Very frivolous or absurd indeed are sometimes the inducements to copyists to do gratuitous work of this kind, such as that every letter transcribed paid for one sin of the copyist, and it is said that a certain monk--a heavy sinner--only owed his salvation to the fact that the number of letters in a Bible which he copied exceeded by a single unit the sum total of his sins. CHAPTER XIII MONASTIC ILLUMINATION--_continued_ The copyists--Gratuitous labour--Last words of copyists--Disputes between Cluny and Citeaux--The Abbey of Cluny: its grandeur and influences--Use of gold and purple vellum--The more influential abbeys and their work in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Of course, only really expert calligraphers were employed on great and important works. In the monastery all such labour was gratuitous, that is, the copyist received no pecuniary remuneration, only his food and lodging. Yet even this had to be provided for. Hence the frequent requests for donations from the laity. To give a volume to a monastery did not always mean actually to present the book, but to stand the expense of its production in the monastery itself. In the case of specially distinguished penmen, their entertainment in a monastery was sometimes an expensive business. It was only in later times, however, when lay-artists were invited to reside in the monastery to do their work that money was paid for their services. Very often we find notices at the end of volumes that "So-and-so" had ordered the book to be written and illuminated at his expense, and an invocation for the gratitude of the reader and remembrance in his prayers is added, sometimes with the date to the very hour when the book was finished.