1 00:00:14,670 --> 00:00:20,120 Can all those who want to hear me. So. 2 00:00:21,550 --> 00:00:27,480 Then I'll begin. Let's show you something more interesting to look at. 3 00:00:30,010 --> 00:00:36,430 In the first week of these lectures, I looked at two complex bodies of evidence for medieval libraries. 4 00:00:37,650 --> 00:00:47,400 Books that carry marks of institutional provenance and library catalogues that seek to portray a whole collection of books at a particular time. 5 00:00:49,450 --> 00:00:53,640 We are accustomed to using this evidence in a simple way, 6 00:00:54,540 --> 00:01:02,160 but I urged that it has the potential to answer bigger, more general questions than we're used to asking. 7 00:01:03,800 --> 00:01:09,670 Today without losing sight of libraries as institutional holders of book collections, 8 00:01:10,550 --> 00:01:18,110 I want to invite you to think about the same evidence as also a reflection of books owned by individuals. 9 00:01:20,560 --> 00:01:27,970 No. It's in the nature of a database to atomised information and hamper good visual communication. 10 00:01:29,850 --> 00:01:38,370 Something that I tried to avoid with MLG Be3, which retains much of the layout on the page. 11 00:01:40,530 --> 00:01:48,450 The chance provided by the database to open up on screen details behind the single line 12 00:01:48,450 --> 00:01:54,990 entry means that online information from the original card can be made available. 13 00:01:56,100 --> 00:01:59,970 That was something that was very difficult for care in the printed book. 14 00:02:01,630 --> 00:02:12,520 So where he has an italic e fakes liberals, he sacrificed giving the wording of Exlibris inscriptions on the grounds that they are generic, 15 00:02:12,910 --> 00:02:18,400 and Exlibris is a simple signification of institutional ownership. 16 00:02:19,510 --> 00:02:30,070 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. 17 00:02:32,180 --> 00:02:41,570 He did include the wording of inscriptions referring to donors or those that provide other non generic evidence of provenance. 18 00:02:42,410 --> 00:02:49,310 And this list of donor dominated inscriptions occupies 100 pages. 19 00:02:49,940 --> 00:02:56,090 Towards the back of the book, it's organised at first level by institution. 20 00:02:56,420 --> 00:03:01,610 You know, if you're going from Bury in the book, you go to Bury in the appendix. 21 00:03:02,630 --> 00:03:06,980 But the second level is organised alphabetically by the name of the donor. 22 00:03:07,400 --> 00:03:11,510 And you don't have that information as you go from the main entry. 23 00:03:11,690 --> 00:03:17,180 You go with the shelf. Mark So you're reading down in alphabetical list, looking for a shelf mark. 24 00:03:18,790 --> 00:03:28,570 These 100 pages represent a considerable body of evidence for personal ownership of what are, by definition, library books. 25 00:03:29,660 --> 00:03:34,160 I'm not conscious that it has ever been used as a resource. 26 00:03:36,120 --> 00:03:44,430 In MLG b three. The data is invisible on the virtual cards behind each line. 27 00:03:45,360 --> 00:03:53,700 That's a convenient arrangement for going from the entry for the book in the main listing to the detail behind it. 28 00:03:56,250 --> 00:04:01,350 But it makes it extremely difficult for a general appraisal of the donor inscriptions 29 00:04:02,250 --> 00:04:08,820 over time or by the distribution of donors between one kind of institution and another. 30 00:04:10,660 --> 00:04:15,820 Our library catalogues could also provide the same kind of information. 31 00:04:16,150 --> 00:04:29,170 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. 32 00:04:31,090 --> 00:04:39,700 We should also see that among our thousand plus library records, a large class are not catalogues. 33 00:04:40,680 --> 00:04:45,930 But records of accession in most cases by gift from a named donor. 34 00:04:47,750 --> 00:04:54,710 And another large class of records of intention to give not necessarily fulfilled. 35 00:04:57,480 --> 00:05:03,870 A list in a monastic context of books given by an abbot we take to represent accession. 36 00:05:04,880 --> 00:05:10,460 Sometimes bequests are recorded in the same way as, in effect, a receipt record. 37 00:05:12,050 --> 00:05:19,100 A testament that leaves books to a particular institution or institutions is evidence of books 38 00:05:19,100 --> 00:05:25,490 in private hands and potential evidence that the books went to their intended beneficiary. 39 00:05:27,080 --> 00:05:33,740 This can sometimes be proven by matching a document to a book bearing an inscription with the name. 40 00:05:34,680 --> 00:05:43,410 But it was a warning constantly repeated by Ian Doyle on the Medieval Library Catalogues Committee that with only a testament to go on, 41 00:05:43,770 --> 00:05:53,790 one did not know whether the books were ever delivered or supposing they were, whether they were accessioned rather than sold on. 42 00:05:55,800 --> 00:06:05,660 Let me give you some unsophisticated numbers. The corpus has included some 560 accession records. 43 00:06:06,260 --> 00:06:14,060 That's out of a thousand plus records, of which testaments represent the great majority. 44 00:06:16,240 --> 00:06:29,440 The aggregate number of entries as itemised in the additions from this class of record is around 6600 now as a proportion of documents. 45 00:06:30,010 --> 00:06:33,280 This is by far the most numerous species of record. 46 00:06:35,570 --> 00:06:39,110 6602. I mean that. 47 00:06:40,390 --> 00:06:43,990 I'm seeing a 560 out of a thousand. 48 00:06:44,560 --> 00:06:51,460 But as a proportion of the entries, 6600 out of a little over 50,000. 49 00:06:53,040 --> 00:06:59,429 Is quite small in proportion. Between MLG and the Corpus. 50 00:06:59,430 --> 00:07:07,800 We have nonetheless quite a lot of data here about books that passed from personal ownership into institutional ownership. 51 00:07:08,610 --> 00:07:11,100 Now let's look at a couple of books. 52 00:07:12,900 --> 00:07:21,960 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. 53 00:07:23,190 --> 00:07:30,480 Both these books include a copy of The Life of St Modena by Geoffrey Abbott of Burton on Trent, 54 00:07:31,380 --> 00:07:39,150 who created a local saint for Staffordshire with aid from the life of an Irish saint called Mona. 55 00:07:41,550 --> 00:07:44,910 I first looked at these books 40 years ago. 56 00:07:46,160 --> 00:07:55,040 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. 57 00:07:56,780 --> 00:08:06,470 The first one is, to my eye, obviously a private book, the layout of the page almost square, quite small. 58 00:08:06,500 --> 00:08:10,220 It's 180 millimetres by 165 millimetres. 59 00:08:11,120 --> 00:08:18,950 The near lack of any margin, the small handwriting where there is no particular need for such economy. 60 00:08:20,060 --> 00:08:24,770 The minimal ruling. We have verticals, but horizontals are quite hard to see. 61 00:08:26,310 --> 00:08:34,890 Are all signs that this that say this was an unprofessional copy made simply by someone who wanted to own the work. 62 00:08:35,910 --> 00:08:41,580 The copyist could not easily buy the work. The photocopier had not yet been invented. 63 00:08:42,090 --> 00:08:46,230 So he did what readers did for many centuries. He made his own copy. 64 00:08:48,020 --> 00:08:51,410 The book in which this. Booklet. 65 00:08:52,820 --> 00:09:04,160 Is now bound. It's a tiresome library binding which is stepped the small boy folio to top and bottom of every booklet. 