ps he placed
himself with his back against a pillar and fronted his foes. All the
bravery and violence of his old knightly life seemed to revive in Thomas
as he tossed back the threats and demands of his assailants. "You are our
prisoner," shouted Fitzurse, and the four knights seized him to drag him
from the church. "Do not touch me, Reginald," cried the Primate, "pander
that you are, you owe me fealty"; and availing himself of his personal
strength he shook him roughly off. "Strike, strike," retorted Fitzurse,
and blow after blow struck Thomas to the ground. A retainer of Ranulf de
Broc with the point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains on the
ground. "Let us be off," he cried triumphantly, "this traitor will never
rise again."

[Sidenote: The Church and Literature]

The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout
Christendom; miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb; he was
canonized, and became the most popular of English saints. The stately
"martyrdom" which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed to embody the
triumph which his blood had won. But the contest had in fact revealed a
new current of educated opinion which was to be more fatal to the Church
than the reforms of the king. Throughout it Henry had been aided by a
silent revolution which now began to part the purely literary class from
the purely clerical. During the earlier ages of our history we have seen
literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself
against the ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical
privileges. Almost all our writers from Baeda to the days of the Angevins
are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which followed the Conquest
was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee
had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman
abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and
writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature,
patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints
compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this
time a part of every religious house of any importance. But the
literature which found this religious shelter was not so much
ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philosophical and devotional impulse
given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics. The
literary revival which followed the Conquest took ma