The miniatures of this school are executed in the following manner: first of all a slight outline is lightly sketched with a lead or silver point; the main masses are then put in with flat, solid colour; the internal drawing of the folds of the drapery, the hair and features and the like, are then added with a delicate pointed brush, capable of drawing the finest possible line; and finally some shading is added to give roundness to the forms, especially of the drapery, a broader touch being used for this, unlike the first drawing of the details, which is executed with a thin, though boldly applied line. As a rule the portions which are in shadow are put in with a pure pigment; the high lights being represented with white, and the half lights with a mixture of white and the same pigment that is used for the dark shadows. By this somewhat conventional system of colouring, the local colour is never lost, and the whole effect is highly decorative, and far more suitable for painting on such a minute scale than a more realistic system of colour would have been[108]. _Bible of Mainerius._ _Benedictine scribes._ One of the larger and more magnificent manuscripts of this class, in the library of S^{te} Géneviéve in Paris, is a historiated _Vulgate_ in three large volumes, which is of special interest from the fact that it is signed by its scribe, a monk named Mainerius of the Benedictine Abbey of Canterbury. Most of these Bibles and other sacred manuscripts of this period appear to have been written and illuminated in the great Benedictine Abbeys of England and Normandy. On this side of the Channel York, Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Winchester, St Albans, and Canterbury were specially famed for their schools of illumination[109]. And probably some work of the kind was done in every Benedictine House[110]. The unity of a great monastic Order like that of St Benedict, and the fact that monks were often transferred from a monastery in one country to one of the same Order in another country, had an important influence on the artistic development of mediaeval Europe. _Monastic unity._ This unity of feeling was of course encouraged by the existence of a common language (Latin) among all the ecclesiastics of Western Europe; and to a great extent the old traditions of a great Western Empire, uniting various races under one system of government, survived in the organization of the Catholic Church. This unity of life, of custom and of thought, which was so striking a feature of the monastic system, was, to a great extent, the cause why we find a simultaneous change of artistic style taking place at several far distant centres of production[111]. Hence also it is usually impossible, from the style of illumination in an Anglo-Norman manuscript of the thirteenth century, to judge whether it was executed in Normandy or in England. _Backgrounds of sheet gold._