If the celebrated coronation book of the Anglo-Saxon kings should turn out to have been written and illuminated in this country, it would afford a striking illustration of this reaction. The general opinion, however, appears to be, among the learned, that it may have been given to Athelstan by Otho of Germany, who married his sister, and by Matilda, Otho's mother. The arguments in favour of, and against, the Anglo-Saxon origin of the volume would be too long to discuss in this place. The writing is mainly Carlovingian.
"Bib. Dec." vol. i. p. cxxii.
It is to be regretted that the propriety of those just and learned remarks of Muratori, in which he exhibited himself as one of the earliest foreign scholars inclined to do justice to the ancient Irish and British schools,—"Neque enim silenda laus Britanniæ, Scotiæ, et Hiberniæ, quæ studio liberalium artium eo tempore antecellebant reliquis occidentalibus regnis; et cura præsertim monachorum, qui literarum gloriam, alibi aut languentem aut depressam, in iis regionibus impigrè suscitarent atque tuebantur" (Murat. "Antiq. Ital." diss. 43),—should have been impugned by the Rev. Mr. Berington in his "Literary History of the Middle Ages," pages 180, 181.
These pious monks, until probably some time after the Norman conquest, generally worked together in an apartment capable of containing many persons, and in which many persons did, in fact, work together at the transcription of books. The first of these points is implied in a curious document, which is one of the very few specimens extant of French Visi-Gothic MS. in uncial characters, of the 8th century. It is a short but beautiful form of consecration or benediction, barbarously entitled "Orationem in Scripturio," and is to the following effect: "Vouchsafe, O Lord, to bless this Scriptorium of thy servants and all that dwell therein; that whatsoever sacred writing shall be here read or written by them, they may receive with understanding, and bring the same to good effect, through our Lord," &c.—See Merryweather's "Bibliomania in the Middle Ages."
"Dark Ages," second edition, p. 193.