In the first week of these lectures. I surveyed the two main bodies of evidence for the history of medieval libraries in England.
And in the second week, I questioned two widespread assumptions.
This week's lectures will attempt a more sequential narrative.
And today my title uses five nouns which characterise libraries at different periods.
Growth. Competition. Stability.
Loss. Renewals. In discussing Neil Cairns medieval libraries of Great Britain, I laid some emphasis on its tendency to flatten time.
Inviting a cumulative reading of accession, according to date of writing 12th century, 13th century, 14th century.
And in highlighting the evidence that religious houses deaccessioned books,
which went into the second hand market and in some cases helped to build up other libraries with older books.
I further emphasised the role of change in the history of libraries, especially in the 15th century.
Change over time is no surprise, but it can be easily overlooked, especially when medievalist tend to specialise in a period or an approach.
So today I shall make a hasty survey of the ups and downs of libraries over the 500 years
or so from our earliest book lists to the invention of printing in the 15th century.
If I end up at the tempo of the devil's gallop, it's because there is a lot to cover.
And if I induce some measure of confusion, so be it.
For the ups and downs of different libraries and different types of libraries were not synchronised.
There is no single curve of growth, setback.
Renewal, extinction. The flattening effect of MGB is at its most dangerous with very old books and the libraries to which they are assigned.
Our Anglo-Saxon forebears had not advanced in librarianship to the point of entering X libraries inscriptions.
Which become usual only late in the 12th century in England.
Durham retains some books that had belonged to the community of St Cuthbert since the late seventh and eighth centuries.
Which appear under Durham in MLG, be where they were in the high and later Middle Ages,
only to appear under Lindisfarne and one of those with a query and none on the
chest of the street where the community spent the better part of a century.
It was supposedly at Chester Le Street between 1934 and 1939 that King Athelstan, he's the fella on the left, gave five books to the Saint.
Our first booklist is a highly questionable document as quoted if it's quoted rather than made up in the tendentious historia decent to compare to.
But it tells us that King Asal Stone gave a rich gospel book, Jewelled, Binding and so on.
A Missal two more gospel books and a copy of the lives of Saint Cuthbert in prose and verse.
M Cotton. Oh, so benign is a 19th century gospel book.
And. Its inscriptions recording as well.
Stone's gift to St Cuthbert were preserved for us by Humphrey Wanli.
Preserved for us in 1705 because most of the manuscript, including the front leaves, was destroyed in the cotton fire.
This is generally identified as the first of the books on assistance gift.
Cambridge, Corpus Christi 183 is primarily a copy of Bede's to lives of St Cuthbert,
dated by Henry Bradshaw to the ninth century, followed in that by M.R. James.
But since Plummer identified the book as that referred to in the Historia, it has been dated on the basis of its being new when Ethel Stone gave it.
This is what you're looking at here. It's a splendid image of the Saint, the king.
And the book is there on the screen, Pure Entertainment.
Now a church could never really have too many gospel books, and one in a jewelled binding was no doubt a rich gift to honour the Saint.
But a copy of the two lives of Cuthbert can hardly have filled a great deficiency in the library at Chester Le Street,
whose Monk's main role had been to protect and preserve the body of St Cuthbert.
Do we ask ourselves where the king went to get these books?
A Second-hand gospel book and what's now regarded as a new copy of The Lives with a short glossary and a list of bishops.
With a picture for the occasion. It was presumably a commission.
The short glossary and so on makes it seem a rather odd commission.
We have no answer to where the king went. With the earliest books now at Durham Care was, it seems to me, indecisive.
When Will turns to the lists under Canterbury Cathedral, Priory or Winchester Old Minster.
Many entries for pre conquest books are marked with queries.
And they were often entered on the basis of speculation about origins, not on evidence of provenance, not even late medieval provenance.
With Canterbury, you might struggle to notice this.
There's 360 books entered under Canterbury Cathedral, Priory and the early medieval ones are rather spaced out.
But look for those question marks with a place like Winchester Open.
It's much more obvious that the list is really quite speculative.
Well, I can understand the reluctance not to include that book, not not to exclude books that speak for Anglo-Saxon culture.
It's an area where care must be used with special care.
He was an Anglo-Saxon ist himself who turned to later medieval bibliography, and he knew that he was lowering the threshold for entry.
Not all his readers realised that. Anglo-Saxon libraries, however, are far off.
