There is evidence of Greek studies at other monasteries,--at Westminster after 1465, when Millyng, an “able graecian,” became prior at Reading in 1499 and 1500, and at Glastonbury during the time of Abbot Bere.[487]
But Canterbury’s share was greatest. Selling seems to have taught Greek at Christ Church. In the monastic school there Thomas Linacre was instructed, and probably got the rudiments of Greek from Selling himself. Thence Linacre went to Oxford, where he pursued Greek under Cornelius Vitelli, an Italian visitor acting as prælector in New College.[488] In 1485-6 Linacre went with his old master to Italy--his _Sancta Mater Studiorum_--where Selling seems to have introduced him to Poliziano. Linacre perfected his Greek pursuits under Chalcondylas, and became acquainted with Aldo Manuzio the famous printer, and Hermolaus Barbarus. A little story is told of his meeting with Hermolaus. He was reading a copy of Plato’s _Phaedo_ in the Vatican Library when the great humanist came up to him and said “the youth had no claim, as he had himself, to the title Barbarus, if it were lawful to judge from his choice of a book”--an incident which led to a great friendship between the two. Grocyn and Latimer were with Linacre in Rome. The former was the first to carry on effectively the teaching of Greek begun at Oxford possibly by Vitelli; but he was nevertheless a conservative scholar, well read in the medieval schoolmen, as his library clearly proves. This library is of interest because one hundred and five of the one hundred and twenty-one books in it were printed. The manuscript age is well past, and the costliness of books, the chief obstacle to the dissemination of thought, was soon to give no cause for remark.
Secular makers of books have plied their trade in Europe since classic times, but during the early age of monachism their numbers were very small and they must have come nigh extinction altogether. In and after the eleventh century they increased in numbers and importance; their ranks being recruited not only by seculars trained in the monastic schools, but by monks who for various reasons had been ejected from their order. These traders were divided into several classes: parchment-makers, scribes, rubrishers or illuminators, bookbinders, and stationers or booksellers. The stationer usually controlled the operations of the other craftsmen; he was the middleman. Scribes were either ordinary scriveners called _librarii_, or writers who drew up legal documents, known as _notarii_. But the _librarius_ and _notarius_ often trenched upon each other’s work, and consequently a good deal of ill-feeling usually existed between them.