66 00:09:04,400 --> 00:09:10,760 The bell taking the picture has used a piece of paper so that you don't see the pages overlapping. 67 00:09:12,520 --> 00:09:21,460 The the book comprises 25 textual items, not all of them complete in 26 gatherings. 68 00:09:23,190 --> 00:09:37,440 And they range from grammar through Euclid to excerpts from papal letters going beyond what would find its way into the decree clause. 69 00:09:37,440 --> 00:09:46,770 That strikes me as something quite recondite to find to a life of do under the handwriting. 70 00:09:48,220 --> 00:09:56,050 Spreads across probably more than a generation when they were first bound together, I cannot say. 71 00:09:56,560 --> 00:10:00,790 But at the end of the Middle Ages, they were certainly a single book. 72 00:10:02,480 --> 00:10:11,030 With a label on the back cover recognisable but barely readable as that of Worcester Cathedral Priory. 73 00:10:12,280 --> 00:10:16,330 And you have the Worcester press mock a and Raymond 11. 74 00:10:18,610 --> 00:10:29,200 My guess is that these booklets, which most likely have more than one personal origin but not 25, were bound together. 75 00:10:30,470 --> 00:10:36,320 Most likely at Worcester on this evidence and most likely in the 13th century. 76 00:10:37,160 --> 00:10:48,830 And they just stayed there. The volume was still at Worcester when Humphry Wanly compiled the cataloguing manuscript to Anglia Hibernia in the 1690s. 77 00:10:49,400 --> 00:10:54,650 Unless his evidence for Worcester was a significantly older list. 78 00:10:56,450 --> 00:11:00,200 But by 1734, the book was in the Royal Collection. 79 00:11:01,500 --> 00:11:07,140 So reading the signs, this was a personal book that became an institutional book. 80 00:11:08,370 --> 00:11:19,760 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. 81 00:11:20,320 --> 00:11:25,480 But the opportunity to copy the life of Modena is unexplained. 82 00:11:28,360 --> 00:11:37,770 Right this way. The second example. 83 00:11:38,760 --> 00:11:46,560 Is another rather better and rather more complete copy of The Life of Morwenna, beginning on the Rector. 84 00:11:48,120 --> 00:11:52,050 It is perhaps a little older than the personal copy we've just looked at. 85 00:11:52,980 --> 00:11:56,100 It is not earlier than January 1198. 86 00:11:57,030 --> 00:12:04,319 For in the rubric dashboard the red here in the rubric to his day miserere Concepcion 87 00:12:04,320 --> 00:12:11,610 Assoumani Pope innocent the third is referred to as in accounts use papa to use. 88 00:12:12,860 --> 00:12:16,430 And he was elected eighths of January 1198. 89 00:12:17,410 --> 00:12:26,440 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. 90 00:12:27,460 --> 00:12:35,150 This copy is one of a dozen made in different places in England and still surviving that the paleo graphical. 91 00:12:35,170 --> 00:12:40,150 I would date to a 12 stroke 13 or s 13 in. 92 00:12:41,290 --> 00:12:45,580 What they represent is the circulation of the new pope's book. 93 00:12:47,290 --> 00:12:51,490 Written as Cardinal Luke Torrio in the winter of 1194 five. 94 00:12:51,910 --> 00:13:00,010 To prove that he was not just a clever lawyer, but could do spirituality and was therefore worth electing as pope. 95 00:13:00,970 --> 00:13:04,390 He published the book early in 1195, I think, 96 00:13:04,390 --> 00:13:10,570 to improve his chances of election when the very old Celeste and the third eventually popped 97 00:13:10,570 --> 00:13:19,180 his clogs and he gave out copies as booklets to Cardinals or other influential figures. 98 00:13:21,110 --> 00:13:26,000 His election as pope in 1198 meant international demand. 99 00:13:26,890 --> 00:13:34,960 And one or more booklets containing just the one text circulated in England from religious house to religious house. 100 00:13:35,920 --> 00:13:42,520 At some, perhaps at many. A copy was made to keep and the booklet passed on. 101 00:13:44,490 --> 00:13:49,770 Now the contents of this volume are an odd mixture. 102 00:13:50,520 --> 00:13:56,790 The only other thing I've got a picture of is the first item, which is El Red of Rivas. 103 00:13:57,240 --> 00:14:03,480 Life of Saint Edward the Confessor. With the fanciest initial in the book. 104 00:14:06,410 --> 00:14:13,400 The the second text is El Ridge Life of King David of Scotland, written a bit earlier than the Life of Edward, 105 00:14:13,910 --> 00:14:19,730 which shows King David's and Henry the second's descent from the West, Sex and Kings. 106 00:14:20,570 --> 00:14:27,200 There is then a version of The Miracles of the Virgin as found also in Bible College Manuscript 240 107 00:14:28,100 --> 00:14:34,880 together with two sermons on the Virgin by full bore two shot that are clearly tacked on to the miracles. 108 00:14:36,700 --> 00:14:40,210 And then fourth is in the third steamers area. 109 00:14:40,990 --> 00:14:46,440 Each of these work continues in the same choir from the previous text. 110 00:14:46,460 --> 00:14:50,650 So the whole thing is a book not divisible. 111 00:14:51,550 --> 00:14:58,150 And then Jeffrey of Burton's Life of Midwinter written, I think by the same hand. 112 00:14:59,460 --> 00:15:08,820 But starting a new choir. The life is completed in four choirs, three regular ones, and the fourth with one added leaf. 113 00:15:09,540 --> 00:15:20,009 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, 114 00:15:20,010 --> 00:15:25,680 which we don't see in the rest of the book, apart from some difference in the initials. 115 00:15:27,100 --> 00:15:30,340 It looks exactly like it was meant to be the. 116 00:15:31,840 --> 00:15:36,580 Knowing what I know about the demon Azaria I conjecture that wherever this was written, 117 00:15:37,300 --> 00:15:46,150 there was a scribe at work with a book of diverse texts in progress, unbound on his writing desk. 118 00:15:47,340 --> 00:15:51,840 When the Pope's booklet arrived, a decision was taken to copy it. 119 00:15:53,040 --> 00:16:01,290 And the decision to copy this life may represent similar opportunism that a copy had come to hand. 120 00:16:02,760 --> 00:16:05,850 Though the text was, in this case, 50 years old. 121 00:16:07,320 --> 00:16:11,520 It's not a widely known work. Besides the two copies I've shown you, 122 00:16:12,030 --> 00:16:23,040 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. 123 00:16:24,060 --> 00:16:32,430 And we know from library catalogues of three copies tested Burton Abbey, where St Modwen was venerated. 124 00:16:32,970 --> 00:16:36,120 All the catalogue is from the late 12th century. 125 00:16:36,660 --> 00:16:39,240 There was one at Ramsay Abbey in the 14th century. 126 00:16:40,650 --> 00:16:49,530 And copies were seen by Leland in Cistercian hands Revesby in Lincolnshire and by Bale in Benedictine hands at Glastonbury. 127 00:16:50,490 --> 00:16:56,280 The nuns of Rumsey in Hampshire had an abbreviation in the 14th century. 128 00:16:56,640 --> 00:17:01,050 It's in a collection of abbreviated saints lives that we find nowhere else. 129 00:17:02,040 --> 00:17:09,780 It includes a significant proportion of female saints, and that may well have been a compilation made at Rumsey Abbey. 130 00:17:11,750 --> 00:17:19,550 Now Care entered this manuscript initially under Burton in ML GB to galley proof stage. 131 00:17:21,050 --> 00:17:28,310 He had been reading late in 1963 Roger Myners his new catalogue of the manuscripts in Balliol College. 