Whether or not the first continuator of the De dedicatione had studied at the university is impossible to say but he was certainly a good scholar. An idea of the intellectual level achieved by some of the monks of St Edmunds in this period could to some extent be measured if we knew more about their acquisition of books. Unfortunately, sound evidence about book acquisition is scarce. The problem is to be certain when most of the extant thirteenth-century books were added to the monks’ collection. The same is true of some of those earlier ones which have not been identified in the late twelfth-, early thirteenth-century book-list. No other comprehensive book-list survives until c. 1370 when Henry of Kirkstead compiled one. Nor are the extant volumes themselves usually helpful in discovering the date of acquisition. However, there are two manuscripts of exceptional interest which deserve particular mention here. One was certainly acquired by the convent during this period and the other probably was.

The first is Pembroke College, Cambridge, MS 7. It is an early thirteenth-century volume containing reports (reportationes) made by students attending a set of lectures (glosses) by Paris masters on the Gloss (a work of biblical exegesis which evolved in the late eleventh- and twelfth-centuries and became a standard text-book in the Paris schools). The glosses are on five books of the Old Testament and one of the New Testament – the gospel of St Mark. A note on the front flyleaf in the hand of Robert Grosseteste testifies that he gave the volume as a pledge for the loan of a copy of St Basil's Hexaëmeron (a treatise on the Six Days of Creation). The inscription reads: ‘Memoriale Magistri Roberti Grossetest, pro exameron basilii’. Although St Edmunds acquired the volume as a pledge, not as a gift, it remained in the monk's library until the dissolution of the abbey in 1539. The late medieval library class-mark, B. 231., is inscribed on the flyleaf alongside Grosseteste's note. Nor is there any evidence that the copy of the Hexaëmeron was ever returned to St Edmunds. The most likely date for the transaction with Grosseteste would seem to be sometime in the period c. 1230–1235, before Grosseteste became bishop of Lincoln (1235–53).