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The library of a monastery was as much a feature as the scriptorium. The monks were not like the rising literary man, who, when asked if he had read "Pendennis" replied, "No I never read books I write them." Every scribe was also a reader. There was a regular system of lending books from the central store.
It was Queed's privilege to tell Klinker that he must keep away from the Scriptorium; but in that case Klinker might fairly retort that he would no longer give the Doc free physical culture. Did he care to bring that issue to the touch? No, he did not. In fact, he must admit that he had a distinct need of Buck, a distinct dependence upon him, for awhile yet at any rate.
A librarian was in charge, and every monk was supposed to have some book which he was engaged in reading "straight through" as the Rule of St. Benedict enjoins, just as much as the one which he was writing. As silence was obligatory in the scriptorium and library, as well as in the cloisters, they were forced to apply for the volumes which they desired by signs.
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.
Buck Klinker, returning from some stag devilry at the hour of two A.M., and attracted to the Scriptorium by the light under the door, found the little Doctor pacing the floor in his stocking feet, with the gas blazing and the shade up as high as it would go.
Obviously it became a great writing-school, where the copyists consciously or unconsciously wrote according to the prevailing fashion of the place; and there have been, and there are, experts who could tell you whether this or that document was or was not written in this or that monastic Scriptorium.
We lunched in what was the side gallery of the refectory, where some drowsy old brother used to read the lives of saints to the monks eating below. We walked over the graves of abbots, and through the scriptorium, which reminded me of the exquisite scene in the Golden Legend, of the old monk in the scriptorium busily illuminating a manuscript.
When he grew older and was allowed to prowl about in the scriptorium of the Abbey of Montmirail which lay by the Canche side, he found his wood again. It was in a Psaltery on which a hundred years before some Flemish monk had lavished his gold and vermilion. Opposite the verse of Psalm xxiii., "In loco pascuae," was a picture almost the same as that in the bedroom arras.
Edmunds has none; no national chronicle was ever penned in its scriptorium such as that which flings lustre round its rival, St. Albans; nor is even a record of its purely monastic life preserved such as that which gives a local and ecclesiastical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book alone the abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles.
But her lashes did so glitter, and he capitulated at once; and turning instantly went heavy-hearted up the stairs. In a Country Churchyard, and afterwards; of Friends: how they take your Time while they live, and then die, upsetting your Evening's Work; and what Buck Klinker saw in the Scriptorium at 2 a.m.
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