Think not to be reached on the evidence collected by care in the book, which they say operates to a much lower standard of evidence.
Nor do we have ninth century light library catalogues such as Survive from the Carolingian Empire.
Like Lapidus low lectures from 2002 on the Anglo-Saxon library.
Created an abstract library in default of evidence for actual libraries.
More than half. The book comprises appendices of information works known to all 12 works known to be read,
works known to the writer of the old English Martyrology who Lapid should go on to identify as Ecker of Hexham.
And. A list of works in manuscripts surviving that were owned somewhere in Anglo-Saxon England,
a subject now supported by the extensive listing produced by Language and Noise in 2014.
So we have ample material evidence and we can deduce much from the quality of penmanship
and the evolution of handwriting and the letter and learning of Anglo-Saxon books.
But of libraries. The evidence simply bears no comparison with that from the 12th century and later.
The books themselves have in most cases lacked the stability that would allow us to
work backwards from a later provenance to a more secure mapping of their early homes.
Continental evidence is not necessarily better marked by early owners.
But books have more have more often come down an organic line of descent that allows us to follow it backwards.
This is lacking in England, outside Durham.
Nonetheless, we have a few book lists before A World of Winchester gave books to Peterborough Abbey in the second half of the 10th century.
There are 20 titles on the list distinctly different in culture from the contents of early 12th century libraries, which are much more familiar.
None of these books survives. In fact, only a quarter of them re-appeared in an early 12th century list from Peterborough,
which shows 59 volumes, beginning with the newly necessary authors such as Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose Gregory.
But it continues with some authors more popular in Pre Conquest England.
Hard to tell from the list how many of those books were left from the Pre Conquest library.
There may have been some out with the old as well as in with the new, but without more of the books themselves, it's impossible to know.
There is, I think, a real question why we have so few surviving books of the 11th century in England early in comparison,
11th century and earlier in comparison with the numbers we have of books from the 12th century and onwards, the graph is out of proportion.
I don't want to engage now with this with a set of statistics,
and I'm reluctant to hypothesise any significant clearing out when numbers of reconquest books clearly were retained.
And the issue may come down to questions of. Of our inability to establish provenance for pre conquest books.
At Peterborough in the early 12th century. The catalogue includes a book of King Alfred written in English.
But its title was not recorded. The catalogue was limited in his ability to deal with the language.
Perhaps Burton on Trent did rather better with its half dozen old English books in the late 12th century.
When it does manage to identify the works. Better than the evidence from Peterborough.
Is that from Exeter? Two copies of the lists of books.
The list of books given to Exeter Cathedral by its first bishop.
The French in the mid 11th century survive one here in mess walked to 16,
the other removed from the West sex and gospels now in Cambridge, and prefixed to the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry still in Exeter.
Leah Fritsch moved his C from Crediton to the town of Exeter in 1050, where he remained bishop beyond the Norman conquest until his death in 1072.
The list represents 66 books with many entries in English, particularly for the service books going into Latin for the more obviously library books.
It's an old fashioned, but by no means obsolete collection.
With the lists and the 19 surviving books from the from left riches gift.
The Middle 11th century provision of books at Exeter Cathedral is better attested than that for anywhere else in the period.
It is striking that a number of the books are considered to have come from St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury.
How Live Rich put together his collection of books is really impossible to guess now.
Frank Barlow, a fine historian in his generation and long based in Exeter.
Betrays an old habit of thinking in his own DNP article on Live Fritsch, I quote in the league table of pre 12th century manuscripts,
the Exeter Scrip Tourism comes forth off to Canterbury, Salisbury and Worcester.
No, he's not being in any sense out of date.
He was entirely in line with his peers in still thinking that the script for him was the right way to consider the collection.
But the Exeter collection must have come together from a diversity of sources.
There's a new appraisal of what happened.
It's as inconclusive as I am by James Willoughby in the volume on the library cat catalogues of the secular cathedrals,
which I hope will appear before very long.
Long promised later medieval book lists and a continuing record of good survival from Exeter, including many books now in the Bodleian,
has meant that one can also see the expansion of the library under the Fritchey successor, the long serving Norman Bishop.
Osborne. Fitz Osborne. It is another very striking fact.
The books acquired by Bishop Osborne,
such as Miss Balti 301 show the hand of a scribe who also worked on books commissioned by Bishop William of Durham in the same period.
Exeter and Durham are about as far apart as cathedrals in England can be got.
