with the demand, was quite inadequate to
meet the requirements of the wealthy nobles.
Monasteries were then the great storehouses of
book-writing, copying, making, and binding.
Certain monks, whose names have perished,
spent all their lives over the illumining and
binding of books; never leaving their cells
except to pray, and never receiving a farthing
for their labours, notwithstanding that their
works were sold at a fabulous price for the
benefit of greedy priors or rapacious bishops.
When the crusades began, a few knights
devoured by the thirst for tales of battle, learned
to read; and fair ladies, finding the time long
whilst their lords were away, did the same. By
the end of the thirteenth century there were
between fifteen hundred and two thousand
monks in England alone, whose sole occupation
was making books; and paper having been
invented about that time, the publication of
religious works was commenced under a cheaper
form for the benefit of the middle classes, who
were then very much better taught than the
aristocracy.

The mania for splendid books of chivalry
reached its climax under the reigns of Edward
the Third and his immediate successors, when
Froissart sojourned at the English court in
company with Chaucer, the father of English
poetry. One might almost be taxed with
exaggeration were one to attempt to describe
the treasures of art and wealth that were freely
lavished upon the binding and illumining of a
book in those days. A few prices will barely
convey an idea of this bibliomaniac
extravagance.

A copy of the Roman de la Rose, by Guillaume
de Lorris, given by the Duke of Hereford
(afterwards Henry the Fourth) to Mary Bohun,
his wife, cost four hundred crowns of gold,
something equivalent to seven hundred pounds
of our money. The Prayer-book given in 1412
by Charles the Sixth of France to the Duchess
of Burgundy, cost six hundred crowns of gold,
and the Viscounty of Bayeux was specially
taxed to pay for it. In 1430, at the coronation
of Henry the Sixth of England as King
of France, at Notre Dame, the regent Bedford
was presented with three works of chivalry,
and the young monarch with five, by a deputation
of the citizens of Paris. The eight volumes
together were valued at two thousand four
hundred crowns; and it may be instructive to add
that his Grace of Bedford, being subsequently
in need of cash, disposed of them all for about
a third of that sum. A scroll of music,
purchased in 1441 for the abbey church of St.
Stephen's, at Caen, necessitated an outlay of
twenty-two sols (or silver pence), "the value
of ten bushels of wheat."

And, as a final instance, the Bishop of
Poictiers, Simon de Gramand, having presented
a Latin and French dictionary, in two volumes,
in the year 1426, to the Jacobine monastery of
the town, it was resolved, in a council of the
order, "that as a token of kindness for so
munificent a gift prayers should be recited for him
daily 'ad perpetuitatem,' and that after his
death, masses for the sanctification of his soul
should be offered up on the first Sunday of each
month, in the chapel of the convent."

One might be tempted to suppose that, under
the circumstances, the bookseller's bill, which
even in these times plays a very conspicuous
part in a schoolboy's expenses, must have been
the terror and despair of mediæval parents.
But such was not the case.

To begin with, boys went much later to
school than they do now. Twelve was the
usual age for commencing lessons, and as soon
as a student had learnt to write, he was taught to
make his own books. A Greek or Latin work
was chained to a lectern in the middle of the
schoolroom, the master gave out the passage
that was to be learned by heart or construed,
and the pupils came up turn by turn, or three
or four at a time, and copied it out on their
paper. It was only very wealthy scholars who
could afford to have a complete set of books of
their own, and the first head-master of Eton (the
school was founded in 1441) had probably little
more than six or eight volumes in his library.

We come now to the invention of printing,
which marks a complete revolution in the social
history of the world. It is well known that
Fust, who established the first presses invented
by Gutenberg, kept the discovery for some
years secret, and gained an immense deal of
money by selling the earliest printed books as
manuscripts. When, however, the secret at
last transpired, the price of printed volumes
rose instead of falling, and for a long while the
works printed at Nuremberg and Mayence
fetched enormous sums. With the invention of
printing, on the other hand, the fashion for
costly bindings and illumined pages disappeared
almost entirely. People began to care more
for the inside than the outside of books. A
few monks continued to adorn missals and
bibles for kings or princes; but the art of
binding may be said to have fallen into a
complete state of stagnation for the next hundred
years.

It was not until the middle of the sixteenth
century, at the period known as the "Revival,"
that printed books having become more common,
and consequently cheaper, the taste for
handsome bindings set in once more. The richest
library in Europe during the fifteenth century
had been undoubtedly that formed at Buda by
Mathias Corvin, King of Hungary. It numbered
fifty thousand volumes (the greater part of which
are now in the public library at Munich), and
the bindings alone must have cost the worth of
several hundred thousands of pounds of our
money. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, private persons, noblemen, and
wealthy merchants began to surpass monarchs
in the splendour of their libraries. The most
esteemed bookbinders of Europe had originally
been Italians. Under the revival the palm
passed to France, and the encouragement given
to artists by the House of Valois produced such
masters as Enguerraud, Boyer, Deuenille,