READING IN THE REFECTORY

MONASTIC PRACTICE IN ENGLAND, c. 1000-c. 1300

London University Annual John Coffin Memorial Palaeography Lecture

18 February 2010

TERESA WEBBER

2

Revised text, 2013

Copyright: Teresa Webber, Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ

Frontispiece: London, British Library, MS Add. 25042, fol. 22v. Illustration from a late

fifteenth-century Netherlandish copy of an account in Dutch of the origin and regulations

of the Carthusian order.

3

READING IN THE REFECTORY

Monastic Practice in England, c. 1000-c. 13001

Teresa Webber

The subject of this lecture was inspired by a paper given by the late Father Leonard

Boyle, medieval scholar, palaeographer and Vatican Librarian, in which he drew

attention to the presence in a wide variety of medieval books of an oblique hairline

stroke, written above a syllable by the scribe or supplied subsequently.2 These simple

traces are rarely commented upon in descriptions and discussions of manuscripts, but, he

argued, they are worthy of attention since they may provide precious evidence of the use

made of the books in which they are found. Their principal application in copies of Latin

texts was to indicate a stressed syllable in cases of uncertainty for a reader, either because

1 This article represents a revised and expanded version of the lecture delivered on 18 February 2010. I am

very grateful to the following for permission to reproduce manuscripts in their collections: frontispiece

(London, British Library, MS Add. 25042, fol. 22v): © British Library Board; figs 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7: the

Master and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I am also grateful to Dr Geoffrey Webber and Dr

Åslaug Ommundsen for providing the photographs for figs 2 and 3 respectively. The lecture represents the

first stage in a larger project on lectio publica in medieval English monastic practice to be delivered as the

J.P.R. Lyell Lectures in the University of Oxford in 2016.

Abbreviations

CBMLC Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues

CCCM Corpus christianorum continuatio medievalis

CCM Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum

HBS Henry Bradshaw Society

PL Patrologia latina cursus completus, pr. J.-P. Migne, 217 vols (Paris, 1844-55); Index, 4

vols (Paris, 1864)

2 A version of this paper was published posthumously, without footnotes, as Vox paginae: an oral

dimension of texts (Rome, 1999). His observations were also published in two articles: ‘Tonic Accent,

Codicology and Literacy’, in The Centre and its Compass: studies in medieval literature in honour of

Professor John Leyerle, ed. R. A. Taylor et al. (Kalamazoo, MI, 1993), pp. 1-10, and ‘The Friars and

Reading in Public’, in Le vocabulaire des écoles des Mendiants au moyen âge, ed. M. C. Pacheco,

CIVICIMA, Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du moyen âge, 9 (Turnhout, 1999), 8-15;

4

of the unfamiliarity of the word or because the word was known to be one that might be

accented incorrectly. For example: on the opening page of an early twelfth-century copy

of Bede’s commentary on the Catholic Epistles from the abbey of Peterborough, a stroke

was traced above the ante-penultimate syllable of the word ‘catálago’ (fig. 1, column a,

line 10), presumably to prevent the incorrect accentuation of the penultimate syllable.3

1. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 160, fol. 1r.

Such strokes might be applied in the context of the teaching of grammar (which included

instruction in pronunciation and accentuation),4 but they also had a practical application

3 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 160, fol. 1ra, line 10.

4 On the problems of syllabic length and accentuation that confronted medieval readers, and for two

eleventh-century treatises that address the issue, see Aimericus, Ars lectoria, ed. Harry F. Reijnder,

Vivarium, 9 (1971), 119-137; 10 (1972), 41-101, 124-176; Magister Siguinus, Ars lectoria: un art de

lecture à haute voix du onzième siècle. Édition critique sous la direction de Joseph Engels, ed. C. H.

5

in assisting readers in, or preparing for, the task of public reading (lectio publica)—that

is, the oral delivery of a text to the assembled community in the choir, chapterhouse or

refectory.

One of the major achievements of those engaged in British medieval studies over

the past century has been the systematic assembly and description of the evidence for

institutional book ownership, most notably in two complementary collaborative projects:

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (comprising lists of surviving manuscripts that

contain evidence of their medieval institutional ownership) and The Corpus of British

Medieval Library Catalogues (editions of medieval lists of books from ecclesiastical and

academic institutions).5 In the Autumn of 2009 a Mellon-funded project was launched in

Oxford, under the leadership of Richard Sharpe, to combine and supplement in

searchable electronic form all the material from these two indispensable reference tools.

Handlists and catalogues of particular categories of surviving books that can be shown to

have been written or owned in England have also been published through individual

initiative, such as N. R. Ker’s Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon and

Kneepkens and H. F. Reijnders (Leiden, 1979).The strokes supplied to indicate syllabic stress should be

distinguished from the set of prosodic accents described by Donatus and quoted and commented upon by

early-medieval writers on grammar, which transmitted the Greek concept of accentuation marked by pitch

(or tonic) inflection. Potential confusion is caused by the inclusion of a discussion of the latter alongside

reference to the need for correct syllabic accentuation (i.e. accentuation by stress) by the ninth-century

monastic author, Hildemar, in his Epistola ad Ursum: see Anne-Véronique Gilles, ‘La ponctuation dans les

manuscrits liturgiques au moyen âge’, in Grafia e interpunzione del latino nel medioevo, ed. A. Maierù

(Rome, 1987), 113-133, at 123-9. See also M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: an introduction to the history

of punctuation in the West (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 35-7, 128-9, esp. n. 13. Hildemar’s letter was

incorporated within his commentary on Chapter 38 of the Rule of St Benedict (on the weekly reader),

which concludes with a lengthy excursus on how to read aloud correctly (Expositio Regulae ab Hildemaro

tradita, ed. R. Mittermüller [Regensburg, 1880)] 421-34, omitting certain passages; these are supplied in

the ongoing Hildemar Project online at http://hildemar.org [accessed October 2013]). 5 N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: a list of surviving books, 2

nd edn (London, 1964);

Supplement to the Second Edition, ed. A. G. Watson (London, 1987); Corpus of British Medieval Library

Catalogues, 1- (London, 1990- ).

6

Helmut Gneuss’s Handlist of books written or owned in England before 1100.6 The

scholarship that has exploited these resources, however, has tended to focus more upon

the contents of institutional book collections and what may be inferred from them about

intellectual interests and endeavor than upon the manuscript and other evidence for how

and in what contexts the books were used. The particular use made of a book cannot

always be safely inferred from the contents alone. There is a further danger that any such

inferences may be informed by anachronistic assumptions. Leonard Boyle’s paper

exposed a misapprehension that had influenced my own understanding of the book

collections formed in England after the Norman Conquest. Among the manuscripts that

contain strokes marking stressed syllables are a significant number of large- or medium-

format late-eleventh- and twelfth-century copies of major works by the Church Fathers,

such as Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms and on the Gospel of John, or Jerome’s

on Isaiah.7 These volumes have generally been studied within the context of the history

of personal study and devotion (lectio divina), and have been interpreted primarily as

witnesses to the intellectual impact of the Norman Conquest.8 Father Boyle’s paper

findings prompt further investigation of the use of such books for communal public

6 N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957); id., ‘A Supplement to

Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon’, Anglo-Saxon England, 5 (1977), 121-31; H. Gneuss,

Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: a list of manuscripts and manuscript fragments written or owned in

England up to 1100 (Tempe, AZ, 2001); id., ‘Addenda and Corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon

Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England, 32 (2003), 293-305; id., ‘Second Addenda and Corrigenda to the

Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England, 40 (2012), 293-306. See also, for example:

R. Gameson, The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c. 1066-1130) (Oxford, 1999); K. D. Hartzell,

Catalogue of Manuscripts written or owned in England up to 1200 containing Music (Woodbridge, 2006). 7 Boyle, ‘Tonic Accent’, 6-7, drew attention to their presence in seven late-eleventh- and twelfth-century

volumes of patristic and other works from Durham Cathedral Priory, illustrated in plates in R. A. B.

Mynors, Durham Cathedral Manuscripts to the End of the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1939). 8 See, for example, R. M. Thomson, ‘The Norman Conquest and English Libraries’, in The Role of the

Book in Medieval Culture, ed. P. Ganz, 2 vols (Turnhout, 1986), 2. 27-40; T. Webber, Scribes and Scholars

at Salisbury Cathedral c. 1075-c. 1125 (Oxford, 1992), 31-42; M. T. Gibson, ‘Normans and Angevins,

1070-1220’ and N. Ramsay, ‘The Cathedral Archives and Library’, in A History of Canterbury Cathedral,

ed. P. Collinson, N. Ramsay and M. Sparks (Oxford, 1995), pp. 38-68, at pp. 51-3 and 340-407, at pp. 346-

51.

7

reading, in order to identify the particular occasions for their oral delivery as well as the

range of texts and volumes that were involved in such reading within monastic

communities during the central middle ages. Since the practice of scoring a copy of a text

to indicate stressed syllables was not confined to providing an aid to public reading, the

presence of such strokes in a manuscript cannot be taken on its own as evidence that the

volume in question was used for public reading. Additional evidence must therefore be

sought.

Few studies of medieval monastic libraries have examined the books in detail

from the perspective of their use in the oral delivery of texts to an assembled

community.9 One important exception, however, is Nigel Palmer’s study of the medieval

books of the Rhineland Cistercian abbey of Eberbach.10

The reading practices that

Professor Palmer identifies and analyses from these books can be shown to correspond in

broad outline with those of other traditions of communal religious life by the twelfth

century and to share a common origin in the elaborations of, and accretions to, the

9 The use of certain kinds of volume—bibles, homiliaries and passionals-- for public reading in the choir

(and, to a more limited extent, the refectory) has already received some discussion: see A. G. Martimort,

Les lectures liturgiques et leurs livres, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 64 (Turnhout,

1992), pp. 69-102, with references to, and commentary on, the previously published literature; Eric

Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, tr. Madeleine

Beaumont (Collegeville, MN, 1998), pp. 149-58; Heinrich Fictenau, ‘Neues zum Problem der italienischen

“Riesenbibeln”’, Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung: Mitteilungen, 58 (1950), 50-67, at 59-

61; Walter Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 95-6; Diane J. Reilly, ‘Lectern

Bibles and Liturgical Reform in the Central Middle Ages’, in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages:

production, reception and performance in western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly

(New York, 2011), pp. 105-125. For studies of individual volumes, see, for example, Diane J. Reilly, The

Art of Reform in Eleventh-Century Flanders (Leiden, 2006), pp. 45-104, and eadem, ‘The Cluniac Giant

Bible and the Ordo librorum ad legendum: a reassessment of monastic Bible reading and Cluniac

customary instructions,’ in From Dead of Night to End of Day: the medieval Cluniac customs, ed. Susan

Boynton and Iseabelle Cochelin (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 163-89. 10

N. F. Palmer, Zisterzienser und ihre Bücher: die mittelalterliche Biblioteksgeschichte von Kloster

Eberbach im Rheingau unter besonderer Berücksichtig der in Oxford und London aufbewahrten

Handschriften (Regensburg, 1998), esp. ch. 5. See also id. ‘Simul cantemus, simul pausemus: zur

mittelalterlichen Zisterzienserinterpunktion’, in Leservorgänge: Prozesse des Erkennens in

mittelalterlichen Texten, Bildern und Handschriften, ed. E. C. Lutz, M. Backes and S. Matter (Zürich,

2010), pp. 483-569.

8

liturgical practices and other daily routines of the Rule of St Benedict that were

introduced in the late eighth and ninth centuries and that were variously further

developed or adapted between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Communities of monks

and regular canons listened to readings delivered aloud not only during the liturgy of the

Mass and the Night Office of Matins but also during the Chapter meeting held daily each

morning, the evening meeting of the community before compline known as Collation,

and at mealtimes in the refectory.11

Although much remains to be discovered (and much

may remain unknowable through an insufficiency of evidence), it is possible to establish

a broad framework of norms for the readings delivered during each of these occasions,

and sometimes to identify the books that were used.

The readings delivered during the Chapter office and Collation were drawn from

two distinct groups of texts. Core ingredients of the Chapter office (a Carolingian

accretion to the horarium of the Rule of St Benedict) were a reading from the

martyrology and a chapter of the Rule, followed by a homily on that chapter.12

By at least

the late tenth century the custom had been adapted to incorporate the reading of the

Gospel pericope and a gospel homily in place of a chapter from the Rule and its homily

11

There is evidence of a custom within the Cluniac tradition of reading during the periods assigned for

manual labour, but very little evidence survives of its content: see Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis, ed.

P. Dinter, CCM, 10 (Siegburg, 1980), I.xvi; II.149 (pp. 200-201, 213-4); The Monastic Constitutions of

Lanfranc, ed. David Knowles, rev. edn by Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 2002), pp. 120-1. The latter

refers only to the conduct of the reading not its content, but the former prescribes for the morning period a

reading from the refectory lection (provided that it was suitably edifying), and a reading from the Collation

lection when the monks returned to the cloister after the period of manual labour that followed the office of

None; on both occasions the reading was to be followed by a sermon upon it by the prior or a deputy. So far

as I am aware, no medieval lists of texts to be read or books set aside for this purpose are known to survive,

nor have any indications of such use yet been found in extant manuscripts. 12

Memoriale qualiter, ed. D. C. Morgand, and Synodi secundae Aqisgranensis decreta autentica (817), ed.

J. Semmler, in Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae: consuetudines saeculi octavi et noni, CCM, 1 (Siegburg,

1963), no. 10, pp. 234-8, esp. 235 and notes; no. 21, ch. 36, p. 480. On the origins and early history of the

Chapter office, see P. Schepens, ‘L’office du chapitre à Prime’, Recherches de sciences religieuses, 2

(1921), 222-7; C. Morgand, ‘Discipline pénitentielle et officium capituli d’après le Memoriale qualiter’,

Revue bénédictine, 72 (1962), 22-60.