Bishop Williams gifts to the cathedral are well attested and they form an important witness to the normalisation of libraries in England and Durham.
It must be remembered, was still a secular chapter during most of Bishop William's time.
Monks were only introduced in 1093. Some of the books surviving from Durham and Exeter.
Can be traced back to Buyer in Normandy.
The association is made with by cathedral.
Scribes are recognised, but their job titles are not known and the real context of production is not known.
But Buyer was a centre from which scribes and exemplars were supplying new books to Norman Cathedrals in England.
And now the 12th century, the evidence for this period is abundant and well-known.
And I've spoken more about it earlier in the series. Not only can we see the modernisation in the libraries, Dexter and Durham,
but we can see a major period of collection building around the country with very good survival of books from.
To name a few famous names. Canterbury. Christchurch.
Bury. St Edmunds. And St Albans. There is also important evidence provided by 12th century catalogues from Rochester Cathedral,
Priory, Canterbury Cathedral Priory and Durham Cathedral Priory.
And we are so well provided that we can even describe a new intellectual agenda driving the expansion of libraries in England and in Normandy.
In the first half of the 12th century, an agenda centred on study of the Bible and the Latin fathers.
It is, however, predominantly attested in England by Benedictine foundations,
and I have warned that too much focus on the Benedictines and their books can lead us to
overlook the extensive book economy that provided for the needs of the secular clergy.
And who knows who else? When Abbott's hired scribes to provide new books for their libraries and at St Albans gave them lunch as part of the bargain.
There must obviously have been a large market for book production outside the abbeys.
It is too often been overlooked. Books associated with William of Malmesbury often show the handwriting of scribes ten,
a dozen, 15 scribes who worked for him over considerable periods of time,
whether it be in Malmesbury or during his text hunting tours of religious houses around the country where he could find books containing works,
not part of the new agenda, but left from the old unworthy scribes made copies at his direction.
Williams assistants were more likely hired scribes than his monastic brethren.
I mentioned one of these books last time, given to Merton in 1486, which shows 13 scribes.
I've said more than once in these lectures that the half century or so of planned collection development in Benedictine abbeys faded out around 1160.
Its last phase concerned more with secular law books than with the new theology.
From then on. For the most part, Abbeys sat on their laurels, satisfied with adequately stocked libraries,
which grew mostly through the haphazard acquisitions of members of the community referred to
usually as donors when their books became part of the common stock after the owners died.
Besides this, some houses kept a record of acquisitions paid for by successive Abbott's.
These, I presume, reflect corporate purchases.
The Abbot controlling the on allocated surplus of the EP is revenues, but for most institutions the donor was central.
The individual monk, who acquired a few or many books in different books or important books,
and whose souls were prayed for by their successors who read the books.
Learning among the Benedictines did not die out, but the libraries entered a long period of passivity.
In the meantime, it is my impression that Cistercian books of high quality are out of sync.
The great expansion of Benedictine libraries. They date more from the second half of the 12th century and into the early 13th century.
Our earliest Cistercian lists from review around 1190 and 1200 each with upwards of 200 books,
and from a decade or so later, a much smaller library of some 80 books.
But the visual quality of books produced for the cistercians of, say, Boyland or build walls is impressive.
And our delight in the elaborate single colour initials of, say, the island bead note Walmsley Park is increased because such books are rare.
We have no evidence of any major Cistercian library in England.
The Muses 400 books in the 1390s is not insignificant, and it was not a premiere Abbey of the Order.
There may have been bigger libraries unknown to us.
As far as Cistercian writers are concerned, there are few indeed after Ralph of Coggeshall around 1220 until.
The end of the 14th century. There's a few, mostly not very well known figures with death dates in the early 15th century.
Cistercian obscurity goes beyond passivity.
For the Augustinians, we have one clear example of a significant cluster of books from the 12th century land.
Toni in the suburbs Gloucester, with some 90 surviving manuscripts datable from the 12th century broadly to the beginning of the 13th century.
It will be a slow task to examine them,
to decide whether here there was any detectable change of plan around 1160 between a foundation collection and more haphazard accession.
My suspicion is there was not. There may not have been the widespread expansion in the first half of the 12th century.
Its foundation dates of many of the Augustinian houses are in the 1120s and thirties, so they start off a generation behind the Benedictines.
But there is not the obvious slowdown in the second half of the century.
