te in their
time. But the English court had now become the centre of a distinctly
secular literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of
Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the
royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer is the earliest on
English government.

[Sidenote: Gerald of Wales]

Still more distinctly secular than these, though the work of a priest who
claimed to be a bishop, are the writings of Gerald de Barri. Gerald is
the father of our popular literature as he is the originator of the
political and ecclesiastical pamphlet. Welsh blood (as his usual name of
Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his veins, and
something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike through his writings and
his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the
wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald
became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his
hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of
the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw
pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be
understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style:
"new times require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the
old and dry method of some authors and aimed at adopting the fashion of
speech which is actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the conquest of
Ireland and his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of two
journeys undertaken in those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin,
illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observation, his audacity, and
his good sense. They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we
find in the correspondence of a modern journal. There is the same modern
tone in his political pamphlets; his profusion of jests, his fund of
anecdote, the aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness and
critical acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by a
fearlessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous assailant even to
such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives in which Gerald poured
out his resentment against the Angevins are the cause of half the scandal
about Henry and his sons which has found its way into history. His life
was wasted in an ineffectual attempt to secure the see of St. David's,
but his pungent pen played its part in r