5 - The Earliest Books from the Library of Malmesbury Abbey

Summary

MALMESBURY ABBEY was one of that select group of English houses which could trace its history back to the golden age epitomized and chronicled by Bede. To Bede's older contemporary Aldhelm (d. c.709) belongs most of the credit for setting the recently founded community on its feet and for making it a byword throughout the British Isles for the pursuit of divine and secular learning.During his abbacy Malmesbury eclipsed the reputations of the Irish schools and of Hadrian's Canterbury. At only one other point in its long history did the abbey attain a comparable reputation for learning, when it housed William, whose career, intellectual interests and writings were consciously modelled upon the examples of Bede and Aldhelm.

To judge from the quotations in his own works, Aldhelm's library – in secular literature at least – was more extensive than Bede's. One assumes that Aldhelm brought books to Malmesbury for his teaching and that some of them remained at the abbey after his death. In 1931 M. R. James tried to show that one or two of Aldhelm's books were still available to William. Some of the books, too, which John Leland found at Malmesbury in the first half of the sixteenth century, must have been ancient, to judge from their titles. There can in fact be little doubt that, from the twelfth century on, Malmesbury's was one of the great monastic libraries of England. Can we learn anything of its prehistory? In other words, is there any possibility of reconstructing the abbey's pre-Conquest collection, or at least of compiling a list of early manuscripts which could at one time or another have been found at the house? This is a hazardous undertaking and at first sight the prospects of success look bleak: only five Malmesbury manuscripts earlier than the twelfth century find a place in Ker's Medieval Libraries of Great Britain; works quoted by Aldhelm need not have been known to him from books at Malmesbury; demonstrably ancient manuscripts used by William could have come, and often did come, from elsewhere, sometimes to be returned after copying; and Malmesbury books listed by Leland, however early they might be, could in principle have entered the library there at any time before the sixteenth century.