132 00:17:30,040 --> 00:17:40,390 And under manuscript to 40 miners mentioned that there was another copy of these of the miraculous of the virgin in. 133 00:17:42,420 --> 00:17:47,850 A manuscript belonging to Francis Wormald, written from Bourton on Trent. 134 00:17:50,370 --> 00:17:55,230 And correspondence survives between Wormald and care. 135 00:17:55,380 --> 00:18:02,460 That refers to it as a bulletin book. You go to M two now and it's in rejects. 136 00:18:03,060 --> 00:18:10,050 So this was rejecting something that had never been more publicly adverted to than in mind as entry for being little to 40. 137 00:18:11,430 --> 00:18:20,370 But Care clearly was not satisfied with the idea that the life of Morwenna meant it was for Bourton, whereas Francis Wormald was. 138 00:18:21,830 --> 00:18:28,040 Clearly the fact that we have copies from six of the places means that it's not evidence of provenance. 139 00:18:29,030 --> 00:18:32,750 Now, coming a bit more recently, but still more than 20 years ago, 140 00:18:33,260 --> 00:18:39,920 I was reading Tessa Webber's edition of the late 15th century Leicester Abbey catalogue in TypeScript. 141 00:18:40,490 --> 00:18:50,660 In my capacity as general editor of the Corpus, when I recognised the ultimate itemisation of the rather mixed contents of this volume, 142 00:18:51,680 --> 00:18:58,040 the Leicester catalogue uses second folios to your name was so demure that 143 00:18:58,040 --> 00:19:03,110 some name was sent to your quote name most sublimely or in the Aylward text. 144 00:19:04,070 --> 00:19:09,680 And at once I picked up the phone and called Michelle Brown in the British Library to ask her to check. 145 00:19:10,100 --> 00:19:16,670 Did this match the manuscript? It did so great rejoicing. 146 00:19:17,570 --> 00:19:20,150 The book could be proven to Leicester Abbey. 147 00:19:20,660 --> 00:19:30,139 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, 148 00:19:30,140 --> 00:19:37,420 who was still at work on his edition. So it was at Leicester around 1490. 149 00:19:37,870 --> 00:19:41,940 Soon after its entry in the Leicester catalogue, it went a wall. 150 00:19:42,790 --> 00:19:52,330 It has an inscription by Hector reading Vicar of Radcliffe on saw who was vicar there between 1497 and 1509, 151 00:19:52,780 --> 00:20:02,610 saying that it was his book and hands off. Ratliff once saw is in Nottinghamshire, but it's not very far from Leicester Abbey. 152 00:20:02,630 --> 00:20:06,080 We don't know how it made the journey across the river. 153 00:20:07,300 --> 00:20:11,650 But the manuscript remained in private collections until 1971. 154 00:20:13,030 --> 00:20:18,910 So we've observed the differences between a personally made book and a professionally made book. 155 00:20:19,990 --> 00:20:27,970 Both of them plausibly made in different circumstances within a monastic or possibly canonical context. 156 00:20:29,720 --> 00:20:36,320 Is there any difference between a privately owned book and an institutionally owned book? 157 00:20:36,830 --> 00:20:39,980 Not, I think one that can easily be seen. 158 00:20:40,760 --> 00:20:47,809 Books without clear evidence of institutional provenance may nonetheless have been in libraries, 159 00:20:47,810 --> 00:20:50,870 and lack of institutional marks does not mean private. 160 00:20:52,760 --> 00:21:04,130 But that's ownership when we think about production. There is a long tradition of fusing into institutional ownership and institutional production. 161 00:21:05,290 --> 00:21:08,620 I mean, the notion of the monastics scriptural. 162 00:21:10,820 --> 00:21:18,440 It's a persistent idea in two senses. It has existed in the minds of antiquities for three or 400 years. 163 00:21:19,070 --> 00:21:24,950 I suspect I haven't done the work to track it. 164 00:21:25,700 --> 00:21:37,160 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. 165 00:21:38,740 --> 00:21:50,950 I shall look at this notion in more detail in a moment, but contrast this approach to production within the context of the library, 166 00:21:51,790 --> 00:21:55,660 with modern work on manuscript production in later medieval England, 167 00:21:56,110 --> 00:22:04,179 which is focussed on professional often called commercial production from the late 14th century, 168 00:22:04,180 --> 00:22:10,329 certainly to whenever the demand for manuscript books faded out in the face of 169 00:22:10,330 --> 00:22:15,370 the spread of cheaper printed books in the second half of the 15th century. 170 00:22:17,080 --> 00:22:26,410 Between those two phases of phase when we pay attention to monastic script, Toria, and a period when we believe firmly in commercial production, 171 00:22:26,920 --> 00:22:33,670 there is a longish period of getting on for 200 years that receives a great deal less attention. 172 00:22:34,900 --> 00:22:41,110 I should argue that commercial production can certainly be taken back into the mid 13th century. 173 00:22:41,530 --> 00:22:43,870 If you push me, I might go back. 174 00:22:45,060 --> 00:22:51,930 Well, I think I've got a good, strong case for the 12th century, and I'm prepared to believe significantly earlier than that. 175 00:22:54,030 --> 00:23:02,399 The evidence of library records shows a similar phasing down to around 1162. 176 00:23:02,400 --> 00:23:08,130 Major catalogues show foundation collections that we can equate with. 177 00:23:09,080 --> 00:23:18,170 Monastic script. Toria But after that date, down to the time of the catalogues themselves in the second quarter of the 14th century, 178 00:23:18,860 --> 00:23:22,910 accessions are almost entirely represented by donors. 179 00:23:23,780 --> 00:23:27,920 The catalogues list books under headings for this or that donor. 180 00:23:28,620 --> 00:23:39,470 I am thinking now of the E Street catalogue from Christchurch, Canterbury of 1326, and the later catalogue from Ramsay Abbey, not before 1328. 181 00:23:41,840 --> 00:23:48,200 After the mid to late 14th century. We do not have catalogues organised in this way. 182 00:23:49,070 --> 00:23:55,430 Inventories are less likely to record donors names and the shape of the evidence shifts. 183 00:23:55,820 --> 00:24:01,610 We do have catalogues that will mention donors names in association with particular books, 184 00:24:01,940 --> 00:24:06,710 but the books are organised differently from under the names of the donors. 185 00:24:08,320 --> 00:24:17,200 Now between the 1320s and the third quarter of the century, when we see the new sophistication in catalogues. 186 00:24:18,490 --> 00:24:25,809 It's possible that Benedictine libraries at least were woken up from intellectual quietude with the papal bulls 187 00:24:25,810 --> 00:24:32,170 swarming ministry that required the ritual monasteries to send a monk or two to study at the university. 188 00:24:32,770 --> 00:24:44,320 And books and libraries began to matter more. The fact of accession simply through the accident of domination by mostly members of the community. 189 00:24:45,300 --> 00:24:55,080 Suggests no great interest in collection development, and it leads to multiple copies of very basic books. 190 00:24:57,130 --> 00:25:04,790 Now against this background, in brief, I want to spend some time on two modes of collection development. 191 00:25:04,810 --> 00:25:07,960 The two that I've indicated from library records. The. 192 00:25:09,690 --> 00:25:20,280 The first of them very much centred on the 12th century date to around 1160 and dominated by the idea of planned library expansion. 