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Elsewhere it is explained that each window was in three parts, with a carrel from one stanchell of the window to another.

This use of windows suggested to me a new convenience for research in our modern “stack,” which is described in a later chapter as the “stack carrel.”[4]

The growth of libraries slowly followed the development of monastic orders. The systematic care and use of books began with the precepts of S. Benedict in the sixth century, followed by similar rules in other brotherhoods. At the same time secular libraries and library buildings were devastated by the barbarians, while the Arabs, who developed large libraries, appeared to have housed them in mosques, so that library building science slumbered through the Dark Ages.

In the sixth and seventh centuries learning followed the first steps of Christianity into the British Isles. The earliest English “library movement” began in the monasteries of Ireland and Great Britain.

From that era onward, libraries all over Christianized Europe grew with the prosperity of religious brotherhoods. Of progress toward building, however, there is little record until the Cistercians moved theirs from the cloisters to other rooms in their monasteries, although some use of cloisters elsewhere lingered until the beginning of the seventeenth century. These rooms were at first directly over the cloisters, where alcoves first appeared, on the window side only. Still later libraries were assigned to the upper stories of separate buildings, the first put to this use since the time of the Cæsars in Rome.