Dietrich or Theodoric, the first Abbot of St. Evroul (1050-1057), who was himself a skilled scribe (_Ipse manu propria scribendo volumina plura_), and who desired to incite his monks to earnest work as writers, related to them the story of a worldly and sinful Brother, who, notwithstanding his frivolities, was a zealous scribe, and who had, in industrious moments, written out an enormous folio volume containing religious instruction. When he died, the devil claimed his soul. The angels, however, brought before the throne of judgment the great book, and for each letter therein written, pardon was given for one sin, and behold, when the count was completed, there was one letter over; and, says Dietrich naïvely, it was a very big book. Thereupon, judgment was given that the soul of the monk should be permitted again to enter his body, in order that he might go through a period of penance on earth.[94] In the monastery of Wedinghausen, near Arnsberg in Westphalia, there was a skilled and zealous scribe named Richard, an Englishman, who spent many years in adding to the library of the institution. Twenty years after his death, when the rest of his body had crumbled into dust, the right hand, with which this holy work had been accomplished, was found intact, and has since been preserved under the altar as a holy relic.[95] There has been more or less discussion as to whether in the _scriptoria_, it was the practice for monks to write at dictation. Knittel[96] takes the ground that the larger portion of the work was done so slowly, and probably with such a different degree of rapidity on the part of the different scribes, that it would have been as impracticable for it to have been prepared under dictation as it would be to do copper engraving under dictation. Ebert,[97] confirming Knittel’s conclusions, points out that when works were needed in haste, it was probably arranged to divide up the sheets to be copied among a number of scribes. He finds evidence of this arrangement of the work in a number of manuscripts, the different portions of which, put together under one cover, are evidently the work of different hands. Wattenbach specifies manuscripts in which not only are the different pages in different script, but the divisions have been written with varying arrangements of space; in some cases the space, which had been left for an interpolated chapter having evidently been wrongly measured, so that the script of such interpolated chapter had to be crowded together instead of having the same spacing as that of the body of the work. Sickel presents examples of the letters of Alcuin which are evidently the work of a number of scribes. Each began his work with a new letter, and where, at the end of the divisions, leaves remained free, other letters were later written in. In the later Middle Ages, however, there is evidence of writing at dictation, and this practice began to obtain more generally as the results of the work of