193 00:25:21,100 --> 00:25:23,980 By means of a monastic script. Torum. 194 00:25:25,800 --> 00:25:35,520 The second dominant in Benedictine evidence from 1160 onwards to the Mid-14th century, when accession mostly arrived through gifts, 195 00:25:36,060 --> 00:25:45,360 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. 196 00:25:48,160 --> 00:25:52,810 We mentioned a late and large example of this transfer in the first lecture, 197 00:25:53,500 --> 00:26:02,500 when more than 200 of Cardinal Adam Easton's books were shipped back to England and Accessioned at the house of his first profession, 198 00:26:02,890 --> 00:26:13,580 Norwich Cathedral Priory. One can see the same, for example, with Cardinal Langham books, the Priory of Westminster, his Abbey of profession, 199 00:26:13,910 --> 00:26:22,250 headed to Avenue to get his hands on the cardinal's possessions before those thieves in Avignon had done their worst. 200 00:26:24,540 --> 00:26:27,870 During much of the 14th and 15th centuries. 201 00:26:28,230 --> 00:26:33,000 The library records show a pattern that I spoke about in the second lecture, 202 00:26:33,750 --> 00:26:43,530 and I mean an increasing preponderance of secular information on the record rather than monastic preponderance, 203 00:26:43,530 --> 00:26:51,389 accompanied by the large change in the proportion of secular owned books in MLG b three 204 00:26:51,390 --> 00:26:58,140 that will result from the inclusion of books from and in the university colleges. 205 00:26:59,890 --> 00:27:07,990 The university setting is one in which we see personal or quasi personal books dominate within college collections. 206 00:27:08,320 --> 00:27:15,400 The collections were often built up by gifts from previous members of the college or by patrons of the college. 207 00:27:16,920 --> 00:27:22,260 Books went on loan to individuals. Individuals sometimes forgot that they should be given back. 208 00:27:22,680 --> 00:27:29,560 So college collections or. In a close relationship with personal books. 209 00:27:31,520 --> 00:27:36,140 Now the books of the monastic colleges are far less visible to us, 210 00:27:36,590 --> 00:27:44,270 but there is a suspicion that the university provided an environment for them to to drift away from monastic 211 00:27:44,270 --> 00:27:51,080 ownership into the hands of students or from monastic students into the hands of secular students. 212 00:27:53,490 --> 00:27:58,649 If time allows. We could look at a very late monastic example from Zion Abbey, 213 00:27:58,650 --> 00:28:05,130 founded in the reign of Henry the Fifth, where there is evidence of rapid growth in the library. 214 00:28:06,830 --> 00:28:15,319 But our dating of that growth comes from the record in the catalogue of the individual donors whose dates can, 215 00:28:15,320 --> 00:28:19,760 in some cases, be worked out quite closely, sometimes quite broadly. 216 00:28:20,360 --> 00:28:27,260 So if a donor only gave manuscripts rather than only gave printed books, you have a broad division. 217 00:28:28,570 --> 00:28:38,889 But accession comes in through by donor roles and through the community, putting their heads together and saying, What books do we need? 218 00:28:38,890 --> 00:28:41,890 Shall we put in a big order? How are we going to pay for it? 219 00:28:45,650 --> 00:28:54,470 What may persist in these various contexts is the underlying fact that different contexts have different needs. 220 00:28:54,800 --> 00:29:01,130 But in each case, the needs of the individuals associated with the institution, 221 00:29:01,970 --> 00:29:07,610 whether Benedictine monks, secular clerks in the universities, Bridgestone brethren at Syon. 222 00:29:08,990 --> 00:29:12,980 And the needs of their institutions tended to align. 223 00:29:14,790 --> 00:29:24,360 So that unplanned accession. Did not lead to a great deal of unsuitable or unwanted accession. 224 00:29:24,900 --> 00:29:36,209 Barring the occasional batch of French romances given to the Cistercians, as I mentioned last Tuesday, that does change in the university context. 225 00:29:36,210 --> 00:29:49,080 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 226 00:29:49,680 --> 00:29:58,110 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. 227 00:29:58,470 --> 00:30:05,070 I certainly think that some colleges in the 15th century were acquiring the kind of role that broadly 228 00:30:05,100 --> 00:30:11,160 acquired in the 17th century that was completely absent from the university in the 16th century. 229 00:30:12,640 --> 00:30:18,070 Now behind all this is the fundamental question where do library books come from? 230 00:30:20,020 --> 00:30:23,590 Well made books were made by scribes with professional skills. 231 00:30:24,610 --> 00:30:29,230 And a question one step further back is where do professional scribes come from? 232 00:30:31,490 --> 00:30:34,940 To the first question, there are five possible answers. 233 00:30:35,890 --> 00:30:42,820 Domestic production by members of a community. Hired scribes from outside the community. 234 00:30:44,730 --> 00:30:52,110 A bespoke order sent out to producers not connected with the institution at all. 235 00:30:53,260 --> 00:30:59,800 Playing Putschists from outside the institution and gift or bequest from within or without. 236 00:31:02,100 --> 00:31:06,330 If from within, there's a question behind it. 237 00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:11,090 How did the monk or Canon acquire personal books? 238 00:31:12,200 --> 00:31:16,040 I don't have a clear answer to that question. 239 00:31:17,180 --> 00:31:26,870 And we don't really look at the monastic library catalogues as vestiges of personal collections held by monks. 240 00:31:27,710 --> 00:31:30,980 I've done it when writing had notes to collections at Ramsey. 241 00:31:34,070 --> 00:31:40,850 I can say that when you think about production roles and ownership, a community had three areas of need for books, 242 00:31:41,450 --> 00:31:51,170 service books for the church, library, books for study, and books kept and used in the management of the house and its business affairs. 243 00:31:51,650 --> 00:32:01,250 The means of production need not all be the same, but by and large, professional quality was usual in all three areas. 244 00:32:01,790 --> 00:32:04,990 Now the business of monastic script Toria. 245 00:32:07,080 --> 00:32:14,820 I was thinking, especially in the anglo-norman period, has been so dominated by monastic books. 246 00:32:16,640 --> 00:32:28,700 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. 247 00:32:30,260 --> 00:32:33,440 For reasons that will emerge in next Tuesday's lecture. 248 00:32:33,650 --> 00:32:34,940 I think that's false. 249 00:32:36,870 --> 00:32:48,000 Studies have homed in on those libraries represented by good numbers of early to mid-20th century books listed by provenance in ML GB. 250 00:32:49,410 --> 00:32:54,630 They've been studied as evidence of integrated ebook production and learning 251 00:32:55,380 --> 00:32:59,190 that you know what you want to read and you produce the books that you want. 252 00:32:59,940 --> 00:33:03,120 A key example would be Canterbury Cathedral Priory. 253 00:33:04,320 --> 00:33:14,850 Where the distinctive spiky hand is a house script associated only with the cathedral priory and with other religious houses closely connected to it. 254 00:33:15,330 --> 00:33:18,570 St Augustine's Abbey and Rochester Cathedral. Priory. 