5. § V
The medieval collector of books sometimes, and the monastic
librarian nearly always, took care that his library was strong in
hagiology and history. He felt the need of books which would tell him of
the past history of his church and of the lives of her greatest
teachers. When collected these books were an incentive to the more
cultivated of the monks to begin the history of his country or his
house, or to write or re-write the lives of saints. The fruit is
preserved for us in a long line of monkish historians and hagiographers.
As a rule the histories they wrote were of little value; but when they
had brought the tale down to their own times they continued it with the
help of records to their hand, narrated events within their own memory,
and maintained the narrative in the form of annals. The method of
annalising was simple. At the end of the incomplete manuscript a loose
or easily detachable sheet was kept, whereon events of importance to the
nation and the monastery and locality of the annalist were written in
pencil from time to time during the year. At the end of the year the
historian welded these jottings into a narrative. When this was done
another leaf for notes was placed after
the manuscript. The value of the work so accomplished is incalculable.
Without these records it would now be impossible for us to realise what
the Middle Ages were like. This service, added to the enormously
greater service which monachism did for us in preserving ancient
literature, will always breed kind thoughts of a system so repugnant to
our modern view of human endeavour.
