First of all, Hugh was a trained writer, who might look a little later to be actually paid for his toil, if so be he did not take the black habit and became a monk himself. All of their gentle craft that the master limners and letterers in this great scriptorium of Tewkesbury Abbey could teach him, he had learned. In all the ten major abbeys and priories of Gloucestershire, perhaps no other lad of his years was so skilled to use both brush and pen. His term of tutelage being passed, he wrought now, in repayment for his teaching, upon the choicest of the volumes written here for great nobles and patrons of art and letters. And if ever sureness of glance and touch was called for, it was at this present time, since the work must be meet for royal eyes. The volume--when all its soft, creamy leaves should have been covered with arabesques and high painted crests and shields and deftly regular text of writing, and been sewed together inside their embossed covers--was to be given, they said now, to the brother of the King. Prouder ambition than this a craftsman could hardly dream of--yet now, all at once, Hugh despaired to find himself making foolish mis-marks on the precious page, and not able to contrive their betterment.
The boy stared in gloom upon the parchment, wondering if, in truth, it were wholly spoilt; then his eyes wandered off through the open window to the blue May sky, and drifting after their gaze went his thoughts, in wistful reverie upon that gilded dreamland of princes and earls, whither this book, in good time, was to wend its way. New promptings stirred in his blood.
He had been a monk's boy in all these later years of peace, since his father, the poor saddler, fell in his Nevill livery on Hedgely Moor, away in the farthest north. The great kindly Abbey had been much more his home than the dark, squalid little house in the village below, where his widowed mother lived: here he had learned to write so that even the Abbot, John Strensham, lofty magnate and companion of princes though he was, had nodded smilingly over his work; here he had helped to serve the Mass in the grand Abbey church, with censer and bell, and felt his young mind enriched and uplifted by pious longings; here, too, he had dreamed into the likeness of veritable and detailed history his vision of the time when he should compose some wonderful chronicle, and win thanks from the great ones of the earth, and be known to all men as Hugh of Tewkesbury, whose book was to be prized above every other.