Daniel
Morley.

treatise on the Natures of Inferiors and Superiors, or things of earth and heaven, "cum pretiosa multitudine librorum," with a precious lot of books. He found too little regard for liberal science among the English; and rather than be the only Greek among the Romans, was travelling out of the country again. But he met on his road John Bishop of Norwich, who received him with great honour, heard him tell of the studies of Toledo, and encouraged him to stay and write his treatise "De Naturis Inferiorum et Superiorum," which is in two books, the first showing what the Arabians taught of creation, matter, and the world below; the second of the nature and movements of the heavenly bodies in the world above.

Contact with the Saracen mind was still being maintained by the Crusaders. Walter de Coutances, whom Gerald de

The Crusaders. Walter de Coutances.

Barri calls a Cornishman, and who perhaps was of Jersey John of Salisbury calls him Walter

de Insula, and Jersey belongs to the diocese of Coutances was in 1173 Vice-Chancellor, and in 1183 Bishop of Lincoln, from which dignity he was promoted in less than a year to the Archbishopric of Rouen. In 1188 this Archbishop took the cross and meant to go to Palestine with Henry II. He did go with Cœur de Lion; came back to act for him in the regency, and held office during the captivity of Richard. He died in 1207, and left only a few letters, but he is said to have written a history of the Crusade.

Richard the

Richard the Canon, a monk of the Priory of Holy Trinity in London, about the year 1200 was the author of an interesting account of Cœur de Lion's expedition Canon. to the Holy Land, "Itinerarium Ricardi Anglorum regis in Terram Sanctam," which was published in Gale's Collection under the name of Geoffrey de Vinsauf.

Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Galfridus de Vinosalvo, who is also called Galfridus Anglicus, educated in the Priory of St.

Geoffrey de
Vinsauf.

Frideswide, at Oxford, and in the Universities of France and Italy, dedicated to his patron at Rome, Pope Innocent III., his Latin critical didactic poem, there written and published, on the New Poetry, “De Nova Poetria." His New Poetry is the old revived; a recommendation of the ancient measures and the Horatian critical standard in place of the Leonine verse and Latin rhymes by which they had been superseded. There is ascribed to this writer a book on Preserving Wines ("De Vinis, Fructibus, &c., conservandis"), written by one Geoffrey, of which Pits saw the MS. in Caius College, Cambridge; and from this has been derived his name, De Vino Salvo. Very probably he no more wrote that than Richard the Canon's Itinerary of King Richard and others to Jerusalem, the lively Chronicle of an eyewitness (or, as it might be, Own Correspondent), who himself went with King Richard and saw the last flash of the crusading enthusiasm that Rome afterwards had no more power to sustain in Europe. There remained only, twenty years later, the disastrous crusade of St. Louis in Egypt. Already Europe had so far advanced in spiritual life (and the struggle against Church abuses was a sign of it), that they could say with Map, or with St. Bernard, “It is better to struggle against the sinful lusts of the heart than to conquer Jerusalem." The record of Richard the Canon that has been ascribed to Vinsauf, begins with the Crusade itself, in the year 1187, and is valuable for its trustworthy detail of the "Gesta Regis Ricardi" till his death in 1199. Vinsauf is said to have written also a monody on

*

* A translation of this Chronicle into English is in the volume of "Chronicles of the Crusades," in Bohn's Antiq. Library (London, 1848). The Chronicle itself was edited by Professor Stubbs for the Rolls Series of Chronicles and Memorials, “Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi " (1864), with a second volume (1865) of Letters of the Prior and Convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, between 1187 and 1189, showing the state of the English Church under Richard I.

the death of Richard, besides treatises on Rhetoric and Ethics. In fact, if we omit the works ascribed to him on Crusading, Pickling and Preserving, there remains only a writer upon Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetry.

Ralph de
Glanville.

