Item Anoyer called the Sexte [Liber Sextus Decretalium].
Item A boke called Hugucyon [see pp. 223-4].
Item A boke called Vitas Patrum.
Item Anoyer boke called pauls pistols.
Item A boke called Januensis super evangeliis dominicalibus [Sermons of Jacobus de Voragine, Abp. of Genoa, on the Gospels for the Sundays throughout the year].
Item Anoyer boke called Legenda Aurea [Legenda sanctorum aurea of Jacobus de Voragine].”[331]
This is a respectable list for such a church. Some sixty years before there were apparently only service books (1465).[332]
From 1456 to 1475 charges occur in the accounts of St. Michael’s Church, Cornhill, for chains to fix psalters, and for writing.[333] At St. Peter’s upon Cornhill there would appear to have been a good library. “True it is,” writes Stow, “that a library there was pertaining to this Parrish Church, of olde time builded of stone, and of late repayred with bricke by the executors of Sir John Crosby Alderman, as his Armes on the south end doth witnes. This library hath beene of late time, to wit, within these fifty yeares, well furnished of bookes: John Leyland viewed and commended them, but now those bookes be gone, and the place is occupied by a schoolemaister.”[334] In 1483 the Church of St. Christopher-le-Stocks, London, seems to have had a collection only of service books; but five years later mention is made of “a grete librarie.” “On the south side of the vestrarie standeth a grete librarie with ii longe lecturnalles thereon to lay on the bookes.”[335] About the middle of the sixteenth century certain inhabitants of Rayleigh held a meeting one Sunday, after service, and, without the consent of the churchwardens, sold fifteen service books, and “four other manuscript volumes,” as well as some other church goods, for forty shillings.[336]
But we might continue for a long time to bring together facts of this kind. Enough has been written to suggest the character and extent of the work done by the churches. Many of these small collections were for use in connexion with the schools; they were formed for the benefit of clergy and the increase of clergy. The few books chained up in the churches for the use of the people were displayed for various reasons. The Catholicon, a Latin grammar and a dictionary, was a large book, obtainable only at great cost, yet for reference purposes all students and scholars constantly needed it. Wealthy ecclesiastics and benefactors would therefore naturally leave such a book for chaining up in the church, which was then the real centre of communal life. The Catholicon was chained up for reference in French churches, and the practice was imitated here, possibly in nearly all the large churches.[337] The Medulla grammatice, left to King’s Norton Church by Sir Thomas Lyttleton, was a book of similar character, and would be deposited in church for a like purpose. Books of canon law would also be useful for reference purposes when chained in the church. Some other shackled books were homiletical in character. Should we be accused of excess of imagination if we conjured up a picture of a little cluster of people standing by a clerk who reads to them a sermon or a passage of Holy Writ? The collection of tales, each with a moral, known as the Gesta Romanorum, would make especially attractive reading. Some books often found in churches and frequently mentioned in this book, as the Summa Praedicantium of John de Bromyarde, Pupilla Oculi, by John de Burgo, and the Speculum Christiani, by John Walton, were manuals for the instruction of priests.