This employment of copying manuscripts appears to have been diligently practised at Croyland; for Ingulphus relates, that when the library of that convent was burned in the year 1091, seven hundred volumes were consumed. Fifty-eight volumes were transcribed at Glastonbury, during the government of one abbot, about the year 1300. And in the library of this monastery, the richest in England, there were upwards of four hundred volumes in the year 1248. More than eighty books were thus transcribed for St. Alban’s abbey, by Abbot Whethamstede, who died about 1400. At the foundation of Winchester college, by William of Wykeham, about 1393, one or more transcribers were hired and employed by the founder to _make books_ for the library. They transcribed and took their commons within the college, as appears by computations of expenses on their account now remaining. In the monastery of Ely, the Precentor, or Chantor, was the chief librarian, and had within his Office, the _Scriptorium_, where writers were employed in transcribing books for the library, and missals and other books used in divine service. This officer furnished the vellum, parchment, paper, ink, colours, gums, and other necessaries for limners, used in illuminating their books; and leather, and other implements for binding, and keeping them in repair. Some of the Roman classics were copied in the English monasteries at a very early period. Henry, a Benedictine monk of Hyde abbey, near Winchester, transcribed in the year 1178, Terence, Boethius, Suetonius, and Claudian. Of these he formed one volume, illuminating the initials, and forming the brazen bosses of the covers with his own hands; but this abbot had more devotion than taste, for he exchanged this manuscript a few years afterwards for four missals, the legend of St. Christopher, and St. Gregory’s PASTORAL CARE, with the Prior of the neighbouring cathedral convent. Benedict, abbot of Peterborough, author of the latin chronicle of king Henry the second, amongst a great variety of scholastic and theological treatises, transcribed Seneca’s epistles and tragedies, Terence, Martial, and Claudian, to which may be added GESTA ALEXANDRI, about the year 1180.