The penultimate comment reminds me of something from Robinson Jeffers

“We love life as the sailor loves the sea,
When the helm is for home.”

He spent time in the British Isles and had some interest in the middle ages. I wonder if he encountered this trope either here or in another form.

Making manuscripts had to be hard, cold work. I was in a couple of ruined abbeys in northern England this summer, and I remember thinking at the time that the scribes might have been dry but they weren’t warm in the winter. Physical work would have kept them warmer than sitting all day long in the damp and chill–as several of these notations indicate.

[…] https://www.neveryetmelted.com/2014/12/17/medieval-scribal-marginalia/ […]