Earlier Collections
In the eighth century, the Minster had a school and book collection which were unrivalled in Western Latin Christendom. The collection is lost. It was probably destroyed by the Vikings in the ninth century or the Normans in the eleventh. Scholars have been unable to identify any surviving books. The Minster appears not to have had a book collection on a similar scale again until Neuton's bequest, although there are extant a small number of volumes which belonged to the cathedral between the Norman Conquest and the early fifteenth century.
The first initial (U, decorated with knotwork, foliage, and two bird-beaks) in the second volume of a mid twelfth-century Bible. This volume was at the Minster by the fourteenth century. (Reference: York Minster, MS XVI.Q.3, fol. 1r.) Photograph: © The Chapter of York.