There probably was a time when there existed no private libraries in the
kingdom, nor any save the monastic; that of Oxford, at the close of the
thirteenth century, consisted of "a few tracts kept in chests." In that
primeval age of book-collecting, shelves were not yet required. Royalty
itself seems to have been destitute of a royal library. It appears, by
one of our recently published records, that King John borrowed a volume
from a rich abbey, and the king gave a receipt to Simon his Chancellor
for "the book called Pliny," which had been in the custody of the Abbot
and Convent of Reading. "The Romance of the History of England," with
other volumes, have also royal receipts. The king had either deposited
these volumes for security with the Abbot, or, what seems not
improbable, had no established collection which could be deemed a
library, and, as leisure or curiosity stimulated, commanded the loan of
a volume.
The borrowing of a volume was a serious concern in those days, and heavy
was the pledge or the bond required for the loan. One of the regulations
of the library of the Abbey of Croyland, Ingulphus has given. It regards
"the lending of their books, as well the smaller without pictures as the
larger with pictures;" any loan is forbidden under no less a penalty
than that of excommunication, which might possibly be a severer
punishment than the gallows.
Long after this period, our English libraries are said to have been
smaller than those on the Continent; and yet, one century and a half
subsequently to the reign of John, the royal library of France,
belonging to a monarch who loved literature, Jean le Bon, did not exceed
ten volumes. In those days they had no idea of establishing a library;
the few volumes which each monarch collected, at great cost, were always
dispersed by gifts or bequests at their death; nothing passed to their
successor but the missals, the _heures_, and the _offices_ of their
chapels. These monarchs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
amid the prevailing ignorance of the age, had not advanced in their
comprehension of the uses of a permanent library beyond their great
predecessor of the ninth, for Charlemagne had ordered his books to be
sold after his death, and the money given to the poor.
Yet among these early French kings there were several who were lovers of
books, and were not insensible of the value of a studious intercourse,
anxious to procure transcribers and translators. A curious fact has been
recorded of St. Louis, that, during his crusade in the East, having
learned that a Saracen prince employed scribes to copy the best writings
of philosophy for the use of students, on his return to France he
adopted the same practice, and caused the Scriptures and the works of
the Fathers to be transcribed from copies found in different abbeys.
These volumes were deposited in a secure apartment, to which the learned
might have access; and he himself passed much of his time there,
occupied in his favourite study, the writings of the Fathers.[1]
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 mediaeval 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."
However clumsy this invention in "Paradise" may seem to us, it was not
more so than the custom of chaining their books to the shelves, allowing
a sufficient length of chain to reach the reading-desk--a mode which
long prevailed when printing multiplied the cares of the librarian.
[Illustration: _King's Library, British Museum_