athered together a collection of books that would do
credit to a modern University.

It is very interesting to notice, as Order after Order was founded, a
steady development of feeling with regard to books, and an ever increasing
care for their safe-keeping. S. Benedict had contented himself with
general directions for study; the Cluniacs prescribe the selection of a
special officer to take charge of the books, with an annual audit of them,
and the assignment of a single volume to each brother; the Carthusians and
the Cistercians provide for the loan of books to extraneous persons under
certain conditions--a provision which the Benedictines in their turn
adopted. Further, by the time that the Cluniac Customs were drawn up in
the form in which they have come down to us, it is evident that the number
of books exceeded the number of brethren; for both in them, and in the
statutes which Lanfranc promulgated for the use of the English
Benedictines in 1070, the keeper of the books is directed to bring all the
books of the House into Chapter, after which the brethren, one by one, are
to bring in the books they had borrowed on the same day in the previous
year. Some of the former class of books were probably service-books, but,
after this deduction has been made, we may fairly conclude that by the end
of the eleventh century Benedictine Houses possessed two sets of books:
(1) those which were distributed among the brethren; (2) those which were
kept in some safe place, probably the church, as part of the valuables of
the House: or, to adopt modern phrases, they had a lending library and a
library of reference. The Augustinians go a step farther than the
Benedictines and the Orders derived from them, for they prescribe the kind
of press in which the books are to be kept. Both they and the
Premonstratensians permit their books to be lent on the receipt of a
pledge of sufficient value. Lastly, the Friars, though they were
established on the principle of holding no possessions of any kind, soon
found that books were indispensable; that, in the words of a Norman
Bishop, _Claustrum sine armario, castrum sine armamentario_. So, by a
strange irony, it came to pass that their libraries excelled those of most
other Orders, as Richard de Bury testifies in the _Philobiblon_.

Whenever we turned aside to the cities and places where the
Mendicants had their convents ... we found heaped up amidst
the utmost poverty the utmost rich