Dividers to prick out the guiding-lines of the text. Scissors for shaping the gold leaf. Burnishers, stamps, and _stili_ for ornamenting the gold. Small horns to hold black and red ink; see fig. 53 on page 209. Colour-box, palette, pigments, gold leaf and _media_ of various kinds. Sponge and pumice-stone for erasures. _Paintings of scribes._ Miniatures representing a scribe writing a manuscript are the commonest of all subjects in several classes of illuminated manuscripts. For example the first capital of Saint Jerome's _Prologue_ in the historiated Anglo-Norman _Vulgates_ almost always has a very minute painting of a monastic scribe[285], seated, writing on a sloping desk, with his pen in one hand and his penknife in the other[286]. _The scribes' processes._ In one respect such scenes are always treated in a conventional way; that is, the scribe is represented writing in a complete and bound book, whereas both the writing of the text and the illuminations were done on loose sheets of vellum, which could be conveniently pinned down flat on the desk or drawing-board. The processes employed in the execution of an illuminated manuscript of the fourteenth or fifteenth century were the following; _First_, if the text were to be in one column, four lines were ruled marking the boundaries of the patch of text and the margin. These four lines usually cross at the angles and are carried to the extreme edge of the vellum[287]. _Ruled lines._ Next, the scribe, with a pair of dividers or compasses, pricked out at even distances the number of lines which were to be ruled to serve as a guide in writing the text. These pricked holes were, as a rule, set at the extreme edge of the vellum, and were intended to be cut off by the binder, but in many manuscripts they still remain. The scribe then filled the space within the first four marginal lines with parallel ruled lines at the intervals indicated by the pricks at the edge. _Stilus lines._ In early manuscripts the guiding lines to keep the text even are usually ruled, not with colour or ink, but simply traced with a pointed _stilus_, which made a sufficiently clear impressed line on the vellum, showing through from one side to the other. _Lead lines._ _Red lines._ In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the practice began of ruling the lines with a _lead point_; and then, from the fourteenth century onwards, they were usually ruled with bright red pigment[288]; this has a very decorative effect in lighting up the mass of black text, and thus we find in many early printed books[289] these red guiding lines have been ruled in merely for the sake of their ornamental appearance. This ruling was nearly always done with special metal ruling-pens, very like those now used for architectural drawing; and thus the lines are perfectly even in thickness throughout. _The plain text._