Meanwhile the decay of holiness and learning in the cloister was brought into more vivid light by a great outburst of intellectual vigour of a wholly new type. The literary activity of the reign of Henry I. had been all but quenched by the troubles of Stephen’s reign. Chronicler after chronicler lays down his pen, as if in disgust or despair, in the middle of the dreary story, till Henry of Huntingdon and the nameless English annalist at Peterborough are left to struggle almost alone through the last years of anarchy to welcome the new king; and he is no sooner crowned than they, too, pass away into silence.[2176] The first half of Henry’s reign has no contemporary historian at all. The other branches of literature continued equally barren; and a promise of better things had scarcely dawned in the miscellaneous treatises of John of Salisbury when the whole intellectual horizon was darkened by the great ecclesiastical storm. No sooner had it subsided, however, than the literary impulse revived under wholly changed conditions. Its bent was still mainly historical; and, as might be expected, the first subject-matter upon which it seized was the history of the new martyr. Within twenty years of his death, no less than ten different biographies of S. Thomas were composed by writers of the most diverse characters—his old comrade John of Salisbury, three of his own confidential clerks, a Benedictine abbot of Peterborough, an Augustinian prior of Oxford, a monk of Canterbury who was probably an Irishman by blood, a French poet who had seen the primate in his chancellor-days, a Cambridge clerk who had joined him on the eve of his martyrdom. But meanwhile a new school of English history was springing up in the court instead of the cloister. Modern research has ascertained that the book which may fairly be called the foundation-stone of this new school, as well as the primary authority for English political history from the death of S. Thomas to the third year of Richard Cœur-de-Lion—- the “Acts of King Henry and King Richard,” long attributed to Benedict abbot of Peterborough—is really the work of Richard Fitz-Nigel, bishop of London and treasurer. Its continuator, Roger of Howden, was a clerk of the royal chapel and an active and trusted officer of the royal administration under both Henry and Richard.[2177] A third chronicler of the period, Ralf de Diceto, was archdeacon of Middlesex from 1153 to 1180, when he became dean of S. Paul’s, an office of great political as well as ecclesiastical importance, which he filled with distinction until his death in the fourth year of King John.[2178] The works of these three writers are examples of a species of historical composition which is one of the most valuable literary products of the later twelfth century. They are chronicles in the strictest sense of the word:—records of facts and events arranged year by year in orderly chronological sequence, and for the most part without any attempt at illustration, comment or criticism. But the gap which parts them from the ordinary type of monastic chronicle is as wide as that which parted the highly-placed ecclesiastical dignitary, the trusted minister of the Crown, or the favourite court-chaplain from the obscure monk who had spent, it may be, well-nigh his whole life in copying manuscripts in the scriptorium of Burton or Dunstable or Waverley. Their writers were not merely chroniclers; they were statesmen and diplomatists as well. Their position as members of the royal administration, dwelling in the capital or at the court, placed them in constant and intimate communication with the chief actors in the events which they narrate, events of which not only were they themselves frequently eye-witnesses, but in which they even took a personal, though it might be subordinate, share; it gave them access to the most authentic sources of political intelligence, to the official records of the kingdom, to the state-papers and diplomatic correspondence of the time, whereof a considerable part, if not actually drawn up by themselves, must at any rate have passed through their hands in the regular course of their daily business. The fulness and accuracy, the balance of proportion, the careful order which characterize the work of these statesmen-chroniclers are scarcely more remarkable than its cosmopolitan range; Henry’s historiographers, like Henry himself, sweep the whole known world into the wide circle of their intelligence and their interest; the internal concerns of every state, from Norway to Morocco and from Ireland to Palestine, find a place in the pages of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, side by side with the narrative of their sovereign’s wars with France or with the text of the various assizes whereby he was reforming the legal and judicial administration of their own native land. While, however, the first works of this new historical school thus rose far above the level of mere annals, they still stood far below the literary standard of history in the higher sense, which had been set up by a monk at Malmesbury half a century before. The only writer who in the latter half of the twelfth century, like William of Malmesbury in its earlier half, looked at history in its true light, not as a mere record of facts, but according to its old Greek definition, as “philosophy teaching by examples,” must be sought after all not in the court but in the cloister. William indeed had left no heir to his many-sided literary genius; but if some shreds of his mantle did fall upon any historian of the next generation, they fell upon one who bore his name, in an Augustinian priory among the Yorkshire moors.

