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 244 Readings in European History GILDAS, a monk of Britain (ca. 516-573), who lived two centuries before Bede, has left a melancholy account of the calamities of his time, Liber querulus de calamitate, excidio et conqnestu Britanniae, qttani Angliam nunc vacant. (Edited by Mommsen in the Monumenta Ger- maniae Historica and in Six English Chronicles in the Bohn Library.) BEDE, Ecclesiastical History of the English ; see above, p. 112. ASSER, Life of Alfred. Very interesting. New edition, edited by Stevenson, 1904. Translation in Bohn's Six English Chronicles. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is all important for the period to the Norman Conquest. It is not very voluminous, and can speedily be read through. (Rolls Series in the original and translation. Better edited, without translation, by Plummer and Earle, 2 vols. (Clarendon Press) ; also in the Bohn Library, in the volume containing Bede's history.) ORDERICUS VITALIS; see above, p. 221. WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY, The History of the Kings of England. An entertaining and sagacious monk, who brought his work down to Stephen's time, and probably died about 1150. See extract given above, pp. 224 sqq. (Rolls Series, translated in the Bohn Library, and by Stevenson in The Church Historians of England, 1854.) ROGER OF HOVEDEN, Annals of English History, bringing the story down to 1201, and very important for the reign of Richard. (Rolls Series and Bohn.) The monks of St. Albans were distinguished, like the monks of St. Denis (see above, p. 221), for their historical writings in the thir- teenth century. Among these historians two may be mentioned : ROGER OF WEN DOVER, whose chronicle, The Flowers of History, reviews the history of the world, but is especially valuable for the quarter of a cen- tury of his own time (it closes with the year 1235). The more famous MATTHEW OF PARIS an ardent Englishman in spite of his name in his so-called Greater Chronicle, after the customary review of the world's history, carried the work of Roger of Wendover down to the year 1259. His history Cardinal Baronius declared to be "a golden book, only marred by hostility to the Holy See." It is prob- ably the most generally useful historical production of the thirteenth century. The writings of both these monks of St. Albans are in the Rolls Series and in the Bohn Library. Another so-called Flowers of .History is a compilation reaching the year 1307, long attributed without ,any particular reason to an apparently imaginary MATTHEW OF WEST- MINSTER and commonly cited under his name. (In the Rolls Series and in the Bohn Library.)