9

on Sundays and major feastdays.13

The texts that recur in lists of books for Collation

comprise patristic and early medieval texts that advocate or exemplify the monastic life

and virtues, including those recommended by St Benedict in the final chapter of the Rule

(Cassian’s Collationes and De institutis coenobiorum, and the Vitas patrum),14

as well as

Gregory’s Dialogi, Isidore’s Sententiae and Smaragdus’s Diadema monachorum—an

early-ninth-century patristic florilegium compiled largely from works of Cassian and

Gregory specifically to provide readings for Collation.15

The programme of reading in the refectory, however, was far more extensive and

complex. To gain an impression of its full scope, evidence has to be pieced together from

a number of different kinds of source: descriptions (often only partial) of norms included

in custumals; records of books or texts assigned for the purpose, and annotations in

surviving books. Detailed evidence of the full programme of reading from any single

13

Cluniacensium antiquiorum redactiones principales saec. x/xi/xii (BB1B

2GC), ed. K. Hallinger, M.

Wegener and C. Elvert, in Consuetudines Cluniacensium antiquiores cum redactionibus derivatis, ed. K.

Hallinger, CCM 7/2 (Siegburg, 1983), p. 27; Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis, ed. T. Symons, S.

Spath, M. Wegener and K. Hallinger, in Consuetudinum saeculi x/xi/xii monumenta non-Cluniacensia,

CCM, 7/3 (Siegburg, 1984), 86-7; Regularis concordia Anglicae nationis monachorum

sanctimonialiumque, ed. and tr. Thomas Symons (London, 1953), 17-18. Some later Benedictine custumals

also specify the periodic reading of the community’s customs: see, for example, Consuetudines

Floriacensis saeculi tertii decimi, ed. Anselme Davril, CCM, 9 (Siegburg, 1976), pp. xl, 4). A number of

Chapter books survive: see, for example, Timothy Graham, ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57 and its

Anglo-Saxon Users’, in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M.

Treharne (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 21-69; Joanne Autentrieth, ‘Der Codex Sangallensis 915: ein Beitrag zur

Erforschung der Kapiteloffiziumsbücher’, in Landesgeschichte und Geistesgeschichte: Festschrift für Otto

Harding zum 65. Geburstag, ed. Kaspar Elm, Eberhard Gönner and Eugen Hillenbrand (Stuttgart, 1977),

pp. 42-55; J.-L. Lemaître, ‘Liber capituli: le livre du chapître, des origines au xvie siècle—l’exemple

français’, in Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. K.

Schmid and J. Wollasch (Munich, 1984), pp. 625-48. 14

RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, MN,

1981), ch. 73, pp. 294-7. 15

Smaragdus, Diadema monachorum, prologus: ‘Et quia in regula beati Benedicti scriptum est, Mox ut

surrexerint fratres a coena, sedeant omnes in unum, et legat unus collationes vel vitas Patrum, aut certe

aliquid quod aedificet audientes: ideo nos et de collationibus Patrum, et de conversationibus et

institutionibus eorum modicum, et de diversis Doctoribus in hoc libello congessimus plurimum, et sic eum

in centum capitulis consummavimus totum.’ (pr. PL, 102, col. 593). For lists of Collation reading from

Saint-Martial, Limoges, Saint-Denis, Paris, Saints-Pierre-et-Paul, Conches, and Durham Cathedral Priory,

see Donatella Nebbiae-dalla Guarda, ‘Les listes médiévales de lectures monastiques’, Revue bénédictine,

96 (1986), 271-326, at 275-83, 288-90 (nos 1,2 and 4), and Catalogi veteres librorum ecclesiae cathedralis

Dunelm, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society publications, 7 (London, 1834), 9-10.

10

community is rare before the thirteenth century (and especially so from England), and

each individual source can be difficult to interpret in isolation. From the late nineteenth

century onwards, scholarship on the practice has focused primarily upon the publication

and analysis of individual lists or groups of lists,16

but this material has never been

brought together and analyzed in conjunction with the other forms of evidence that

survive. As a result, references to refectory reading in modern studies of medieval books

and reading are sometimes lacking in precision or betray an incomplete understanding of

the practice. There has been, for example, a tendency to conflate and confuse the customs

for the reading in the refectory at the mealtimes of the community, those for the reading

during the meal of the servers that followed the conventual meal, and those for the

reading at Collation.17

What follows will, I hope, provide some clarification.

16

See Albert Derolez, Les catalogues des bibliothèques, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental,

31 (Turnhout, 1979), pp. 44-5. The earliest detailed study of a list of refectory reading known to me is C.

A. (= U. Berlière), ‘Les lectures de table des moines de Marchiennes au xiiie siècle’, Revue bénédictine, 11

(1894), 27-35. The list itself, together with four other lists of refectory reading (two of which also contain

lists of Collation reading) and a further four lists of collation reading alone, is printed and the contents

identified in Nebbiai-dalla Guarda, ‘Listes médiévales de lectures monastiques’, which also provides

references to a number of other such lists (previously published and unpublished). See also Josef Siegwart,

‘Die geistliche Tischlesung der Fastenzeit im Zisterzienserkloster Hauterive (Altenryf)’, Freiburger

Geschichtsblätter, 54 (1966), 9-69; Raymond Étaix, ‘Le lectionnaire cartusien pour le réfectoire’, Revue

des Études Augustiniennes, 23 (1977), 272-303; Hermann Hauke, ‘Die Tischlesung im Kloster Tegernsee

im 15. Jh. nach dem Zeugnis seiner Handschriften’, Studien und Mitteillungen zur Geschichte des

Benediktiner-Ordens und seiner Zweige, 83 (1972), 220-28; Burkhard Hasebrink, ‘Tischlesung und

Bildungskultur im Nürnberger Katharinenkloster: ein Beitrag zu ihrer Rekonstruktion’, in Schule und

Schüler im Mittelalter, ed. Martin Kintzinger (Cologne, 1996), pp. 187-216; Simone Mengis, Schreibende

Frauen um 1500: Scriptorium und Bibliothek des Dominikanerinnenklosters St. Katharina St Gallen

(Berlin, 2013), pp. 177-92. Lists of books assigned for refectory reading are also included in CBMLC and

the equivalent continental series of editions of medieval booklists. 17

Such conflation and confusion has arisen, for example, in the interpretation of a fourteenth-century list

from the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds entitled ‘Ordo legendi in mensa seruitorum in refectorio

et ad collationem conuentus per totum annum’: English Benedictine Libraries: the shorter catalogues, ed.

R. Sharpe et al., CBMLC, 4 (London, 1996), B14, pp. 87-9 (where it is dated to the thirteenth century; the

later dating arises from the identification of its scribe as Henry of Kirkstead: see Henry of Kirkstede,

Catalogus de libris autenticis et apocrifis, ed. Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, CBMLC, 11 [London,

2004], xlix, pl. 3a). Because of the reference to the refectory, the list has hitherto been misidentified as a

list of refectory reading for the monastic community. The meal referred to in the rubric, however, is not the

main sitting of the community but that of the servers; ‘in refectorio’ refers to the location for this meal, as

opposed to that of Collation, which took place in the chapterhouse (in Cistercian practice, however,

collation was held in the cloister). The texts specified correspond closely with those of other lists of

11

Reading in the refectory in late antiquity and the early middle ages

The practice of listening to sacred readings during mealtimes is advocated in several

early texts on the communal life. Chapter 38 of the Rule of St Benedict stipulates that

‘Reading will always accompany the meals of the brothers. The reader should not

be the one who just happens to pick up the book, but someone who will read for a

whole week, beginning on Sunday. ... Let there be complete silence. No

whispering, no speaking – only the reader’s voice should be heard there. …

Brothers will read and sing, not according to rank, but according to their ability to

benefit their hearers.’18

The importance of the role of the weekly reader at meals was given ritual expression each

week, when, after the principal mass on Sunday the incoming reader would intone Psalm

50 (51):17, ‘Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise’, a verse that

was then repeated thrice by the community, after which he received a blessing.19

The emphasis in the Rule’s prescriptions for the refectory reading, as in the

practices and writings of the early desert fathers (especially as described and widely

Collation reading. The practice indicated here represents a change from the norm specified in the

Carolingian reform legislation and recorded in earlier custumals, which prescribe the same reading at the

meal for the servers as that for the meal of the brethren that preceded it: see, for example, Legislatio

Aquigranensis, ed. J. Semmler, CCM 1, 435 (Synodi primae Aquisgranensis acta preliminaria, ch. 10);

ibid., 465 (Synodi primae Aquisgranensis decreta authentica, ch. 26); ibid. 522 (Regula sancti Benedicti

abbatis Anianensis sive Collectio capitularis, ch. 22). This earlier custom was apparently still being

practised at Eynsham Abbey in the thirteenth century: The Customary of the Benedictine Abbey of Eynsham

in Oxfordshire, ed. Antonia Gransden, CCM, 2 (Siegburg, 1963), 183. 18

‘Mensis fratrum lectio deesse non debet, nec fortuito casu qui arripuerit codicem legere ibi, sed lecturus

tota hebdomada dominica ingrediatur. ... Et summum fiat silentium, ut nullius mussitatio vel vox nisi solius

legentis ibi audiatur. ... Fratres autem non per ordinem legant aut cantent, sed qui aedificant audientes.’ RB

1980, ed. Fry, pp. 236-7. 19

‘Qui ingrediens post missas et communionem petat ab omnibus pro se orari, ut avertat ab ipso Deus

spiritus elationis, et dicatur hic versus in oratorio tercio ab omnibus, ipso tamen incipiente: Domine, labia

mea aperies, et os meum adnuntiabit laudem tuam; et sic accepta benedictione ingrediatur ad legendum.’

RB 1980, p. 236. Formulae for the blessing are found in a number of monastic custumals and missals: see

Anselm Strittmatter, ‘The Monastic Blessing of the Weekly Reader in Missal W. 11 of the Walters Art

Gallery’, Traditio, 3 (1945), 392-4.

12

disseminated by Cassian in his De institutis coenobiorum),20

is upon the monastic

discipline of silence.21

According to Cassian, readings were introduced by the

Cappadocian monks not so much as a spiritual discipline for its own sake but as a means

of curbing superfluous idle chatter and the almost inevitable quarreling that would

otherwise arise.22

In the chapter from the Rule of St Benedict, the edification provided by

the reading is mentioned only obliquely in relation to the abilities required of those

chosen to read. Other early monastic rules, however, are more explicit in advocating

reading not simply as an ascetic discipline but also for its positive benefit in providing a

spiritual counterpart to the bodily nourishment of the meal.23

Caesarius of Arles (d. 542),

Aurelian of Arles (d. 551), and the sixth-century author of the Regula magistri adduced in

support the Gospel precept: ‘man does not live by bread alone but on every word of God’

(Luke 4: 4).24

Carolingian monastic reformers likewise combined the teachings of both

those who advocated reading as a means towards the ascetic ideal of silence and those

20

John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum, IV, xvii: pr. PL, 49, cols 175-7. 21

On silence as a monastic discipline, see A. de Vogüé, ‘“Lectiones sanctas libenter audire”: silence,

reading and prayer in St Benedict’, Word and Spirit, 7 (1985), 87-109. See also Scott G. Bruce, Silence and

Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: the Cluniac tradition c. 900-1200 (Cambridge, 2007). 22

Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum, IV, xvii: ‘Quos nulli dubium est non tam spiritalis exercitationis

causa, quam compescendae superfluae, otiosaeque confabulationis gratia, et maxime contentionum, quae

plerumque solent in conviviis generari, hoc statuere voluisse’ (pr. PL, 49, col. 175). 23

For example, Isidore of Seville, Regula monachorum: ‘caeteri vescentes tacebunt, lectionem attentissime

audientes, ut sicut illis corporalis cibus refectionem carnis praestat, ita mentem eorum spiritualis sermo

reficiat’ (pr. PL 83, col. 878). 24

‘ut sicut corpus reficitur terreno cibo, ita anima reficiatur Dei uerbo. Sic dicit dominus : non in pane solo

uiuit homo, sed in omni uerbo dei’: Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad monachos, ch. 9, in Caesarius of Arles,

Oevres monastiques, II. Oevres pour les moines, ed. Joël Courreau and Albert de Vogüé, Sources

chrétiennes, 398 (Paris, 1994), 208; Aurelian, Regula ad monachos, ch. 49: ‘Sedentes ad mensam taceant,

et lectio quotidie omni tempore, dum cibus sumitur, legatur: ut uterque homo, et exterior cibo, et interior

verbo Dei reficiatur. Quia scriptum est: Non in pane solo vivit homo, sed in omni verbo Dei’ (pr. PL 68, col.

393); Regula magistri, 24, 4-5: ‘ut numquam desit carnali refectioni et esca diuina, sicut dicit scribtura :

Non in solo pane uiuit homo, sed in omni uerbo Dei, ut dupliciter fratres reficiant, cum ore manducant et

auribus saginantur.’ (La règle du maître, ed. Albert de Vogüé, 3 vols, Sources chrétiennes, 105-107 (Paris,

1964-1965), 1. 124.

13

who expressed its positive benefits in providing spiritual nourishment.25

Hildemar, for

example, acknowledged that reading at mealtimes had originally been introduced as a

preventative measure but asserted that its purpose now was both to prevent story-telling

or scandal and to edify: ‘nunc autem non solum debet esse lectio causa vitandi fabulas vel

scandalum, verum etiam causa aedificationis’.26

The discipline and spiritual benefits of sacred reading were also advocated by the

more ascetically-minded bishops for communities of clergy, and especially for the

bishop’s dinner-table. At the Third Council of Toledo (589), such teaching was

articulated as canon law: canon 7 (repeated in later canon law collections) prescribed the

reading of Scripture and forbad the recitation of secular tales.27

In similar vein Alcuin

reprimanded an Anglo-Saxon bishop for the inappropriately secular conduct of his

community of clergy, urging the replacement of secular music and heroic poetry with

readings from Scripture and the Fathers: ‘Let God’s words be read at the episcopal

dinner-table. It is right that a reader should be heard, not a harpist; patristic discourse, not

pagan song. What has Hinield to do with Christ?’28

25

See, for example, the catena of quotations in Benedict of Aniane’s Concordia regularum, ch. xlvii (pr.