William of Newburgh was born in 1136 at Bridlington, a quiet little town lying under the southern escarpment of the York Wolds, not far from Flamborough Head. Here, between the bleak uplands and the cold northern sea, a priory of Austin canons had been founded by Walter de Gant in the reign of Henry I.;[2179] from this house a colony went forth in the early years of Stephen to settle, under the protection of Roger de Mowbray, first at Hode near Thirsk, and afterwards, in 1145, at Newburgh near Coxwold. William entered the new house as a child—probably, therefore, almost at its foundation; there he passed his whole life; and there, as the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion drew towards its close, he wrote his English History, from the Norman conquest to his own day. The actual composition of the book seems to have occupied little more than two years; it can scarcely have been begun earlier than 1196, and it breaks off abruptly in the spring of 1198. The surroundings of its writer offered comparatively few advantages for the pursuit of historical study. No atmosphere of venerable antiquity, no traditions of early scholarship and poetry, no hallowed associations with the kings and saints and heroes of old, hung around Newburgh priory; the house was younger than its historian; the earliest and well-nigh the only memory that can attract a pilgrim to its now desolate site is the memory of William himself. No crowd of devotees from all parts of the realm came thither year by year to bring their offerings and their news, as they came to the shrine of S. Ealdhelm; no visit of king or prince is likely ever to have startled the inmates of Newburgh out of the quiet routine of their daily life; its prior held no such place among the ecclesiastical dignitaries of his province as the abbot of Malmesbury had held for ages among the prelates of the south; he and his canons could have little or no business with the outside world, and it is hardly conceivable that any of them would ever have occasion to travel further than to the mother-house at Bridlington, unless indeed his own love of enterprise and thirst for a wider knowledge of the world should drive him further afield. Even in such a case, however, the undertaking would have been beset with difficulties; travelling in Yorkshire was still, even under Henry Fitz-Empress and his son, a more arduous and dangerous matter than travelling in Wessex under his grandfather. William, too, had grown up amid those terrible days when peaceable folk could find no shelter save within convent-walls, and even that shelter sometimes proved unavailing—when the men of the north were only too thankful to wrap themselves in that comparative isolation which saved them at any rate from sharing in the worst miseries that overwhelmed their brethren in southern England. The memories of his boyhood were little calculated to arouse in him such a spirit of enterprise as had fired the young librarian of Malmesbury. He seems, indeed, never to have set a foot outside his native shire; we might almost fancy that like the first and most venerable of all our historians, he never set a foot outside his own monastery. The vivid sketches of town and country which give such a picturesque charm to the writings of William of Malmesbury are wholly absent from those of William of Newburgh; there is but one bit of local description in his whole book, and even that one—a brief account of Scarborough[2180]—contains no distinct proof of having been drawn from personal knowledge of the place. The brotherhood of Newburgh had, however, ample opportunities of obtaining authentic, though indirect, intelligence from the outer world. Their home, in a sheltered spot under the western slope of the Hambledon Hills, was quiet and peaceful, but not lonely; for it lay on an old road leading from York to the mouth of the Tees, and within easy reach of a whole group of famous monastic establishments which had sprung up during the early years of the religious revival in the little river-valleys that open around the foot of the moors. A few hours’ journey down the vale of Pickering would bring the canons of Newburgh to brethren of their own order at Kirkham and Malton; some ten or twelve miles of hill and moor lay between them and the famous abbey of Rievaux; another great Cistercian house, Byland, rose only a mile from their own home. With the two last-named houses, at least, they were clearly in frequent and intimate communication; it was indeed at the desire of Abbot Ernald of Rievaux that William undertook to write his history; and remembering the important part which the Cistercians, and especially those of Yorkshire, had played for more than half a century in English politics, secular as well as ecclesiastical, we can readily see that his external sources of information were likely to be at once copious and trustworthy.

