When it comes to the practical use of books, the same variety in detail is in evidence. The conditions of use were, to begin with, various. Most libraries had both the chained-book reference collection and a collection for lending. The chained books were like the strict reference collections to-day, but their chaining produced this interesting variation from modern custom, that, when many books were to be used at once, the reader had to go to the books instead of having the books brought to him. Some few libraries were purely for reference, — borrowing or lending, inside or outside the house, being forbidden. Sometimes books were loaned outside of the library-room, but not out of the building. Peterhouse College at Cambridge provided that books not chained might be loaned within the college, but “no books so selected and distributed shall pass the night out of college.” In general, however, books were lent out, and a council at Paris in 1212 forbids the forbidding of loans, “seeing that such a loan is one of the chief works of mercy.”

Some of the details of lending are picturesque enough. In calling for books one of the orders, which prescribes silence on its members, had a code of signs to be used in asking the librarian for books. The sign for the missal was the sign of the cross; for a book of offices, kissing the fingers; and for a secular book the direction was to scratch one's ear like a dog, because unbelievers are like dogs. The Benedictine rule gives minute directions for the annual distribution: first the librarian has the books brought out and laid on a carpet, then the brethren gather, each carrying in his hand the book borrowed the year before; then the librarian calls the roll, each returning the books as his name is called. If a borrower is conscious of not having read the book through, he must fall on his face, confess his faults, and pray for forgiveness. (In some communities the abbot examined the borrower to make sure, and if the monk failed to pass, e had to take the same book out again.) The librarian then hands to each another book and charges it.

When books were loaned out in the building it was the universal custom to require a pledge of deposit, either of books of an equal value or of money. Another method was to require a legal indenture with witnesses, binding the borrower, his heirs, and his executors wither for all his estate, both real and personal, as in one Durham instance, of for a specific valuation — e.g., “100 solidos.” One of the colleges provided that every book given out “shall have a high value set upon it when it is borrowed, in order that he that has it may be more fearful lest he lose it.” That some precaution was necessary is shown by the experience of Durham, which found it necessary to proceed at law against a bishop who borrowed books and failed to return them. That the privilege of borrowing was much availed of is shown by the many duplicates that some of them had to have of popular books like Voragine's Golden Legend, and the further fact that many of these were fairly well read to pieces, like any popular modern novel in a public library.

Books were loaned sometimes for only two weeks, sometimes for as long as two years. A common period among the monks was one year, but often the loan seems to have been for no stated time, save return on or before the day of the annual, or semiannual, auditing of books. At this time, if a borrower failed to return, he was subject to forfeiture of privilege of bond.

Many and, if we may believe De Bury, much needed were the injunctions to carefulness on the part of borrowers or readers. The must not lend the books to anyone else, must not leave them open when they go to their meals or to church, must take utmost pains “that they be not soiled by smoke, or dust, or dirt of any kind; for it is our wish that books, as being the perpetual food of our souls, should be most jealously guarded, and most carefully produced.” A Frankfort rule required that “students should be polite and modest in the library, avoid outcries and noise, and talk in Latin.”

On the whole, the monks performed well the library task of serving their own