255 00:33:19,690 --> 00:33:26,379 New care in his first lawyer lecture taught us that exemplars from Patristic for Patristic 256 00:33:26,380 --> 00:33:33,430 Texts came into Canterbury from Normandy and were shared around for copying in this period. 257 00:33:35,100 --> 00:33:45,120 Tessa Webber taught us that the spiky hand was very likely designed and taught by Brother Adama in the Cathedral Priory. 258 00:33:45,390 --> 00:33:56,910 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. 259 00:33:56,910 --> 00:34:03,840 Correspondence from time to time refers to getting something copied by brother this or brother that. 260 00:34:05,280 --> 00:34:14,520 So we have a sense that Christchurch had a house script and could turn out books in house or for neighbours, 261 00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:20,400 or perhaps sharing the exemplars with neighbours. Where the monks do the writing. 262 00:34:22,580 --> 00:34:28,410 Both earlier and later. When the first practice of the spiky hand at Canterbury. 263 00:34:29,510 --> 00:34:35,299 Tessa Webber revealed the planned production of books to meet modern needs 264 00:34:35,300 --> 00:34:41,120 Bible study in the Patristic under the patronage of the bishops of Salisbury. 265 00:34:42,600 --> 00:34:48,180 Bishop Osmond in the 1080s and nineties had a group of scribes working for him. 266 00:34:49,010 --> 00:34:58,790 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. 267 00:35:00,410 --> 00:35:10,800 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. 268 00:35:11,690 --> 00:35:14,630 Shows a score of scribes working together, 269 00:35:15,200 --> 00:35:25,410 some much more engaged than others on the extensive parchment work that lay behind the final synthesis of great doomsday. 270 00:35:26,450 --> 00:35:28,730 The number of clocks in the King's Service, 271 00:35:29,300 --> 00:35:38,120 very likely in offices in Salisbury to do the work on the six Southwestern counties, is no doubt surprising. 272 00:35:39,130 --> 00:35:43,240 It would certainly have astonished my predecessor, Pierre SHAPLEY. 273 00:35:44,900 --> 00:35:51,650 6 to 8 scribes working on books at Salisbury Cathedral in a secular environment. 274 00:35:51,980 --> 00:36:00,590 And then another group, more than 20 years later, working for Bishop Roger, who from 1121 was the king's chief minister. 275 00:36:01,450 --> 00:36:08,710 Tells a story of systematic collection development for the new cathedral, but cannot be disputed. 276 00:36:10,340 --> 00:36:13,640 But at Salisbury, the scribes were certainly secular. 277 00:36:15,140 --> 00:36:25,160 Possibly members of the Episcopal household, but possibly simply hired to work on texts over an extended period of time. 278 00:36:26,990 --> 00:36:34,850 Are we correct then to extrapolate from Edward and so that monks were the main labourers in the script forum? 279 00:36:36,140 --> 00:36:39,740 I suspect that we may have been misled. 280 00:36:40,550 --> 00:36:46,420 I'm going to give you just a few pictures stolen from the Internet and. 281 00:36:48,720 --> 00:36:56,880 We have in mind depictions of writers in monastic environments like Lawrence of Durham in Durham. 282 00:36:59,230 --> 00:37:07,930 A rather late medieval depiction of Vincent of Beauvais, surrounded by books and scribbling away. 283 00:37:09,510 --> 00:37:16,860 Or the famous ad winner at the back of the Edwin Salter, now in Trinity College, Cambridge. 284 00:37:17,280 --> 00:37:21,390 Universally known and subject to parody. 285 00:37:23,690 --> 00:37:36,290 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. 286 00:37:37,750 --> 00:37:41,940 But one does get analogies with more recent technologies. 287 00:37:41,950 --> 00:37:49,660 With the monk slumped over his desk and brother Robert behind says that's the third time the coffee has broken down this morning. 288 00:37:51,920 --> 00:37:58,770 Well. It is a wide a widely shared picture. 289 00:37:59,940 --> 00:38:12,510 The tradition of depicting writers writing in copies of the books is not, I think, necessarily true to the environment of the script tourism. 290 00:38:14,130 --> 00:38:19,830 I know I shouldn't be opening my mouth on this sort of thing since I really don't study pictures of scribes. 291 00:38:20,670 --> 00:38:27,030 But how often do we find depictions of the scribe actually copying with an 292 00:38:27,030 --> 00:38:32,490 exemplar opened and the leaves of a new book in front of him at the same time. 293 00:38:33,610 --> 00:38:40,450 The pictures that I could find were all of a writer writing from his head. 294 00:38:42,580 --> 00:38:49,450 Now, the evidence that there were monk scribes or canon scribes is incontrovertible but sporadic. 295 00:38:51,760 --> 00:38:58,750 Among the accession lists in the corpus, I can mention the lists of books written by particular scribes. 296 00:38:59,760 --> 00:39:05,790 Brother Alexander Rochester, who by 1203 had written 19 books for the library. 297 00:39:06,630 --> 00:39:12,630 Some of which are credited to him as donor in the catalogue of the library from 1202. 298 00:39:13,740 --> 00:39:17,070 The books in the list include both library books and surface books, 299 00:39:17,970 --> 00:39:27,150 but they do not overlap with the medical books added under the name of Alexander sometime presenter at the end of the 1202 catalogue. 300 00:39:27,960 --> 00:39:31,260 I'm not sure that I understand the heading of Buffalo's medical books. 301 00:39:33,140 --> 00:39:41,180 Brother. Brother John De Bruges, Coventry Cathedral Priory has left us a list of 33 books written by him. 302 00:39:42,020 --> 00:39:47,540 These are mostly church books, but they include a book of charters and a few books for study, 303 00:39:47,780 --> 00:39:51,590 including what seems to be a copy of Gregory the Nine Sticks Beetles. 304 00:39:52,070 --> 00:39:56,980 That would be a big copying job for a monk in house. 305 00:39:57,800 --> 00:39:59,420 This was around 1240. 306 00:40:01,050 --> 00:40:11,910 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, 307 00:40:12,420 --> 00:40:17,190 which he wrote at the behest of sometimes the presenter, sometimes the supplier, 308 00:40:17,220 --> 00:40:24,300 sometimes others during a four year stay at the reading cell of Lympstone in Herefordshire. 309 00:40:24,780 --> 00:40:34,410 The books include except for example, from the letters of Jerome and Augustine, which brother William compiled. 310 00:40:34,860 --> 00:40:38,250 So Brother William is a reader as well as a copyist. 311 00:40:39,190 --> 00:40:48,849 His name is perhaps best known from a list of polyphony in Bell Hall in 1978, which includes the famous English song Sumer. 312 00:40:48,850 --> 00:40:58,200 Is he coming in? One of his tasks was to cop two and a copy of Pseudo Augustine's Day Spiritual Animal. 313 00:40:59,650 --> 00:41:03,460 To the copy of the whole Bible in quite a small format. 314 00:41:05,070 --> 00:41:12,930 That Alfred of Dover bought the list of his books seized, put it in the Bible of Alfred of Dover. 315 00:41:13,740 --> 00:41:20,970 And we have a long account of that book in the form of an open letter from Alfred, who was Sacristy of Redding Abbey, 316 00:41:21,660 --> 00:41:32,730 in which he gives a detailed description of this augmented Bible, augmented with various texts which had been stolen from the cloister in 1253. 317 00:41:33,150 --> 00:41:38,549 And the letter was appealing for its return. In this library. 318 00:41:38,550 --> 00:41:46,890 Act f38 is part of another book acquired by Alfred of Dover with his name in it, 319 00:41:46,890 --> 00:41:55,620 so that we have here a rather evocative little cluster of monastic books connecting Redding and Leicester much later. 