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56 Chapter 1
16497 (written on cheap parchment) cost 12 sol. of Paris all told,
so the parchment would have cost between 2 and 3 sol., between a
quarter and a third of a florin, quite a modest sum. Alms given
by Louis IX in 1256 give a relative idea of the cost of the parchment
for this book. Thus pittances of bread and wine for fourteen days
came to £38. 17s. 8d. in Paris currency, pittances from the kitchen
for eighteen days came to £33. 2s. 6d., and alms for 200 poor on
14 August came to £20, a little short of the cost of the parchment
for BN Lat. 16497 for each poor person. On the assumption that
the parchment was the main monetary cost because the labour cost
only the future user’s time, the book—of this sort and in these
circumstances—becomes a relatively inexpensive article.
Another study notes a fifteenth-century English manuscript
composed of parchment quires (sixteen pages per quire) which cost
a penny-halfpenny each. To put this in perspective by comparison
with a peasant inventory from 1457: two buckets are valued at
a shilling, which makes each worth four quires; a sheet cost 4d.,
more than two quires; two worn canvasses cost 4d., each more than
a quire; a chair cost 3d., two quires. Friars received substantial
donations, and money on this scale would have been readily available.
In the light of these figures, some of the ideas current among
scholars about the minimum cost of a basic parchment book are
exaggerated by orders of magnitude.
As just noted, manuscripts with maverick modifications of the
text can be written as well as if they were produced by professional
scribes. Whoever improvised upon the text did so in a physical form
that others could use and copy. These maverick texts with nonconformist
variants are not confined to personal preaching notebooks
which could only be of use to the man who wrote them.
Here it is useful to invent a term: cul-de-sac books. A cul-de-sac
Evidence’, in P. R•uck, Pergament: Geschichte, Struktur, Restaurierung, Herstellung
(Historische Hilfswissenschaften, 2; Sigmaringen, 1991), 145–57 at 147, 151.
Bataillon, ‘Les conditions de travail’, 423 n. 24 (citing M. Mabille, ‘Les
manuscrits de Jean d’Essomes conserv‹es ›a la Biblioth›eque Nationale de Paris’,
Biblioth›eque de l’ ‹Ecole des Chartes, 130 (1972), 231–4).
Cf. P. Spu·ord, with the assistance of W. Wilkinson and S. Tolley, Handbook of
Medieval Exchange (Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, 13; London,
1986), 168.
E. M. Hallam, Capetian France 987–1328 (London etc., 1980), 233, table 5.1.
Cf. Gullick, ‘From Parchmenter to Scribe’, 151.
C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England
c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), 170.