PL, 103, 1101-1112). Smaragdus of St-Mihiel presented a more selective synthesis of these patristic

authorities in his commentary on ch. 38 of the Rule (Smaragdi abbatis Expositio in Regulam S. Benedicti,

ed. Alfred Spannagel and Pius Engelbert, CCM, 8 (Siegburg, 1974), 252-4), which was itself cited and

commented upon by Hildemar in his commentary upon this chapter of the Rule: Expositio Regulae ed.

Mittermüller (Regensburg, 1880), 421-34; The Hildemar Project at http://hildemar.org. 26

Ibid., 422. 27

‘Pro reverentia dei et sacerdotum id universa sancta constituit synodus; ut quia solent crebro mensis

otiosae fabulae interponi, in omni sacerdotali convivio lectio scriptura(ru)m divinarum misceatur. Per hoc

enim et animae aedificantur ad bonum et fabulae non necessariaę prohibentur.’ (Concilios visigóticos e

hispano-romanos, ed. José Vives, with Tomàs Marín Martínez and Gonzalo Martínez Díez

(Barcelona/Madrid, 1963), p. 127 28

‘Verba Dei in sacerdotali convivio: ibi decet lectorem audiri audiri, non citharistam, sermones patrum,

non carmina gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?’ (Epistola Karolini Aevi, 2, ed. E. Dümmler,

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae, 4 (Berlin, 1895), 183 [no. 124]). On the letter and the

identification of its addressee as a bishop with a secular familia (and not the bishop of Lindisfarne, as

previously assumed), see Donald A. Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne’, Anglo-Saxon

England, 22 (1993), 93-125.

14

Refectories and refectory rituals

The earliest surviving detailed description of the ritual and other arrangements involved

in the mealtime reading is found in an early-medieval Roman ordo, Ordo Romanus XIX,

which survives in a single manuscript from the second half of the century (St Gallen,

Stiftsbibliothek, MS 349), introduced by the rubric ‘De conuiuio siue prandio atque cenis

monachorum qualiter in monastiria Romane ecclesie constitutis est consuetudo’.29

The

meal itself began with a prayer (‘Oculi omnium’, Ps. 144: 15) and blessing

(‘Benedicantur nobis domine dona tua’).30

Before beginning to read, the reader sought a

blessing (‘Iube domini benedicere’) and, as with the lections of the Night Office,

terminated the reading with the formula ‘Tu autem domine miserere nobis’,31

practices

29

Ordines aevi regulae mixtae, ed. J. Semmler, CCM 1 (Siegburg, 1963), 51-63; Michel Andrieu, Les

ordines Romani du haut moyen âge, 5 vols, Spicilegium sacrum lovaniense 11, 23, 24, 28, 29 (Louvain,

1931-1961), 3. 215-27. 30

For identification of, and references to, earlier precedents and Carolingian practice, see Ordines aevi

regulae mixtae, ed. Semmler, notes on pp. 53-6. 31

C. Callewaert, ‘Tu autem domione miserere nobis’, Sacris erudiri (Steenbrugge, 1940), pp. 185-8.

2. Beaulieu Abbey, refectory reader’s pulpit. 3. Fountains Abbey, refectory book-recess. 3. Fountains Abbey, recess for

refectory books

15

that were to become the norm in subsequent monastic traditions.32

The ordo also

describes the presence of a seat and lectern for the reader, located in a raised position

near the abbot’s table: ‘Habent autem prope mensa abbatis cathedra tale ex alto stabilita

cum annologio ubi librum ponitur et sedeunt cum legunt’. The ninth-century so-called

‘Plan of St Gall’ likewise depicts a lectern, labelled ‘analogium’, on what appears to be

some form of raised platform, located at the centre of one of the long walls of the

refectory.33

By at least the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, readers’ pulpits had

become or were becoming an integral part of the refectory building, built as a recess in

one of the two long walls, with large windows behind to maximize the available light,

and approached by stairs in the thickness of the wall, typically arcaded on the near-side.

More-or-less well-preserved late-twelfth- and thirteenth-century examples (albeit

sometimes subsequently modified, or partially ruined) survive from England at the

Cistercian abbeys of Beaulieu (where it is now used as the parish church, see fig. 2),

Fountains (including a recessed cupboard for books at the foot of the stairs, see fig. 3;

traces of a similar cupboard also survive in what remains of the refectory at Rievaulx),

and Kirkstall;34

at the Benedictine abbey of St Werburgh, Chester (now Chester

32

Not all monastic custumals describe the customs observed at mealtimes (they are not included, for

example, in the late-tenth-century Regularis Concordia or Lanfranc’s Monastic constitutions). The fullest

accounts are found in late-medieval custumals, such as those of St Augustine’s, Canterbury and

Westminster Abbey (see Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury and

Saint Peter, Westminster, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, 2 vols, HBS, 23, 28 (London, 1902-4), 1. 161-

82; 2. 99-137) and St Mary’s Abbey, York (The Ordinal and Customary of the Abbey of Saint Mary, York

[St John’s College, Cambridge, MS D. 27], ed. [Laurentia McLachlan] and J. B. L. Tolhurst, 3 vols, HBS,

73-5 (London, 1936-7), 1. 142-50. 33

W. Horn and E. Born, The Plan of St Gall, 3 vols (Berkeley, CA, 1979), 1. 263-84. For full discussion of

the early development of monastic refectories and their architecture and forms of decoration up to the mid-

thirteenth century, see Irene Kabala, ‘Medieval Decorated Refectories in France, Italy and England until

1250’ (unpublished PhD. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2001). 34

Glyn Coppack, Fountains Abbey: the Cistercians in Northern England (Stroud, 2003), pp. 66-9; Peter

Fergusson and Stuart Harrison, Rievaulx Abbey: community, architecture, memory (New Haven and

London, 1999), pp. 141-50. On the architecture of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cistercian refectories in

England and Wales, see also Peter Fergusson, ‘The Twelfth-Century Refectories at Rievaulx and Byland

16

Cathedral) and Worcester Cathedral Priory (now the hall of the King’s School,

Worcester),35

at the Premonstratensian abbeys of Tupholme and Easby,36

and the

Augustinian abbey of Haughmond and priory of Norton.

The content of the refectory readings

Of the monastic rules of late antiquity and the early middle ages, only the Regula

magistri prescribed a specific text to be read during meals—namely the rule itself, which

was to be read through in sequence. Each day the weekly reader was to commence to

read at the point where he or the previous week’s reader had left off the day before,

except when lay guests were present, when a different text was to be selected, unless the

abbot deemed a guest to be sufficiently devout to benefit from hearing the rule.37

No

single text or category of texts is prescribed in the Benedictine rule or in the Carolingian

customs that elaborated upon it. Isidore’s Regula monachorum echoes the Third Council

of Toledo’s requirements for the episcopal mensa in specifying Scripture, to which

Abbeys’, in Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles, ed. Christopher Norton and David Park, 2

nd

edn (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 160-80; David M. Robinson, The Cistercians in Wales: architecture and

archaeology 1130-1540 (London, 2006), pp. 201-209; and, for the wider European context: M. Aubert,

L’architecture cistercienne en France, 2nd

edn, 2 vols (Paris, 1947), 2. 97-114; W. Braunfels, Monasteries

of Western Europe: the architecture of the orders (London, 1972), 103-7; Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian

Europe: architecture of contemplation (Kalamazoo, MI, 2002), pp. 282-7, with numerous illustrated

examples in F. Van der Meer, Atlas de l’ordre cistercien (Paris and Brussels, 1965), passim, and J.-F.

Leroux-Dhuys, Cistercian Abbeys: history and architecture (Paris and Cologne, 1998), passim. 35

A refectory pulpit, but little else, also survives from Shrewsbury Abbey. 36

G. J. Borradaile, C. Cameron, J. D. Stewart and D. Start, ‘Magnetizing Dating at a Medieval Monastery

(Tupholme, Loncolnshire)’, Archaeometry, 41 (1999), 175-83; Peter Fergusson, ‘The Refectory at

EasbyAbbey: Form and Iconography’, The Art Bulletin, 71 (1989), 334-51. 37

‘Legat namque cottidie regulam hanc, posito ad diem signo hucusque legerit, ut sequenter cottidie, tamen

omnia perlegantur, ut per uices eudomadum et finiri possit et recapitari legendo. … Nam si superuenerint

forte mensae monasterii laici, propter detractationem futuram in saeculo, cum secreta Dei saecularis

agnouerit, si placuerit abbati, iam lectionem cuiuscumque codicis legat, ut secretum monasterii uel

mensuras uitae sanctae constitutes in disciplinam ab inrisoribus non sciatur. Legat namque aliam lectionem,

posito tamen in regula signo. Nam si talis laicus ad mensam monasterio detineatur, de quo certus sit abbas

quod non solum admirari possit constituta diuina, sed etiam huius religiositatis sit, quod in conuersione

possit esse pedisequus et ad mores possit trahi diuinos, in huius lector aduentu ad mensam regulam

subsequatur. Nam illi debent monasterii regulam audire, qui illam possunt merito obseruare.’ (Ch. 24, 15-

25, ed. De Vogüé, 1. 126-8).

17

Alcuin, in his letter to the bishop whom he nicknames Speratus, added the writings of the

Fathers.38

The substance of the mealtime reading in Carolingian monastic houses,

however, remains obscure, although one might speculate that Alcuin’s expectations for

episcopal practice are likely to reflect those also considered appropriate for monastic

communities. Late-medieval inscriptions on the bindings of three ninth-century St Gallen

manuscripts (St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MSS 116-118, containing Jerome on Isaiah and,

in two volumes, Gregory on Ezekiel) designate them as books for the refectory (‘ad’ or

‘pro mensa’), but from what date they had been used for this purpose has not yet been

determined.39

The mid-ninth-century Vita Aegili provides rare evidence of monastic

refectory reading more certainly datable to the Carolingian period, but extrapolating from

it poses certain difficulties. According to the author, Candidus, Eigil (abbot of Fulda,

818-822) ordered that the Vita Sturmi be read at mealtime on Sturmi’s anniversary, as

part of the liturgical commemoration of his predecessor.40

It might be unwise to infer

from this requirement a more general introduction of hagiographical texts to the refectory

reading, paralleling the increasing use of hagiographical readings in the Office at this

time, since it is unclear whether or not the commemorations introduced by Eigil

represented ‘the first cautious steps towards establishing a saint’s cult’, and thus whether

this vita would have been regarded as a saint’s life.41

38

Isidore, Regula monachorum: ‘Unus tamen in medio residens, benediction accepta, de Scripturis aliquid

legat’ (pr. PL 83, col. 878). 39

I am grateful to Professor David Ganz for drawing these volumes to my attention. 40

Vita Aegil abbatis Fuldensis a Candido ad Modestum edita prosa et versibus: Ein opus geminatum des

IX. Jahnrhunderts: Einleitung und kritische Edition, ed. G. Becht-Jördens, 2 vols (Marburg, 1994), 1. ch.

22; Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744-c. 900 (Cambridge,

2021), p. 164. 41

Raaijmakers, Making of the Monastic Community, p. 164. She notes that Pius Engelbert has argued that

Eigil was simply putting into practice Carolingian reform legislation requiring that the death of an abbot be

commemorated liturgically each year, but suggests that Eigil’s Vita Sturmi presents Sturmi, nevertheless, as

‘saint-like’: as a powerful patron and also, by analogy with a similar description of Boniface earlier in the

18

More detailed evidence of the content of refectory reading begins to accumulate

from the eleventh century onwards, largely in the form of prescriptions or

recommendations for refectory reading which are sometimes included in monastic

custumals and ordinals. Such evidence can be supplemented and clarified by later

medieval lists of the books used in the refectory, individual entries in booklists that

identify the item in question as a refectory book, and inscriptions and annotations in

surviving manuscripts. Despite the incomplete and sometimes seemingly opaque nature

of this evidence, it is possible, if one sets what survives from England within the context

of the material extant from the continent, to discern the emergence of an outline

framework for an annual cycle of readings in the refectory, whose general parameters

were shared by the various traditions of communal life, whether of monks or regular

canons, throughout the Western Church. The effect by at least the end of the twelfth

century was a programme of reading that operated in dialogue with the liturgical calendar

and readings. First, it provided a means of fulfilling (in principle if not wholly in

practice) the prescriptions for the reading the Bible in the Night Office by delivering (if

only partially) in the refectory whatever, for reasons of time, could not be read within the

Office. Second, it allowed further reflection on the liturgical lessons of the Office and the

Mass by means of readings from patristic biblical commentary and gospel homilies, and

third, it could be used to extend the observance of a saint’s feast beyond the liturgy with

additional readings from the lives, miracles and translation of the saint, or permit the

commemoration at mealtime of a saint whose feast was recorded in the martyrology but

was not celebrated liturgically by that particular community. A more precise

text, an intercessor in heaven (ibid., pp. 163-5; Pius Engelbert, Die Vita Sturmi des Eigils von Fulda:

Literarkritisch-historische Untersuchung und Edition, Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission für

Hessen und Waldeck, 29 [Marburg, 1968], pp. 111-14).

19

understanding of the relationship between refectory and office readings in individual

houses must await more detailed examination of the content of the Night Office readings.

Nevertheless, the general framework that structured both Office and refectory readings,

and some details of practice at the local level are already discernible.