The literary resources of Newburgh itself, however, must have been of the very poorest; its library, if it possessed one at all, could only be in process of formation even in William’s mature years. He himself gives us no clue to its contents. His style is that of a man of education and taste, but he shews little trace of the classical scholarship which may be detected in William of Malmesbury. Only three earlier writers are mentioned by name in his preface; with two of these—Bæda and Gildas—he has of course no ground in common; while the third, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is named only to be overwhelmed with scorn. It is plain, however, that William largely used the works of Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon; while the fact that his sketch of the reigns of Henry I. and Stephen is founded upon the last-named writer seems to shew that his literary ambition had never been quickened by a sight of the Gesta Regum and Historia Novella, of which nevertheless his book is the sole worthy continuation. Compared with the works of Richard Fitz-Nigel and Roger of Howden, its faults are obvious; its details are vague and inaccurate, it is full of mistakes in names, pedigrees and suchlike small matters, and its chronology is one long tangle of inconsistencies, confusions and contradictions. But in the eyes of William of Newburgh, as in the eyes of William of Malmesbury, the office of an historian is not so much to record the events of the past as to explain them, to extract from them their moral and political significance for the instruction of the present and the future. His work is not a chronicle; it is a commentary on the whole history of England, political, ecclesiastical and social, throughout the twelfth century.[2181] Such a commentary, written at such a time and by such a man, is for later students above all price. The one short chapter in which William sums up the causes and effects of the anarchy under Stephen[2182] is of more real historical worth than the whole chaos of mere disjointed facts which is all that the chroniclers have to give us, and in which he alone helps us to discover a meaning and a moral. The same might be said of many of his reflections upon men and things, both at home and abroad. In some respects indeed he contrasts favourably even with his greater namesake of Malmesbury. If he is less anxious for the entertainment of his reader, he is more in earnest about the philosophical bearings of his subject; he cares less for artistic effect and more for moral impressions; his stories are less amusing and less graphically told, but they are untinged with Malmesbury’s love of gossip and scandal; his aim is always rather to point a moral than to adorn a tale; he has a feeling for romance and a feeling for humour,[2183] but he will ruthlessly, though quietly, demolish a generally-accepted story altogether, if he knows it to be false.[2184] Only once does the judicial calmness of his tone change into accents of almost passionate indignation; and it is this outburst which above all has gained for him in our own day the title of “the father of historical criticism,”[2185] for it is the earliest protest against a rising school of pseudo-historical writers who seemed in a fair way to drive true history altogether out of the literary field.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the marvellous vitality of the ancient Celtic race shewn itself more strikingly than in the province of literature. Of all the varied intellectual elements that went to the making of the new England, the Celtic element rose to the surface first. The romantic literature of England owes its origin to a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who became bishop of S. Asaph’s about two years before the accession of Henry II. Long before that time—probably in the days when poets and men of letters of every type were thronging to the court of Henry’s grandmother the good Queen Maude—Walter Calenius, archdeacon of Oxford, had picked up during a journey in Britanny “a very ancient book, containing a history of the Britons, from Brut to Cadwallader son of Cadwallon;” this book he carried home to England and presented to his friend Geoffrey, begging him to translate it out of Welsh into Latin.