cted to be the schoolmaster of his parish, and generally was so, and
there was hardly a village in England during the reign of Henry III, in
which there were not one or more persons who could write a _clerkly_
hand, draw up accounts in _Latin_, and keep the records of the various
petty courts and gatherings that were continually being held, sometimes
to the annoyance and grievous vexation of the rural population. The
professional _writers_ were so numerous, and their training so severe,
that they had got for themselves privileges of a very exceptional kind;
the _clerk_ took rank with the _clergyman_, and the _writer_ of a book
was almost as much esteemed as its _author_.

The scriptorium of a great monastery was at once the printing-press and
the publishing office. It was the place where books were written, and
whence they issued to the world. With the traditional exclusiveness of
the older monasteries there was less desire, no doubt, to diffuse and
disperse than to accumulate books, but the composing and the
multiplication of books was always going on. The scriptorium was a great
writing school too, and the rules of the art of writing which were laid
down there were so rigidly and severely adhered to, that to this day it
is difficult to decide at a glance whether a book was written in St.
Alban's or St. Edmund's Abbey. Sometimes as many as twenty writers were
employed at once, and besides these there were occasionally
supernumeraries, who were professional scribes, and who were paid for
their services; but nothing short of perfect penmanship, such trained
skill, for instance, as would now be required for an engraver, would
qualify a copyist to take part in the finished work, which the copying
of important books required.

One of the conclusions which Sir Thomas Hardy arrived at during the
course of his minute examination of Sir Frederick Madden's theory is so
curious, and opens out such an unexpected view of the way in which our
monasteries may have been brought under the influence of foreign
literature, that it is worth while in this connection to quote the great
critic's own words:

'After minutely examining every page of the manuscripts in
question, as well as others, which were undoubtedly written
in the monastery of St. Alban's, and comparing them with
others executed in various parts of England and on the
Continent, I can come to no other conclusion than that
during the latter hal