The liturgical readings of the Night Office by the eleventh century drew variously

upon three principal components: an annual cycle of reading of the books of the Bible,

sometimes in conjunction with corresponding patristic exegesis; patristic homilies upon

the Gospel pericope assigned for Mass, and hagiographical texts appropriate to a given

feast.42

Although certain shared principles shaped the cycle of readings, and is most

evident in the order in which the biblical books were read, the surviving evidence from

the central middle ages indicates considerable variation in the choice of readings from

house to house, even those from within the same monastic tradition. The Cistercians were

the first to introduce a single office lectionary as part of a uniform observance of the

divine office; the earliest surviving evidence for its content is Dijon, Bibliothèque

municipale, MS 114, datable to the 1180s, which, according to the elaborate frontispiece

on fol. 1v, contains ‘the books pertaining to the Divine Office which, in our Order, ought

not to admit of diversity’, including the Night Office lectionary (here called

breuiarium’).43

This precedent was subsequently followed by the Dominicans,44

but the

42

The indispensable guides are Martimort, Les lectures liturgiques, 78-94; Palazzo, History of Liturgical

Books, pp. 149-60; P. Salmon, L’office divin au Moyen Âge: Histoire de la formation du bréviaire du ixe au

xvie siècle, Lex orandi 43 (Paris, 1967); R. F. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: the origins

of the divine office and its meaning for today (Collegeville, MN, 1986). For Anglo-Saxon England, see

Jesse Billett, The Divine Office in Anglo-Saxon England, 597-c. 1000, HBS Subsidia (Woodbridge,

forthcoming). 43

‘In hoc uolumine continentur libri ad diuinum officium pertinentes. quos utique non decet in ordine

nostro diuersos haberi’: Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux, ed. Chrysogonus Waddell

(Cîteaux, 1999), pp. 37-8, and also pp. 457-8; Les Ecclesiastica officia cisterciens du xiième siècle: texte

latin selon les manuscrits édités de Trente 1711, Ljubljana 31 et Dijon 114…, ed. Danièle Choisselet and

Placide Vernet (Reiningue, 1989); R. Grégoire, ‘L’Homéliaire cistercien du manuscript 114(82) de Dijon’,

20

black monks (including the Cluniacs) never adopted a single, uniform lectionary for the

Night Office.45

Biblical readings46

Surviving eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic custumals reflect a special concern for

the organization of the biblical readings, incorporating directions for an annual cycle of

continuous reading of the Bible in the Night Office (with the exception of the Psalms and

the Gospels which had their own liturgical cycles).47

The order in which the books were

to be read, and in what season, drew upon the framework of annual cycles of reading of

the Old and New Testaments practised in seventh- and eighth-century Rome, records of

which had become more widely disseminated during the Carolingian ecclesiastical

Cîteaux, 28 (1977), 133-207. It is uncertain from what earlier date a uniform office lectionary may have

been introduced (Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts, p. 458 n.) nor how rigorously it was adhered to

subsequently at a local level: see, for example, D. F. L. Chadd, ‘Liturgy and Liturgical Music: the limits of

uniformity’, in Cistercian Art and Architecture, ed. Norton and Park, pp. 299-314, at 312-4. 44

W. R. Bonniwell, A History of the Dominican Liturgy (New York, 1944), pp. 18-193. 45

It is important to note that even the norms concerning the type of text read within each of the three

nocturns of the night office on Sundays and major feasts that are observable in many late medieval

breviaries, and which are presented as later medieval norms in modern handbooks and guides to the

medieval liturgy (e.g. Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: a guide to their

organization and terminology [Toronto, 1982], pp. 60-2; John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western

Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: a historical introduction and guide for students and

musicians [Oxford, 1991], p. 81), had not yet become established by the central middle ages: see, for

example, J. Billett, ‘Sermones ad diem pertinentes: sermons and homilies in the liturgy of the divine office’

(forthcoming). 46

For an introduction to the biblical readings of the Office, see S. J. P. van Dijk, ‘The Bible in Liturgical

Use’, in The Cambridge History of the Bible, II: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W.

H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969), 220-52, at 230-6; Pierre-Marie Gy, ‘La bible dans la liturgie au moyen âge’,

in Le Moyen Âge et la Bible, Bible de tous les temps, 4, ed. Pierre Riché et Guy Lobrichon (Paris, 1984),

pp. 537-54, at 543-4, 550-2; Joseph Dyer, ‘The Bible in the Medieval Liturgy, c. 600-1300’, in The New

Cambridge History of the Bible, II: From 600 to 1450, ed. Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter

(Cambridge, 2012), 659-79, at 659-67. 47

For their inclusion in the early Cluniac custumals, see Reilly, ‘The Cluniac Giant Bible and the Ordo

librorum ad legendum’. The Cistercians, however, did incorporate the reading of the four Gospels into the

refectory element of the annual cycle in October following the reading of Maccabees, but excluded the

Passion narratives: Ecclesiastica officia, ed. Choisselet and Vernet, p. 132, ‘In kalendis octobris leguntur

duo libri machabeorum. dum canitur ADAPERIAT DOMINUS. Et cum perlecti fuerunt. legimus quatuor

libros evangeliorum in refectorio tantum usque ad passiones. Et dimissis passionibus. quos relictum est

legatur.’

21

reforms of the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and were frequently copied in various

manuscript contexts between the ninth and twelfth centuries, sometimes augmented with

further directions for readings and chants.48

Surviving evidence from eleventh- and

twelfth-century England corresponds most closely with the text designated by Michel

Andrieu as Ordo Romanus XIIIA (although as far as the sequence of biblical books is

concerned, there was little variation between the different ordines identified by

Andrieu).49

The Heptateuch (Genesis to Judges; sometimes expanded to the Octateuch by

the inclusion of Ruth) was assigned to the weeks between Septuagesima and Passion

Sunday; Jeremiah and Lamentations to Passiontide; Acts, the Canonical Epistles and

Revelation to the period between Easter and the octave of Pentecost; Kings and

Chronicles from thence to the beginning of August; the Wisdom books in August; Job,

Tobit, Judith, Esther and Ezra in September; Maccabees in October;Ezekiel, Daniel and

the Minor Prophets in November; Isaiah in December, and the Pauline Epistles between

Epiphany and Septuagesima.

The extent to which, in practice, individual communities implemented the cycle in

full, and the various means by which the principle of continuous reading was fulfilled at

least in spirit have yet to be fully explored.50

A number of practical difficulties stood in

the way, such as the variable length of time between Epiphany and Septuagesima and

between Pentecost and the beginning of August (depending upon the date of Easter), the

48

See Ordines Romani, ed. Andrieu, 2. 467-526, 3. 23-41. 49

Ibid., 2. 469-95. For the variations from Ordo Romanus XIIIA in one late-Anglo-Saxon source, see

Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, ed. C. A. Jones (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 148-9, 217-26; J. R. Hall,

‘Some Liturgical Notes on Aelfric’s Letter to the Monks at Eynsham’, The Downside Review, 93 (1975),

297-303, and Milton McC. Gatch, ‘The Office in Late Anglo-Saxon Monasticism’, in Learning and

Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the occasion of his sixty-fifth

birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 341-62, at pp. 352-6. 50

For important preliminary observations and a detailed examination of evidence from Freising, St Gallen

and Constance, see Henry Parkes, ‘Biblical Readings for the Night Office in Eleventh-Century Germany:

reconciling theory and practice’ (forthcoming).

22

variable hours of darkness, and the frequent intrusion into the liturgy of specially-

designated readings for the major feasts of the temporale and of saints’ feasts with their

own proper readings or readings from the common of saints. A number of eleventh-

century monastic writers acknowledged such difficulties and identified as one solution

the allowance for some of the biblical reading to take place in the refectory. The earliest

known evidence for this solution is found in customs drawn up in the early eleventh

century for Eynsham Abbey by its first abbot, the homilist, Ælfric. After setting out a

cycle of reading closely corresponding to that of Ordo Romanus XIIIA, including not the

full Heptateuch but only Genesis and Exodus, he wrote: ‘And be it known that, in the

course of a year, the entire canon [of Scripture] ought to be read in church, but because

we are lazy and slothful, we read in the refectory whatever we do not cover in church.’51

From this one might infer that the remainder of the books of the Heptateuch would be

read in the refectory. This is unlikely to have been a solution personally devised by

Ælfric; it may well already have been introduced at other reformed monastic houses in

England and on the Continent since evidence of the practice can also found in three

eleventh-century Cluniac custumals: the mid-eleventh-century Liber tramitis (surviving

from Farfa), and the late-eleventh-century customs compiled by Bernard of Cluny and by

Ulrich of Zell (for Hirsau).52

These three custumals also provide directions for how the

division between church and refectory was (or should be) applied (albeit only in very

51

‘Et sciendum quod tota bibliotheca debet legi in circulo anni in ecclesia, sed quia nos pigri serui sumus ut

segnes, legimus in refectorio quicquid de ea in ecclesia omittimus.’ Ælfric’s Letter, ed. Jones, pp. 148-9.

See also ibid., pp. 217-26; Hall, ‘Some Liturgical Notes’, 297-303, and Gatch, ‘The Office’, pp. 352-6. 52

Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis, ed. P. Dinter, CCM, 10 (Siegburg, 1980), e.g. ch. xiv, 78, pp. 121-2;

Bernard, ‘Ordo cluniacensis’, in Vetus disciplina monastica, ed. Marquard Herrgott (Paris, 1726; repr.

Siegburg, 1999); Ulrich of Zell, Consuetudines antiquiores cluniacenses, pr. PL 149, cols 643-779. For

invaluable guidance on these texts and their place in the evolution of the customs of Cluny and of Cluniac-

influenced houses, see From Dead of Night to End of Day, ed. Boynton and Cochelin, esp. Isabelle

Cochelin, ‘Évolution des coutumiers monastiques dessinées à partir de l’étude de Bernard’, pp. 29-66.

23

general terms and to differing extents), including directions for reading part of the

Heptateuch in the refectory. Ulrich provides the most detail, set out as a response to his

interlocutor, William of Hirsau, who had heard of the exceptional length of the Night

Office readings at Cluny and had inquired how the reading of the Old and New

Testaments was organised there. Ulrich explains that, as elsewhere, the reading of the

Octateuch commenced at Septuagesima, but that at Cluny the book of Genesis was read

in its entirety in the Night Office in the space of a week, with Exodus and the other

remaining books being read in full in continuous sequence between Sexagesima and the

beginning of Lent (except on Sundays) but split between the Night Office and the

refectory.53

Ulrich also observed that, because of the short length of the hours of darkness

in the Summer, much of the books of Acts, Revelation and the Canonical Epistles was

read in the refectory, and that the books of Kings, the Wisdom books, Job, Tobit, Judith,

Esther, Ezra and Maccabees were hardly read in the Office at all, apart from the extracts

read in the Night Office on Sunday.54

Twelfth-century evidence, both textual and

53

‘Ut incipiam de librorum omnium antiquissimo, id est Octateucho, hic liber, ut mos est generalis, et in

aliis Ecclesiis et Septuagesima ponitur ad legendum. In ipsa Dominica fiunt lectiones satis breves, praeter

ad primam lectionem, prologus ille Desiderii mei expenditure totus. Per sequentes noctes ita protenduntur

ut in illa una septimana Genesis perlegatur, et in ecclesia tantum. In Sexagesima Exodus inchoatur, et simul

cum aliis voluminibus quae leguntur, legitur utrumque et in ecclesia, et in refectorio, ita ut ubi lectionis

terminus fuerit lectae, ibi semper initium fiat legendae die sequenti, et si non ante, tamen intrante

Quadragesima ex toto perlegitur Octateuchus; ex quo tamen ad Dominicas sunt lectiones exceptae.’ Ulrich,

Consuetudines, col. 643. Notwithstanding Ulrich’s claim that Genesis was read in its entirety in the course

of a single week, the Cluny lectionary of c. 1100 (Paris, BnF, MS nouv. acq. lat. 2246) assigns readings

from Genesis not only to Septuagesima Sunday (where the first reading is indeed the entire prologue, as

specified by Ulrich) but also to the Sundays of Sexagesima and Quinquagesima: Raymond Étaix, ‘Le

lectionnaire de l’office à Cluny’, Recherches Augustiniennes, 11 (1976), 91-143, at 100-101. These may be

the Sunday exceptions to which Ulrich himself refers. Cf. Liber tramitis, ed. Dinter, p. 48: ‘Liber genesis

legatur ad officium nocturnale tandiu quousque sit expletus; ac deinde alii [i.e. the other books of the

Heptateuch] qui post ipsum restant tam in refectorio quam in aecclesiis, ut sint exacti in Capite Ieiunii quod

fit feria quarta.’ Bernard’s custumal provides the greatest level of specificity concerning the division of the

biblical books into Office lections (see Reilly, ‘Cluniac Giant Bible’, pp. 174-5). Taken together, the

various Cluniac sources indicate a degree of fluidity in the passages chosen for the biblical lections: see

Candida Elvert, ‘Die Nokturnen lesungen Klunys im 10.-12. Jahrhundert’, in Clavis voluminum CCM

VII/1-3, CCM, 7/4 (Siegburg, 1986), 37-126. 54

Ulrich, Consuetudines, col. 644, and, in closely similar wording, Bernard, ‘Ordo cluniacenesis’, p. 325.

