and must assume that secular demand and secular production will making the running and monastic houses work for the most part, buying in.
On the margins then, of the period when 20th century scholarship has tended to place libraries and in particular monastic libraries,
centre stage there is clear and extensive evidence for a wider book economy outside.
It's not isolated from or independent of the monastic environment.
Geoffrey of Monmouth of Oxford and Henry of Huntingdon were both arch deacons in the Diocese of Lincoln in the time of Bishop Alexander.
Ralph Guppy in Chaplain and keeper of the Treasure to Bishop Alexander, while still a secular priest,
became a monk of St Albans, but he continued to work on loan from the Abbey to the bishop.
Ralph was a great lover of books, a persistent collector and an eager students of the Italian master wo do as he appears in Riley's edition.
I do wonder whether that was a Riley typo for we do who lectured on the scriptures seemingly in the bishop's household.
David Smith, who edited Bishop Alexander's acts, simply refers to him as we do.
But then from 1146, Ralph became Abbot of St Albans and he brought all his secular books into the monastery.
This pattern of books being added to monastic collections through individuals is visibly dominant,
as I've said, from the Catalogues of Christ Church, Canterbury and Ramsey.
It was empanelled in monastic custom rules which say that the name of the donor should be entered in each book,
and that when a monk reads that book, he should remember the donor in his prayers.
The assumption is that the donor in most cases a monk, retained books for his personal use while he lived,
and as monks had no private property, they became part of the communal stock when he was in need of other reader's prayers.
It is a pattern that can be recognised in evidence from other Benedictine houses through the
inclusion of donor names in the books rather than through the organisation of catalogues.
Whether it's applied in stricter orders, I cannot say.
Books from Augustinian houses do sometimes refer to donors, but we don't have the same organisation of catalogues that way though.
The big catalogue from the late 14th century from Leonard Toni, ends with the addition of 40 odd books from a specific donation.
From Ramsey MP We have two imperfect copies of catalogues,
one in codex form of which only a few leaves have survived now in Lambeth Palace and a substantial row among the cotton collection.
They describe the same books under the same donor's names, though not always in the same words or in the same sequence.
These fragments provide evidence of 72 donors.
Almost all of the monks. And among them, Abbot Nicholas of Redding, known from reading sources as Nicholas of Hop, followed.
A village in the fence. Where a source Redding tells us his parents were buried.
Yet no Redding source tells us that he was, by profession, a monk of Ramsay.
Later presenter and abbots of Redding, who retired to Ramsey in 1328 with his books.
Some of these donors owned one or two or three books.
Often elementary. Some had remarkable personal collections.
Both Roberts of Guildford and Gregory of Huntingdon in the mid 13th century and books in Hebrew.
Gregory also had books in Greek, of which one survives.
Colette and Salter, now in Corpus Christi, Cambridge.
Walter of Milford, a completely unknown figure, had an impressive collection of scholastic theology for the beginning of the 14th century.
Among them, his own reportage to the owners of the disputation he attended.
Then neither of the English universities has preserved any record of his studying.
He appears to have died just prior of the tiny cell of St Ives from where his book came.
Books came to the Abbey and I went to the second volume of heads of religious houses,
hoping to find precise detail, and the usual monastic sources have provided nothing.
He gets into the list of priors on the basis of my notes in the Ramsay Abbey catalogue.
The evidence for libraries acquiring books by gift is very extensive and contrasts with the
slender basis for inferring any planned collection development over anything but a short period.
I referred earlier to the very large number of accession records in the corpus of medieval library catalogues.
Of those not simply classified as testaments, the numbers tell a story.
A simple bar chart might show that evidence of this kind grows steadily and steeply.
From before A.D. 1100.
We have five accession records, one by Royal Gift and four Episcopal Gifts of books to Benedictine houses from the 12th Century.
The number of records is seven. From the 13th century.
It is 29. An increase that's not without interest.
If you remember from last Thursday that the number of actual catalogues declines from the 12th to the 13th century.
Then from the 14th century, we have 73 records of accession and from the 15th, no fewer than 133.
Even from the early part of the 16th century, the number is 65.
Now turning the figures around to look at them.
According to the kind of institution recording receipt of books or accepting bequests, we find 69 Benedictine records.
A striking number in the monastic context next to one Carthusian record.
Three. Two. A Cistercian house. Three.
Two houses of Augustinian canons. And all of ten bequests to Franciscan friars.
There are none to Dominicans. None to Austin Friars.
Now, we should remember that monks, canons and friars in ordinary circumstances do not make wills and were unable to bequeath property as private.
So any testamentary gifts to these institutions are coming from outside.
And this accounts for the relatively depressed numbers.
Many of the Benedictine records, however, are internal recording.
The acquisition of books by members of the community, most often by adults, paid for, one presumes,
by the abbot's share of the communal revenues and becoming part of the common resources.
Accession records. Two cathedrals, I mean, the secular cathedrals and the collegiate churches are more numerous.
43 for cathedrals, 34 for colleges with eight to hospitals and eight to town or professional libraries.
Until the university colleges. Accession records.
Number 128 and of the two universities, 13.
Among these 13. The three lists of books given to Oxford by Duke Humphrey.
Items 274 books.
Most accession records are not on that scale.
Now, in addition to the 312 accession records broken down this way, there are some further some 240 further testaments,
all of them in favour of cathedrals, collegiate churches, hospitals or university colleges.
A very small number of these documents. Test to the bequest of a number of books approaching 30, the great majority showed much smaller numbers.
Six five. Four, three.
It's still a list of it's two might get in if there's one.
It's difficult for me to control access across the large number of documents to recover,
whether there are references to books from the donors not going to institutions,
but to nephews in the priesthood or what have you, which lie outside the scope of the corpus.
My general impression has been that there are not, but individual ownership of books is documented for individuals with very few books,
often fewer than the monks whose books pulsed automatically into conventional stock.
We have not yet worked out a sensible approach to the evidence for books in personal possession beyond those covered in
this secondary way by the corpus or by MLG being on the basis that they entered libraries and bear witness to that fact.
The upshot of all this is that books acquired and owned by individuals.
With a monastic, secular or even lay probably for a numbered the holdings of libraries at every point during the period under review.
The focus of scholarship on a Paleo graphical approach to 12th century books owned by the few
institutions that have preserved them in numbers can distort our longer term perceptions.
It's obvious not just from the hugely increased evidence of the later Middle Ages that books,
for the most part, were made in a secular book economy even for the 12th century.
If we read historical sources through an artistic environment or consider what some secular authors had been reading.
The dimly attested books supply outside monastic libraries.
Was most likely greater than the better evidenced monastic collections.
What the major collections did and why we find them so interesting is they preserved and accumulated in some cases, many, many books.
Catalogues and shelf marks point to the large numbers.
And a few libraries, as we saw, have left large numbers of monastic survivors.
And we just don't have the same window on the wider context to have our attention drawn to it.
But some libraries, some of these earlier libraries lost books on the loss of monastic books, fed the more mobile world of secular libraries.
And turnover is my subject for Thursday.