§ II
When gifts or bequests were received by a church or monastery, it was a beautiful custom to lay them, or something to represent them, upon the altar: “a book, or turf, or, in fact, almost any portable object, was offered for property such as land; or a bough or twig of a tree, if the gift were a forest.” King Offa’s gift of churches to Worcester monastery in 780 was accompanied by a great book with golden clasps, with every probability a Bible.294 A gift was made under similar circumstances in c. 1057, about the time Bishop Leofric was founding the library at Exeter, when Lady Godiva, the wife of another Leofric, restored some manors to Worcester, and with them gave a Bible in two parts. Before this, Bishop Werfrith, to whom we have referred before as a helper of King Alfred, had sent to Worcester the Anglo-Saxon version of Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis; the very copy of it is now in the Bodleian Library.
Such were perhaps the beginnings of the library of Worcester Cathedral. We cannot but think that a collection of books was formed slowly and steadily here, as in other foundations of the same kind, although actual records are scanty and meagre. In over forty of the manuscripts now at Worcester are inscriptions on fly-leaves stating where they were procured: sometimes the price is given. The dates of these inscriptions run from about 1283 to 1462, or later.295 “In 1464,” writes the Rev. J. K. Floyer, in his article entitled A Thousand Years of a Cathedral Library, “we first hear of a regular endowment for the acquisition of books. Bishop Carpenter made a library in the charnel house chantry, and endowed it with £10 for a librarian. The charnel house was near the north porch of the Cathedral, and stood on or near the site of the present Precentor’s house. It was a separate institution from the monastery, and had its own endowments and priests. Bishop Carpenter’s foundation was probably entirely separate from the collection of books kept for the use of the monks in the cloister.”296 At the same time, the bishop made regulations for the use of the library. The keeper was to be a graduate in theology, and a good preacher. He was to live in the chantry, where a dwelling had been erected for him at the end of the library. Among other duties he had to take care of the books. The library was to be open to the public every week day for two hours before Nones (or nine), and for two hours after Nones. This alone was a most liberal regulation, for making which Bishop Carpenter deserves all honour. But he went still further. When asked to do so the keeper was to explain difficult passages of Scripture, and once a week was to deliver a public lecture in the library. The Bishop’s idea of a library is precisely that embodied in the modern town library: a collection of good books, for the free use of the public, with some personal help to the proper use of them when necessary. Three lists of the books were to be drawn up, one to be kept by the Bishop, the second by the sacrist, and the third by the keeper. Once a year stock was taken, and if a book were missing through the keeper’s neglect, he was to forfeit its value within a month, or in default was to pay forty-shillings more than the value of it, one half of the sum to go to the Bishop, the other half to the sacrist. Unfortunately these and other regulations were not observed with care, and within forty years the Bishop’s work was completely neglected and forgotten.
At the Dissolution the Priory was deprived of much of its church plate, service books and vestments, and probably of many of its books. But the library there suffered a good deal less than those of other houses, and the Cathedral now has in its possession some respectable remains of its ancient collection of books.297