24

manuscript, suggests that some form of dovetailing of Office and refectory reading of the

bible became the norm not only in communities that followed the Benedictine rule

(including the Cistercians)55

but also among the Carthusians and communities of regular

canons.56

The mid-twelfth-century Liber ordinis of the Augustinian house of St-Victor in

Paris (ch. 48) is, to my knowledge, the earliest extant custumal to set out an entire annual

cycle of reading in the refectory as a discrete text, the biblical cycle interspersed with

directions for readings from corresponding biblical commentary and from gospel

homilies appropriate to the liturgical season.57

Thus, from Septuagesima until Passion

Sunday (referred to by the incipit of the first responsory of the Night Office), not only the

Octateuch was to be read but also Origen’s homilies on the Old Testament and

commentaries and homilies on the Gospels appropriate for Lent.58

The earliest surviving

detailed records of cycles of refectory reading from English religious houses are in

sources that date from no earlier than the late thirteenth century. They comprise three

late-thirteenth-century custumals, two from Benedictine houses: Norwich Cathedral

55

The custumal that forms part of the compilation of texts that were to be observed uniformly by the

Cistercians (as set out in Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 114) directs which books of the Bible might

be divided between the Night Office and the refectory, as time permitted.See, for example, on the reading

of Isaiah during Advent: ‘In aduentu domini dominica prima ysaias incipiatur ad uigilias. et deinceps totus

legatur per aduentum. Non solum ad uigilias. sed et in refectorio prout tempus expetierit.’ Ecclesiastica

officia, ed. Choisselet and Vernet, p. 66. For special directions concerning how Lamentations, Proverbs 31:

10-31 and the Song of Songs were to be delivered in the refectory, see Waddell, Twelfth-Century Statutes,

pp. 647-8. 56

Étaix, ‘Le lectionnaire cartusien pour le réfectoire’, 273, n. 4, citing two redactions of the customs of St

Anthelme, prior of La Grande Chartreuse, 1139-1151: ‘Omnes libros qui leguntur ab octauis Pentecostes

usque ad kalendas Nouembris, partim in Ecclesia partim in refectorio legimus’ (ed. James Hogg, in Die

ältesteten consuetudines der Kartäuser, Analecta Cartusiana, 1 [Berlin, 1970], 95 and 109). For the

Victorine congregation of Augustinian canons, see Liber ordinis sancti Victoris Parisiensis, ed. Luc Jocqué

and Ludo Milis, CCCM, 61 (Turnhout, 1984), 211-215, and for the Arrouasians, see Constitutiones

canonicorum regularium ordinis Arroasiensis, ed. Ludo Milis, CCCM, 20 (Turnhout, 1970), 219-20. 57

Liber ordinis, ed. Milis, pp. 211-215, where it forms part of chapter 48, De lectione mensae. 58

‘A Septuagesima usque ad Isti sunt dies legantur quinque Libri Moysi et cetera quae sequuntur, usque ad

Librum Regum et omiliae Origenis super Vetus Testamentum et expositiones euangeliorum et sermones ad

Quadragesimam pertinentes.’ Ibid., p. 212.

25

Priory (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 465) and Peterborough Abbey

(Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 459), and one from the Augustinian priory of

Barnwell, near Cambridge (BL, MS Harley 3601).59

Taken together, they correspond

with other such lists from the Continent in broadly sharing the same framework but each

exhibiting certain differences in matters of detail. Thus, although some passages in the

Barnwell custumal reflect the influence of the Liber ordinis,60

the biblical content of its

prescriptions for the annual cycle of refectory reading is a little less full than that

specified for St-Victor: only Genesis, not the full Octateuch, is set for the period from

Septuagesima to Passion Sunday; the four books of Kings but not Chronicles between the

Octave of Pentecost and the beginning of August, and there is no mention of the book of

Ezra. Minor differences also distinguish the number and order of the biblical books

included in the cycles from the Benedictine abbeys of Peterborough and Norwich. The

latter specifies the full Octateuch, the former just the Pentateuch (with the book of Judges

being read in between Chronicles and the Wisdom books); the latter (like St-Victor)

assigns the Pauline Epistles to the period after Easter, whereas the former (in common

with the sequence in Ordo Romanus XIIIA, Ælfric’s customs and those of Barnwell)

assigns them to the period of variable length between the Epiphany and Septuagesima;

and finally, the Peterborough cycle (like that from Barnwell) omits any mention of the

59

The Customary of the Cathedral Priory Church of Norwich, MS 465 in the Library of Corpus Christi

College, Cambridge, ed. J. B. L. Tolhurst, HBS, 82 (London, 1984), pp. 198-9, with the rubric ‘Incipit ordo

lectionum ad prandium per totum annum’; Peterborough Abbey, ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen and James M. W.

Willoughby, CBMLC 8 (London, 2001), BP20, pp. 46-9: ‘Quid debeat legi in Refectorio per annum’; The

Observances in Use at the Augustinian Priory of S. Giles and S. Andrew at Barnwell, Cambridgeshire, ed.

John Willis Clark (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 66-7, beginning ‘Libri eciam, qui secundum diuersa anni tempora

debent legi in mensa’. 60

See, for example, the close correspondence between the detailed specifications for the book-cupboard in

both (Observances in Use at Barnwell, ed. Clark, pp. xlii-xlvi, 64-5; Liber ordinis, ed. Jocqué and Milis,

78-9): Richard Sharpe, ‘The Medieval Librarian’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and

Ireland, Volume I: to 1640, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge, 2006), 218-41,

at 224 and n. 20.

26

book of Ezra, whereas in the cycle from Norwich it is positioned before the reading of

Job rather than (as was more usual) after the book of Esther.

The focus of all three of these English lists of refectory reading, as with that in the

Liber ordinis, is the biblical cycle, albeit interspersed with provision for the reading of

patristic commentary and prefaced by directions for the reading of homilies on the Mass

readings on Sundays. A record of the annual cycle of refectory reading included in the

early-thirteenth-century Fécamp ordinal, however, not only integrates patristic

commentary and gospel homilies within the biblical cycle but provides in addition a full

calendar (from January to the end of December) of hagiographical readings and homilies

for saints’ and other feasts, with over 180 days in the year being assigned such readings.61

The Liber ordinis had made a general allowance that on saints’ feast days their lives or

passions might be read,62

but the number of possible days that, at the cantor’s discretion,

might be given over to such reading evident from the Fécamp ordinal, as well as from

similarly detailed lists from the abbey of Sainte-Rictrude, Marchiennes, and from Saint-

Wandrille (dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries respectively)63

had serious

implications for achieving the ideal of the annual cycle of biblical readings. It was the

responsibility of the cantor to make sure that sufficient priority was given to the biblical

readings and to adjust the assignment of both hagiography readings and biblical

commentary accordingly, whilst also ensuring that the commencement of the biblical

books between Easter and Advent dovetailed with the Night Office responsories that

61

The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp (Fécamp, Musée de la Bénédictine, Ms 186), ed.

David Chadd, 2 vols, HBS, 111-2 (1999-2002), 2. 674-85; D. B. Grémont, ‘Les “lectiones ad prandium” à

l’abbaye de Fécamp au XIIIe siècle’, in Cahiers Léopold Delisle, 20 (1971), 3-41. 62

‘In festiuitatibus sanctorum legantur uitae uel passiones eorum.’ Liber ordinis, ed. Jocqué and Milis, 214. 63

Nebbiai-dalla Guarda, ‘Les listes médiévales’, 290-9 (Sainte-Rictrude, Marchiennes), 309-312 (Saint-

Wandrille); C. A. [U. Berlière], ‘Les lectures de tables des moines de Marchiennes au xiiie siècle’, Revue

bénédictine, 11 (1894), 27-35; J. Laporte, ‘L’ordo lectionum, les us et la bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Saint-

Wandrille au xive siècle’, Revue Mabillon, 27 (1937), 188-209; 28 (1938), 15-28.

27

corresponded with them.64

In the Norwich custumal, for example, an allowance for the

inclusion in the refectory of readings from the letters and commentaries of the Fathers is

immediately qualified by the proviso that ‘the specified reading may never be omitted,

and may the reading of the Bible especially be delivered in its season, with the exception

of the books of the prophets which are read more fully at Matins, and are sometimes

omitted in the refectory so that their commentaries may be read.’65

A partial cycle of

refectory reading (running from the first Sunday in November to the end of Christmas

week), added in the late fourteenth century to a twelfth-century book from Reading

Abbey (St John’s College, Oxford, MS 11), but probably deriving from an earlier

custumal,66

includes the observation that the sheer number and prolixity of the some of

the saints’ lives that might be assigned during November was such that the armarius be

permitted to omit the ‘less useful’ lives, such as Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St Martin, so

that the specified biblical books (Ezekiel, Daniel and the Twelve Minor Prophets) might

be read through in their entirety.67

64

In the lists of refectory reading from Norwich, Peterborough, Fécamp, Saint-Wandrille and also a

thirteenth-century list from Saint-Denis, Paris, some or all of the books of the Bible assigned between

Easter and Advant are cued to the incipits of the first responsory of the Sunday Night Office rather than, or

as well as, to a particular month, to bring out the textual correspondences between the content of the

responsories (the chants that accompanied the Office readings), the biblical component of the Office

readings themselves, and the biblical reading in the refectory. For the list from Saint-Denis, see P.

Schmitz, ‘Les lectures de table à l’abbaye de Saint-Denis vers la fin de moyen âge’, Revue bénédictine, 42

(1930), 163-7; Nebbiai-dalla Guarda, ‘Les listes médiévales’, 299-301. 65

‘Ita tamen quod statuta lectio nunquam omittatur et precipue lectio bibliotece quin legatur in tempore

suo. exceptis libris prophetarum qui plenius ad matutinas leguntur . et ad mensam aliquando omittuntur ut

eorum expositiones legantur.’ Customary of Norwich, ed. Tolhurst, 199. 66

Alan Coates, English Medieval Books: the Reading Abbey collections from foundation to dispersal

(Oxford, 1999), p. 66 (cf. English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe et al., p. 443, B71.150, ‘Consuetudines

Cluniacenses in uno uolumine’). 67

‘In refectorio leguntur Ezechiel, Daniel et xii prophete. Sed quia uite sanctorum multe et prolixe infra

hoc temporis spacium eueniunt prouidendum est armario ut que minus utiles fuerint omittantur sicut est

dialogus Sulpicius Severi de uita sancti Martini et si que sunt similes ut libri prefati ante Aduentum domini

perlegi possint.’ Coates, English Medieval Books, p. 84 (with minor variations in punctuation); the note was

also printed by J. R. Liddell, ‘Some Notes on the Library of Reading Abbey’, Bodleian Quarterly Record, 8

(1935), 47-54.

28

Although detailed descriptions of cycles of refectory reading survive from

England from no earlier than the late thirteenth century, manuscripts that were used for

such reading survive from an earlier date, including at least one twelfth-century bible

demonstrably made for use in the refectory. Adam of Eynsham’s Life of St Hugh of

Lincoln (c. 1140-1200) describes an especially fine, decorated bible that had been made

by the monks of Winchester Cathedral Priory to be read during meals.68

King Henry II,

who had promised to obtain a copy of the Old and New Testament for Hugh’s newly-

founded Carthusian priory of Witham, and having been informed of the refectory bible

from Winchester, pressed the prior of Winchester to give him the book, and he did so. St

Hugh and his monks were delighted—especially, so the narrative goes, because of the

elegance of the hand and the beauty of the book, but most of all because the care with

which it had been corrected.69

On subsequently learning of how the book had been

obtained by Henry, Hugh insisted that it be returned. The bible has been shown to have

survived and now forms Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Auct. E inf. 1-2, a two-volume

bible of disputed origin but certainly completed and corrected at Winchester during the

second half of the twelfth century.70

Its scale, clarity and quality of script, and the

attention paid to the correction of the text throughout, correspond well with both the

description in the Vita and the requirements of a book to be read aloud from a lectern.

68

‘egregiam recenti et decenti opera confecisse bibliothecam, in qua ad mensam edentium fratrum legi

debuisset.’ Magna vita sancti Hugonis: the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln, 2 vols, ed. and tr. D. L. Douie and

D. H. Farmer, 2nd

edn (Oxford, 1985), 1. 85-6. 69

‘in eo potissimum gauisi quod stili elegantium, totiusque operis uenustatem, operosior emendation

sublimius commendaret.’ Ibid., p. 85. 70

On the corrections and the scribal and textual relationship between the ‘Auct’ Bible and the more famous

Winchester Bible (Winchester Cathedral, MS 1), see N. R. Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century after

the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1960), pp. 50-2; Walter Oakeshott, The Two Winchester Bibles (Oxford,

1981). For discussion of the evidence adduced by Oakeshott in favour of a St Albans origin, and a counter-

argument in favour of Winchester, see Rodney M. Thomson, Manuscripts from St Albans Abbey 1066-

1235, 2nd

edn, 2 vols (Woodbridge, 1985), 1. 33-6.

29

How many of the other surviving large-format bibles produced or acquired in England

during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries were used for the refectory readings from

the outset cannot be ascertained with certainty, 71

but evidence survives that at least two

came to be used in such as way. The magnificent late-eleventh-century bible donated to

Durham Cathedral Priory by Bishop William of Saint-Calais (of which the second

volume only survives as Durham Cathedral, MS A.II.4) is recorded in a late-fourteenth-

century Durham list of refectory books,72

and a fifteenth-century benefaction list from

Bury St Edmunds refers to the twelfth-century Bury Bible (one volume of which survives

complete as Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 2), as a ‘magna biblia refectorii’.73

71

Dual use of large-format bibles such as these in the choir during the Night Office and in the refectory

during the eleventh century and twelfth centuries may perhaps be inferred from the provisions made by

both Bernard of Cluny and William of Hirsau for an assistant to help the weekly reader carry the book to-

and-fro between the refectory and the choir, if required: Bernard, ‘Ordo cluniacensis’, p. 252: ‘libros autem

in quibus legendum est, in refectorium portat et reportat; tamen Lector adjuvat eum, si fuerat nimium

pondus : qui legit ad Servitores’; William of Hirsau, Consuetudines Hirsaugensis, pr. PL 150, col. 1028:

‘Librum in quo legendum est, in refectorium portat et reportat is qui legit ad servitores, adjuvante eum ipso,

si opus est, mensae lectore.’ Passionals and homiliaries may have been of sufficient size and weight to

require such assistance, but the provision more plausibly applies to volumes of the dimensions of the so-

called ‘giant bibles’: see Reilly, ‘Cluniac Giant Bible’, pp. 175-6, and eadem, ‘French Giant Bibles and

their English Relatives: blood relatives or adopted children?’, Scriptorium, 16 (2002), 294-311. For the use

by the Cistercians of a single bible to serve both functions, see Placide Vernet, ‘”Historia”: la lecture de la

Bible en communauté dans les monastères cisterciens au xiie siècle’, Liturgie: Revue monastique de la

lecture du Bible, 60-3 (1988), 295-318, at 298-9. 72

Durham, Dean and Chapter Library, MS B.IV.46, fol. 32, first item; Catalogi veteres Dunelm, ed. Raine,

pp. 80-81; A. J. Piper, ‘The Libraries of the Monks of Durham’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts &

Libraries: essays presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London, 1978), pp.