[2186] Some years after the death of Henry I. Geoffrey’s translation was given to the world. Its original cannot now be identified; but Geoffrey may fairly take to himself the whole credit of the History of the British Kings to which his name is attached. The book is an elaborate tissue of Celtic myths, legends and traditions, scraps of classical and Scriptural learning, and fantastic inventions of the author’s own fertile brain, all dexterously thrown into a pseudo-historical shape and boldly sent forth under the imposing name of History. The success of Geoffrey’s venture was amazing. The dedication of the book was accepted by the foremost lay scholar of the day, William of Malmesbury’s friend and patron, Earl Robert of Gloucester; its fame spread rapidly through all sections and classes of society. A Yorkshire priest, Alfred of Beverley, tells us how some of the clergy of the diocese, when suspended from the usual occupations of their calling—doubtless by one of the many interdicts which fell upon them during the struggle between S. William and Henry Murdac—beguiled their time by discussing the stories which they had heard or read about the ancient British kings; how, his curiosity aroused by their talk, he with some difficulty borrowed a copy of the new book which had set them talking; and how he longed to transcribe it at length, but lacking time and means was obliged to content himself with an abridgement.[2187] Norman barons and ladies heard of the wondrous book and became eager to read it in their own tongue; a copy was borrowed from Earl Robert himself by no less a personage than Walter Lespec, that he might lend it in his turn to a friend of his own, Ralf Fitz-Gilbert, whose wife wanted her household-minstrel Geoffrey Gaimar to translate it into French verse for her entertainment.[2188]

The version of Gaimar was superseded in a few years by that of Wace, a Norman poet who did a better service to the cause of history by his later work, the Roman de Rou or riming chronicle of the Norman dukes from Hrolf to Henry II. Neither Alfred nor Gaimar nor Wace seems to have had any suspicion of the true character of Geoffrey’s book of marvels; they all alike treated it as genuine history, and from the point where it closes, at the death of Cadwallon in 689, carried on their narratives without a break down to the times of the Norman kings. It was against this blurring of the line between truth and falsehood, this obliteration of the fundamental distinction between history and romance, that William of Newburgh lifted up his well-grounded and eloquent protest in the preface to his Historia Anglicana.[2189] Notwithstanding that protest, the fabulous tales of the Brut (as Geoffrey’s book is commonly called, from the name of the first British king mentioned in it) continued to pass current as an integral part of the history of Britain for many generations after him. The fraud was in fact countenanced in high places for political ends; Henry himself was quick to seize upon it as a means of humouring the national vanity and soothing the irritated national feelings of those Celtic vassals who were generally among the most troublesome of his subjects, but who were also not unfrequently among the most necessary and useful of his allies. On one occasion he is said, though on doubtful authority, to have conciliated the Bretons by consenting to enter into a diplomatic correspondence with their long-departed, yet still mysteriously living monarch, Arthur, and by proposing to hold Britanny as Arthur’s vassal.[2190] In his last years, however, he turned the new Arthurian lore to account in a far more significant way in the island Britain: he set the monks of Glastonbury to find the grave of the British hero-king. In the cemetery of S. Dunstan’s old abbey stood two pyramidal stones, of unknown age, and covered with inscriptions so old and worn that nothing could be read in them save, as it was thought, Arthur’s name. Between these stones, sixteen feet below the surface of the ground, Henry—so the monks afterwards declared—guided by what he had heard from an old Welsh bard and read in the histories of the Britons,[2191] bade them look for a wooden sarcophagus containing Arthur’s mortal remains. The discovery was made in 1191; a coffin, hollowed as Henry had said out of the solid trunk of an oak-tree, was dug up on the spot indicated; let into a stone at its foot was a leaden cross, which when taken out proved to bear upon its inner face the words, “Here in the isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned King Arthur, with Guinevere his wife.” In the coffin were found a few rotten bones, and a “cunningly-braided tress of golden hair,” which however crumbled into dust in the hand of a monk who snatched it up too eagerly. The bones were carefully preserved and solemnly re-buried under a marble tomb before the high altar in the abbey-church.[2192]