theological content is derivative; Orm closely follows Bede's exegesis of Luke, the Enarrationes in Matthoei, and the Glossa Ordinaria of the Bible. Thus, he reads each verse primarily allegorically rather than literally. Rather than identify individual sources, Orm refers frequently to "" and to the "holy book". Bennett has speculated that the Acts of the Apostles, Glossa Ordinaria, and Bede were bound together in a large Vulgate Bible in the abbey so that Orm truly was getting all of his material from a source that was, to him, a single book. Although the sermons have been deemed "of little literary or theological value" and though Orm has been said to possess "only one rhetorical device", that of repetition, the Ormulum never was intended as a book in the modern sense, but rather as a companion to the liturgy. Priests would read, and congregations hear, only a day's entry at a time. The tedium that many experience when attempting to read the Ormulum today would not exist for persons hearing only a single homily each day. Furthermore, although Orm's poetry is, perhaps, subliterary, the homilies were meant for easy recitation or chanting, not for aesthetic appreciation; everything from the overly strict metre to the orthography might function only to aid oratory. Although earlier metrical homilies, such as those of Ælfric and Wulfstan, were based on the rules of Old English poetry, they took sufficient liberties with metre to be readable as prose. Orm does not follow their example. Rather, he adopts a "jog-trot fifteener" for his rhythm, based on the Latin iambic , and writes continuously, neither dividing his work into stanzas nor rhyming his lines, again following Latin poetry. Orm was humble about his oeuvre: he admits in the preface that he frequently has padded the lines to fill out the metre, "to help those who read it", and urges his brother Walter to edit the poetry to make it more meet. A brief sample may help to illustrate the style of the work. This passage explains the background to the Nativity: Orthography Rather than conspicuous literary merit, the chief scholarly value of the Ormulum derives from Orm's idiosyncratic orthographical system. He states that since he dislikes the way that people are mispronouncing English, he will spell words exactly as they are pronounced, and describes a system whereby vowel length and value are indicated unambiguously. Orm's chief innovation was to