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48 Chapter 1
ficers in charge of the custodies where the books had been first issued. The
convent, custody or province which assigned the books was to have such
books returned; other volumes, i.e. gifts, or the personal books of a friar
were to go to the convent at which the friar had first been received. If it was
impossible to discover who had originally assigned the books, they were to
be sent to the province from which the friar first came. Any friar who had
lent a book to another should ensure that it was returned to the custodian
or warden at the death of the borrower. (Humphreys, 52)
It is hard to imagine that this system worked like clockwork.
Though books belonged to Franciscan custodies, Humphreys
points out (57) that there is no evidence that every custody had a
library. If books lacked a physical home, it must have been dicult
to keep track of them. Again, we know that books could be loaned
to a Franciscan for life (ibid. 62). Friars could move around Europe
a good deal in the course of their life, and books must have got lost
in one way or another.
The implications should not be understated. No doubt some of
these books were eventually incorporated into mendicant libraries,
but often they would leave the order: books of deceased friars could
be sold (Humphreys, 28, 53). Some were probably purchased by
the older orders, which built up large collections of sermons in
their libraries. This may explain why so many mendicant sermon
collections survive in monastic libraries. There they would have a
stable existence, unless recycled at the end of the Middle Ages for
parchment. Books that went into private hands surely had much
less chance of survival. It is a law that books outside libraries tend
eventually to disappear. Of course, they were physically sturdy, so
their nomadic existence could have continued for some time. Yet
the very sturdiness of their parchment would in the end make them
desirable to commercial bookbinders. One suspects that they were
even more vulnerable to recycling than books in monastic libraries,
because unwanted books are more of a nuisance to an individual
and his heirs than to a large institution with continuity and a lot of
space.
Quaterni
Even more vulnerable than books would have been the quaterni or
unbound quires used by the friars. We know that friars used them.
Roger Bacon says that the secular clergy with pastoral responsibili-