We must not take William as an average specimen of the monastic culture and intelligence of his day. In any age and in any circumstances he would probably have been a man of exceptional genius. But his outward life and surroundings were those of the ordinary monk of his time; and those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the fact, abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man as William could feel himself thoroughly at home in them, and could find in them full scope for the developement of his powers. It was in truth precisely his monastic profession which gave him opportunities of acquiring by personal experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied and extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be obtained in any other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance with William is enough to dispel all notions of the medieval monk as a solitary student, a mere bookworm, knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he could learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the narrow circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A community like that of Malmesbury was in active and constant relations with every rank and class of society all over the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open alike to king and bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the high-born pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with relics and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the marvels of Holy Land, to the merchant who came to sell his curious foreign wares at the local fair and to pay his devotions, like S. Godric, at the local shrine, as well as to the monk of another house who came, perhaps, to borrow a book from the library, to compare notes with the local history, or to submit some literary question to the judgement of the great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the political news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the social gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or other of these channels, and was discussed within the safe shelter of the inviolable convent-walls with a boldness and freedom impossible amid the society of the outside world, fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest, and mutual dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat among earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council, whom they treated almost as an equal, and whom they came, with a train of secular clerks and lay followers, to visit and consult on matters of Church or state or of their own personal interests. If the king himself chanced to pass that way, it was matter of course that he should lodge in the monastery. William’s vivid portraits of all the three Norman kings were doubtless drawn, if not from the observation of his own eyes, at any rate from that of his friend Abbot Godfrey; his portrait of Henry I. was in all likelihood painted from life as the king paid his devotions before S. Ealdhelm’s shrine or feasted at the abbot’s table in the refectory, or—quite as probably—as William, in his turn, sat in the royal hall discussing some literary question with his friend and patron, the king’s son Earl Robert of Gloucester, if not actually with the king himself. The hospitality of the abbey was repaid by that which greeted its brethren wherever they went, on business for their house or for themselves. The monk went in and out of castle or town, court or camp, as a privileged person. Such a man as William, indeed, might be sure of a welcome anywhere; and William, indefatigable as a student, was almost equally so as a traveller. The little sketches of town and country which illustrate his survey of the dioceses of England in the Gesta Pontificum must have been made on the spot. He had seen the marvels of Glastonbury;[221] he had probably taken down the legend of S. Eadmund of East-Anglia on the very site of the martyrdom;[222] he had seen with his own eyes the Roman walls of Carlisle, and heard with his own ears the rough Yorkshire speech, of which, puzzling as it was to a southerner, he yet learned enough to catch from some northern gleeman the echo of Northumbria’s last heroic lay, the lay of Waltheof at the gate of York;[223] he had, we cannot doubt, wandered with delight up that vale of Severn which he paints in such glowing colours, and been drawn to write the life of S. Wulfstan by a sight of his church and his tomb at Worcester. His own cell at Malmesbury was the garner in which treasures new and old, of every kind, gathered from one end of England to the other, were stored up to be sifted and set in order at leisure amid that perfect tranquillity, that absolute security from outward disturbance and worldly care, which to the modern student is but a hopeless dream.
The new intellectual movement, however, was by no means confined to the cloister. Clerk and layman had their share in it; king and queen encouraged it warmly, and their sympathy with the patriotic revival which animated it was marked enough to excite the mockery of their Norman courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224] Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome at the court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his youth, that “an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His tastes were shared by his good queen Maude, who had received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey such an education as was probably given to few women of her time; and in her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond sea left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of poor and sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless charities was almost equalled by that of the scholars and poets who vied with each other to gain her ear by some new feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson Earl Robert of Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief historical works, as to a comrade and an equal in the world of letters; it may even be that the “Robert” of whom we once catch a glimpse, sitting in the library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over its treasures, and suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at his side, is no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy had no mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity; Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar, urged his archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a History of the English in emulation of the Gesta Regum. Nor did history alone absorb the intellectual energy of the time. Natural science had its followers, among them the king himself, who studied it in characteristically practical fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts collected from all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary” of an Anglo-Norman poet, Philip de Thaun, found a patroness in his second queen, Adeliza of Louvain. A scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried his researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours and Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own, but he soon quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering in distant lands. He crossed the Alps, made his way to the great medical school at Salerno, thence into Greece and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems, to the great centre of Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what we now call Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned to England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published his first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop William of Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his travels. He next opened a school, apparently in Normandy, for the diffusion of the scientific lore which he had acquired in the East. He had picked up, among other things, an Arabic version of Euclid, and the Latin translation which he made of this became the text-book of all succeeding mathematicians for centuries after. But his teaching of the physical science of the East was vehemently opposed by western scholars; his own nephew, who had been one of his pupils at Laon, was among his opponents, and it was in the shape of a discussion with this nephew that Adelard put forth, under the title of Quæstiones Naturales, a plea for a more free inquiry into the principles of natural science, instead of the blind following of old authorities which had hitherto contented the scholars of the West.[229] In the last years of Henry’s reign he seems to have returned once more to settle in his native land.[230] His career shows how daring was the spirit of enterprize now stirring among Englishmen, and how vast was the range of study and experience now thrown open to English scholars. We see that England was already within reach of that wider world of which her Angevin kings were soon to make her a part.
What gave scope for all this social, moral and intellectual developement was, to borrow a phrase from the Peterborough Chronicler, “the good peace” that Henry, like his father, “made in this land.”[231] The foundations of the political and administrative system by which that peace was preserved inviolate to the end of his reign were laid in the three years succeeding the battle of Tinchebray—the brightest period of Henry’s prosperity, and the only time in his life when he himself could enjoy, on both sides of the sea, the tranquillity which he fought to secure. In England, indeed, from the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême in 1103 to his own death in 1135, the peace was never broken save by an occasional disturbance on the Welsh border. Even in Wales, however, the settlement of the Flemings and the appointment of a “Saxon” bishop to the see of St. David’s[232] were doing their work; and though in Henry’s later years the restlessness of the Welsh princes and people twice provoked him to march into their country, the danger from them was never great enough to mar the general security of the realm. From Scotland there was still less to fear; its three successive kings, Eadgar, Alexander and David, were the brothers of the good queen Maude and the faithful allies of her husband. But in Henry’s dominions beyond the sea, the state of things was very different. In the duchy of Normandy the year 1110 saw the opening of a new phase of politics, the beginning of a train of complications in which England seemed at the moment less directly concerned than in the earlier struggles between the king and the barons, but which in the end exercised an important influence on the course of her after history by bringing her into contact with the power of Anjou. Before we can trace the steps whereby this came to pass, we must change our line of thought and study. We must turn aside from the well-worn track of English history to travel awhile in less familiar paths; we must leave our own land and make our way into the depths of Gaul; we must go back from the broad daylight of the twelfth century into the dim dawn of the ninth, there to seek out the beginnings and thence to follow the romantic story of the house of Anjou.