This supposition calls to mind another argument sometimes used to prove how easy it was to make a small collection of books. Chaucer’s poems display his acquaintance, more or less thoroughly, with many authors. Surely, it is urged, his library was a good one for the time: then how was it possible for a man of his means to own such? He was not wealthy. As a courtier and a public officer the calls upon his purse must have been heavy: little indeed could be left for books. The explanation is probably simple. Books were freely lent, more freely than nowadays; and Chaucer would be able to eke out his library in this way. Another point is important. Professor Lounsbury, who has spent years in an exhaustive study of Chaucer, points out a curious circumstance. “It must be confessed,” he says--a shade of disparagement lurks in the phrase--“it must be confessed that Chaucer’s quotations from writers exhibit a familiarity with prologues and first books and early chapters which contrasts ominously with the comparative infrequency with which he makes citations from the middle and latter parts of most of the works he mentions.”[567] Surely the implication is unjust. Stationers used to let out on hire parts of books or quires. Manuscript volumes were also often made up of parts of works by several authors. Books being scarce, it was preferable to make some volumes select miscellanies, little libraries in themselves. Hear Chaucer himself--
“And eek ther was som-tyme a clerk at Rome, A cardinal, that highte Seinte Jerome, That made a book agayn Jovinian; In whiche book eek ther was Tertulan, Crisippus, Trotula, and Helowys, That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys; And eek the Parables of Salomon, Ovydes Art, and bokes many on, And alle thise were bounden in o volume.”[568]
In composite volumes often only the earlier parts of authors’ works were included. If Chaucer owned a few books of this kind, his familiarity with parts of authors--and oftenest with the earlier parts--is accounted for satisfactorily; so also is the range and variety of his reading. Examine the Christ Church Canterbury catalogue in Henry Eastry’s time, and note what a remarkable variety of subjects is comprised in what we nowadays consider rather a paltry number of books. There is another point worth bearing in mind. Speaking of Bishop Shirwood’s books, a writer in the _English Historical Review_ says: “Many of the books bear his mark, _Nota_, scattered over the margins, or a hand with a long pointing finger. These notes occur usually at the beginnings. In the days when chapters and sections were unknown and division into books rare, when headlines were not and pages sometimes had no signatures even, not to speak of numbers, a reader had to go solidly through a book, and could not lightly turn up a passage he wished for, by the aid of a reference. But except in Cicero and in Plutarch--which is read almost from beginning to end--the marks do not often go far. Shirwood was doubtless too busy to find much time for reading, and before he had made much way with a book a new purchase had come to arouse his interest.”[569]