But to the general rule of scarcity of books some exceptions are known. When a book won a reputation, the cost of producing copies was not wholly restrictive of circulation. Copies of some works of the Fathers were produced in great numbers. The Bible, whole or in part, was copied with such industry that it became the commonest of manuscripts, as it now is the commonest of printed books. Peter Lombard’s _Sentences_ became a famous book: the standard of the schools; everywhere to be found side by side with the Bible, everywhere discussed and commented upon. A twelfth century author of quite different character had a good hold upon the people; the number of copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth must have been considerable, for the British Museum now has thirty-five copies and Bodley’s Library sixteen. “Possibly, no work before the age of printed books attained such immediate and astonishing popularity ... translations, adaptations, and continuations of it formed one of the staple exercises of a host of medieval scribes.”[570] A glance at the monastic and academic library catalogues of later date than mid-thirteenth century will prove more clearly than a shelf full of books how enormous was the influence of Aristotle. If such a collocation as the Bible and Shakspere sums up the present-day Englishman’s ideals of spiritual sustenance and literary power, a similar collocation of the Bible and Aristotle would sum up, with a greater approach to truth, the ideals of the medieval schoolman. Popularity fell to _Piers Plowman_. Apart from the large currency given to it by ballad singers, many manuscripts were in existence, for even now forty-five of them, more or less complete, remain. As M. Jusserand aptly remarks: “This figure is the more remarkable when we consider that, contrary to works written in Latin or in French, Langland’s book was not copied and preserved outside his own country.”[571] Again, but a few years after the writing of the _Canterbury Tales_, a copy of it was bequeathed, among other books, by a clerk named Richard Sotheworth of East Hendred, Berks (1417).[572] The impression is left upon one’s mind that this work had found its way quickly and in many copies into country places.