The most ancient binders were the monks, who stitched together their own compositions or transcripts, or, when the volume was more substantial, encased it in oaken boards, which a subsequent hand often improved and preserved by a coat of leather. But laymen were occasionally their own binders, as we perceive in the note to Warton's Poetry,[3] where a "Life of Concubranus" in MS. is said to have been bound by William Edis, afterward a monk at Burton-on-Trent, while he was a student at Oxford in 1517.
At Durham and Winchester there were notable schools of art of the present class in the Middle Ages, and specimens occasionally occur, though rarely in good state. A very fine Winchester piece of work was sold in 1898 among William Morris's books (No. 580), and all over the country and abroad, even down to the present time, the inmates of religious institutions occupy themselves with the same industry on a less ambitious scale, and with infinitely less artistic and picturesque results.
When Barclay wrote his English paraphrase of Brandt's Stulltifera Navis about 1508, it almost seems as if the type of connoisseur, who understood the outside better than the interior of a book, was already in evidence, for the writer says:—
"Still am I busy bookes assembling,
For to have plentie it is a pleasaunt thing
In my concept, and to haue them ay in hand:
But what they meane do I not vnderstand. . . .
Lo in likewise of bookes I haue store,
But fewe I reade, and fewer vnderstande,
I folowe not their doctrine nor their lore,