“For lewdë men y undyrtoke On Englyssh tunge to make thys boke: For many ben of swyche manere That talys and rymys wyl blethly[556] here, Ye gamys and festys, and at the ale.”[557]
ANCIENT VELLUM BOOK-MARKER WITH REVOLVING DISC
FROM A DOUBLE-COLUMN CANTERBURY BIBLE; THE DISC CAN BE USED TO MARK COLUMN AND LINE. MS. 49 C.C. COLL. CAMB.]
The need of multiplying manuscripts of these poems would not be greatly felt. The reciter would be obliged to learn them off by heart; he need not, and often did not, possess written versions of the poems he recited. And even literate men, as Bishop Grosseteste, preferred to listen to these gestours, rather than to read the narrative themselves. Therefore, any estimate we may form of the number of manuscripts of romances in existence at any time in the fourteenth century, for example, would give not the smallest idea of the extent to which these tales were known.
The medieval collector of books sometimes, and the monastic librarian nearly always, took care that his library was strong in hagiology and history. He felt the need of books which would tell him of the past history of his church and of the lives of her greatest teachers. When collected these books were an incentive to the more cultivated of the monks to begin the history of his country or his house, or to write or re-write the lives of saints. The fruit is preserved for us in a long line of monkish historians and hagiographers. As a rule the histories they wrote were of little value; but when they had brought the tale down to their own times they continued it with the help of records to their hand, narrated events within their own memory, and maintained the narrative in the form of annals. The method of annalising was simple. At the end of the incomplete manuscript a loose or easily detachable sheet was kept, whereon events of importance to the nation and the monastery and locality of the annalist were written in pencil from time to time during the year. At the end of the year the historian welded these jottings into a narrative. When this was done another leaf for notes was placed after the manuscript. The value of the work so accomplished is incalculable. Without these records it would now be impossible for us to realise what the Middle Ages were like. This service, added to the enormously greater service which monachism did for us in preserving ancient literature, will always breed kind thoughts of a system so repugnant to our modern view of human endeavour.