213-49, at 230-2. A slightly earlier (mid-fourteenth-century) list of books in Durham, Dean and Chapter

Muniments, Misc. Charter 7144 (ed. R. A. B. Mynors, in his Durham Cathedral Manuscripts, p. 11) may

also be a list of books for the refectory: see Piper, ibid., p. 230. 73

Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 553, fol. 16v; English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, p.94,

B15.17. More recent scholarship by Diane J. Reilly and others on the significance of the biblical readings

in the refectory in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and on the bibles produced for that purpose, give

reason to dismiss the reservations expressed here in the note on B15.17 and earlier in the note on B15.1 (p.

90) that the Bury Bible could have had such a function from the outset. See also the revised opinion given

by R. M. Thomson in his The Bury Bible (Woodbridge and Tokyo, 2001), pp. 25-8 (but where the refectory

readings are conflated and confused with those of Collation). A fragment (in private ownership) has been

identified as part of a leaf from the lost second volume of the Bury Bible: ibid., p. 9, pl. 49. Other bibles

designated for use in the refectory but which are not known to have survived are recorded in at least two

more late-medieval English library catalogues. A two-volume ‘biblia mensalis’ is recorded in the late-

fourteenth- or early-fifteenth-century catalogue from St Augustine’s, Canterbury (the catalogue survives in

a late fifteenth-century copy, now Dublin, Trinity College, MS 360): see St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury,

ed. B. C. Barker-Benfield, 3 vols, CBMLC, 13 (London, 2008), 1. 373, BA1.3-4. A two-volume bible was

30

The presence of stress-marks in the Bury Bible provides further evidence of its use for

public reading in the refectory and/or the choir. For example, in the passage illustrated

4. Cambridge, Corpus Christ College, MS 2, fol. 33r.

from the opening of the book of Exodus in fig. 4, the scribe noticed that he had made an

error of word separation in column b, line 11, one that might also have caused a reader to

accentuate the syllables incorrectly. Therefore, in addition to tracing a tie-mark between

what had been written as two words—‘inter ea’—he traced an oblique hairline stroke

over the second syllable in order to indicate the correct accentuation ‘intérea’. Biblical

names were widely recognized to present particular problems of accentuation, and for

located in the refectory at the Augustinian abbey of Leicester when a catalogue of all the abbey’s books

was compiled in the late fifteenth century, the first item being ‘Biblia per se in iibus volumnibus et iacet in

Refectorio’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 623, fol. 4r): The Libraries of the Augustinian

Canons, ed. T. Webber and A. G. Watson, CBMLC, 6 (London, 1998), 121, A20.1.

31

this reason a stress-mark was supplied, perhaps by a different hand, above the final

syllable of ‘ioséph’ (line 12). Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 3-4 (the Dover

Bible), produced at Christ Church, Canterbury in the mid-twelfth century, would also

appear to have been produced with the annual cycle of biblical reading in mind, since the

first volume opens with a version of Ordo Romanus XIIIA, immediately preceding and in

the same hand as that of Jerome’s preface to Genesis (MS 3, fol. 1r).74

Use in the Night Office sometimes left traces in the books from which the

readings were taken in the form of a sequence of roman numerals in the margins

demarcating the passages to be read for each of the readings: three readings on ferial

nights, and one, two or three groups of either four readings per group (for the monastic

cursus, numbered from i-xii) or three (in the case of the secular cursus, numbered from i-

ix), comprising the readings for each of the three nocturns of the Night Office on Sundays

and major feasts. The passage read in the refectory, however, was a single reading of

variable length (in part because the length of the meal was not pre-determined and in part

to permit the cantor a degree of flexibility in negotiating the competing requirements of

the annual cycle of biblical readings and the proper commemoration of saints’ feasts and

other festivals), and was therefore less likely to attract such annotation. Nevertheless,

some bibles were occasionally annotated to indicate where the mealtime reading was to

74

See Nigel Gilmour, ‘The Origins of the Dover Bible with a Note on its Historical Context’, Transactions

of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 14/1 (2008), 51-66, with the page containing the ordo and the

beginning of Jerome’s preface reproduced as pl. 4 on p. 70. The annual cycle of reading the books of the

bible is also reflected in a late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century note supplied on fol. 121r, at the end

of the Catholic Epistles in a mid-twelfth-century copy of the New Testament, now Cambridge, Pembroke

College, MS 120, perhaps from Bury (and certainly there in the fourteenth century), which reads ‘Post has

epistolas legatur immediate apocalipsis et non epistole pauli quia post natale legentur.’ See T. A. Heslop,

‘The Production and Artistry of the Bury Bible’, in Bury St Edmunds: medieval art, architecture,

archaeology and economy, ed. Antonia Gransden, The British Archaeological Assocaition Transactions, 20

(Leeds, 1998), pp. 172-185, at p. 182, and Peter Kidd, ‘Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 120: overlooked

and new observations’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 13/3 (2006), 289-99, at

299.

32

begin in relation to what was prescribed for reading in the choir. The multi-volume

twelfth-century Bible from the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux (Troyes, Bibliothèque

municipale, MSS A20-22, 24-25), contains not only several sequences of marginal

numerals in sets of three to indicate the prescribed Office ferial readings from the books

of Genesis, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel but also marginal notes directing where

and when the refectory reading of the books of Tobit and I Maccabees should commence,

and directions to omit the Passion narratives from the reading of the four gospels at

mealtimes.75

At the end of the fourth book of Kings in the second volume of a twelfth-

century five-volume bible from the abbey of Saint-Amand (in which Kings is followed

directly by Isaiah), a rubric (perhaps contemporary, or a little later) states that the books

of Kings is to be followed in the refectory by Chronicles, for which the text is to be found

in the fourth volume.76

I have yet to discover similar evidence concerning the refectory

readings in surviving English large-format bibles from before the thirteenth century, but

sequences of late-medieval Office lection-numbers are not uncommon.77

References to

the refectory were, however, added in the fifteenth century to a thirteenth-century bible

from an English Charthouse, already marked up throughout in accordance with the

75

For details, see J.-P. Bouhot and J.-F. Genest, La bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Clairvaux du xiie au xviiie

siècle (Paris, 1997), pp. 72-5. I am grateful to Michael Gullick for this reference. On the Cistercian practice

of reading the Gospels as part of the annual biblical cycle, see above, note 47. 76

‘Post libros Regum legitur ad mensam Paralipomenon. Require in Quarto Volumine’: Valenciennes,

Bibliothèque municipale, MS 2, fol. 78v. The bible is now Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MSS 1-

5, and was described in the mid-twelfth-century list of books of Saint-Amand as ‘Vetus et novum

testamentum in quinque volumnibus quae leguntur as mensam’: see Walter Cahn, Romanesque

Manuscripts: the twelfth century, 2 vols, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France (London, 1996), 2.

142-4. 77

Late-medieval Office lection marks are present, for example, in a twelfth-century large-format, single-

volume bible perhaps from St Albans, now Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.5.1, e.g. on fol. 5r (lections

for Quinquagesima beginning at Genesis 12.1).

33

Carthusian annual cycle of biblical reading.78

Further evidence might emerge from a

systematic examination of all large-format English bibles dating from between the

eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

The Church Fathers: gospel homilies and biblical exegesis

The Benedictine Rule states that ‘Besides the inspired books of the Old and New

Testaments, the works read at Vigils (i.e. the Night Office) should include explanations

of Scripture by reputable and orthodox catholic Fathers (ch. 9)’.79

This injunction came to

be fulfilled in two ways: (1) through readings from patristic gospel homilies

corresponding to the cycle of gospel readings at Mass on Sundays and major feast days

and (2) through readings taken from patristic commentary on Scripture corresponding

with the annual cycle of biblical readings.80

Both became integrated within the annual

cycle of refectory readings.

From the Carolingian period onwards, it became common for the readings for the

final nocturn on many Sundays and great feast days throughout the year to be taken from

a patristic gospel homily. The practice is mentioned by Aelfric, who comments at the end

of his outline of the cycle of biblical reading that, whilst on the feasts of saints throughout

the year, the office readings could be taken from the lives or passions of the saints, for the

third nocturn they should be ‘from a homily on the Gospel as we do always and

78

Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.2.23: see Paul Binski and Patrick Zutshi, Western Illuminated

Manuscripts: a catalogue of the collection in Cambridge University Library (Cambridge, 2011), 90-91, no.

97. I am grateful to Michael Gullick for drawing this entry to my attention. 79

‘Codices autem legantur in vigiliis divinae auctoritatis, tam veteris testament quam novi, sed et

expositiones earum, quae a nominatis et orthodoxis catholicis patribus factae sunt.’ RB 1980, ed. Fry, pp.

204-5. 80

A.-G. Martimort, ‘La lecture patristique dans la liturgie des heures’, in Traditio et progressio: studi

liturgici in onore Prof. Adrien Nocent, OSB, Studia Anselmiana 95 (Rome, 1988), 311-31.

34

everywhere’.81

By the time Aelfric wrote, the most common source for these readings

was the great homiliary compiled specifically for this purpose at Charlemagne’s request

by Paul the Deacon and variously expanded in the centuries that followed.82

The

Carthusians and Cistercians, however, compiled new homiliaries by returning directly to

the works of the Fathers as their sources.83

By the twelfth century, if not earlier, this

element of the Night Office readings was also being paralleled in the refectory. Nearly all

the surviving lists of refectory reading from England and the continent, including the

earliest-surviving such list from St-Victor, Paris, integrate gospel homilies within the

annual cycle of readings, specifying their use on Sundays and/or at the major festivals,

such as Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter.84

Homiliaries set aside for use in the refectory

are recorded in the late twelfth-century booklists of Reading Abbey and its daughter

81

‘et tertiam sedem de tractu euuangelii sicut et ubique semper sumimus.’ Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of

Eynsham, ed. Jones, pp. 146-7. See also the similarly-worded comment on the readings of the final nocturn

on Holy Saturday: ibid., pp. 144-5. 82

For this and other early-medieval homiliaries, see Réginald Grégoire, Les homéliaires du moyen âge:

inventaire et analyse des manuscrits (Rome, 1966), and id., Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux: analyse

des manuscrits (Spoleto, 1980). Although no extant English copy of the homiliary of Paul the Deacon is

earlier than the late eleventh century, textual evidence demsonstrates its presence in England by at least the

late tenth century: see Cyril L. Smetana, ‘Aelfric and the Early Medieval Homiliary’, Traditio, 15 (1959),

163-2204; id., ‘Paul the Deacon’s Patristic Anthology’, in The Old English Homily & its Backgrounds’, ed.

Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé (Albany, NY, 1978), pp. 75-97; Thomas N. Hall, ‘The

development of the common of saints in the early English versions of Paul the Deacon’s Homiliary’, in

Anglo-Saxon Books and their Readers: essays in celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s Handlist of Anglo-Saxon

manuscripts, ed. Thomas N. Hall and Donald Scragg (Kalamazoo, MI, 2008), pp. 31-67. 83

R. Étaix, ‘L’homiliaire Cartusien’, Sacris Erudiri, 13 (1962), 67-112; Jean-Paul Bouhot, ‘Deux

exemplaires de l’homéliaire des “Sancti catholici Patres”’, Revue des études augustiniennes, 19 (1973),

287-302; id., ‘L’homéliaire des Sancti catholici Patres’, Revue des études augustiniennes, 21 (1975), 145-

96. 84

Liber ordinis, ed. Milis, 211: ‘In illis diebus, quibus ad missam euangelium legitur de quo expositione

habetur, si expositio illa ad matutinas tota lecta non fuerit aut fere tota, legatur in refectorio.’ See also,

Observances of Barnwell, ed. Clark, pp. 66-7; Customary of Norwich, ed. Tolhurst, p. 199. The list from

Peterborough specifies only the seasonal homilies that were to be read during the festal seasons of the

temporale, for example, from Easter Sunday until the beginning of the week after Easter week: ‘A pascha

dominica usque ad feriam .ij.am

post octauam eiusdem, legi debent Euuangelia et sermones de pascha.’

(Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, p. 47). For Carthusian practice, see Étaix, ‘Le lectionnaire cartusien

pour le réfectoire’.

35

house at Leominster,85

and in the late-medieval lists from Durham and St Augustine’s,

Canterbury.86

Scholars have long recognised the importance of such homiliaries for the

reception of patristic exegesis and theology in the early and central middle ages, but in

some instances the gospel homilies for the refectory reading were read aloud directly

from a copy of the full patristic text. For example, a late-tenth-century continental of

Gregory’s Homiliae in Euangelia at Worcester by at least the late eleventh century

(Worcester Cathedral, MS Q.21) contains early-twelfth-century marginal annotations

specifying the feast for which that homily was to be assigned,87

while in another copy

dating from the mid-twelfth century, of unknown English origin and medieval

provenance (now Oxford, University College, MS 191), a fourteenth-century hand has

annotated fols 12v, 31v, 40v, 54v, 103r and 112v to indicate where the reader in the

refectory was to commence.88

Several lists of refectory reading from England and the

Continent recommend that on weekdays during Lent, Augustine’s Tractatus in

Euangelium Iohannis might read. In some, the text is referred to as De cena domini, a

title that signified just the second part of Augustine’s commentary (on the passion

narrative), in which case the text was probably read sequentially.89

In other houses,

however, manuscript evidence indicates that text was read out of sequence as a gospel

85

English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, pp. 443 (B71.147 ‘Sermones in refectorio in uno uolumine’)

and 458 (B75.39 ‘Sermones in festis in refectorio legendi’). 86

Catalogi veteres Dunelm, ed. Raine, p. 81 (‘Omeliae de Tempore’ [two volumes], ‘Omeliae excerptae de

diversis Tractatoribus’); St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, ed. Barker-Benfield, 1. 768 (BA1. 658

‘Omeliarium nouum mensale per totum annum’, BA1. 659 ‘Omeliarium nouum mensale’). 87

R. M. Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library

(Cambridge, 2001), p. 132. 88

E.g., fol. 12v ‘Hic incipiatur ad mensam’: N. R. Ker, Medieval Mannuscripts in British Libraries: III.

