Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The most noteworthy example of the literary interests of Britain during the manuscript period is afforded by Richard Aungerville, better known as Richard de Bury, Bishop Palatine of Durham, whose famous Philobiblon was given to the world in 1345. In his various travels, and through his correspondents in England, France, and Italy, he was able to get together a great collection of books, which were later bequeathed to the University of Oxford. His eloquent tribute to his beloved books must, I judge, be taken rather as expressing the enthusiasm of an exceptionally devoted scholar than as fairly representing the literary spirit of the time:

“Thanks to books, the dead appear to me as though they still lived.... Everything decays and falls into dust by the force of time: Saturn is never weary of devouring his children, and the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, had not God as a remedy conferred on mortal man the benefit of books.... Books are the masters that instruct us without rods or ferules, without reprimands or anger, without the solemnity of the gown or the expense of lessons. Go to them, you will not find them asleep: if you err, no scoldings on their part: if you are ignorant, no mocking laughter.”[407]

In 1344, (the year before his death) Richard writes as follows:

“As it is necessary for a state to provide military arms, and prepare plentiful stores of provisions for soldiers who are about to fight, so it is evidently worth the labour of the church militant to fortify itself against the attacks of pagans and heretics with a multitude of sound books. But because everything that is serviceable to mortals suffers the waste of mortality through lapse of time, it is necessary for volumes corroded by age to be restored by renovated successors, that perpetuity, repugnant to the nature of the individual, may be conceded to the species. Hence it is that Ecclesiastes significantly says, in the 12th chapter. ‘There is no end of making many books.’ For, as the bodies of books suffer continued detriment from a combined mixture of contraries in their composition, so a remedy is found out by the prudence of clerks, by which a holy book paying the debt of nature may obtain an hereditary substitute, and a seed may be raised up like to the most holy deceased, and that saying of Ecclesiasticus, be verified, ‘The father is dead and, as it were, not dead, for he hath left behind him a son like unto himself.’”

One of the earliest authorities concerning book publishing in England is Bishop Fell, who in his Memoir on the State of Printing in the University of Oxford, tells us that that university “possessed an exclusive right of transcribing and multiplying books by means of writing,” a privilege which implies a species of copyright. The date referred to is about 1600.

In both Oxford and Cambridge, according to the statutes in force before the introduction of printing, the stationarii belonged to the class of Servientes, who were appointed by the chancellor or vice-chancellor of the university. The records of Oxford show many instances of the pawning of books by the undergraduates and occasionally by the instructors to the stationarii. In one codex, belonging to Mr. Thomas Paunter, there is an inscription showing that it was pawned to a stationarius in 1480, for the sum of thirty-eight shillings.[408] Books which had been so pledged, came frequently enough, after their forfeiture, into sale. An entry in the accounts of the library of S. John’s College in Cambridge, dating from 1456, records a payment made, apparently from the treasury of the college, for the redemption of an Avicenna from the stationarius to whom a certain John Marshall had pledged the manuscript. The cost of the redemption was £1. 6s. 4d.[409]

The Oxford stationarii finally secured privileges as members of the university, but not before 1458, (as a result apparently of an arrangement between the university and the city authorities), did this agreement take the stationarii out of the jurisdiction of the city, and put them into the same class with the dealers in parchment, the illuminators, and the scribes, who for many years had been subordinated to the university. The taxes on the stationarii were fixed by and collected by the chancellor, and the proportion due to the city treasury was paid over by him.

The term stationarius, which had, as we have seen, been in use for these university dealers throughout all Europe, secured in Great Britain a permanent association with the book-trade by its use as an appellation for the publishers’ and booksellers’ guild, which was chartered in 1403 as “The Stationers’ Company.” Its headquarters in London was entitled Stationers’ Hall, and is still so known. The term in Great Britain, however, was made from a very early date to cover a larger variety of trade undertakings than that to which it was limited in the university towns in Italy, France, and Germany. The business of selling manuscripts on commission, which was, as we have seen, kept under very close supervision on the part of the university authorities of Paris and Bologna, appears to have been much less important in England, and the dealers seem for the most part to have been left free to make such terms either in buying or selling manuscripts as they saw fit, and as the necessities of their customers rendered practicable.

As early as the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377), there is record of a number of stationarii as carrying on business in Oxford. In an Oxford manuscript dating from this reign, there is an inscription of a certain Mr. William Reed, of Merton College, who tells us that he purchased this book from a stationarius.[410]

In London, there is record of an active trade in manuscripts being in existence as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. The trade in writing materials, such as parchment, paper, and ink, appears not to have been organised as in Paris, but to have been carried on in large part by the grocers and mercers. In the housekeeping accounts of King John of France, covering the period of his imprisonment in England, in the years 1359 and 1360, occur entries such as the following: