Monastic Learning and Libraries in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire

Abstract

In July 1565 Edmund Skeltpn, clerk, left to the curate of Egton to remain in the parish for ever a book called Postella Cassiodorus, a Catholicon, and a Latin Bible, works distincdy at odds with the Protestant ethos which the new generation of bishops was striving to introduce into the Elizabethan Church. This bequest in itself singles Skelton out from the usual run of priests serving in Yorkshire villages at this rime. In fact, until his prior surrendered the house on 31 August 1 1539 he had been a monk of Grosmont Priory, and then, at the Dissolution, at the age of thirty-six, with a pension of £36s. 8d, he had apparendy settled in the adjoining parish of Egton. In his will he also gave a gown, tippet, and hat to Nicholas Morley, almost certainly the former prior of Whitby Abbey, and 20d. and certain other unspecified books to a former fellow canon, Robert Holland. Both the books destined for Egton church and those intended for Robert Holland may once have formed part of Grosmont monastic library. Although the evidence can only be reassembled with difficulty, sufficient records have survived to suggest that a significant number of erstwhile monks and friars were similarly redistributing medieval books around Yorkshire in the generation after the Henrician Reformation. An examination of the religious known to have attended the two English universities in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, a survey of monastic schools and, in particular, an assessment of monastic libraries and books can together provide at least an impression of the state of learning within Yorkshire monasteries and friaries, and of the contribution they may still have been making to northern intellectual life at the close of the Middle Ages.