But though by far the greater portion of work done in the Scriptorium
was mere office work, the educational department, if I may so term
it, being subsidiary, it must not be forgotten that the literary and
the historical department also was represented in the Scriptorium of
every great monastery. In the thirteenth century men never kept
diaries or journals of their own daily lives, but monasteries did. In
theory, every religious house recorded its own annals, or kept a
chronicle of great events that were happening in Church and State.
Where a monastery had kept its chronicle going for a long time, it
got to be regarded almost as a sacred book, and was treated with
great veneration: it lay in a conspicuous place in the Scriptorium,
and was under the care of an officer who alone was permitted to make
entries in it. When any great piece of news was brought to the
monastery that seemed worth putting on record, the person giving the
information wrote out his version of the story on a loose piece of
parchment, and slipped his communication into the book of annals for
the authorized compiler to make use of in any way that seemed best to
him, after due examination of evidence. This was the rule in all
monastic houses. Unfortunately, however, as it is with the journals
or diaries of men and women of the nineteenth century, so it was with
the journals and diaries of monks of the thirteenth, they evidently
were kept by fits and starts; and before the fourteenth century was
half out, the practice of keeping up these diaries in all but the
larger monasteries had come to an end.
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