Eadfrid, who was bishop of Lindisfarne in the year 698, was one of the most learned men of his time. He translated the gospels into latin, which work after his death was highly decorated by his successor with gold and jewels. Bilfrid, a hermit, illuminated it with various paintings and rich devices; and Adred a priest, interlined it with a Saxon version. Before each gospel is prefixed a painting of the evangelist who wrote it, and the opposite page is full of beautiful ornaments, enriched with various colours; then follows the commencement of the gospel, the first page of which is most elaborately ornamented with letters of a peculiar form, and very large, which displays at once the zeal of the writer, and the taste of the age in which the book was written.[10] This curious work is now among the Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum. It was lost in the sea during the removal of the body of St. Cuthbert in those troublesome times, about the year 876, when the Danes were laying waste the whole country, but it was afterwards found washed up on the shore without suffering any injury. (_Hutchinson’s History of Durham_, 1. p. 57.) It was under the patronage of the same learned prelate Eadfrid, that the Venerable Bede[11] wrote the life of St. Cuthbert. The books which Fergus the second, king of Scotland, who assisted Alaric the Goth, had brought with him as a part of the plunder from Rome, had been deposited in the monastery in the island of Iona. From thence they were, by degrees, copied for the use of other monasteries; and besides these, other books were obtained afterwards by means of various journeys to Rome. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the monastery of Weremouth, and the friend of Archbishop Wilfrid, made no fewer than five journeys to Rome to purchase copies of books. These books became deposited in various monasteries. Some such were at Canterbury, where also were books that had been brought from Rome, both by Augustine and Theodore. And the letter of Aldhelm, the very person who founded the monastery of Malmesbury, containing an account of his studies, and progress at Canterbury by the help of such books, is one of the most curious fragments of antiquity. (_Angl. Sacra. tom. 2. p. 6._) The price of these books was at various times enormous. Aldfred, king of Northumberland, gave _eight hides of land_, that is, as much as eight ploughs could till, for one volume of cosmography; and on this occasion it perhaps ought not to be forgotten, that there is still preserved in the library of Hereford cathedral, an ancient map on parchment, for the illustration of cosmography as known at the period of its being drawn. In the reign of William the Conqueror books were extremely scarce. Grace, Countess of Anjou, paid for a collection of homilies, two hundred sheep, a quarter of wheat, another of rye, and a third of millet, besides a number of martin skins. (_Kaimes’s Sketches_, 1. 136.)