A library of five hundred
volumes would, in those days, have been considered an important
collection, and, after making all due allowances for ridiculous
exaggeration which have been made by ill-informed writers on the
subject, it may safely be said that nobody in the thirteenth century--
at any rate in England--would have erected a large and lofty
building as a receptacle for books, simply because nobody could have
contemplated the possibility of filling it. Here and there amongst
the larger and more important monasteries there were undoubtedly
collections of books, the custody of which was intrusted to an
accredited officer; but the time had not yet come for making
libraries well stored with such priceless treasures as Leland, the
antiquary, saw at Glastonbury, just before that magnificent
foundation was given as a prey to the spoilers. A library, in any
such sense as we now understand the term, was not only no essential
part of a monastery in those days, but it may be said to have been a
rarity.
But if the thirteenth century monastery possessed necessarily no
great Reading-Room, the Scriptorium, or Writing-Room, was almost an
essential adjunct. In the absence of the printing-press, the demand
for skilled writers and copyists throughout the country was enormous.
In the Scriptorium all the business, now transacted by half a dozen
agents and their clerks, was carried on.
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