320 00:41:55,980 --> 00:42:00,600 William Charity, who compiled the late 15th century catalogue from Leicester Abbey, 321 00:42:01,110 --> 00:42:07,800 referred to in the context of this book and of John Nichols thinking that these medieval books only had two leaves. 322 00:42:10,540 --> 00:42:12,820 The list included books commissioned by him. 323 00:42:13,730 --> 00:42:25,460 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. 324 00:42:26,450 --> 00:42:33,380 The total is 81 books, of which the largest component is 33 books bought. 325 00:42:34,670 --> 00:42:38,600 Most of which can be found in their proper places in the catalogue. 326 00:42:40,350 --> 00:42:43,800 Only one of these can be matched with a survivor. 327 00:42:44,640 --> 00:42:50,070 The survivor is unless advocates library 18 513, 328 00:42:50,940 --> 00:43:00,450 which was written in the late 12th century and has a 15th century inscription per acquisition and Fratellis will tell me charity. 329 00:43:02,550 --> 00:43:10,530 It's one of a group of classical texts, school books no doubt acquired by him that are listed together in the catalogue. 330 00:43:11,480 --> 00:43:17,060 One wonders whether the others which don't survive, were also late 12th century books. 331 00:43:18,680 --> 00:43:27,020 And one can only wonder where he was going to buy such quite basic books already 300 years old. 332 00:43:28,160 --> 00:43:29,780 But I wondered from my point. 333 00:43:30,470 --> 00:43:40,820 Occasional monk scribes or in Williams case, canon scribe, do not amount to planned collection, development or a monastic scriptural. 334 00:43:43,110 --> 00:43:53,310 For English historians. A classic account of the Monastic Script forum is provided by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy in 1870. 335 00:43:54,150 --> 00:44:01,140 Introducing the third volume of his catalogue of the many of the manuscript sources for medieval English history. 336 00:44:02,510 --> 00:44:07,299 Hardy's catalogue was an important piece of work in his time. Here. 337 00:44:07,300 --> 00:44:12,760 He gives us several pages in rich detail about the management of the monastic strip. 338 00:44:12,760 --> 00:44:16,120 Taurean As if describing some ideal. 339 00:44:17,150 --> 00:44:23,420 All of it taken from the 12th century liberal ordinance of the Paris Abbey of Sir Victor. 340 00:44:24,400 --> 00:44:28,120 Which had been printed by Edmund Martin at the beginning of the 18th century. 341 00:44:29,710 --> 00:44:38,140 Hardy did not so much as hint that there may have been something ideal about this or that few houses saw themselves as 342 00:44:38,140 --> 00:44:44,380 having a central place in making books available to the devout and learned of Europe as the Abbey of Sandvik tall. 343 00:44:47,690 --> 00:44:54,920 Hardy, I think, was unaware that. Portions of this account. 344 00:44:56,250 --> 00:45:03,360 Of the well regulated scrip torum were incorporated in the customs of Barnwell Priory near Cambridge. 345 00:45:04,410 --> 00:45:13,920 But the editor of those customs, John Willis Clarke, certainly knew that they echoed most, that they echoed the sandvik tall labour ordinance. 346 00:45:14,940 --> 00:45:19,230 He printed chunks of sandvik tor in parallel with Barnwell. 347 00:45:21,230 --> 00:45:26,530 And he seems to have imagined that they were applied most improbably in Barnwell. 348 00:45:28,600 --> 00:45:34,660 Hardy had been reading the three volumes of the guest to a bottle of St Albans printed. 349 00:45:35,970 --> 00:45:40,200 For the World Series, of which she had oversight as keeper of the public records. 350 00:45:42,230 --> 00:45:51,050 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. 351 00:45:51,710 --> 00:45:58,670 The word generally means a writing desk, and it's rare to find it used of a writing house. 352 00:45:59,240 --> 00:46:06,560 The medieval Latin Dictionary offers no example and had missed these from the bottom. 353 00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:10,020 No from the guest. 354 00:46:10,020 --> 00:46:18,440 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, 355 00:46:19,190 --> 00:46:24,950 a monk who presided over quite a writing establishment and continued by Thomas 356 00:46:24,950 --> 00:46:30,890 Walsingham titled Scriptural Abuse at St Albans at the end of the 14th century. 357 00:46:31,400 --> 00:46:37,160 From this source, Hardy finds that Abbot Poole set up the script for him around 1080. 358 00:46:38,790 --> 00:46:49,200 And brought in the best scribes from far away to write noble books for the AP, which embarked on its Norman rebuilding. 359 00:46:50,160 --> 00:46:53,940 28 books are referred to all of them service books, 360 00:46:54,720 --> 00:47:04,110 though it is unusual and noteworthy that the text mentions that exemplars were loaned to St Albans by Archbishop Len Frank. 361 00:47:04,890 --> 00:47:12,600 He was Abbot Paul's uncle. This is not, I suspect, meant to on the problem of exemplars. 362 00:47:12,960 --> 00:47:18,750 How does one build a collection in-house if one can only copy what one already has? 363 00:47:20,120 --> 00:47:29,540 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. 364 00:47:31,100 --> 00:47:37,940 Under Abbot after Abbot Mention is made of the writing of books, usually with specific reference to church books. 365 00:47:38,720 --> 00:47:46,670 By the middle of the 12th century. The script scriptural was stood down because the Abbey had enough books. 366 00:47:48,190 --> 00:48:01,240 But after 1166, Albert Simon, a scholar, restarted the arrangement, keeping always two or three scribes in his chamber. 367 00:48:02,490 --> 00:48:06,600 And providing that future Abbotts should keep at least one. 368 00:48:08,470 --> 00:48:14,740 He revived the practice of earlier days that they should have daily rations provided by 369 00:48:14,740 --> 00:48:21,790 the Celera so that their work should not be impeded by the need to go out and buy lunch. 370 00:48:24,980 --> 00:48:29,390 Had they been monks, their rations would have been automatic. 371 00:48:31,020 --> 00:48:40,080 And the reason why the rule of Gilbert's prohibited hired scribes was not to ensure that books were written by canons, 372 00:48:40,740 --> 00:48:44,970 but to keep non canons out of the house. 373 00:48:45,420 --> 00:48:48,600 St Albans had these outsiders. 374 00:48:50,430 --> 00:48:55,469 Working in a room above the chapter house and then in the Abbot's Chamber. 375 00:48:55,470 --> 00:48:58,020 That's, I think, larger than a single room. 376 00:49:00,720 --> 00:49:13,410 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. 377 00:49:13,680 --> 00:49:24,690 It shows hired scribes evidently paid for, usually by the abbots rather than by another officer with a dedicated funding stream. 378 00:49:27,950 --> 00:49:31,370 With hired scribes. I have no problem. 379 00:49:32,710 --> 00:49:45,160 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. 380 00:49:46,500 --> 00:49:52,230 That they might be directed by the presenter on behalf of Abbots and chapter is entirely plausible. 381 00:49:53,760 --> 00:49:59,070 But it's equally plausible that an Abbott may choose to direct the work himself. 382 00:50:00,270 --> 00:50:05,670 At Abingdon, under the Italian abbot. Fabrizio At the beginning of the 12th century, 383 00:50:06,240 --> 00:50:14,520 there was a campaign of library expansion referred to simply in terms of many books in various subjects. 