The library of the Cathedral church at Tours dated from the time of St. Perpetuus, the sixth bishop, who left to his Cathedral church all his manuscripts except the copy of the Gospels written by the hand of St. Hilary of Poitiers (353-68) whom St. Martin had visited.[206] Perpetuus was Bishop of Tours from 460 to 494. Ruinart, whose edition of Gregory of Tours Migne took as the original of his edition, notes that he had seen in the Cathedral library at Tours a book in Saxon characters which had been supposed to be the work of Hilary’s own hand; but he found that it contained matter much later than Hilary’s time, and that the author had appended an inscription stating himself to be Holaindus by name. A catalogue of the Cathedral library was made in 1706 by the Chanoine Victor d’Avanne, at which time the library contained 461 manuscripts. The Chanoine complained that many other manuscripts had been borrowed by savants and not returned; he names as culprits Auguste de Thou, André Duchesne, Maan, and Michel de Marolls. Of the 461 manuscripts catalogued, the Public Library now has 309.
The library of Marmoutier was founded by St. Martin himself with the abbey: so at least the phrase is understood to mean, “except writing (or scripture) no art was exercised there.” Dom Gérou, librarian of Marmoutier, made a catalogue of the manuscripts in his charge, and Chalmel’s copy of that catalogue is now in the library of Tours. There were, in 1754, 360 manuscripts, and there are now 263 of them in the library. Many of these are of value. Marmoutier was always rich in Latin manuscripts. In 1716 a great collection made by the Lesdiguières family was bought at Toulouse; these were chiefly French, and thus it comes about that the library of Tours now possesses some of the very first rank of the most ancient monuments of French literature.
Sulpicius Severus, who made a special visit to St. Martin at Tours, gives us an exact description of the site of this monastery, founded by Martin in or about 372, at a distance of two miles from the city, on its north-east side. He describes it as bounded on the north by a range of precipitous rock, and on the south by a portion of the stream of the river Loire, here divided. In those times it was only accessible by one narrow way. Martin’s own cell was of wood, but many of the eighty brethren excavated cells for themselves in the rock, the nature of which lends itself to such excavation. The range of cliff is honeycombed to this day for stables, wagon-sheds, &c.; indeed, excavations of this character are a feature of the district, observable from Poitiers to many miles on the Orleans side of Tours. This abbey, like that of St. Martin, gradually became secularized, and it, like St. Martin’s, was ruled by Count Vivian forty years after Alcuin’s death. The names of many of its abbats before Alcuin’s time are known, but it is only from the year 814 that a continuous series is recorded. A photograph of some remains of the abbey is given in [Plate V].
The library of the Collegiate church of St. Martin was founded by Alcuin, who borrowed books from England, mainly from York, and had them copied; probably some of the borrowed books remained at Tours, for Northumbria was in too disturbed a state to look after manuscripts lent to France. In 1739 Bernard de Montfaucon published an inventory of this library, which then contained 272 manuscripts. Of these the library of Tours now possesses 140. The twenty-one other sources referred to above have provided 96 manuscripts, and the library has, besides, 159 which cannot be traced to their source. This makes nearly 1,000 manuscripts in all from these sources. The twenty-one sources referred to, and the number of manuscripts each has provided, are as follows: The Augustins of Tours 16; les Carmes 11; les Capucins 1; les Dames du Calvaire 3: l’Oratoire 19; les Récollets 1; le Grand Séminaire St. Julien 3; St. Pierre le Puellier 2; l’Union Chrétienne 3; la Visitation 2; Aigues Vives 1; Amboise 3; St. Florentin d’Amboise 1; l’Abbaye de Beaumont 4; Bois-Rayer 1; Cormery 5; Notre-Dame de Loches 2; la Chartreuse du Liget 5; les Augustines de Beaulieu-lès-Loches 1; les Religieuses Hospitalières de Loches 1; les Minimes du Plessis-lès-Tours 11. What endless treasures England would now have possessed if municipal authorities had taken such care as this of the monastic libraries in the time of Henry VIII.
Plate V
Some remains of Marmoutier. To face p. 222.
In translating the life of Alcuin, we omitted one of the examples of Alcuin’s insight into the ways of men which the anonymous author gives. It relates to Cormery, some miles up the river Indre, one of the places from which manuscripts were brought into the library of Tours. The trick played was as clever in itself as the detection of it was. It got over the difficulty of the vessels being found to be partly empty, and the difficulty that, if they were filled up with water, the taster of the monastery would detect the fraud at once.
This is the passage in the Life:—
“To the brothers of Cormery, whom he greatly loved, the father had ordered a hundred measures of wine to be given. When the wine was to be taken to the monastery, he ordered the stewards of the monastery, through Sigulf, a monk of Abbat Benedict, that they should detain the conveyors of the wine, until in their presence the wine should be poured from the vessels in which they had brought it into others; because some of them had stealthily taken out some of the wine, and, in order that the vessels might be full when they reached the monastery, had put into them river-sand. That this had been done, the fathers proved most conclusively.”