The library's never reached the size of Benedictine libraries.
Perhaps they had less surplus resources to spend on collection development.
And they would. The rule did not direct them to read in as obvious a way as the Benedictine rule.
I certainly do not notice the shift towards donors in books belonging to Augustinian houses.
Though donations could play a part to lists both of the end of the 12th century from Waltham Abbey and from Bridlington,
Priory Show around 120 books at each.
Not very impressive by comparison with the Benedictine abbey. Do we infer that at this state, Augustinian libraries were typically that much smaller?
Probably so. Then, Tony, in its mid-14th century, peak had some 500 books, including the substantial bequest of 56 books from John Leech,
rather more of which appear secondary entries added to the catalogue than were cross matched when the edition was published in 1998.
Sorry about that. Well, 500 is a very decent size.
It does not compare with the big Benedictine holdings around the same date of 1350, 1360, when we have libraries of 1802 thousand volumes.
Size, of course, is a crude means of grading when one acknowledges the number of duplicate copies of the same works in some of these places.
But I have not come up with a points scheme for appraising overall quality, and I don't want to.
How Land Tony would compare with other significant Augustinian collections over the early part of this period.
We have not the means to say some fried wines and only had the advantage of proximity to Oxford.
Sire Ancestor seems to have had a flourishing library in the time of the author Alexander Niccum.
But we're talking numbers like 40 books known but the Augustinian library I'm most wished for evidence of is holy
trinity in old gate close to the monstrous Martin le grand and not far from the Cathedral of Saint Paul in London.
Neither.
The friars who compiled the registrant, Anglia nor John Leland in the 1530s visited Holy Trinity and MGB Records, all of five surviving books.
It had been a very wealthy Augustinian priory, but it was dissolved voluntarily in 1532 ahead of the dissolution,
seeking the King's help with its insupportable corporate debt.
And launching the idea of dissolution in the minds of the King's ministers, the fate of its library is unknown.
It was, however,
the base from 1170 to 1221 of Peter of Cornwall Prior with the house from 1197 and his books I have mentioned already as something of real interest.
His Libreville Autonome, dated 1200s, survives as a primary copy made for the author.
It was copied professionally for him.
As I argued in the last chapter of the book that Robert Easton and I brought out in 2013 on the contents of this manuscript.
The first book is The Work of Scribe A and you can see Scribe a writing in the left hand column there.
The second book was started by Scribe B, and you can see Scribe be in the right hand column starting at the bottom of the left hand column.
Scribe B found that he had much more to copy than his colleague.
He demanded an assistant. And on the left, we have the handwriting of that assistant.
I think that these copyists had books piled up on their desks, the tables with markers in them.
They would copy excerpts and add headings as directed by the markers put in by Peter of Cornwall.
The chapters could not be numbered before copying.
And so the fine red chapter numbers that we see here didn't exist until the book had been written out.
This is the first and only copy known. So when Scribe C was hired.
The pile of books to be copied on scribes desk was divided and they thought, Hmm, how many?
What chapter number should you start at? Start at 600.
And when Scribe Bee caught up with him, he finished a chapter 582.
So they'd misjudged it. The choir ring and he started on a new choir.
So we have an incomplete choir ending at 582.
One extra chapter inserted by scribe a leaves cut out and then Scribe C continues from chapter 600.
When Scribe. Be caught up.
Scribe see you sacked. And this is why here Scribe B is taking over from Scribe C in the left.
But if you compare and I, I haven't put them side by side for you, so you'd have to be very smart to do it.
The right hand columns there a scribe c writing a single column of copying in Scribe A's stint at Folio 60.
And the way I understand the code ecology here is that scribe be number two had said I need an assistant.
And at that point Scribe C was brought in and given a trial.
Do the next column in my stint say scribe.
He does it very carefully. He gets the job. He started it.
Chapter 600. And when Scribe is caught up with him, he's sacked.
So we have. Three scribes working together, copying from piles of books.
To get the book finished as efficiently as can be.
We cannot work out how many books were needed to provide these excerpts.
The number of excerpts adds up to a number over 1200, but there are sometimes many excerpts taken from one text,
and sometimes more than one of the texts could have been in the same book.
The assumption would usually be made that they were all available in the Library of Holy Trinity.
Many would have supposed to scribes to be themselves canons, which I think unlikely.
I'm also inclined to question whether the exemplar were all from the prior library.
