The troublesome taxonomy of the secular college asserts itself, as naturally it would, in any discussion of the nature of the book collections held by these widely disparate institutions. A small college of three chantry priests, one of them serving as prior, would hardly have been supplied with, or perhaps had call to use, a collection containing more than service books, perhaps a sermon collection, one of the common manuals of pastoral instruction, and sometimes a book of canon law. Chantry colleges that were raised on a more ambitious scale by gentry, such as the Cobham family, had rather more in the way of books; aristocratic and episcopal foundations (such as Pleshey and Fotheringhay, or Rotherham and Ottery St Mary) are known to have possessed good collections; while it was the colleges of Eton and Winchester, founded as sister institutions to university colleges, that were apparently best served of all. But although there could be wide disparities in the wealth or size of these houses, and differences in their constitutional arrangements or founding purpose, what might be called the outlook of each institution was broadly very similar, and belonged to the intellectual formation of the secular clergy who staffed them. The academic colleges of the universities therefore bear strongly on this picture, and, although we shall be concerned in what follows with the secular colleges outside the universities, it will be necessary to bear in mind the pattern of book provision in the institutions in which many churchmen had their formation.

Book provision in the secular college had more in common with the arrangements of the friars than with the model of library development provided by the monasteries. In the monastic setting, books represented the patrimony of institutional life, in which a brother might copy or use a book but not own it. Ownership was vested in the undying community, which therefore ensured a stable setting, barring mishaps of fire or theft or neglect, for the continual accumulation of a library collection.