Ralph de Glanville, who was in 1180 appointed Chief Justiciary of England, was the author of the first treatise on English law. Born at Stratford in Suffolk, founder in 1171 of Bulkley Abbey, at which time he held Richmond Castle in fee of the king; in the battle of Alnwick, 1174, he captured the Scottish king William the Lion, and carried him to King Henry, then in Normandy. The Scottish king rode as a prisoner with his legs fettered under the body of a horse. In 1175 Glanville was made sheriff of Yorkshire, next year a judge of the King's Court; he went as a Justice in eyre on the northern circuit, and in 1180 was made Chief Justiciary, by right of his sound knowledge of law and his firm support of the king's prerogative against encroachments of the Church. In 1186 he assumed the Cross; in 1187 he went on a mission to France. He remained Justiciary at the accession of Richard I., but dissatisfied with the state of the home government in 1190, he resigned his offices, and went to Palestine with the Crusaders. There, in the same year, he fell in battle at the siege of Acre. He compiled and collected the laws of his country, and wrote a Latin treatise, of which his authorship has been disputed, on the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England-"De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliæ." It is a regular treatise, in fourteen books, on the system and practice of English law under the king's courts in the days of Henry II. Upon Glanville's book was founded the treatise of Bracton.*

*Henry Bracton will come later. He became Lord Chief Justice in the time of Henry III., took the degree of Doctor of Laws at Oxford, and about the year 1244 was one of the king's Justices in eyre. Ten years later he was made Lord Chief Justice, and held the

William of

William Petit or Little, monk of the Abbey of Austin Canons of Newbury in the North Riding of Yorkshire, was born at Bridlington in the year 1136, and educated in the monastery from which he took Newbury. his name. As a diligent theologian and historian he was employed by the abbots of the neighbouring monasteries of Byland and Rievaulx, and began his career as a writer with a commentary on the Song of Solomon, written for, and dedicated to, Robert Abbot of Byland. It was at the desire of the convent of Rievaulx, conveyed to him by their Abbot Ernald, that William of Newbury wrote his History of English Affairs ("Historia Rerum Anglicarum”), of which the preface, as we have seen, very properly attacked the credibility of Geoffrey of Monmouth's historical romance, and of which the substance has secured him lasting credit for his own trustworthiness. Beginning at the Conquest, and ending with the year 1198, he condenses into a dozen pages all that occurred before his own time, so that his chronicle is almost throughout the journal of a contemporary, who, with some of the credulity then common to his age and calling, had a clear and manly sense of life. He is dispassionate in judgment, and it is noticeable that he draws his illustrations not from writers of all kinds but chiefly from the Bible. He died in 1208, at the age of seventy-two. Of his History there are several MSS.* It was first printed by Silvius at Antwerp, in 1567, afterwards at Heidelberg and Paris; by Hearne, in three volumes, in 1719; in two volumes, for the English Historical Society, in

office for ten years, during which he wrote his treatise "De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliæ." This work, collated with all extant MSS., has been edited by Sir Travers Twiss in seven volumes of the Rolls Series of Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages.

* One in the Archbishop's library at Lambeth is of the early part of the thirteenth century, and said to be very accurate.

1856, by Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton; and lastly, in the Rolls Series of Chronicles and Memorials of the Middle Ages, by Mr. William Howlett, of the Middle Temple.

The manor and church of Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire were conferred by William the Conqueror on William St. Carileph, Bishop of Durham, who Roger of Hoveden. kept the manor and transferred the church of Howden to the priory of Durham, for which body the now ruined church was built. The travels of Dr. Richard Pococke* describe Howden as he saw it in 1751: "I went to Howden, formerly called Hoveden, one of the canons of the Collegiate Church being known by the name of Hoveden. It is two miles from the Darwent, which falls into the Ouse at that distance above it. There is a very fine church which was collegiate, the east part of which, with the chapter-house, are in ruins, all exactly on the model of York Cathedral; the west part serves for divine service. The Bishop of Durham, to whom this place belonged, had a house near it. The steeple, built by Bishop Skirlaw, is 146 feet high, and a fine structure. It is said it was designed as a place for the inhabitants to take shelter in against inundations, but I could not find there had been any such inundation in the memory of man, or from tradition."

Roger of Hoveden or Howden was, in 1174, as one of the clerks of King Henry II., a member of the royal household. In the autumn of that year he was in France with the king, who was pacifying provinces that had revolted at the instigation of his sons and his wife. He was next employed by the king with Robert de Vals, Warden of Carlisle, in endeavouring to draw the wild people of Galloway into a transference of their allegiance from the King of Scots to the King of England. In 1175, when King Henry kept his court at Reading, Roger of Hoveden was * Published by the Camden Society in 1888.