The library of the Collegiate church of St. Martin was founded by Alcuin, who borrowed books from England, mainly from York, and had them copied; probably some of the borrowed books remained at Tours, for Northumbria was in too disturbed a state to look after manuscripts lent to France. In 1739 Bernard de Montfaucon published an inventory of this library, which then contained 272 manuscripts. Of these the library of Tours now possesses 140. The twenty-one other sources referred to above have provided 96 manuscripts, and the library has, besides, 159 which cannot be traced to their source. This makes nearly 1,000 manuscripts in all from these sources. The twenty-one sources referred to, and the number of manuscripts each has provided, are as follows: The Augustins of Tours 16; les Carmes 11; les Capucins 1; les Dames du Calvaire 3: l’Oratoire 19; les Récollets 1; le Grand Séminaire St. Julien 3; St. Pierre le Puellier 2; l’Union Chrétienne 3; la Visitation 2; Aigues Vives 1; Amboise 3; St. Florentin d’Amboise 1; l’Abbaye de Beaumont 4; Bois-Rayer 1; Cormery 5; Notre-Dame de Loches 2; la Chartreuse du Liget 5; les Augustines de Beaulieu-lès-Loches 1; les Religieuses Hospitalières de Loches 1; les Minimes du Plessis-lès-Tours 11. What endless treasures England would now have possessed if municipal authorities had taken such care as this of the monastic libraries in the time of Henry VIII. [Illustration: PLATE V Some remains of Marmoutier. _To face p. 222._] In translating the life of Alcuin, we omitted one of the examples of Alcuin’s insight into the ways of men which the anonymous author gives. It relates to Cormery, some miles up the river Indre, one of the places from which manuscripts were brought into the library of Tours. The trick played was as clever in itself as the detection of it was. It got over the difficulty of the vessels being found to be partly empty, and the difficulty that, if they were filled up with water, the taster of the monastery would detect the fraud at once. This is the passage in the _Life_:— “To the brothers of Cormery, whom he greatly loved, the father had ordered a hundred measures of wine to be given. When the wine was to be taken to the monastery, he ordered the stewards of the monastery, through Sigulf, a monk of Abbat Benedict, that they should detain the conveyors of the wine, until in their presence the wine should be poured from the vessels in which they had brought it into others; because some of them had stealthily taken out some of the wine, and, in order that the vessels might be full when they reached the monastery, had put into them river-sand. That this had been done, the fathers proved most conclusively.”