It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of Chartres and Paris London could boast of 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 of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions.  An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel,