Albert, abbot of Gemblours, who with incredible labour and immense expense had collected a hundred volumes on theological, and fifty on general subjects, imagined he had formed a splendid library.
About 790, Charlemagne granted an unlimited right to hunting to the abbot and monks of Sithin, for making their gloves and girdles of the skins of the deer they killed, and covers for their books.
At the beginning of the tenth century, books were so scarce in Spain, that one and the same copy of the Bible, St. Jerome’s Epistles, and some volumes of ecclesiastical offices and martyrologies, often served several different monasteries.
Amongst the constitutions given to the monks of England by Archbishop Lanfranc, in 1072, the following injunction occurs: At the beginning of Lent, the librarian is ordered to deliver a book to each of the religious; a whole year was allowed for the perusal of this book! and at the returning Lent, those monks who had neglected to read the books they had respectively received, are commanded to prostrate themselves before the abbot to supplicate his indulgence. This regulation was partly occasioned by the low state of literature in which Lanfranc found the English monasteries to be; but at the same time it was a matter of necessity, and partly to be referred to the scarcity of copies of useful and suitable authors.
John de Pontissara, Bishop of Winchester, borrowed of his cathedral convent of St. Swithin at Winchester, in 1299, Bibliam bene Glossatam, or the Bible, with marginal annotations, in two large folio volumes; but he gives a bond for due return of the loan, drawn up with great solemnity. This Bible had been bequeathed to the Convent the same year by his predecessor, Bishop Nicholas de Ely: and in consideration of so important a bequest, and 100 marks in money, the monks founded a daily mass for the soul of the donor.
About 1225 Roger de Tusula, dean of York, gave several Latin Bibles to the University of Oxford, with a condition that the students who perused them should deposit a cautionary pledge.
The Library of that University, before the year 1300, consisted only of a few tracts, chained or kept in chests in the choir of St. Mary’s Church.
Books often brought excessive prices in the middle ages. In 1174, Walter, Prior of St. Swithin’s at Winchester, and afterwards abbot of Westminster, purchased of the monks of Dorchester in Oxfordshire Bede’s Homilies and St. Austin’s Psalter, for twelve measures of barley, and a pall on which was embroidered in silver the history of Birinus converting a Saxon king.
About 1400, a copy of John de Meun’s Roman de la Rose was sold before the palace-gate at Paris for forty crowns, or 33l. 6s. 6d.
In Edward the Third’s reign, one hundred marks (equal to 1000l.) were paid to Isabella de Lancaster, a nun of Ambresbury, for a book of romance, purchased from her for the king’s use.