he names of places and persons, and some
Polish words scattered through the Latin documents of the time,
written without orthographic rules, and therefore often hardly
intelligible. There exists an ancient Polish war-song, the author of
which is said to have been St. Adalbert, a Bohemian by birth, who was
bishop of Prague at the end of the tenth century;[11] but even
according to Rakowiecki, a philologist who is more disposed than any
other to find traces of an _early_ cultivation of the Slavic nations,
and especially of the Poles, this song, or rather hymn, is, in its
present form, not older than the fourteenth century. All that is
extant from this period is written in Latin. Besides some unimportant
documents and an anonymous biography of Adalbert, there remain several
historical works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Martin Gallus, a Frenchman, who lived in Poland between 1110 and 1135,
is considered as the oldest Polish historian. Other chronicles of
Poland were written by the bishops of Cracow, Matthew Cholewa, and
Vincent, son of Kadlubec, who died in 1223; by Bogufal, bishop of
Posen, some twenty years later; and by Godzislav Baszko, about thirty
years later still. Strzembski wrote towards the middle of the
thirteenth century a history of the popes and Roman emperors. In 1008
duke Boleslav, the son of Miecislav, invited Benedictine monks to
Poland, who founded convents at Sieciechov and Lysagora, with schools
attached to them. This example was followed at a later period by other
orders: and in Poland, longer than in any other country, education was
entirely in the hands of the ecclesiastics. For several hundred years
the natives were excluded from all clerical dignities and privileges,
and the numerous monasteries were filled only with foreign monks. Even
as late as the fifteenth century, foreigners had decidedly the
preference. In the year 1237 Pelka, archbishop of Gnesen, directed the
institution of schools by the priests; but added the recommendation
to the bishops, that they should employ as teachers only Germans who
understood Polish. In A.D. 1285 at the synod of Leczyc, they went a
step further in excluding all foreigners, who were ignorant of the
Polish language, from the places of ecclesiastical teachers and
instructors. But more than eighty years later, it was found necessary
at the synod of Kalish in 1357 to repeat the same decree; and even a
century after this time, in A.D. 1460, John Ostrorog