gland among both the clergy and the _5_ laity, and
what happy times there were then throughout England, and how the kings
who held sway over the people in those days obeyed God and his ministers;
and how they preserved not only their peace but their morality also and
good order at home and extended _10_ their possessions abroad; and how
prosperous they were both with war and with wisdom; and how zealous the
clergy were both in teaching and in learning, and in all the services
they owed to God; and how foreigners came to the land in search of wisdom
and learning, and _15_ how we should now have to secure them from abroad
if we were to have them. So complete was this decay in England that there
were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their
rituals in English or translate a Latin letter into English; and I feel
sure _20_ that there were not many beyond Humber. So few there were that
I can not remember a single one south of the Thames when I began to
reign. Almighty God be thanked that we have any teachers among us now....

Then I considered all this, and brought to mind _25_ also how, before it
had all been laid waste and burned, the churches throughout all England
stood filled with treasures and books; and there was a great multitude of
God's servants, but they knew very little about the books, for they could
not understand anything in them, _30_ since they were not written in
their own language--as if they spoke thus: "Our fathers who held these
places of old loved wisdom and through it acquired wealth and bequeathed
it to us. Here we may still see their tracks, but we can not follow them,
and hence we have _35_ now lost both the wealth and the wisdom, since we
would not incline our hearts after their example."

When I called all this to mind, I wondered very much, considering all the
good and wise men who were formerly throughout England and all the books
that they _40_ had perfectly learned, that they had translated no part of
them into their own language. But soon I answered myself and said: "They
did not expect that men should ever become as careless and that learning
should decay as it has; they neglected it through the desire that the
_45_ greater increase of wisdom there should be in the land the more
should men learn of foreign languages."

I then considered that the law was first found in the Hebrew tongue, and
again when the Greeks learned it, they translated it all into their own
languag