“As it is necessary for a state to provide military arms, and prepare plentiful stores of provisions for soldiers who are about to fight, so it is evidently worth the labour of the church militant to fortify itself against the attacks of pagans and heretics with a multitude of sound books. But because everything that is serviceable to mortals suffers the waste of mortality through lapse of time, it is necessary for volumes corroded by age to be restored by renovated successors, that perpetuity, repugnant to the nature of the individual, may be conceded to the species. Hence it is that Ecclesiastes significantly says, in the 12th chapter. ‘There is no end of making many books.’ For, as the bodies of books suffer continued detriment from a combined mixture of contraries in their composition, so a remedy is found out by the prudence of clerks, by which a holy book paying the debt of nature may obtain an hereditary substitute, and a seed may be raised up like to the most holy deceased, and that saying of Ecclesiasticus, be verified, ‘The father is dead and, as it were, not dead, for he hath left behind him a son like unto himself.’” One of the earliest authorities concerning book publishing in England is Bishop Fell, who in his Memoir on the State of Printing in the University of Oxford, tells us that that university “possessed an exclusive right of transcribing and multiplying books by means of writing,” a privilege which implies a species of copyright. The date referred to is about 1600. In both Oxford and Cambridge, according to the statutes in force before the introduction of printing, the _stationarii_ belonged to the class of _Servientes_, who were appointed by the chancellor or vice-chancellor of the university. The records of Oxford show many instances of the pawning of books by the undergraduates and occasionally by the instructors to the _stationarii_. In one codex, belonging to Mr. Thomas Paunter, there is an inscription showing that it was pawned to a _stationarius_ in 1480, for the sum of thirty-eight shillings.[408] Books which had been so pledged, came frequently enough, after their forfeiture, into sale. An entry in the accounts of the library of S. John’s College in Cambridge, dating from 1456, records a payment made, apparently from the treasury of the college, for the redemption of an _Avicenna_ from the _stationarius_ to whom a certain John Marshall had pledged the manuscript. The cost of the redemption was £1. 6_s._ 4_d._[409]