Lampeter-Oxford (Oxford, 1983), 719. 89

For example, the list from Norwich: Customary of Norwich, ed. Tolhurst, p. 198 ‘In quadragesima,

Augustinus super Iohannem scilicet De cena domini.’

36

homily on those (many) days in Lent when the gospel pericope at Mass was taken from

John’s Gospel, corresponding with a practice suggested by directions in a list of refectory

reading from Saint-Denis, Paris, to the effect that during Lent expositions on the Gospels

were to be read at Matins and in the refectory,90

a practice also perhaps indicated by the

list from Peterborough which prescribes a gospel reading (and, by implication, its homily

as well) only on those ferial days in Lent when the Gospel was from John.91

Since the

sequence of gospel pericopes from John during Lent does not follow the ordo narrationis

of John’s Gospel, the reader in the refectory needed some assistance to find both the

relevant homily and where to commence reading, should the pericope began at a later

verse than that with which the particular tractatus commenced.

5. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 17, fol. 109v (detail).

90

Schmitz, ‘Lectures de table’, 164: ‘In quadragesima legantur expositiones de evangelio ad matutinum et

ad prandium’. After allowing for the reading of the Psalms also if required at mealtime, the list then

specifies Augustine on John and the sermons of Peter of Ravenna. 91

Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, p. 48, ‘A prima dominica quadragesime usque ad passionem

dominicam non legentur Ewangelia diebus ferialibus nisi secundum Iohannem.’

37

This requirement has left a visible mark in several English twelfth-century copies in the

form of marginal headings specifying the particular day and week in Lent when the

adjacent passage was to be read, or, more simply, a cross in the margin against the

relevant passages.92

Here (fig. 5), for example, in a copy of unknown English origin and

provenance, a contemporary marginal heading has been supplied at the start of

Augustine’s homily on the beginning of John 7 that specifies ‘Feria IIIa, ebdomadę .v.

quadragesime’, the Tuesday of the fifth week of Lent, the day for which the the Gospel

pericope began at John 7: 1. The twelfth-century copy from Glastonbury (BL, MS Harley

1916) not only contains similarly-worded marginal headings but also an explanatory note

for the ‘lector refectorii’ on the recto of the first leaf of the volume (now detached as BL,

MS Harley 5958, fol. 87), in which an alphabetical reference system is deployed as a

finding aid to link each day to the relevant passage in the manuscript. A similar system of

reference was supplied in the thirteenth-century on a front endleaf of the copy from Great

Missenden (Bodl. Libr., MS Auct. D.1.10, fol. ivr).

In order to observe the feast of Trinity Sunday in the refectory, some monastic

communities turned not to gospel homilies but to treatises on the doctrine of the Trinity.

At Peterborough, the treatise assigned was that of Alcuin,93

whereas at Norwich it was

Augustine’s De Trinitate, which was to be read at both mealtime and at collation

throughout the week following Trinity Sunday.94

The copies of Augustine’s De trinitate

92

They are found in the following: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 17; Hereford Cathedral, MS

P.ix.5 (perhaps from Winchcombe); London, British Library, MS Harley 1916 + Harley 5958, fol. 87 (from

Glastonbury); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. D.1.10 (from the Arrouaisian abbey at Great

Missenden), and Winchester Cathedral, MS 2 (from Winchester Cathedral: N. R. Ker and A. J. Piper,

Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, IV. Paisley-York [Oxford, 1992], 579-80). 93

Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, p. 47, BP21.22 :‘In die sancte trinitatis legatur Euuangelia, et tota

ebdomada sequenti Alquinus de trinitate.’ 94

Customary of Norwich, ed. Tolhurst, p. 198: ‘In ebdomada sancte Trinitatis, Augustinus De Trinitate ad

prandium et ad collacionem.’ The list of refectory reading in the early thirteenth-century Fécamp ordinal

38

and the De trinitate of Hilary recorded in a late-fourteenth-century list of books kept in

the dormitory at Reading for use in the refectory were presumably also read during this

week.95

In his commentary on Chapter 9 of the Rule, Hildemar of Corbie recommended

that if a book of the Bible had been completed in the Office it should not be re-read, but

that some corresponding exegesis by the Fathers should be read instead; thus, if the book

of Isaiah had been completed (i.e. before Advent had come to an end), Jerome’s

commentary on Isaiah should be read.96

As with the gospel homilies, the liturgical

reading of patristic exegesis in parallel with the annual cycle of biblical reading had

gained its counterpart in the refectory by at least the twelfth century. At St-Victor in Paris

sermons of Origen on Isaiah, on the Old Testament and on the books of Kings

accompanied the reading of the book of Isaiah in Advent, the Octateuch in the weeks

between Septuagesima and the beginning of Lent, and Kings between the octave of

Pentecost and the beginning of July respectively; Florus of Lyons’s compendium of

Augustine’s exegesis on the Pauline epistles followed the reading of the Epistles

themselves before Ascension; Gregory’s Moralia in Iob accompanied the reading of Job

in August, and a commentary on Ezekiel (presumably that of Gregory) was read rogether

also specifies Augustine’s De trinitate, and provides directions for its reading: the text was to be read

sequentially, with the cantor instructing the reader to resume each year at the point reached by the end of

the octave of Trinity the previous year: ‘In Die sancte Trinitatis ad prandium in Augustino de Trinitate. sine

euangelio et per totam ebdomadam. et debet cantor prouidere ut ibi incipiatur. ubi transacto anno finitum

est. et sic totus liber perlegatur.’ (The Fécamp Ordinal, ed. Chadd, 2. 676). The manuscript in question has

survived (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 2088), with remnants of the annotations from the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries still visible in the margins (e.g. fol. 38r: ‘hic fecit finem lector anno

MoCCC

oXI

o in oct. trinitatis’): see Grémont, ‘Lectiones ad prandium’, 19.

95 Oxford, St John’s College, MS 11, fol. 3r: English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, pp. 451-53, at p.

453 (B74.17-18). 96

Hildemar, Expositio Regulae, ed. Mittermüller, p. 281: ‘Cum lectus fuerit liber Veteris vel Novi

Testamenti, non debet iterum relegi, sed causa honestatis debent legere expositionem eiusdem libri, aut

alterius libri si non potuerint eiusdem libri expositionem habere.v. gr. Si liber Isaiae lectus fuerit, non debet

iterum relegi, sed causa honestatis secundum auctoritatem capituli huius (Regulae) debent legere

Expositiones quas Hieronymus in Isaiam fecit.’ Martimort, ‘Lecture patristique’, 324.

39

with the books of Daniel and Ezekiel in November.97

The late-thirteenth-century cycle of

refectory reading from Peterborough assigned Gregory’s Moralia in Iob to follow the

reading of the book of Job; Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah in Advent, and Haymo of

Auxerre’s commentary on the Pauline Epistles after Epiphany (the period when the

Epistles were read in the Office at Peterborough), while, in the weeks after Easter, the

biblical books of Acts, the Seven Catholic Epistles and Revelation were followed (if

required) by Bede’s Commentary on Acts and the Catholic Epistles, Berengaudus on the

Apocalypse, and Augustine’s In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus X.98

The various cycles of refectory reading from England and the Continent display a

mixture of common practice and local differences in the particular commentaries

specified: thus, while at Peterborough the reading of the book of Isaiah in December was

complemented by Jerome’s commentary, the Liber ordinis of the Augustinian canons of

St-Victor in Paris prescribed Origen, and the monks of Bury, to judge from the

inscription in the surviving copy, the commentary of Haymo of Auxerre.99

Extant

manuscripts that had been used for this purpose can be hard to identify, because, as with

the reading of the Bible, such continuous reading of the texts did not usually prompt

marginal annotation. Inscriptions labelling books for refectory use are also rare. The copy

of Haymo on Isaiah is one of only two volumes from Bury St Edmunds to contain the

inscription ‘de refectorio monachorum S. Edmundi’ (both written by the fourteenth-

97

Liber ordinis, ed. Milis, 212-214. See also Grover A. Zinn, Jr., ‘The Influence of Augustine’s De

doctrina christiana upon the Writings of Hugh of St. Victor’, in Reading and Wisdom: the De doctrina

christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame, IN, 1995), pp. 48-60, at

48-50. 98

Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, pp. 47-9, BP20.35, 47, 58, 4, 6, 8 (where, in the note, the text is

incorrectly identified as Augustine’s Tractatus in euangelium Iohannes) and 9 (surviving as Cambridge,

Corpus Christi College, MS 160). 99

London, British Library, MS Egerton 2782 ‘Haymo super Ysaiam de refectorio monachorum S.

Edmundi’ (in the hand of Henry of Kirkstead: see Henry of Kirkstede, Catalogus, ed. Rouse and Rouse, p.

xlix and n. 83.

40

century librarian, Henry of Kirkstead); the other is a copy of Gregory’s commentary on

Ezekiel (Cambridge, St John’s College, MS B. 13).100

Likewise, just one of seven extant

manuscripts from Durham that Alan Piper has observed bear some indication of use in

the refectory now contains an inscription identifying the book as one that had been used

there (Durham, Dean and Chapter Library, MS B.II.34, fol. 1).101

Of the two books that

survive from Peterborough which contain texts listed in that abbey’s cycle of refectory

reading (twelfth-century copies of the commentaries of Bede on the Catholic Epistles,

now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 160, and Berengaudus on the Apocalypse,

now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 134), neither currently bears an inscription,

but M.R. James recorded the presence of an erased inscription at the left-hand of the

upper margin of the first page of Corpus 160 (see fig. 1), which, when’revived’, could be

made out to read ‘Liber refectorii Burg.’.102

The mere trace of this inscription is no longer

visible, even under ultraviolet light, but in natural light it is possible to discern as a lighter

colour the a stain of what may have been the reagent used by James. Evidence of this

volume’s use in the refectory survives, however, in the form of marginal liturgical

annotations analogous to those found in copies of Augustine’s Tractatus in euangelium

Iohannis. These indicate the days on which a passage might be read in the refectory to act

as a commentary upon the corresponding epistle that had been read at the Mass that day,

as, for example, on the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, indicated by the marginal reference

on fol. 38r, ‘Dominica .v.a post pentecosten’ together with the incipit of the introit,

‘Exaudi domini’ (see fig. 6). The sequential reading of the text prescribed at

100

Ibid. 101

Piper, ‘Libraries of the Monks of Durham’, p. 231, pl. 71. 102

Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi

College Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912), 1. 358 ‘at top of fol. 1 erased and revived’.

41

Peterborough in the period before the post-Easter rogation days,103

however, has left no

obvious trace.

6. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 160, fol. 38r.

Hagiographical readings

The third component of the night office readings in all but the more austere monastic

orders, such as the Cistercians, was hagiography.104

In some monastic houses, all twelve

103

Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, p. 47 (BP20.9). 104

Aimé Georges Martimort, Les lectures liturgiques et leurs livres (Typologie des sources du moyen âge

occidental lxiv, 1992), 97-100; Eric Palazzo, A history of liturgical books from the beginning to the

thirteenth century, tr. M. Beaumont, Collegeville, MN 1998, 156-7. The official Cistercian kalendar as it

evolved over the twelfth century included only a very restricted number of feasts (many saints were

included only with commemorations), and a correspondingingly limited inclusion of hagiography within

the standard lectionary as presented in the late twelfth-century Ecclesiastica officia: see Bernard Backaert,

‘L’évolution du calendrier cistercien’, Collectanea ordinis cisterciensium reformatorum xii (1950), 81-94,

302-316; xiii (1951), 108-127; Réginald Grégoire, ‘L’homéliaire cistercien du manuscrit 114(82) de Dijon’,

Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 28 (1977), 133-207. But for evidence of allowances made by the

General Chaper of the Cistercian order for limited local accretion to the festal observance, see Chadd,

‘Liturgy and Liturgical Music’, 307-314.

42

lessons (or nine, in the case of the regular canons) on a major feast could come from a

saint’s life, in others, as Ælfric prescribed, just those of the first two nocturns, with the

lessons of the final nocturn being taken from the gospel homily.105

The three readings of

a lower-graded feast might also be taken from appropriate hagiography. Sequences of

roman numerals from i-xii, i-viii (or i-vi and i-ix in books from houses of regular canons)

or i-iii are not uncommon in the margins of eleventh- and twelfth-century copies of

saints’ lives. The extent to which such hagiography was read in the refectory, and how

this may have differed from house to house, is hard to determine from the available

records of refectory reading, which variously either include no special provision for

saints’ feasts (as is the case with the Norwich list), specify hagiographical readings for

the entire festal kalendar, or provide only general or seemingly partial information. The

Liber ordinis of the Augustinians of St-Victor in Paris, for example, simply includes the

general provision that ‘on saints feasts their lives and passions may be read’,106

whereas

the lists of refectory reading from the northern French monasteries of Fécamp,

Marchiennes, St-Wandrille, and St-Vaast, Arras, provide details for all of days

throughout the year on which a saint’s feast could be observed in such a way (including

also saints’ that were not observed liturgically).107

The Peterborough list, however, only

makes provision for the reading of saints’ lives in the periods from Septuagesima to

105

‘Omnibus uero festiuitatibus sanctorum in toto anno legimus uitas aut passiones ipsorum sanctorum siue

sermones congruentes ipsi sollempnitati et responsoria propria, si habeantur. Sin alias, alia congruentia

canimus et tertiam sedem de tractu euuangelii sicut et ubique sumimus.’ Ælfric’s Letter, ed. Jones, pp. 146-

7; 222 n.344. 106

‘In festiuitatibus sanctorum legantur uitae uel passiones eorum.’ Liber ordinis, ed. Milis, 214. 107

The Fécamp Ordinal, ed. Chadd, 2. 677- 9; Grémont, ‘Lectiones ad prandium’, 7-15, 17-27 (for

identifications of surviving mannuscripts) and 30-8 for a concordance between the liturgical kalendar of

Fécamp and the saints recorded in the refectory list; Nebbiai-dalla Guarda, ‘Les listes médiévales’, 290-9

(Sainte-Rictrude, Marchiennes); Laporte, ‘L’ordo lectionum Saint-Wandrille’; The Monastic Ordinale of

St. Vedast’s Abbey Arras: Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 230 (907) of the beginning of the fourteenth

century, ed. Louis Brou, 2 vols, HBS, 86-7 (London, 1955-7), 2. 363-5 (this list is comprised exclusively of

readings for saints’ feasts, and is headed ‘Legende sanctorum per anni circuitum legende ad mensam’).