In London there were other religious houses and there were scribes for higher.
Although we have no reference to Stationers before 1262 Roger of Oxford, whom I mentioned last Thursday.
There may well have been stationers in London at this date.
1262 is, after all, approximately the beginning of that kind of archival evidence, not necessarily the beginning of Stationers.
There may well have been stations in London able to supply exemplars as well as scribes.
Where in London would Peter of Cornwall most likely find a copy of Reginald of Durham's Life and Miracles of Godric?
Much excerpted in this book. The extent copies are all associated with Durham Cathedral Priory.
I wonder, had Peter borrowed a copy from the London home of Philip?
What? To the Bishop of Durham. Or from a London house or from a stationer.
The scale of the trade I've already alluded to.
Peter finished his vast Panthere Lucas a decade earlier in 1189.
Merton College has the dedication copy given to the patron of the first Port Ralph, the oak tree, who is thanked for paying for the higher scribes.
In the lower margins of manuscript 191 the first volume of the set,
we find that scribes signed the choirs, presumably as part of the financial reckoning.
Does it imply already? Payment by the choir.
Rather than by the day, which will be the normal approach to paying a hired workman.
Four scribes worked on volume one of four.
If we multiply up for a minimum of number of copies, five copies, one for himself, four for his benefactors,
then we should be looking at scores of scribes employed at the same time, unless production was staggered.
With getting on for a million words to each copy. This was an expensive task, but the aim seems to have been to get it done.
The date 1189 for the copying of button 191 is secure.
The compilation behind the copying had also included the making of a great many excerpts.
It's no wonder that Peter was grateful to the patrons who had paid for the scribes.
Now, after 1197 prior, he could have done without such external support.
One suspects, but is a mere canon. He couldn't ask his prior for the money to hire 80 or 90 scribes for several weeks.
I inclined to think that in London, the trade and the established libraries about which we know so little would have cooperated.
But there remains a distinct possibility that the trade kept exemplars of popular texts, even at this date.
Only popular texts, not Reginald Slicer Godfrey.
Would it be surprising if London was already and had been for a long time, the centre of the book Economy in England?
I don't feel surprised. I remember with a little caution a passage in Thomas Molpus account of the abbots of Evesham written about 1216,
but much of it based on the work of Dominic of Evesham. The passage.
I'm going to. Quote, I suspect is in Thomas of Marlborough's Woods rather than Dominic of Ephraim's.
It was Abbot Alfred towards the end of its reign who retained the Embassy of Evesham upon becoming Bishop of London.
And here we have Alfred taking advantage of some merchants arriving in London with the body of Saint Rudolph,
the Confessor from Staverton in Holland, which they sell him for 100 marks, and he heads off census of Evesham to be venerated.
And almost as an afterthought, liberal R.S. Pluribus Tem de Venus, Kwame Grammaticus de Leon Donia transmit it.
He also sent from London a very large number of books termed to Venus Quam Grammaticus life translated as both service books and school books.
It does not appear that he is creating an important library for scholarship.
He is rather meeting basic needs, albeit on a plentiful scale.
But he is not hiring scribes and he is not directing his monks.
He is buying books seemingly in the trade in 1034 or soon after.
No. If we believe this is only valid in the perspective of Thomas of Musselburgh and not of Abbot Alfred.
This is still very early evidence for trade supply.
From the 1230s onwards, however,
we start to see direct evidence of the book trade craft workshops like that of William de Braille's here in Oxford along Kent Street.
Attested by both by the books it produced and by record sources for the occupancy of shop premises.
From then on, continually, if not continuously.
Art historical work has built a picture of workshops characterised by style or by individual artists,
and no one is likely to challenge the notion that in London and in Oxford and perhaps other places, we have an answer to the supply side question.
The question of exemplars for texts remains problematic in the universities.
There was a provision by the end of the 13th century through Stationers and PC, perhaps earlier, for the supply of approved books.
But many works spread and circulated that were not on the university curriculum.
We know that libraries were not and could not be self-sufficient in the provision of exemplars.
But we do not know how works were made available to meet what have been may have been only occasional need.
I must go faster from the second quarter of the 13th century.
We must include a new kind of consumer of library books.
The Friars. We know them as studious, though some medieval authors made them an object of satire.
Not all friars were like. Here in Oxford and Cambridge, in Paris and across Europe, friars were prodigious consumers of books.
