All these influences, combined with others which it might be wearisome to dwell upon, combined to make the manuscripts of the pre-commercial period works of the most unvarying perfection of technique, unspeakably rich in the varied wealth of fancy shown in their decorative schemes, as well as in the minute detail of each part. The illuminated ornament in one place is concentrated into a gem-like miniature within the narrow limit of a small initial letter. At another place it spreads out into the splendour of a full-page picture, which swallows up most of the text, and covers the whole page with one mass of burnished gold and brilliant colour. Or again, springing from its roots in an illuminated capital, it grows over the margin and frames the text with a mass of richly designed and exquisitely graceful foliage.
Every possible scheme of decoration is to be found in these manuscripts; but in all cases the illuminator is careful to make his painted ornament grow out of and form, as it were, an integral part of the written text, which thus becomes not merely a book ornamented with pictures, but is a close combination of writing and illumination, forming one harmonious whole in a united scheme of decorative beauty[212].
_The Scriptoria of Monasteries._ As I have previously mentioned, it was more especially the Benedictine monasteries[213] that were the centres for the production of mediaeval manuscripts[214]. I will therefore describe the usual arrangements of the _Scriptorium_ in a Benedictine House.
In early times, in the eighth and ninth centuries for example, the Scriptorium and library appear usually to have been a separate room, near or over the Sacristy, and adjoining the Choir of the church[215].
During most of the mediaeval period, however, and in England down to the suppression of the Abbeys by Henry VIII., the system was to devote one whole walk or alley of the cloister, that nearest to the church, to the double purpose of a Scriptorium and library. This was naturally the warmest and dryest portion of the cloister, at least in most cases when the usual arrangement was followed of placing the cloister on the south side of the nave of the Abbey church[216].
This north walk (as it commonly was) of the cloister faced south and so received plenty of sun; at each end of it a screen was placed to shut it off from the rest of the cloister, which formed a sort of common living-room for the monks[217]. Along one side of this alley of the cloister were fixed, against the wall of the church, oak cupboards (_armaria_), with strong locks and hinges, to receive the manuscripts which formed the library of the monastery[218]. At Westminster and in other Benedictine monasteries the marks showing where these _armaria_ were fixed are visible on the cloister wall or rather along the wall of the church, which forms one side of this walk of the cloister.