43

Passion Sunday; from Ascension to Pentecost, and from Advent to Epiphany.108

Whether

this reflects an intention to ensure that the biblical reading was completed during the

period from Pentecost to the beginning of Advent, or whether the person compiling the

list did not set out to include a comprehensive record for the observance of saints’ feasts,

cannot yet be known.

By the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, legendaries (compilations of saints’

lives, in two or more volumes, arranged in the order of the liturgical year, sometimes also

referred to as passionals) were becoming widespread.109

The occasional presence of

marginal numerals corresponding to the numbered lections of the Night Office may

indicate that legendaries were sometimes used in the Office. Nevertheless, the inclusion

of the lives of numerous saints who did not form part of the local observance of the

individual houses that owned the volumes has led Guy Phillipart and others to argue that

Office use was not the primary function of these great tomes, but that the principal place

in which they were read aloud was the refectory, where it was permissible to observe not

only the feast of a saint from the local calendar but that of another saint familiar to the

community from the passage read from the martyrology during the Chapter office.110

Evidence for such practice is visible in surviving English legendaries, including the

earliest surviving legendary from England: a pair of volumes from Worcester Cathedral

108

Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, 48 (BP20.61, 19, 51). 109

Guy Philippart, Les légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques,Typologie des sources du

moyen âge occidenta, 24-5 (Turnhout, 1977); Baudouin de Gaiffier, ‘À propos des légendiers latins’,

Analecta Bollandiana, 97 (1979), 57-68; François Dobeau, ‘Notes sur l’organisation interne des légendiers

latins’, in Hagiographie, cultures et société IVe-XII

e siècles: Actes du colloque organisé à Nanterre et à

Paris (2-5 mai 1979) (Paris, 1981), pp. 11-29. For the English context, see Rosalind Love, ed., Three

Eleventh-Century Anglo-Latin Saints Lives: Vita S. Birini, Vita et miracula S. Kenelmi and Vita S.

Rumwoldi (Oxford, 1996), pp. xii-xxxiii. 110

Philippart, Les légendiers latins, 106-116; de Gaiffier, ‘À propos des légendiers latins’; id.,

‘l’hagiographie et son public au xie siècle’, in his Études critiques d’hagiographie et d’iconologie, Subsidia

hagiographica, 43 (Brussels, 1967), 475-507. For evidence of such use of a legendary in the refectory at

Fécamp, see Grémont, ‘Lectiones ad prandium’, 7-15, 30-8. On the liturgical and other uses made of

legendaries in England, see Love, Three Eleventh-Century Lives, pp. xxix-xxxiii.

44

Priory, dating from the mid-eleventh century, now divided between the British Library

(MS Cotton Nero E. I, vol. 1, vol. 2, fols 1-180, 187-88) and Corpus Christi College,

Cambridge (MS 9).111

The volumes contain evidence of their use for public reading from

very shortly after they were produced.112

For example, on p. 356, in the account of the

7. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 9, p. 356 (detail).

life of St Trudo by Donatus the Deacon, the Old English words ‘oferhef’ (fig. 7, col. a,

line 19) and ‘foh’ (col. b, line 3) were supplied as tiny interlinear annotations, directing

the reader to stop and then to resume, omitting the passage in between. The same or

111

Peter Jackson and Michael Lapidge, ‘The Contents of the Cotton-Corpus Legendary’, in Holy Men and

Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (New York, 1996),

pp. 131-46; Love, Three Eleventh-Century Lives, pp. xviii-xxiii. 112

Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, p. 41, no. 29; Love. Three Eleventh-Century

Lives, p. xxxi.

45

similar annotations are found elsewhere in the volume in the lives of saints included in

Worcester’s liturgical kalendar, but here they were supplied in the account of a saint

whose feast was not observed at Worcester. One may, therefore, infer that this life was

read in the refectory on St Trudo’s feast day, 23rd

November, whereas the feast of St

Clement, recorded for that day in the liturgical kalendar at the start of the volume, was

observed liturgically in the cathedral. Medieval booklists provide further evidence of the

use of legendaries in the refectory: a five-volume legendary and two further volumes are

recorded under the heading ‘Passionalia mensalia’ in the thirteenth-century catalogue of

Glastonbury Abbey;113

another in five volumes is included in the late-fourteenth-century

Durham list of refectory books,114

and a three-volume copy in that from Reading

Abbey.115

For the commemoration of local saints not included in the legendary, a

community would have recourse to smaller volumes of saints’ lives.116

For example, in

an early twelfth-century copy of the lives of Canterbury saints composed for the abbey of

St Augustine’s by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian B. XX) ,

the text of his Historia maior S. Augustini is accompanied on fol. 30r by a note in a late-

thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century hand instructing that the text be read in the

refectory on the feast of St Augustine.117

Copies of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica were

113

English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, 194-5 (B39.222-8). 114

Catalogi veteres Dunelm, ed. Raine, 80. 115

English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, 452 (B74.4-6). 116

Four such volumes are included in the Durham refectory list: ibid, 80-81. 117

‘Hic incipiendum est in die sancti augustini ad prandium’: St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, ed.

Barker-Benfield, 3. 1749. An All saints’ day reading on St Augustine of Canterbury in one volume of the

abbey’s passional (London, British Library, MS Arundel 91, fol. 183v) was also assigned for mealtime

reading: ‘Iste leccio legitur ad mensam’: ibid., 3. 1744-5.

46

also sometimes used for this purpose.118

A twelfth-century copy from the Augustinian

abbey of Waltham was annotated to mark up for refectory reading on the feast of St

Augustine of Canterbury the narrative of the Augustinian mission (Book i. 23-2.3,

omitting the digression at 2.1);119

a similarly-worded note (but without specific reference

to the refectory) was also supplied to accompany this same passage in a twelfth-century

copy from the Augustinian priory of Plympton.120

******

Responsibility for the day-to-day choice of refectory reading, within the broad parameters

I have outlined, lay with the cantor-armarius, the person also responsible for oversight of

the liturgical readings as well as for the chants. He saw to the provision of the books

involved and to their correction. The number and range of volumes involved was

considerable: not just the bible, homiliary and legendary, but several other volumes of

saints’ lives and a significant number of patristic commentaries and other works that we

more usually perceive as ‘library books’. A cumulative list compiled just from the

incomplete evidence provided by English custumals and booklists includes Augustine’s

Enarrationes in Psalmos, Tractatus in Euuangelium Iohannis, In epistulam Iohannis ad

Parthos tractatus X and De Trinitate; Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah; Ambrose’s De

118

Teresa Webber, ‘Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica as a source of lections in pre- and post-Conquest

England’, in The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past, ed. David Woodman and Martin

Brett (forthcoming). 119

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 211, fol. 13v: ‘Hic incipit ad legendum in refectorio de s.

augustino anglorum apostolo’; fol. 23r: ‘va-’ (the corresponding ‘-cat’ is no longer visible at the end of the

chapter); fol. 27v: ‘usque huc legitur in refectorio de sancto augustino anglorum apostolo’. 120

London, British Library, MS Add. 14250, fol. 18r: ‘Ab hoc loco debet legi in festiuitate sancti augustini

anglorum apostoli usque ad capitulum quartum proximi libri quod sic incipit successit augustinus et cetera.’

It is possible that a number of narrative passages variously marked up for oral delivery in other copies of

the Historia ecclesiastica were likewise intended as refectory readings on the feast-days of the saints

concerned: see Webber, ‘Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica’.

47

fide and his commentary on Psalm 118; Gregory’s commentaries on Ezekiel and on Job;

Bede’s on Acts and on the Catholic Epistles; the histories of Josephus, Eusebius and

Cassiodorus; Didimus on the Holy Spirit and Hilary on the Trinity, as well as a number

of Carolingian commentaries.121

If we add to this list the patristic and later texts read in

the Chapter office and at Collation, it comes to represent a significant proportion of the

texts produced or acquired during that remarkable period of book production within

religious communities in England and on the Continent between the late eleventh and late

twelfth centuries. This was the period when it was becoming common for the cantor also

to be the monastic armarius or librarian.122

His oversight of the public reading outside

the choir as well as of the chant and readings within it may perhaps best explain why his

custodianship of the monastic books extended beyond those volumes we would describe

as liturgical to encompass the entire library.

The size and quality of many of these volumes not only had a practical purpose—

to enhance their legibility when read aloud—but also reflected the importance of such

public reading within monastic communities, providing a visible material counterpart to

the emphasis placed by the Rule and monastic custumals upon the suitability of the

weekly reader and upon correct pronunciation in the Rule.123

Some custumals

121

Peterborough Abbey, ed. Friis-Jensen, 46-9 (BP20); Customary of Norwich, ed. Tolhurst, pp. 198-9;

Observances in Use at Barnwell, ed. Clark, pp. 66-7; Catalogi vesteres Dunelm, ed. Raine, pp. 80-1 and

Mynors, Durham Cathedral Manuscripts, p. 11; English Benedictine Libraries, ed. Sharpe, 451-3 (B74)

and Coates, English Medieval Books, pp. 84-6. A comprehensive picture of the volumes used at a single

monastic house is provided by the list of refectory reading in the early-thirteenth-century Fécamp ordinal,

which records not only the texts to be read but the volumes in which they were to be found (a number of

which have survived): see Grémont, ‘Lectiones ad prandium’. 122

For the combination of the originally separate roles of armarius and cantor as the duties of a single

monastic official from the eleventh century onwards, see Margot Fassler, ‘The Office of the Cantor in Early

Medieval Western Monastic Rules and Customaries: a preliminary investigation’, Early Music History, 5

(1985), 29-51. See also Sharpe, ‘The Medieval Librarian’, 221-4. 123

RSB ch. 38: ‘nec fortuito casu qui arripuerit codicem legere ibi, sed lecturus tota hebdomada dominica

inéediatur... Fratres autem non per ordinem legant aut cantent, sed qui aedificant audientes.’ (‘The reader

should not be the one who just happens to pick up the book, but someone who will read for a whole week,

48

recommended that the abbot or prior who presided at mealtimes stop the reader if he

made a mistake, and make him repeat the sentence correctly.124

For those monks

sufficiently latinate and attentive to absorb the substance of the readings, the impact upon

their knowledge and reception of these texts, heard year after year, must have been

considerable.

A further, contemporary monastic perspective on the place and performance of

the readings of the refectory within monastic practice in the central middle ages is offered

by an anecdote from the anonymous life of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, written

at the Norman abbey of Bec during the mid-twelfth century. 125

The anecdote assumes the

audience’s appreciation of the importance of such reading and the care with which it was

to be delivered, and exploits this appreciation to exemplify the monastic virtues of

humility and obedience. It concerns the period shortly after Lanfranc’s arrival at the

Norman abbey of Bec when he was merely the grammar master. Despite the rapid fame

that he acquired as a teacher, the Life emphasises the importance to Lanfranc of monastic

humility. Expert latinist though he was, he still took pains to rehearse the readings with

the cantor whenever it was his turn to be the weekly reader in the refectory. One day as

he was reading, he pronounced a certain word, ‘docére’, correctly, with the stress upon

beginning on Sunday.... Brothers will read and sing, not according to rank, but according to their ability to

benefit their hearers.’) RB 1980, ed. Fry, pp. 236-9. 124

See, for example, the customs of William of Hirsau, ch. xcv: pr. PL 150, col. 1027: ‘Inchoans lectionem,

si submissa voce legerit, ab armario adveniente signum altius legendi accipit; si corrupte, prior ei, ut

corrigat, vel signo aliquo, vel ipsum verbum emendando innotescit.’ 125

Vita Lanfranci, ch. 2: pr. PL 150, col. 32: ‘Hic ergo Lanfrancus, qui pro Deo se abdicaverat sibi, omni

vilitate et extremitate contentus, omni obedientia se submittere curabat majori. Denique, ut fertur,

lectionem non volebat legere in ecclesia nisi prius eam cantor audisset. Quadam die dum ad mensam

legeret, dixit quiddam inter legendum sicut dicere debuit, quod non placuit praesidenti, et aliter dicere

jussit; velut si dixisset, docre, media producta, ut est; et iste eadem media correpta emendasset dócere,

quod non est. Non enim prior ille litteratus erat. At vir sapiens sciens magis obedientiam Christo deberi

quam Donato, dimisit quod bene pronuntiaverat, et dixit quod non recte dicere jubebatur. Nam producere

brevem, vel longam corripere syllabam, non capitale noverat crimen; verum jubenti ex parte Dei non

parere, culpam non levem esse sciebat.’

49

the second syllable. The prior, however, who (according to the narrative) was not

litteratus, stopped him (as custom permitted), and wrongly asserted that the correct

pronunciation was ‘dócere’. Lanfranc, mindful of the Rule’s teaching, did not demur but

repeated the word incorrectly with the stress on the first syllable, for he recognised that

obedience to Christ, in the form of his superior, was more important than obedience to

the grammatical rules of Donatus.