e name of Benedict of Peterborough. The king's clerk
and justiciar, Roger of Hoveden, must have been collecting materials for
the famous Chronicle which he began very soon after Henry's death, when
he gathered up and completed the work of the Durham historians. Gervase
of Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, well known in every great
town of Italy and Sicily, afterwards the writer of _Otia Imperialia_ for
the Emperor Otto IV., wrote a book of anecdotes, now lost, for the younger
King Henry. Gerald of Wales, a busy courtier, and later a chaplain of the
king, was the brilliant historian of the Irish conquest and the mighty
deeds of his cousins, the Fitz Geralds and Fitz Stephens. "In process of
time when the work was completed, not willing to hide his candle under a
bushel, but to place it on a candlestick that it might give light to all,
he resolved to read it publicly at Oxford, where the most learned and
famous English clergy were at that time to be found. And as there were
three distinctions or divisions in the work, and as each division occupied
a day, the reading lasted three successive days. On the first day he
received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor of the town, on the
next day all the doctors of the different faculties and such of their
pupils as were of fame and note, on the third day the rest of the scholars
with the _milites_, townsmen, and many burgesses. It was a costly and noble
act; the authentic and ancient times of poesy were thus in some measure
renewed, and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of
such a solemnity having ever taken place in England."

Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while
it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald's writings, the
first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were
avowedly composed for "laymen and uneducated princes," and professed to
tell "the doings of the people." He declared his intention to use common
and easily understood words as he told his tales of Ireland and Wales,
of their physical features, their ways and customs, and with a literary
instinct that knew no scruple, added scandal, gossip, satire, bits of
folk-lore or of classical learning or of Bible phrases, which might
serve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit. The
independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church
was illustrated in his _Speculum Ecclesiae_, a bitter satire on