Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/159

 strangers who happened to be in town: the venerable old dean, Ralph de Diceto, would show him the beautiful MS. of his Imaginationes; from the canon Richard, the high treasurer, he might learn the history of the Exchequer, or even borrow the precious Tricolumnis before it was lost; Peter of Blois would be grumbling at the small profits of his archdeaconry, but wisely putting his pen to good interest; Roger Niger perhaps just flying from the wrath of the king, whom he has exasperated by savage invective; and the great Foliot himself, the able statesman who pitted all his skill, experience, and learning against the zeal of Becket and lost the game, at least in the opinion of his contemporaries.

At the court would be Ranulf Glanville, the father of the study of English common law, and the astute band of justices who shared with him the confidence of the most sagacious and business-like of kings. Our friend would find the historical mind fairly well awake to the importance of the era in which it found itself: the author of the Gesta Regis Henrici may not yet have chosen to be anonymous, but have been keeping a busy account from day to day of the king's doings; Thomas Brown would be there with his roll, and Peter of Blois moralising 'de Praestigiis fortunae,' on the magic tricks of Fortune exemplified in the career of his royal patron; and the author perhaps of the Draco Normannicus awaiting a reward for panegyrising the old Empress Maud; not to speak again of Ralph de Diceto and Gervase of Tilbury. At Westminster he would fall in with the Abbot Laurence, a theologian of some note in those days when almost every learned man was a theologian. In London indeed, or at Westminster, all the men whom I have mentioned might at any stirring time be found together: William Fitz Stephen, the biographer of Becket, possibly becoming a judge after he had tried his fortune as a scholar, but known to us by the lively picture which he has drawn of London in his own days; Giraldus Cambrensis, the erratic Norman-Welshman, who, as he would be looked for everywhere, might safely be caught near the king; even Roger of Hoveden, the