d work were Henry Fitzalan, Earl of
Arundel; Lord William Howard; Long Harry Savile of Bank; Laurence
Nowell, who rescued Anglo-Saxon books; Nicholas Brigam, who was
interested in English literature and built Chaucer's tomb in the Abbey;
the Theyers of Brockworth, near Gloucester. These are names to some of
which we shall return; it would be well at this moment to take a few
libraries one by one and see what can be said of them.

CATALOGUES OF MSS.

But, first, what are our means for pursuing such an investigation? We
are best off if we have a catalogue of our abbey library, and preferably
a late one; for in that case not only will the library be at its
fullest, but probably the cataloguer will have set down, after the title
of each book, the first words of its second leaf. Does this need
explanation? Perhaps. In MSS., unlike printed books, the first words of
the second leaf will be different in any two copies, say, of the Bible;
the scribes did not make a page for page or line for line copy of their
archetype--in fact, they may probably have avoided doing so purposely.
By the help of such a catalogue we can search through collections of
MSS., noting the second leaves in each case, and, it may be, identifying
a considerable number of books. It is a laborious but an interesting
process.

But, alas! such catalogues are very few; we have them for Durham, St.
Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury (and partly also for Christchurch), St.
Paul's Cathedral, Exeter Cathedral, Dover Priory, the Austin Friars of
York (all now in print), and for not many more.

Next best it is to have a catalogue enumerating the contents of each
volume; and next, and commonest, one which gives usually but a single
title to each. Among the most useful I reckon those of Christchurch,
Canterbury, Peterborough (an anomalous one), Glastonbury, Bury St.
Edmunds, Rochester, Dover, Lincoln, Leicester Abbey (not yet printed in
full), Ramsey, Rievaulx, Lanthony-by-Gloucester, Titchfield. There are a
good many short catalogues for smaller houses, written on the fly-leaves
of books, which do not, as a rule, help us much. The list of monastic
catalogues, however, is dreadfully defective. We have none for St.
Albans or Norwich or Crowland or Westminster, for Gloucester or
Worcester, St. Mary's, York, or Fountains. What do we do in such cases?

THE EVIDENCE OF MSS. THEMSELVES

We have to depend, of course, on the evidence of the MSS. themselves. It
was happily