hat among the books imported in the seventh century from
Italy by Benedict Biscop and Theodore and Hadrian, and in the great
library of York, which Alcuin panegyrizes in his poem on the saints of
York, there were texts now lost. But the Danes made a clean sweep of all
those treasures, as they did of the whole vernacular literature of
Northumbria, undoubtedly a rich one. The scattered indications I have
collected in the preceding paragraphs point to the fact that some
strange and rare books did lurk here and there in English libraries. It
is almost a relief that catalogues do not tell us of supremely desirable
things, such as Papias on the Oracles of the Lord, or the complete
Histories or Annals of Tacitus.

Another word on a topic akin to the last. I have said more than once
that the men of the later Middle Ages did not value early books as such;
they were difficult to read, and often in bad condition. At first they
were apt to be made into palimpsests; but when good new parchment became
abundant and comparatively cheap, this practice was dropped. I
conjecture that there is no important palimpsest whose upper writing is
later than the eleventh century. The fate of the early books is rather
obscure to me, but I see that bits of them were not uncommonly used for
lining covers and fly-leaves for MSS. of the thirteenth to fifteenth
centuries, and perhaps still oftener as wrappers for documents. Binders
of the sixteenth century, and especially those who lived after the
Dissolution, used up service-books and scholastic theology and Canon law
to a vast extent, but early books not so lavishly. There are cases in
which one is left doubtful as to whether the binder or his employer did
not insert the old leaves with the definite wish to preserve them. I
think of the leaves of a Gospel book bound at the end of the Utrecht
Psalter, of a fragment of another fine Gospels in an Arundel MS. at the
College of Arms, of some splendid Canons of the Gospels in the Royal MS.
7. C. xii; but in the cases that follow I think that accident and not
design has been at work, viz.: the fragments of several venerable
volumes at Worcester, admirably edited of late by Mr. C. H. Turner; the
leaves of a great sixth-century Bible found by Mr. W. H. Stevenson
wrapping up Lord Middleton's documents at Wollaton; uncial fragments of
Eucherius in the Cambridge University Library; other uncial leaves at
Winchester College; bits of AElfric's Grammar at All Souls';