Most scribes were not writing down what ever came into their head. They were instead making copies of already completed manuscripts. They need an exemplar to copy from. If the scribe did not have a copy of the text they were wanting to reproduce, then they might try to borrow it for awhile from someone who did have a copy. Later, when universities were flourishing, the exemplar system become very complex. So as not to lose the original texts, universities would make a copy of it. This new copy is called the stationer’s exemplar. From that a set of unbound pecia, or parts, would be made and lent out to student’s to copy from. Even if a manuscript was an original piece, it would most likely have been written up on a wax tablet.

The time it took to copy out a text was dependent on a number of things. A shorter text would obviously take less time to copy than a longer text, but length isn’t the only factor. The amount of time a scribe had to work on copying also can vary the time needed. Graham and Clemens say for monastic scribes, “the daily round of services and other duties meant that…[they] were probably able to devote no more than six hours a day… a good rate of production…would probably have been between 150 and 200 lines of text a day” (22-23). Another important factor to consider is the number of scribes working on making the copy. Two or three scribes can finish a text much faster than one.