The Plan of St. Gall :: :: University of Virginia Library

The daily work span of a medieval scribe, to judge by an
anonymous writer of the tenth century, was six hours.[118]
In Cluny, in the twelfth century, the scribes were exempted
from certain choir prayers;[119] but in the ninth century,
according to Hildemar, a scribe was not allowed to complete
a verse "once the bell for the divine service was rung,
not even a letter which he had started, but must instantly
set it aside unfinished."[120] The same author lists as the
indispensable tools of the scribe: the pen (penna), the quill
(calamus), the stool (scamellum), the scraping knife (rasorium),
the pumice stone (pumex), and the parchment
(pergamena).[121]

In general, writing was a daytime activity but occasionally
we hear of a monk being at this task before or after
sunset, as in a marginal annotation to a ninth century copy
of a text by Cassidorus, made in a monastery at Laon,
which reads: "It is cold today. Naturally, Winter. The
lamp gives bad light."[122] From Ekkehart IV we learn that
Ratpert, Notker, and Tutilo had permission from the abbot
to convene at night in the scriptorium for collating and
correcting texts.[123]

But there were also those more joyous occasions in the
spring or early summer when a monk would do his writing
outdoors under the shade of a tree, as evidenced in a
charming marginal gloss of an Irish manuscript of an
eighth- or ninth-century Priscian in the Library of St. Gall
(ms. 904), which reads:

A hedge of trees surrounds me
A blackbird's lay sings to me
Above my lined booklet
The trilling birds chant to me

In a grey mantle from the top of bushes
The cuckoo sings
Verily—may the Lord shield me!
Well do I write under the greenwood.[124]

[118]

"Arduous above all arts is that of the scribe: the work is difficult
and it is also hard to bend necks and make furrow on parchments for six
hours" (Madan, 1927, 42; Roover, 1939, 605).

[119]

See Schmitz, II, 1948, 66.

[120]

"Scriptor non debet pro verso complendo stare aut certe pro litera
perficienda . . . sed statim imperfecta debet dimittere, sicuti illa sonus signi
invenerit" (Expositio Hildemari; ed. Mittermüller, 1880, 458-59). The
scribe's stopping in the middle of a letter, on the sound of the bell—as
Charles W. Jones informs me—duplicates the act of brother Marcus of
Scete in Pelagius' Verba Seniorum, XIV (Vitae Patrum, V). Transl.
Helen Waddel, The Desert Fathers, London, 1936, 163.

The stipulation appears in almost identical form in the Institutiones of
Cassian and in a slightly different wording in the Regula magistri (for
quotations and reference to sources see Nordenfalk, 1970, 99)."

[121]

Ibid., 139.

[122]

Lindsay, Paleographia Latina, II, 1923, 24.

[123]

"Erat tribus illis inseparabilibus consuetudo, permisso quidem prioris,
in intervallo laudum nocturno convenire in scriptorio colationesque tali
horae aptissimas de scripturis facere" (Ekkeharti (IV.) Casus sancti Galli,
chap. 36; ed. Meyer von Knonau, 1877, 133-34; ed. Helbling, 1958,
77-78).

[124]

An Anthology of Irish Literature, edited with an Introduction by David H. Greene, New York, 1954, p. 10, after a translation by Kuno Meyer. For the Old Irish version, see Thesaurus Paleohibernicus, A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholin Prose and Verse, edited by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, vol. II, Cambridge, 1903, 290. The gloss was brought to my attention by Wendy Stein.