When Adam returned to Oxford from Norwich he took his collection of books with him. It is quite clear from the entry in the Communar Rolls for 1364 that the expense of carrying this library was far in excess of that more usually expected for the monk students. Some earlier examples are shown below for comparison. The handful of shillings spent on carrying the books of students back to Oxford was the run of the mill, yet the cost of moving Adam's collection back to Oxford was 113 shillings and 4 pence, and that was before he incepted as a doctor! We should remember that Adam lived a full century before the arrival of the printing press in Europe and the only way a scholar could acquire a new book was through the laborious task of copying by hand. Illuminated books may have been reproduced in the scriptorium of every monastery in the land, but completion of these illuminated manuscripts took a lot of time, up to a year for a substantial tome. To amass a large collection of books was therefore a labour of love that only the most enthusiastic and talented scholars would take time over.