The Roman jurist Gaius, probably of the second century, held that where an artist had painted upon a _tabula_, his was the superior right. And this opinion was adopted by Tribonian, chief editor of the code of Justinian, in the sixth century, and was applied in a modern question in respect to John Leech's drawings upon wood. {Sidenote: Monastic copyists} {Sidenote: St. Columba and Finnian} In the early Christian centuries, the monasteries became the seats of learning, and the _scriptorium_ or writing room, in connection with the _librarium_ or _armarium_,--the armory in which the weapons of the faith were kept,--was the work-shop of the monkish copyists, sometimes working as a publishing staff under the direction of the _librarius_ or _armarius_ as chief scribe. The first record of a copyright case is that of Finnian _v_. Columba in 567, chronicled by Adamnan fifty years later and cited by Montalembert in "The monks of the West." St. Columba, in his pre-saintly days, surreptitiously made a copy of a psalter in possession of his teacher Finnian, and the copy was reclaimed, so the tradition relates, under the decision of King Dermott, in the Halls of Tara: "To every cow her calf." The authenticity of the tradition is questioned by other writers, but the phrase gives the pith of the common law doctrine of literary property and indicates that in those early centuries there was a sense of copyright. Monks from other monasteries came to a noted _scriptorium_ where a specially authentic or valuable manuscript could be copied, and the privilege of copying sometimes became the basis of an exchange of copies or of a commercial charge. Finally different texts of the same work were compared to obtain a certain or standard text, and the multiplication of such copies became the basis of a publishing and bookselling trade, in secular as well as sacerdotal hands, the development of which is traced in detail by George Haven Putnam in "Books and their makers in the Middle Ages." {Sidenote: University protection}