The evidence for the resources available to the Durham monks for the study of Scripture is fuller than for any other medieval monastery in Britain. More books belonging to the community survive than for any other house and there are important inventories of its holdings from the twelfth and the late fourteenth centuries, together with records of substantial gifts, notably those by Bishop William of St Calais (d. 1096) and Bishop Hugh of Le Puiset (d. 1195). The picture that emerges over the span of more than four and half centuries during which the monks formed the cathedral chapter in Durham (1083–1539) is not perhaps startling, and one of its chief values is probably that it is so very full. Nonetheless it is impressive for the way in which the community found the resources to keep abreast of developments in scriptural studies over a very long period, enabling its members to acquire an understanding of the Bible that would have entitled them to hold their heads high among their contemporaries in every generation. It is also very clear that a particularly high priority was attached to obtaining aids to the study of the Psalms, no doubt because they occupied a central place in the liturgy to which the monks devoted so much of their time; as the biblical texts that were the most familiar to junior monks they were an obvious starting point for engaging in scriptural studies, but it may also be that a deeper understanding of these texts was seen as spiritually desirable. The way in which the last generations of monks acquired early printed books for their own needs, and their habit of annotating them, sheds important light on the place that they accorded to Scripture in their studies, a place that the propaganda purveyed by the reformers of the sixteenth century might all too easily obscure.

The Durham monks, like the great majority of medieval English Benedictine communities, were not noted for making major original contributions to the study of Scripture; unlike the mendicants and university men their literary energies were largely directed to the fields of historiography and hagiography, fields in which they could give full play to expressing their corporate esprit de corps.