A few exceptions there were, as we have said. Not till the fifteenth century do we find that a few books were commonly in the possession of well-to-do and cultivated people; suggesting an advance in culture upon the previous age. But before 1400 several book collectors were sharp aberrations from the general rule. Richard de Gravesend, Bishop of London, owned nearly a hundred books, almost all theological, and each worth on an average more than a sovereign a volume, or in all about £1740 of our money. A certain Abbot Thomas of St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, gave to his house over one hundred volumes.[446] To the same monastery a certain John of London, probably a pupil of Friar Bacon, left a specialist’s library of about eighty books, no fewer than forty-six being on mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.[447] Simon Langham, too, bequeathed to Westminister Abbey ninety-one works, some very costly.[448] John de Newton, treasurer of York, left a good library, part of which he bequeathed to York Minster and part to Peterhouse (1418). A canon of York, Thomas Greenwood, died worth more than thirty pounds in books alone (1421). And Henry Bowet, Archbishop of York, left a collection of thirty-three volumes, nearly all of great price,--copies _de luxe_, finely illuminated and embellished, worth on an average a pound a volume (1423).
But Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, is at once the bibliomaniac’s ideal and enigma (1287-1345). All accounts agree in saying he collected a large number of books.
What became of them we do not know. In the _Philobiblon_, of which he is the reputed author, he expressed his intention of founding a hall at Oxford, and of leaving his books to it. Durham College, however, was not completed until thirty-six years after his death. Among the Durham College documents is a catalogue of the books it owned at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and only the books sent to Oxford in 1315, and as many more are mentioned, so that his large library did not go to the college, but was probably dispersed.[449] De Bury, like Cobham, was a heavy debtor, and as he lay dying his servants stole all his moveable goods and left him naked on his bed save for an undershirt which a lackey had thrown over him.[450] His executors, as we know, were glad to resell to St. Albans Abbey the books he had bought from the monks there.