f the historian Ralph of Diceto,
always ready with a quotation from the classics amid the court news and
politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection
of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more
famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man
of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion
write under a famous name. The friends and followers of Becket told
on every side and in every way, in prose or poetry, in Latin or
Norman-French, the story of their master's martyrdom and miracles. The
greatest historian of his day, William of Newburgh, was monk in a quiet
little Yorkshire monastery. Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, began the
Chronicle that bears his name in 1185. The historical workers of Durham,
of Hexham, and of Melrose started into a new activity. A canon of the
priory of St. Bartholomew's in London wrote before Henry's death a life of
its founder Rahere, and noted the first cases received into the hospital.
Joseph of Exeter, brother of Archbishop Baldwin, was the brilliant author
of a Latin poem on the _Troy Story_, and of a poetic history of the first
crusade. There was scarcely a religious house in the whole land which
could not boast of some distinction in learning or literature.
Even the feudal nobles caught the prevailing temper. A baron was not
content to have only his household dwarf or jester, he must have his
household poet too. Intellectual interest and curiosity began to spread
beyond the class of clerks to whom Latin, the language of learning and
worship, was familiar, and a demand began to spring up for a popular
literature which could be understood of the unlearned baron or burgher.
Virgil and Statius and Ovid were translated into French. Wace in 1155
dedicated to Eleanor his translation into Norman-French of the _History
of Geoffrey of Monmouth_, a book which came afterwards to be called the
_Brut d'Engleterre_, and was one of the sources of the first important
English poem, Layamon's _Brut_. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told
in the _Roman de Rou_ the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem,
especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to
history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the
rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred
Thomas--poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin
fashion, and embodied the tales o
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