Authors of books and distributors of books. I name only Aquinas, Bonaventure and the Oxford teacher from Tweeddale SCOTUS.
It must be a cause of great regret that the evidence from the English friar is so poor.
One suspects that there was much, much more than has survived.
The motivation in creating registrar anger was a desire to read everything that mattered.
And one may mention that they may have sought to make copies of much that mattered to them.
The fact that gross tests books went to the Greyfriars in Oxford to serve as exemplars for the future,
and that as early as 1253 is a sign that the bishops saw it as a serious research library.
It's almost all gone without leaving a meaningful trace.
We have a handful of books older than the Great Frost Foundation, a few 13th century books, a few 14th century books and some later items.
No consistent text library at any period. No shelf marks.
The Franciscans elsewhere used simple shelf smokes and no documentary evidence.
Fryers personally were not bound by stability as Benedictines were care complained of
the difficulty of dealing with books marked only with the names of individual friars.
Were the houses unable to provide stability for their books?
By Leland's time when he gained entry at the Greyfriars.
Here, he found a library room. That would be relatively modern equipment, 15th century,
probably full of dust spiders and the grubs and beetles of cliche with not a lot of books to attract his interest.
The library had changed much over time. That library room had been built some high points of interest.
Its books had drifted away. We have to look back over several phases of change to try and imagine what the
Greyfriars Library in Oxford looked like in 1253 or in 1300 when a Digby manuscript,
I think, was copied from one of the greatest exemplars.
It certainly has the most accurate text of of his tractatus de DSM mandates.
Were fryers perhaps too much users of books to maintain a safe library of deposit where
a Benedictine house might have space to leave hundreds of books unused for a century,
two or two friars had more use for the books and less luxury of storage space.
I'm guessing the clock moves on. We have two centuries still to go.
In the 1320s. I've wondered whether it's funny.
AP We can see an extreme outcome of that Benedictine passivity.
I've written somnolence here. In the display case.
At the time of my first lecture, there was the scrap parchment used by the presenter of Thorney over a period of years
to track the annual distribution of books to the monks on the first Monday of Lent.
We are able to read the entries for four non-consecutive years between 1324 and 1330.
And I managed to provide a plausible reconstruction of monastic seniority in order to track which books each monk took over time.
This is a little puzzling combinatorics, and I don't claim to have got the only viable solution.
It might tragic to 2005 if anyone would like to come up with an alternative solution.
Three things emerged. A surprising number of monks were absentees on this occasion, laid down in the rules for the distribution of books.
Many of the monks took only the most basic reading material.
In one case, a brother had the Lord's Prayer on all four non-consecutive years within the eight year period covered.
And a small supply of books provided for the needs of the Lenten distribution year after year.
One of those books is No portly 680 medical works written in the 13th century and given to the MP by Ralph Clock.
That's the kind of late 13th century donation we might well expect.
The impossible question is whether there was, besides these books,
a large and neglected library of books built up first in the early 12th century and added to by individual monks over the succeeding years.
If that wasn't what had happened to it. If there was, why weren't they using it?
When we have reference to the library and all these at Abingdon, which were kept in a different cupboard from the main stock.
It's not that only the books in that cupboard were distributed every year.
It was that once the distribute distribution had happened.
In the cloister you could lock your. This year's book among the library and walls.
And more people had the key to let you get it. That was just a convenience within the year.
It seems to me that Thorney presents a low end of monastic reading.
By the mid thirties and forties we know that the monks had some rather racy book.
The bishop called it shameful and in no way to be committed to writing, which circulated among them.
Condemned by the bishop, but slow to be eradicated.
My guess is that we're looking at to here a French debut.
But this is not great evidence for the AP as a community of readers with what should have been a mature library.
The 1320s was perhaps a nadir for the Benedictines, but not for all of them.
From 1336, Pope Benedict the 12th,
wanted a revival of Benedictine Learning and then joined larger communities to maintain one or two members of the monks at university.
Now, before we think of this as an outside imposition on monks who had abandoned their books and wanted to stay that way,
remember that the very large history catalogue of 1800 books at Canterbury.
Dates from 1326. The very large Ramsay catalogue probably dates from the 1330s.
There was interest. There was learning. Bennett Benedict's aim was to spread best practice more widely in the order within England.
We might think of John of London, Monk of St Augustine's Abbey.
If one could see the huge and complex library catalogue of that abbey so well-edited by Bruce Parker Benfield in its accession order.
