"To Rosamond" survives only as a copy, written in the front of a book of other texts. This origin makes differentiates it from other canonical poems. Its author didn’t prepare it for publication. He had no control over the scribe, who might have made mistakes or even intentional changes.
Many scholars see the invention of print at the end of the fifteenth century as one of the most important moments in recent history, akin to the industrial revolution or the invention of the internet. Before printing, every single version of a book had to be copied out by hand. To even get to this point was expensive: pages were usually made of parchment—dried and scraped animal skin. For higher quality books, these sheets were then carefully ruled (the medieval equivalent of a notebook), so that the writing would follow neat lines. Books were also sometimes decorated with elaborate “illuminations,” or ornamental letters and illustrations.
The cost of expensive materials and, just as expensive, labour, made books a luxury item. Even noble families rarely owned more than 20 books. Without print, access to information was much more restricted, and literacy was difficult to acquire and not necessarily particularly useful if you didn’t happen to be either wealthy or attached to a monastery or university with a collection of books.
However, manuscript culture wasn’t all bad. It also enabled different and more creative ways of engaging with books. For example, we have lots of accounts of people getting together to hear something read out loud. If books are rare, it makes a lot of sense to meet up, so that the one literate person in the community can share their knowledge and their stories with everyone else. People were also much more likely to modify the books they did own. This might seem surprising; after all, if books were so valuable, wouldn’t you keep them pristine? However, although some books seem to have been mostly decorative, a lot of book owners clearly wanted to make the most of their purchase. It was very common for people to add new material to blank spaces in books; the parchment was just too valuable to waste. "To Rosamond" survives because someone saw an empty page at the beginning of a manuscript and figured it would be a good place to record a poem they had enjoyed, perhaps in a manuscript borrowed from a friend or found in the collection of a monastery.
