Old English libraries; the making, collection and use of books during the middle ages

By the end of the fourteenth century we find signs that books more often formed a part of well-to-do households, and that the formal reading and reciting entertainments were giving place gradually to the informal and personal use of books. Among many pieces of evidence that this was so, Chaucer himself furnishes us with two of the best, one in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the other in his Troilus and Criseide. The Wife took for her fifth husband, "God his soule blesse," a clerk of Oxenford—

"He was, I trowe, a twenty winter old,
And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth."

Joly Jankin, as the clerk was called,

"Hadde a book that gladly, night and day,
For his desport he wolde rede alway.

[Description: CARMELITE IN HIS STUDY]

185

He cleped [called] it Valerie and Theofraste, [9.22]
At whiche book he lough alwey ful faste.
. . . . . . . . .
And every night and day was his custume,
When he had leyser and vacacioun
From other worldly occupacioun,
To reden on this book of wikked wyves." [9.23]

And having quickly taken measure of the Wife's character, he could not refrain from reading to her stories which seemed to contain a lesson and to point a moral for her. She lost patience, and was "beten for a book, pardee."

"Up-on a night Jankin, that was our syre,
Redde on his book, as he sat by the fyre."

And when his wife saw he would "never fyne" to read "this cursed book al night," all suddenly she plucked three leaves out of it, "right as he radde," and with her fist so took him on the cheek that he fell "bakward adoun" in the fire. Springing up like a mad lion he smote her on the head with his fist, and she lay upon the floor as she were dead. Whereupon he stood aghast, sorry for what he had done; and "with muchel care and wo" they made up their quarrel: our clerk, let us hope, winning peace, and his wife securing the mastery of their household affairs and the destruction of the "cursed book."

In Troilus we are told that Uncle Pandarus comes into the paved parlour, where he finds his niece sitting with two other ladies—

". . . And they three
Herden a mayden reden hem the geste
Of the Sege of Thebes . . ."

186

"What are you reading?" cries Pandarus. "For Goddes love, what seith it? Tel it us. Is it of love?" Whereupon the niece returns him a saucy answer, and "with that they gonnen laughe," and then she says—

"This romaunce is of Thebes, that we rede;
And we can herd how that King Laius deyde
Thurgh Edippus his sone, and al that cede;
And here we stenten [left off] at these lettres recle,
How the bisshop, as the book can telle,
Amphiorax, fil through the ground to helle." [9.24]

This picture of a little informal reading circle is not to be found in like perfection elsewhere in English medieval literature.[9.25]

University of Virginia Library

3. § III