ot take place for centuries. But in England
judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific
study of English law. Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and
great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the
Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the _Dialogus de Scaccario_,
an elaborate account of the whole system of administration. Glanville,
the king's justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we have
of the Conqueror's laws and the English usages which still prevailed in
the inferior jurisdictions. A few years later he wrote his _Tractatus de
Legibus Angliae_, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and
described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the
Norman lawyers for the King's Court and its travelling judges. Thomas
Brown, the king's almoner, besides his daily record of the king's doings,
left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom.

The court became too a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred
to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the
contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years
that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of
Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who had
carried on the task of Florence of Worcester also ceased; three years
later the Saxon Chronicle itself came to an end, and in 1155 Henry of
Huntingdon finished his work. From 1154 to 1170 we have, in fact, no
contemporary chronicle. In the historical schools of the north compilers
had laboured at Hexham, at Durham, and in the Yorkshire monasteries to
draw together valuable chronicles founded on the work of Baeda; but in
1153 the historians of Hexham closed their work, and those of Durham in
1161. Only the monks of Melrose still carried on their chronicle as far
as 1169. The great tradition, however, was once more worthily taken up
by the men of Henry's court, kindled by the king's intellectual activity.
A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in
Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the
treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the _Dialogus_, who in 1172
began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical,
political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time--a work which
some scholars say is included in the _Gesta Henrici II_ that was once
connected with th