Most books were bound by the monks themselves. The commonest materials used for ordinary manuscripts were wooden boards, covered with deerskin and calfskin, either coloured red or used in its natural tint, and parchment usually stained or painted red or purple. Charles the Great authorised the Abbot of St. Bertin to enjoy hunting rights so that the monks could get skins for binding. In mid-ninth century, Geoffroi Martel, Count of Anjou, commanded that the tithe of the roeskins captured in the island of Oléron should be used to bind the books in an abbey of his foundation. Few monastic bindings have been preserved, because many great collectors have had their manuscripts rebound. Several examples of Winchester work remain. Mr. Yates Thompson has a mid-twelfth century manuscript bound in the monastic style, the leather being stamped with cold irons of many curious rectangular shapes. The manuscript of the Winton Domesday has a binding with stamps exactly like those on Mr. Thompson’s book. “At Durham in the last half of the twelfth century there was an equally important school of binding, with some one hundred and fourteen different stamps. The binding for Hugh Pudsey’s Bible has nearly five hundred impressions.”[274] In Pembroke College library an excellent specimen of twelfth century stamped binding remains on MS. 147. Such stamps were small, and frequently of geometrical or floral design, always rudimentary; but animals of the quaintest form—grotesque birds and dragons—were also introduced. A hammer or mallet was employed to obtain an impression from the stamp. Sometimes the oak boards were not covered with skin but were painted.
If a book was specially prized the binding was often rich. The covers of the Gospels of Lindau, a superb example of Carolingian art, bear nearly five hundred gems encrusted in gold.[275] Abbot Paul of St. Albans gave to his church two books adorned with gold and silver and gems. Abbot Godfrey of Malmesbury, partly to meet a heavy tax imposed by William Rufus, stripped twelve Gospels of their decorations. “Books are clothed with precious stones,” cried St. Jerome, “whilst Christ’s poor die in nakedness at the door.”[276] In spite of the many references to jewelled monastic bindings in medieval records, very few are extant.
CHAPTER V
CATHEDRAL AND CHURCH LIBRARIES
§I
TO the books of the monastery some human interest clings: we can at once conjure up a picture of the cloister and the scribe at his work; the handling of an old manuscript, the turning over of finely-written and quaintly-illuminated yellow pages, throws the mind flashing back centuries to the silent writer in his carrell. But the church library is not rich in associations. It was a small “working” collection: one part for the use of the clergy, the other part—consisting of a few chained books—for the use of the people. These chained books, which now suggest a scarcely conceivable restriction upon the circulation of literature—even theological literature—were, in fact, the sign of a glimmer of liberal thought in the church. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not only were monastic books issued to lay people more freely, but many more books were chained in places of worship than in the sixteenth century, when the proclamation for the “setting-up” of Bibles in churches was granted unwillingly.