According to Kapp, the first evidences of an organised German trade in manuscripts are to be found at the beginning of the fifteenth century. He is, however, convinced that a very considerable exchange of literary material in manuscripts must have found place at a much earlier date. There came to be in the German towns and among the citizen class an earlier interest in literature than there is evidence of at this time in the same class of any other country of Europe. This demand for reading matter on the part of the citizen class brought into existence in Germany (at a time when in Italy, France, and England there were practically no books in other than the Latin language) a considerable mass of popular literature written in the vernacular, and copied out on cheap material in such way as to make possible a general circulation. This popular circulation of books written for the common folk was very much facilitated by the introduction into Germany, as early as the fourteenth century, of paper, which for the cheaper manuscripts took the place of the old-time parchment. The Order of Brothers of Common Life carried on their literary work, so to speak, between the monasteries and the writers of the general lay community. They had for their first purpose the dissemination of sound doctrine, but as they were trying to give instruction direct to the common folk, they put their teachings into the dialect of the place, and they wrote out in their own monasteries the chap-books and instruction books which, at times distributed freely from the monastery centres, came to be very largely sold. Their work lay between that of the monastery monks and that of the city scribes in another respect. As before indicated, the work of the scribes in the _scriptorium_ was performed for no individual remuneration. If the manuscripts were sold or were exchanged for property of one kind or another, the benefit of the sale or exchange accrued to the monastery. On the other hand, the scribes of the cities, as they came to organise themselves into an accepted trade, arrived at a system of fixed charges for their work. The Brothers of Common Life, while living together in monkish centres, did not withdraw themselves from the life of the world, but made it their first duty, using their monastery homes simply as a starting-place or place of consultation or as centres of education, to go out into the highways and by-ways, teaching what they had to teach direct to the people whom they met; and as an important means of this instruction they used their facilities as scribes for manifolding the tracts and the scriptural classics with which they provided themselves. It was their recognition of the enormous service that could be secured in influencing a community through the distribution of books, that made them so prompt in their appreciation of the value of the printing-press and that caused them to take place among the first printers of Germany.