By the Rev. Canon Jackson, F.8.A. 



53 



straggling acres as belonged to them, they cared not to preserve any 

 other. The covers of books having curious bosses and clasps might 

 be kept, the rest was thrown away : many an ancient manuscript 

 Bible cut in pieces to cover filthy pamphlets ." It is said that fine 

 illuminated Service books were sold as waste at the monastery gates 

 at Malmesbury. John Bale, a writer, who was no lover either of the 

 Pope or the monks, nevertheless bewails this destruction with shame. 

 He says that hundreds of them were sold to the grocers and soap- 

 sellers — others sent over sea. " He knew a merchant-man that 

 bought the contents of two noble libraries for forty shillings a-piece, 

 a shame it was to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied instead of 

 gray paper, by the space of more than these ten years, and yet he 

 hath store enough for many years to come." "Never/'' says he, and he 

 " uttered it with heaviness/'' "did either the Britons under the Romans 

 and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Nor- 

 mans ever have such damage of their learned monuments as we 

 have seen in our time. Our posterity may well curse this wicked 

 act of outrage, this unreasonable spoil of England's most noble 

 antiquities." 1 



John Aubrey also, our old Wiltshire friend, is almost as vehement 

 and copious upon this subject as Thomas Fuller : and his language 

 as peculiar and quaint. 



"In 1633," he says "I entered into my grammar at the Latin 

 school at Yatton Keynel, in the church, where the curate, Mr. Hart, 

 taught the eldest boys Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, &c. The fashion then was 

 to save the forules (i.e. the backs) of their books, with a false cover of 

 old parchment manuscript. I was too young to understand : but 

 I was pleased with the writing and the coloured initial letters. I 

 remember the Rector there, Mr. "William Stump, great grandson of 

 the clothier of Malmesbury," (the exceeding rich man who bought 

 the abbey) "had several MSS. of the abbey. He was a proper 

 man, and a good fellow ; and when he brewed a barrell of special ale, 

 his use was to stop the bung-hole, under the clay, with a sheet of 

 manuscript ; he sayd nothing did it so well, which me thought did 



1 Fuller, Church History, iii., 247. 



