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Updated: April 30, 2025
Now that the work of the scriptorium was coming to be known, orders were received for splendidly illuminated missals and other volumes, for which gilding was necessary. The brilliant colors would lose half their beauty without the decorative touches of gilding to set them off. And gold was costly. "Where do men get gold?" Padraig asked one day. "Out of the earth," answered Brother Basil absently.
But as his eye went round the pretty, dim-lit room, he could not help contrasting it with the bleak Scriptorium above, and he added with a change of tone and a sigh: "You appear wonderfully comfortable here." Nicolovius shrugged. "So-so," he said indifferently. "However, I shall make a move before long." "Indeed?"
Before examining the books themselves, it will be interesting to observe the conditions under which the work was accomplished. Sometimes the scriptorium was a large hall or studio, with various desks about; sometimes the North walk of the cloister was divided into little cells, called "carrels," in each of which was room for the writer, his desk, and a little shelf for his inks and colours.
This momentous composition he had brought and laid upon the Colonel's desk, as usual; but he did not follow his ancient custom by instantly vanishing toward the Scriptorium. Instead he stuck fast in the sanctum, not pretending to look at an encyclopedia or out of the window as another man might have done, but standing rigid on the other side of the table, gaze glued upon the perusing Colonel.
He took a bit of parchment which had once been written upon and had been scraped clean enough to use again, and made some queer marks upon it with his pen dipped in black fluid. That was the first time Padraig had ever seen any one write. It did not take long for Brother Basil to find out how fascinated the herd-boy was with the work of the scriptorium.
With ever fresh wonderment, he faced the fact that this work, first taken up solely to finance the Scriptorium, and next enlarged to satisfy a most irrational instinct, was growing slowly but surely upon his personal interest.
Jessop has pointed out that in addition to the production of church service books, of music, and educational work in connection with the school, "a small army of writers" must have been needed in the "business department of the scriptorium." The Benedictine rule would appear to have been framed with the idea of giving full employment to every inmate of the monastery.
At other times he would take Hans into the beautiful chapel belonging to the monastery, and show him its gaily adorned altars, and curious images; and once or twice Hans got a peep into the Scriptorium, or writing-room, were the monks were at work over their sheets of parchment, writing so carefully one after another the curiously formed letters which were then in use, and which are still used in the printed books of Germany.
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.
Jacob of Breslau, who died in 1480, copied so many books that it is said that "six horses could with difficulty bear the burden of them!" The work of each scriptorium was devoted first to the completion of the library of the individual monastery, and after that, to other houses, or to such patrons as were rich enough to order books to be transcribed for their own use.
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