384 00:50:16,140 --> 00:50:25,800 In the history of the Abbots of Abingdon. But we are told specifically that Fabrizio brought in six hired scribes for this work. 385 00:50:27,150 --> 00:50:32,400 Pretty strong ladies in addition to those belonging to the house. 386 00:50:33,240 --> 00:50:37,290 The monk scribes were either not suitable for the work of library building, 387 00:50:38,100 --> 00:50:47,610 or perhaps were men already occupied in other writing work for the Abbey, whether on service books or on business in the Writing House. 388 00:50:49,900 --> 00:50:57,160 It seems to me that this is what our evidence mostly points to that during a period of library expansion. 389 00:50:58,120 --> 00:51:03,830 Scribes are hired. Where do scribes come from? 390 00:51:03,850 --> 00:51:06,250 Where do you go to? To higher scribes. 391 00:51:07,690 --> 00:51:18,520 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. 392 00:51:20,410 --> 00:51:32,440 And I do wonder whether hiring scribes may actually have meant that the scribes have exemplars and you get the benefit of their exemplars. 393 00:51:33,370 --> 00:51:42,640 By paying the scribes. Now that would imply a level of organisation that is being bought in. 394 00:51:44,230 --> 00:51:52,030 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. 395 00:51:53,140 --> 00:51:59,890 The less challenging question remains, where in 1100 did SEO go to hire six scribes? 396 00:52:01,080 --> 00:52:06,440 And. My answer. It's not one I have time to develop. 397 00:52:06,870 --> 00:52:10,030 No. Is probably London. 398 00:52:12,370 --> 00:52:16,420 The idea that there was a period of collection development around the country 399 00:52:16,720 --> 00:52:23,050 between around 1080 or 1090 and around 1160 appears to be perfectly well-founded. 400 00:52:23,980 --> 00:52:31,510 The first phase was devoted to the renewal of collections with books that fitted a modern agenda for theology, 401 00:52:32,350 --> 00:52:37,510 the Bible, the emerging gloss, and the church fathers, particularly the Latin fathers. 402 00:52:38,620 --> 00:52:47,830 After 1140 or so, the second phase of this period of collection development included building up collections, 403 00:52:48,190 --> 00:52:55,480 the books of canon law, and towards the end of the period, 1160 or so books of civil law. 404 00:52:57,350 --> 00:53:02,180 But this was, in a sense, an externally imposed collection development. 405 00:53:03,210 --> 00:53:06,960 Canon Law was going through a period of serious change. 406 00:53:08,130 --> 00:53:12,330 All of that was happening with secular clocks in the service of the church, 407 00:53:13,140 --> 00:53:23,070 and its impact on monastic libraries was strictly secondary abbots and chapters were corporately affected by canon law. 408 00:53:23,670 --> 00:53:32,100 And naturally they like to have the means to keep up. The study of civil law, likewise, was not necessary for monastic life. 409 00:53:33,100 --> 00:53:34,960 In both areas of law, 410 00:53:35,230 --> 00:53:48,760 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. 411 00:53:50,830 --> 00:54:00,730 On the margins then, of the period when 20th century scholarship has tended to place libraries and in particular monastic libraries, 412 00:54:00,940 --> 00:54:07,600 centre stage there is clear and extensive evidence for a wider book economy outside. 413 00:54:08,620 --> 00:54:14,290 It's not isolated from or independent of the monastic environment. 414 00:54:16,300 --> 00:54:27,070 Geoffrey of Monmouth of Oxford and Henry of Huntingdon were both arch deacons in the Diocese of Lincoln in the time of Bishop Alexander. 415 00:54:28,780 --> 00:54:36,730 Ralph Guppy in Chaplain and keeper of the Treasure to Bishop Alexander, while still a secular priest, 416 00:54:37,540 --> 00:54:45,070 became a monk of St Albans, but he continued to work on loan from the Abbey to the bishop. 417 00:54:46,570 --> 00:54:57,100 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. 418 00:54:57,760 --> 00:55:06,280 I do wonder whether that was a Riley typo for we do who lectured on the scriptures seemingly in the bishop's household. 419 00:55:08,200 --> 00:55:12,820 David Smith, who edited Bishop Alexander's acts, simply refers to him as we do. 420 00:55:15,310 --> 00:55:24,010 But then from 1146, Ralph became Abbot of St Albans and he brought all his secular books into the monastery. 421 00:55:25,560 --> 00:55:32,900 This pattern of books being added to monastic collections through individuals is visibly dominant, 422 00:55:32,910 --> 00:55:37,350 as I've said, from the Catalogues of Christ Church, Canterbury and Ramsey. 423 00:55:38,250 --> 00:55:45,900 It was empanelled in monastic custom rules which say that the name of the donor should be entered in each book, 424 00:55:46,680 --> 00:55:51,630 and that when a monk reads that book, he should remember the donor in his prayers. 425 00:55:53,660 --> 00:56:01,370 The assumption is that the donor in most cases a monk, retained books for his personal use while he lived, 426 00:56:02,210 --> 00:56:10,220 and as monks had no private property, they became part of the communal stock when he was in need of other reader's prayers. 427 00:56:12,260 --> 00:56:19,430 It is a pattern that can be recognised in evidence from other Benedictine houses through the 428 00:56:19,490 --> 00:56:25,070 inclusion of donor names in the books rather than through the organisation of catalogues. 429 00:56:25,580 --> 00:56:29,120 Whether it's applied in stricter orders, I cannot say. 430 00:56:29,630 --> 00:56:39,860 Books from Augustinian houses do sometimes refer to donors, but we don't have the same organisation of catalogues that way though. 431 00:56:40,190 --> 00:56:50,720 The big catalogue from the late 14th century from Leonard Toni, ends with the addition of 40 odd books from a specific donation. 432 00:56:52,550 --> 00:56:56,990 From Ramsey MP We have two imperfect copies of catalogues, 433 00:56:56,990 --> 00:57:06,590 one in codex form of which only a few leaves have survived now in Lambeth Palace and a substantial row among the cotton collection. 434 00:57:07,400 --> 00:57:14,660 They describe the same books under the same donor's names, though not always in the same words or in the same sequence. 435 00:57:15,590 --> 00:57:19,100 These fragments provide evidence of 72 donors. 436 00:57:19,700 --> 00:57:28,430 Almost all of the monks. And among them, Abbot Nicholas of Redding, known from reading sources as Nicholas of Hop, followed. 437 00:57:29,650 --> 00:57:35,780 A village in the fence. Where a source Redding tells us his parents were buried. 438 00:57:36,620 --> 00:57:41,330 Yet no Redding source tells us that he was, by profession, a monk of Ramsay. 439 00:57:42,620 --> 00:57:49,820 Later presenter and abbots of Redding, who retired to Ramsey in 1328 with his books. 440 00:57:51,230 --> 00:57:55,070 Some of these donors owned one or two or three books. 441 00:57:55,790 --> 00:58:01,070 Often elementary. Some had remarkable personal collections. 442 00:58:01,610 --> 00:58:07,070 Both Roberts of Guildford and Gregory of Huntingdon in the mid 13th century and books in Hebrew. 443 00:58:07,670 --> 00:58:11,690 Gregory also had books in Greek, of which one survives. 444 00:58:11,960 --> 00:58:14,540 Colette and Salter, now in Corpus Christi, Cambridge. 445 00:58:15,530 --> 00:58:25,940 Walter of Milford, a completely unknown figure, had an impressive collection of scholastic theology for the beginning of the 14th century. 