As we see those from Canterbury and from Ramsey under the name of John of London would be more books than came from any other donor,
among them a quantity of serious material in mathematics and astronomy.
We do not have any work of learning from this. John of London, despite attempts to link him with others of the same name.
In the mid 13th century and in the mid 14th century.
Another name I had in mind to discuss at this point was Randall Higdon, a monk of Chester, who, from the beginning of the third's reign,
began to make available a very successful universal chronicle, which he continued to revise until his death at an advanced age in 1364.
He outlines his major sources in the preface.
But from time to time, as one reads him, one finds that he can quote really rather unexpected sources.
These are not necessarily identified by the 19th century editor.
We know little enough about the library. A Chester MP.
And I doubt that we could describe its contents on the basis of Higgins reading.
But he is an example of a very successful Benedictine reader, author and publisher at a time when one does not expect it.
I have wondered whether he was allowed to spend rather a lot of his time in London.
Where he could read more and where he had easy access to scribes.
I need not repeat what I've said earlier about the late 14th century as the apogee of medieval library catalogues in England,
as much for the handling of complex metadata as for the size of the collections described.
Much of this was the product of slow accumulation.
But it came with renewed interest. And in the mid to late 14th century, we may see a surge in expansion again.
The librarians who gave us some of these catalogues, I think particularly of Henry Kirk's dead and John Whitfield commissioned and wrote books.
They are concerned with their library over a narrow span of time.
Over the next generation or two, we see perhaps a selection of books and the building of library rooms equipped with reading
desks for more concerted study away from the activity of the cloister walk providing room.
Very likely for fewer books. Berry and Canterbury, for example, had such libraries.
And so, we suspect, did a fair number of places.
The evidence can be very thin evidence of training on surviving books mentioned in accounts, if we have them, of money spent on chains and locks.
In the first the second lecture,
I inferred a room with 50 desks and 750 books from the system of shelf marks revealed in an index catalogue from St Mary's Abbey in York.
A big conclusion from that evidence.
Now, for the first time, we have at the end of the 14th and in the early 15th century, a visible connection between the books that have reached us.
And the late medieval library furniture that we know from Rare Survivals in a number of places.
This visible connection has made the chained library a widely perceived realisation of the medieval library.
Our Benedictine evidence reached its zenith in the late 14th century.
And it is much more difficult to follow even Benedictine libraries into the 15th century.
Though we know that the number of books produced in England was going up at the time.
The library catalogue of St Augustine's provides a challenging tool because they're underneath the 15th century.
Re Transcription. There lies the late 14th century catalogue augmented no doubt by many hands, with all the accessions of 100 years.
If only we had the original to study and not a later copy.
The simple fact is that as far as the Benedictines go in the 15th century,
our attention has shifted away and we'll lose them again, perhaps without real warrant to fall into torpor, interests go elsewhere.
The evidence of accessions to the London Carmel in the late 14th,
early 15th century and the extraordinary catalogue from the Austin Hermits in York in 1372 with the addition of John argues,
300 books somewhat later stand to show that the Friars might be doing well.
If only we had more evidence.
Yet by the time that the Benedictines in Bury and York were equipping their library rooms and perhaps selling off surplus books.
There were other houses. We see definitely deaccessioning on some scale.
To the advantage of individuals buying books who were happy to acquire old books and even old works long forgotten in some cases,
and to seek to preserve them.
And to the advantage of some new libraries, such as those of the Canons of Windsor and the Fellowes of Eton, which I talked about on Thursday.
Now, if build what comes to mind, it is because build was books often very finely produced in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.
Turn up in several places in the 15th century.
Now I'm not going to generalise to argue that Cistercians were now devoting themselves full time to sheep rearing and had given up reading.
Even at build was they retained many books,
a clutch of which fell into the hands of Archbishop Cranmer around the time of the dissolution and survive as a clutch in the Royal Library now.
All Biblical. We must also remember that the universities had come into existence long before the 15th century.
The early evidence from Oxford, around 1100, is perhaps not well known.
But Gerald of Wales is reading to the scholars of Oxford in 1189 is widely familiar.
The 13th century saw the foundation of the first colleges, both in Oxford and in Cambridge,
and the first documentary evidence of the local book trade.
Yet. The first substantial evidence of college libraries is from 1318 by 1334.
The catalogue of 87 volumes of arts books at Merton College.
