"Archives at Westminster Abbey" Scene

This is when Quatermass and his colleague are investigating the paranormal activity at Hob's Lane, and they exhaust the local newspaper archives in their research and then head off to even earlier records, written as illuminated medieval manuscripts.

My question is: Why was the manuscript the scholar was translating for them SO FRICKIN' LARGE? What was it, a "large print" manuscript for the partially-sighted? You can't tell me that such old manuscripts were always that large!