The original library of Titchfield Abbey would have consisted of its service books, scriptures and possibly some donations made on its foundation in 1232. In time this would have been added to by the labours of the canons themselves, devotional works being borrowed from other convents and copied by them. In common with other monastic orders, the Premonstratensian Canons had to carry out a certain amount of spiritual reading. The Cluniac rule laid this down as at least one volume per year, which had to be exchanged, in full view of the Chapter, on the first Monday in Lent. More frequent exchange of books was encouraged, and periods were set aside for both communal and individual reading. At first these books would be kept, together with the service books, in the church itself, or possibly in a chest in the cloister and would be under the supervision of the choirmaster or “precentor”. Later the Premonstratensian Rule stated that the office of the Librarian was bound by the rule to provide for both lending and borrowing of books and was specifically enjoined to pay attention to theology, philosophy and “Literas humaniores”
By the mid-fourteenth century some monasteries had built up fair collections of books, both through their own copying and through the increasing practice of obtaining books written by professional scribes. Durham Abbey had as many as 3,000 volumes. Moreover, library science had progressed correspondingly. Not only did individual monasteries catalogue their books, but a union list of the monastic libraries of East Anglia had been compiled.
Titchfield’s collection was catalogued in 1400 and it is through the catalogue, one of the finest surviving examples of a monastic catalogue, that we know about the Abbey’s books. It seems likely that the library room had been built by this time, as the catalogue describes the bookcases as being “two on the Eastern face, on the Southern face the third, and on the Northern face the fourth”. This would accord with the room identified as the library in the published plan, which had its entrance in the western side. This room opens from the cloister and immediately adjoins the chapter house – a typical situation for the library room. It was approximately ten feet wide and twenty-five feet long, which would be a generous allowance for a mere book room. Perhaps it was also used as a scriptorium in cold weather.
Books would be read either in the cloister, or in the monk’s own cell. The catalogue (which is in the Portland collection of manuscripts on loan to the British Museum) lists a total of 326 volumes in the library for a readership of only about fourteen canons. This number must not be confused with books, as several books were often bound together in order to save money. Works unbound are specifically referred to in the catalogue as “in quatemo”. The number of individual works listed is well over 1,000, one volume containing as many as twenty works. Titchfield’s catalogue was in fact one of the earliest to list all the contents of a volume, not only the first book – a significant advance.
Another innovation in the Abbey catalogue was the introduction which set out the arrangement of the books and gave a brief outline as to which cupboards contained the books. As stated, these were four cases, each with eight shelves, these shelves were lettered according to the class of books they had on them. Thus the shelf containing theology, Class A, was on shelf A. This class letter might extend to several shelves if books were plentiful, as for example in class B where no less than seven shelves would have this letter. To fix the exact place of a bookon the shelves, each volume was given a number with its letter class. Thus the Abbey’s “Remembrance Book” (The Rememoratorium) was PX – the tenth book of class P. This identification was marked in the catalogue, on the spines and the fly leaves of the books.
The books represented in the catalogue would all have been handwritten, and were nearly all in Latin. There were however a few books marked as “in anglicis”, one being a rare twelfth century poem called “The Owl and the Nightingale”. Printed books would have been added later in the fifteenth century. The greater part of the library consisted of religious books, but the variety of subjects represented show that the monastic idea of learning was not a narrow one. In fact monks were responsible for the saving of most of the classical literature we have, not to mention early English material and all our early history. Medicine was a particular speciality of Titchfield with 29 volumes represented. The historian R.M. Wilson remarks however that the collection would have been fifty years out of date in 1400 and probably represented the interest of one individual earlier in the century. The eighteen volumes in French remind us that the Premonstratensian Canons were a French order. Unfortunately very few volumes have survived until the present day. The dispersal in 1537 and the destruction of Popish books” by the 1547 and 1549 Acts have done their work. Only nine volumes are listed in G.N.Ker’s catalogue of surviving books, The Mediaeval Libraries of Great Britain. These included Richard de Glanville’s Laws of England (Book P1) the Magna Carta and English Statutes (PI 1) and the Remembrance Book (PX).
The actual use of the library would have been largely confined to the fourteen or so inmates of the Abbey. However, lay persons were generally allowed to consult the books at the monastery (provided they could read Latin). Moreover, we know that sometimes books were loaned out under heavy surety to another monastery for copying, or even to a wealthy layman. The surety would have been sufficient to restrict the borrowing to the wealthiest men. There is no evidence to suggest that English convents lent freely upon a small deposit as often happened in France. Despite these restrictions on the use of their books, the monks made developments in the field of book and library science that were not surpassed until the great library awakening of the 1840s. The catalogue of Titchfield Abbey serves as a reminder of the endeavours of the monks in this as in many other fields.
References:
Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club, VII (1916)
P. R. Catcheside