nd manners during the reign of Henry III.--a record, too, drawn
up by a contemporary writer of rare genius and literary skill--was
defaced by blunders, audacious tampering with the text and gross
inaccuracies, to such an extent that no conscientious student could
allow himself to quote the printed work without first referring to one
of the very MSS. which the Archbishop professed to have used.

Nevertheless, the task of bringing out a critical edition of the
'Chronica Majora' did not appear less formidable as fresh sources of
information cropped up; and Dr. Luard shrank from the immense labour
that such an edition involved, it was because he had formed a correct
notion of its magnitude. In 1861 he brought out in the same series the
'Letters of Robert Grosseteste,' the heroic and magnanimous Bishop of
Lincoln; and while working at this volume, the England of the 13th
century became more and more alive and present to the mind of the
student.

But distinctly and grandly as one noble character after another revealed
itself, there was a strange mist that required to be dispelled before
even the importance of great events could be rightly estimated. The
inner life of the monasteries, great and small, must be enquired into,
so far as it was possible to get any information on so obscure a
subject; and, above all, the paramount influence which so magnificent an
institution as the Abbey of St. Alban's exercised upon the intellectual
life of the country must be studied with patient impartiality. Before a
scholar with so lofty an ideal of an editor's duty could venture upon
his _magnum opus_, there was indeed an enormous mass of preliminary work
to get through. The horizon seemed to widen everywhere as the years of
historical discovery went on. It was left to Mr. Riley to attack that
wonderful collection of documents to which he gave the title of
'Chronica Monasterii Sancti Albani'--a series occupying twelve thick
volumes, and which furnish us not only with a priceless _apparatus_, by
the help of which a hundred problems perplexing the historian are
furnished with a clue towards their solution--but which afford such an
insight into the life of the greatest monastery in England during its
best times as nobody expected could ever be forthcoming. While Mr. Riley
was occupied with the _Chronicles_ of St. Alban's and the lives of its
Abbots, Dr. Luard was engaged in collecting all the _Annals_ of the
lesser monasteries which he could l