The first concordance of the bible was was undertaken under the guidance of Hugo, or Hugues, de Saint-Cher (Hugo de Sancto Charo), afterwards a cardinal, assisted, it is said, by 500 fellow-Dominicans.
"It contained no quotations, and was purely an index to passages where a word was found. These were indicated by book and chapter (the division into chapters had recently been invented by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury) but not by verses, which were only introduced by Robert Estienne in 1545. In lieu of verses, Hugo divided the chapters into seven almost equal parts, indicated by the letters of the alphabet, a, b, c, etc. This beginning of concordances was very imperfect, as it gave merely a list of passages, and no idea of what the passages contained. It was of little service to preachers, therefore; accordingly, in order to make it valuable for them, three English Dominicans added (1250-1252) the complete quotations of the passages indicated. This completeness of quotation is not aimed at in the present concordances, for lack of space; it is likely, therefore, that the passages indicated were far fewer than those found in a complete concordance of today. The work was somewhat abridged, by retaining only the essential words of a quotation, in the concordance of Conrad of Halberstadt, a Dominican (1310), which obtained great success on account of its more convenient form. The first concordance to be printed, it appeared in 1470 at Strasburg, and reached a second edition in 1475" (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04195a.htm, accessed 12-24-2011).
"The first concordance (Saint Jacques I), which was compiled at Saint Jacques in Paris under the direction of Hugh of Saint Cher [Hugo de Sancto Caro], was probably already in existence by 1239. This pioneering work originated the reference system used thereafter: each appearance of a word was noted according to book of the Bible, chapter of the book (following the chapter divisions attributed to Stephen Langton), and relative location with the chapter, indicated by means of one of the first seven letters of the alphabet A--G. The production of this major work over a period time required an impressive organization of man-power. There survive, in the fifteenth-century bindings of manuscripts from Saint Jacques, four quires of what must be the penultimate draft of this concordance, revealing something of their methods: each quire was written by a different copyist responsible only for a fixed portion of the alphabet, as one can see from the blank space each left when he had finished his assigned task. Corrections were then noted, so that it would be ready for the final copy. A drawback of Saint Jacques I is the fact that its words are not cited in context. This version survives in eigthteen manuscripts, thirteen of which date from the thirteenth century" (Rouse & Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts [1991], 224-25.)
"The development of the concordance should be examined in the context of the methods used to 'distinguish' words found in the text of the Bible. The collections of biblical distinctiones that abound in western Europe from the end of the twelfth century are the earliest of alphabetical tools save the dictionaries. Distinction collections provide one with the various figurative and symbolic means of a noun that is found in Scripture, illustrating each meaning with a scriptural passage" (Rouse & Rouse, op. cit., 222-23).
