Many of the great monastic libraries owed their origin to the liberality of one donor, usually an ecclesiastic. Among other libraries destroyed by the Danes was the fine collection of books at Wearmouth monastery, made by Benedict Biscop, the first English book collector, who was so eager in the cause of books that he is said to have made no less than five journeys to Rome in order to search for them. Part of his library was given to the Abbey at Jarrow, and shared the same fate as the books at Wearmouth. One of the earliest English libraries was that of Christ Church, _i.e._ the Cathedral, at Canterbury. On the authority of the Canterbury Book, a fifteenth century manuscript preserved at Cambridge, this library began with the nine books said to have been brought from Rome by St Augustine. These nine books were a Bible in two volumes, a Psalter, a Book of Gospels, the Lives of the Apostles, the Lives of the Martyrs, and an Exposition of the Gospels and Epistles. This collection was enriched by the magnificent scriptural and classical volumes brought from the continent by Archbishop Theodore in the seventh century. Under Archbishop Chicheley, in the fifteenth century, this library was provided with a dwelling of its own, built over the Prior's Chapel, and containing sixteen bookcases of four shelves each. At this time a catalogue was already in existence, made by Prior Eastry at the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century, and records about three thousand volumes. The monastery of St Mary's at York owned a library which was founded by Archbishop Egbert. Egbert's pupil Alcuin, whom Charlemagne charged with the care of the educational interests of his empire, soon after taking up his residence at St Martin's at Tours, desired the emperor to send to Britain for "those books which we so much need; thus transplanting into France the flowers of Britain, that the garden of Paradise may not be confined to York, but may send some of its scions to Tours."