Charles le Sage, in 1373, had a considerable library, amounting to nine hundred volumes. He placed this collection in one of the towers of the Louvre, hence denominated the “Tour de la Librarie,” and entrusted it to the custody of his valet-de-chambre, Gilles Malet, constituting him his librarian.[2] He was no common personage, for great as was the care and ingenuity required, he drew up an inventory with his own hand of this royal library. In that early age of book-collecting, volumes had not always titles to denote their subjects, or they contained several in one volume,[3] hence they are described by their outsides, their size, and their shape, their coverings and their clasps. This library of Charles the Fifth shines in extreme splendour, with its many-coloured silks and velvets, azure and vermeil, green and yellow, and its cloths of silver and of gold, each volume being distinctly described by the colour and the material of its covering. This curious document of the fourteenth century still exists.[4]
This library passed through strange vicissitudes. The volumes in the succeeding reigns were seized on, or purchased at a conqueror’s price, by the Duke of Bedford, Regent of France. Some he gave to his brother Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, and they formed a part of the rich collection which that prince presented to Oxford, there finally to be destroyed by a fanatical English mob; others of the volumes found their way back to the Louvre, repurchased by the French at London. The glorious missal that bears the Regent’s name remains yet in this country, the property of a wealthy individual.[5]
Accident has preserved a few catalogues of libraries of noblemen in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, more pleasant than erudite. In the fourteenth century, the volumes consisted for the greater part of those romances of chivalry, which so long formed the favourite reading of the noble, the dame and the damoiselle, and all the lounging damoiseaux in the baronial castle.[6]
The private libraries of the fifteenth century were restricted to some French tomes of chivalry, or to “a merrie tale in Boccace;” and their science advanced not beyond “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” or “The Secrets of Albert the Great.” There was an intermixture of legendary lives of saints, and apocryphal adventures of “Notre Seigneur” in Egypt; with a volume or two of physic and surgery and astrology.
A few catalogues of our monastic libraries still remain, and these reflect an image of the studies of the middle ages. We find versions of the Scriptures in English and Latin—a Greek or Hebrew manuscript is not noted down; a commentator, a father, and some schoolmen; and a writer on the canon law, and the mediæval Christian poets who composed in Latin verse. A romance, an accidental classic, a chronicle and legends—such are the usual contents of these monastic catalogues. But though the subjects seem various, the number of volumes were exceedingly few. Some monasteries had not more than twenty books. In such little esteem were any writings in the vernacular idiom held, that the library of Glastonbury Abbey, probably the most extensive in England, in 1248, possessed no more than four books in English,[7] on religious topics; and in the later days of Henry the Eighth, when Leland rummaged the monasteries, he did not find a greater number. The library of the monastery of Bretton, which, owing to its isolated site, was among the last dissolved, and which may have enlarged its stores with the spoils of other collections which the times offered, when it was dissolved in 1558, could only boast of having possessed one hundred and fifty distinct works.[8]
In this primitive state of book-collecting, a singular evidence of their bibliographical passion was sometimes apparent in the monastic libraries. Not deeming a written catalogue, which might not often be opened, sufficiently attractive to remind them of their lettered stores, they inscribed verses on their windows to indicate the books they possessed, and over these inscriptions they placed the portraits of the authors. Thus they could not look through their windows without being reminded of their volumes; and the very portraits of authors, illuminated by the light of heaven, might rouse the curiosity which many a barren title would repel.[9]
To us accustomed to reckon libraries by thousands, these scanty catalogues will appear a sad contraction of human knowledge. The monastic studies could not in any degree have advanced the national character; they could only have kept it stationary; and, excepting some scholastic logomachies, in which the people could have no concern, one monkish writer could hardly ever have differed from another.
The monastic libraries have been declared to have afforded the last asylums of literature in a barbarous era; and the preservation of ancient literature has been ascribed to the monks: but we must not accept a fortuitous occurrence as any evidence of their solicitude or their taste. In the dull scriptorium of the monk, if the ancient authors always obtained so secure a place, they slept in comparative safety, for they were not often disturbed by their first Gothic owners, who hardly ever allude to them. If ancient literature found a refuge in the monastic establishments, the polytheistical guests were not slightly contemned by their hosts, who cherished with a different taste a bastardised race of the Romans. The purer writers were not in request; for the later Latin verse-makers being Christians, the piety of the monks proved to be infinitely superior to their taste. Boethius was their great classic; while Prudentius, Sedulius, and Fortunius, carried the votes against Virgil, Horace, and even Ovid; though Ovid was in some favour for his marvellous Romance. The polytheism of the classical poets was looked on with horror, so literally did they construe the allegorical fables of the Latin muse. Even till a later day, when monkery itself was abolished, the same Gothic taste lingered among us in its aversion to the classical poets of antiquity, as the works of idolaters!
Had we not obtained our knowledge of the great ancients by other circumstances than by their accidental preservation by the monks, we should have lost a whole antiquity. The vellum was considered more precious than the genius of the author; and it has been acutely conjectured that the real cause of the minor writers of antiquity having come down to us entire, while we have to lament for ever the lacerations of the greater, has been owing to the scantiness of the parchment of a diminutive volume. They coveted the more voluminous authors to erase some immortal page of the lost decades of Livy, or the annals of Tacitus, to inscribe on it some dull homily or saintly legend. That the ancients were neglected by these guardians appears by the dungeon-darkness from which the Italian Poggio disinterred many of our ancient classics; and Leland, in his literary journey to survey the monastic libraries of England, often shook from the unknown author a whole century of dust and cobwebs. When libraries became one source of the pleasures of life, the lovers of books appear to have been curious in selecting their site for perfect seclusion and silence amid their noble residences, and also in their contrivances to arrange their volumes, so as to have them at instant command. One of these Gothic libraries, in an old castle belonging to the Percys, has been described by Leland with congenial delight. I shall transcribe his words, accommodating the reader with our modern orthography.
“One thing I liked extremely in one of the towers; that was a STUDY called PARADISE; where was a closet in the middle of eight squares latticed ‘abrate;’ and at the top of every square was a desk ledged to set books on, on coffers within them, and these seemed as joined hard to the top of the closet; and yet by pulling, one or all would come down breast-high in rabbets (or grooves), and serve for desks to lay books on.”