446 00:58:26,330 --> 00:58:30,980 Among them, his own reportage to the owners of the disputation he attended. 447 00:58:32,550 --> 00:58:37,380 Then neither of the English universities has preserved any record of his studying. 448 00:58:38,220 --> 00:58:43,370 He appears to have died just prior of the tiny cell of St Ives from where his book came. 449 00:58:43,380 --> 00:58:48,060 Books came to the Abbey and I went to the second volume of heads of religious houses, 450 00:58:48,060 --> 00:58:55,500 hoping to find precise detail, and the usual monastic sources have provided nothing. 451 00:58:55,620 --> 00:59:01,560 He gets into the list of priors on the basis of my notes in the Ramsay Abbey catalogue. 452 00:59:03,630 --> 00:59:10,770 The evidence for libraries acquiring books by gift is very extensive and contrasts with the 453 00:59:10,770 --> 00:59:18,360 slender basis for inferring any planned collection development over anything but a short period. 454 00:59:19,440 --> 00:59:26,490 I referred earlier to the very large number of accession records in the corpus of medieval library catalogues. 455 00:59:27,510 --> 00:59:32,730 Of those not simply classified as testaments, the numbers tell a story. 456 00:59:33,390 --> 00:59:40,350 A simple bar chart might show that evidence of this kind grows steadily and steeply. 457 00:59:41,800 --> 00:59:44,200 From before A.D. 1100. 458 00:59:44,650 --> 00:59:56,950 We have five accession records, one by Royal Gift and four Episcopal Gifts of books to Benedictine houses from the 12th Century. 459 00:59:58,110 --> 01:00:03,970 The number of records is seven. From the 13th century. 460 01:00:04,240 --> 01:00:09,270 It is 29. An increase that's not without interest. 461 01:00:09,680 --> 01:00:16,880 If you remember from last Thursday that the number of actual catalogues declines from the 12th to the 13th century. 462 01:00:18,610 --> 01:00:27,340 Then from the 14th century, we have 73 records of accession and from the 15th, no fewer than 133. 463 01:00:28,620 --> 01:00:33,600 Even from the early part of the 16th century, the number is 65. 464 01:00:35,490 --> 01:00:38,220 Now turning the figures around to look at them. 465 01:00:38,790 --> 01:00:49,230 According to the kind of institution recording receipt of books or accepting bequests, we find 69 Benedictine records. 466 01:00:50,910 --> 01:00:57,330 A striking number in the monastic context next to one Carthusian record. 467 01:00:57,930 --> 01:01:01,350 Three. Two. A Cistercian house. Three. 468 01:01:01,560 --> 01:01:08,130 Two houses of Augustinian canons. And all of ten bequests to Franciscan friars. 469 01:01:08,550 --> 01:01:11,790 There are none to Dominicans. None to Austin Friars. 470 01:01:12,300 --> 01:01:22,200 Now, we should remember that monks, canons and friars in ordinary circumstances do not make wills and were unable to bequeath property as private. 471 01:01:22,860 --> 01:01:28,170 So any testamentary gifts to these institutions are coming from outside. 472 01:01:29,550 --> 01:01:32,700 And this accounts for the relatively depressed numbers. 473 01:01:35,150 --> 01:01:40,129 Many of the Benedictine records, however, are internal recording. 474 01:01:40,130 --> 01:01:46,400 The acquisition of books by members of the community, most often by adults, paid for, one presumes, 475 01:01:46,910 --> 01:01:52,400 by the abbot's share of the communal revenues and becoming part of the common resources. 476 01:01:53,630 --> 01:02:01,220 Accession records. Two cathedrals, I mean, the secular cathedrals and the collegiate churches are more numerous. 477 01:02:01,730 --> 01:02:10,760 43 for cathedrals, 34 for colleges with eight to hospitals and eight to town or professional libraries. 478 01:02:11,740 --> 01:02:15,950 Until the university colleges. Accession records. 479 01:02:17,550 --> 01:02:23,400 Number 128 and of the two universities, 13. 480 01:02:24,120 --> 01:02:30,940 Among these 13. The three lists of books given to Oxford by Duke Humphrey. 481 01:02:31,240 --> 01:02:34,390 Items 274 books. 482 01:02:35,940 --> 01:02:38,580 Most accession records are not on that scale. 483 01:02:40,230 --> 01:02:51,270 Now, in addition to the 312 accession records broken down this way, there are some further some 240 further testaments, 484 01:02:51,900 --> 01:02:58,230 all of them in favour of cathedrals, collegiate churches, hospitals or university colleges. 485 01:02:59,600 --> 01:03:11,220 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. 486 01:03:11,640 --> 01:03:15,510 Six five. Four, three. 487 01:03:16,540 --> 01:03:19,600 It's still a list of it's two might get in if there's one. 488 01:03:21,210 --> 01:03:27,660 It's difficult for me to control access across the large number of documents to recover, 489 01:03:27,660 --> 01:03:33,810 whether there are references to books from the donors not going to institutions, 490 01:03:34,110 --> 01:03:39,390 but to nephews in the priesthood or what have you, which lie outside the scope of the corpus. 491 01:03:40,290 --> 01:03:50,280 My general impression has been that there are not, but individual ownership of books is documented for individuals with very few books, 492 01:03:50,640 --> 01:03:57,240 often fewer than the monks whose books pulsed automatically into conventional stock. 493 01:03:58,830 --> 01:04:08,280 We have not yet worked out a sensible approach to the evidence for books in personal possession beyond those covered in 494 01:04:08,280 --> 01:04:17,040 this secondary way by the corpus or by MLG being on the basis that they entered libraries and bear witness to that fact. 495 01:04:18,000 --> 01:04:23,460 The upshot of all this is that books acquired and owned by individuals. 496 01:04:24,450 --> 01:04:37,230 With a monastic, secular or even lay probably for a numbered the holdings of libraries at every point during the period under review. 497 01:04:39,320 --> 01:04:46,160 The focus of scholarship on a Paleo graphical approach to 12th century books owned by the few 498 01:04:46,160 --> 01:04:53,120 institutions that have preserved them in numbers can distort our longer term perceptions. 499 01:04:54,630 --> 01:05:01,440 It's obvious not just from the hugely increased evidence of the later Middle Ages that books, 500 01:05:01,440 --> 01:05:08,250 for the most part, were made in a secular book economy even for the 12th century. 501 01:05:08,550 --> 01:05:17,160 If we read historical sources through an artistic environment or consider what some secular authors had been reading. 502 01:05:18,940 --> 01:05:23,950 The dimly attested books supply outside monastic libraries. 503 01:05:24,930 --> 01:05:29,850 Was most likely greater than the better evidenced monastic collections. 504 01:05:30,890 --> 01:05:40,940 What the major collections did and why we find them so interesting is they preserved and accumulated in some cases, many, many books. 505 01:05:42,230 --> 01:05:45,410 Catalogues and shelf marks point to the large numbers. 506 01:05:46,690 --> 01:05:52,240 And a few libraries, as we saw, have left large numbers of monastic survivors. 507 01:05:53,500 --> 01:06:02,080 And we just don't have the same window on the wider context to have our attention drawn to it. 508 01:06:03,340 --> 01:06:15,100 But some libraries, some of these earlier libraries lost books on the loss of monastic books, fed the more mobile world of secular libraries. 509 01:06:15,580 --> 01:06:18,880 And turnover is my subject for Thursday.