The same college has an earlier testament, leaving two books in 1300 that from the 1330s.
As I discussed in the second lecture, testaments increase in numbers thick and fast, but college catalogues are few.
For the remainder of the century. The flood of documentation is not easily digested into a clear sense of library holdings,
though it does paint a like a lively picture of fellows borrowing college books and then later in life when they've made careers in the church,
remembering their successes back at Merton when they disposed of their personal libraries.
Indexed by author in Title One also sees clearly enough the works most in demand.
I mentioned last time my suspicion that one of the best evidenced college libraries was
losing copies of necessary books and replacing them without really noticing in the evidence.
As currently analysed. Secondary Folios Demand More Attention.
With 33 documents printed in the Oxford volume of the Corpus and 344 recognised survivors from the medieval college.
It is impossible to say how many books there were at Merton when the medieval holdings reached their maximum size.
After inventories of arts books and theology books at different points in the 14th century, we have no further inventory.
We may allow that the record of annual loans will reflect the great majority of the collection shared out among the fellows.
But even here, the evidence is, shall I say, suboptimal.
There survive five aughts lists of loans and two theology lists, and there is no year from which both lists are known.
The earliest is 1372, the latest 1519.
And we may reasonably suppose that such annual loans had been recorded since well before 1372.
So out of a potential of, say, 400.
Even 500 records. Seven exist.
These are transient throw away records redundant within a year.
If all the fellows have behaved well within a few. If some of them have made off with the books.
We must be thankful for what we have now by putting together a list of 1452 on the art side and 1519 on theology.
We might hazard a total of some 700 books, but the lapse of time between 1452 and 1519.
So so much change in the book economy that we must hesitate.
The loan list from 1519 is, in any case, a challenging document listing only the second folios of 442 volumes of the Odyssey.
So your starting point is just the Second Folio.
How many of these represent recent expansion in the collection with printed books?
I'll just say my time is running out. But I should mention that the late 14th and 15th centuries had also seen the foundation of some rich,
secular, collegiate churches like the university colleges.
And unlike the religious houses, they were blessed with continuity in the 16th century.
So that from Windsor and Eton, we still have enough books to see that libraries built from the second hand trade.
Well, the new abbey at Syon grew largely through new books and was acquiring printed books at an
early date as the index of imprints in Vincent Gillespie's edition makes clear at a glance.
I breathlessly mentioned the increasing visibility of professional books for lawyers
and physicians in the 15th century and of private books for personal devotions.
And of strong record evidence from the late 14th century continuously.
For a. Voluminous book trade records massively centred in London.
Doesn't surprise me at all.
But Paul Christiansen did not judge it worth his while to look further back than 1300 for what was by then as you go backwards.
Sparse early evidence. In the long run, it would be hard to say that libraries as a sector in the book economy kept a pace with the private sector.
In part, that's because we are poorly apprised of the earlier history of the private sector.
For the Anglo-Saxon period. It is almost assumed that the book is an institutional book.
Though I doubt the truth of that. First, Private Booklist names the works in the library of a man named Athelstan.
Around the end of the 10th century, we infer he was a schoolmaster from the books he owned.
The manuscript into which the list is written subsequently came into the Library of St Augustine's Abbey and survives.
His was a modest collection.
Richard Parsons successively of St Martin in the corn market in Worcester and the suburban church of Tibetan outside Worcester.
Rural Dean of Worcester in 1221 had the misfortune to have two cartloads of
his books detained by a total gatherer at which bowled ten miles out of town.
How many books make two cartloads, and what part of his personal library this represents are unclear?
And we have no idea why they were on the road ten miles out of town.
He'd been a person in Worcester several years before this date and continued several years after.
So it may be this is his latest purchase from London.
The toll collector, however, was accused of misconduct in obtaining the books and trying to apply unlawful tolls on other people.
So the case into the legal records and we know about it.
It's probably the largest private library attested so early in England.
Yet the person is an unknown but surely not untypical figure.
We could do much more to track personal books over time and so equipped we might have less
sense that the proportion of the library economy was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
What we see is more and more personal books. But we haven't looked for the personal books.
Earlier. There can, however. Be no doubt that the invention of printing.
And the arrival of printed books in some considerable numbers in England within 15 years or so of
Gutenberg's invention represented a huge change in the balance between libraries and private books.
On Thursday, I shall argue that it would spell the end of most libraries in England for a generation.