native of the place of that name in Buckinghamshire, became a monk and precentor in the Benedictine monastery of St. Albans, and died prior of Belvoir, in a cell of that house, on the 6th of May, 1237. He has compiled the earlier portion of his work from Bede, Marianus Scotus, some of the Byzantine writers, Malmesbury, Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, and the other best and most reputable of preceding chroniclers, and in a very workmanlike manner. Mr. Coxe holds him to be quite as good a writer as Matthew Paris, whose more celebrated History is, down to the point where that of Wendover ends, copied from him with few alterations, and those, Mr. Coxe declares, mostly for the worse even in point of expression. Mr. Coxe vindicates the claim of Wendover to the authorship of the portion of the Chronicle bearing his name which has been thus transcribed by Paris, in answer to some remarks by Mr. Halliwell in the introduction to his late edition of Rishanger's Chronicle of the Barons' Wars.

The most celebrated English historian of the thirteenth century, however, is Matthew Paris, who was another monk of the same great monastery of St. Albans, and was also much employed in affairs of state during the reign of Henry III. He died in 1259; and his principal work, entitled Historia Major (the Greater History), begins at the Norman Conquest, and comes down to that year. Matthew Paris is one of the most spirited and rhetorical of our old Latin historians; and the extraordinary freedom with which he expresses himself, in regard especially to the usurpations of the court of Rome, forms a striking contrast to the almost uniforın tone of his monkish brethren. Nor does he show less boldness in animadverting upon the vices and delinquencies of kings and of the great in general. These qualities have in modern times gained him much admiration among writers of one party, and much obloquy from those of another. His work has always been bitterly decried by the Roman Catholics, who at one time, indeed, were accustomed to maintain that much of what appeared in the printed copies of it was the interpolation of its Protestant editors. This charge has now been abandoned; but an eminent Catholic historian of the present day has not hesitated to denounce the narrative of the monk of St. Albans as 66 a romance rather than a history," on the ground of the great discrepancy which he asserts he has found between it and authentic records or contemporary writers, in most instances when he could confront the one with the

other. The Historia Major of Matthew Paris was first printed at London in 1571, under the care of Archbishop Parker; and it has been republished at Zurich in 1606; at London, under the care of Dr. William Wats, in 1640; at Paris, in 1644; and at London in 1684. All these editions are in folio. An excellent French translation, by M. A. Huillard-Bréholles, has lately been published under the superintendence, or at the cost, of the Duc de Luynes, in 9 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1840-41, with a few notes by the translator, but without the Introduction by the Duke, promised on the titlepage at least in the only copy of the work that has fallen in our way. An English translation, by Dr. Giles, makes three of the volumes of Bohn's Antiquarian Library. To the edition published by Dr. Wats, and those that have followed it, are appended some other historical pieces of the author; and there also exists, in MS., an abridgment of the Historia Major, drawn up by himself, and generally referred to as the Historia Minor.

The History of Matthew Paris was continued by William Rishanger, another monk of the same abbey, whose narrative appears to have come down to the year 1322 (the 15th of Edward II.), although no complete copy is now known to be in existence, and only the earlier part, extending to the death of Henry III. (A. D. 1272), has been printed. It is at the end of Wats's edition of Matthew Paris. Rishanger is also the author of several other historical tracts, one of the most curious of which, his Chronicle of the Barons' Wars (preserved in a single MS., with the title of De Bellis Lewes et Evesham) has been printed for the Camden Society, under the care of Mr. James Orchard Halliwell, 4to. Lond. 1840. To Rishanger's narrative Mr. Halliwell has appended a collection of miracles attributed to Simon de Montfort, from another MS. in the Cotton Library.

What is commonly called the Chronicle of John Bromton, and is printed among the Decem Scriptores (pp. 721-1284) under the titles of Chronicon Johannis Bromton, and Joralanensis Historia, a Johanne Brompton, Abbate Jorvalensi, Conscripta, has been shown by Selden, in his most learned and curious preface to that collection, not to be either the composition of Bromton, or in any sense a Chronicle of Jorevale or Jerevaux, of which monastery in Yorkshire Bromton, Brompton, or Bramton, was abbot. The book was merely procured for the library of that house while he presided 1 Dr. Lingard, Hist. of Eng. iii. 160, edit. of 1837.

over it, and probably through his means. It does not appear from Selden's account when Bromton lived; but he has proved (p. xli) that the Chronicle must have been written in or after the year 1328, or the second of Edward III. At the commencement the author intimates that it is his design to bring it down to the time of Edward I., but it terminates with the death of Richard I. (A. D. 1199), having set out from the conversion of the Saxons by St. Augustine. It is not therefore, in any part of it, a contemporary history; but the writer has gleaned from some authorities which we do not now possess, and he gives many details which have not elsewhere been preserved.

Among the other Latin chroniclers of this period, whose works have been printed, the following are the principal : — Thomas Wikes, or Wycke, in Latin Wiccius, canon regular of Osney, near Oxford, whose chronicle, otherwise called the Chronicle of the Church of Salisbury, fills from p. 21 to p. 129 of Gale's Scriptores Quinque, and, as there printed, extends from the Conquest to the year 1304, although it is afterwards intimated (p. 595) that the last ten pages of it are by another hand; Walter Hemingford, or, as Leland calls him, Hemingoburgus, a monk of Gisborough in Yorkshire, the portion of whose work extending from the Conquest to the year 1273 (being the first three Books) was printed by Gale in the same collection (pp. 453–595), and the remainder, comprehending the reigns of Edward I., Edward II., and the first twenty years of that of Edward III., by Hearne, in 2 vols. 8vo., at Oxford, in 1731, and the whole of which has been edited by Mr. H. C. Hamilton for the Historical Society, in 2 vols. 8vo. Lon. 1848; Robert de Avesbury, register of the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose history of the reign of Edward III., Historia de Mirabilibus Gestis Edwardi III., which is esteemed for its accuracy, but comes down only to A. D. 1356, was published by Hearne, in 8vo., at Oxford, in 1720; Nicolas Trivet, whose clear and exact history of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II., Richard I., John, Henry III., and Edward I. (or from A. D. 1135 to 1307), is printed in both editions of Father d'Achery's Spicilegium (1671 and 1723), and has also been published separately by Anthony Hall, in 8vo., at Oxford, in 1719, and, as edited by Mr. T. Hog for the Historical Society, 8vo., Lon. 1845; Adam Murimuth, whose short chronicle, extending from A. D. 1303 to 1337, along with a continuation by an anonymous writer to 1380, was printed

by Hall as a second volume to his Trivet, in 1721, and has also been edited for the Historical Society by Mr. Hog, 1846; Henry de Knyghton (or Cnitton, as he himself spells the name), a canon of Leicester, the author of a History of English affairs from the time of King Edgar to the death of Richard II., which is printed among the Decem Scriptores (pp. 2297-2742); and the two ecclesiastical historians, Thomas Stubbs and William Thorne, the Chronicle of the acts of the Archbishops of York to A. D. 1373 by the former of whom, and that of the Abbots of St. Augustine's monastery at Canterbury to 1397 by the latter, are in the same collection (pp. 1685-1734, and 1753-2202). The original Latin Polychronicon of Ranulph, or Ralph, Higden, monk of St. Werburgh's in Chester, which ends in 1357, still remains, for the greater part, in MS., only the portion of it relating to the period of English history before the Norman Conquest having been published by Gale among his Scriptores Quindecim (pp. 177–289); but an English translation of the whole by John de Trevisa, who was vicar of Berkeley in Gloucestershire towards the close of the fourteenth century, was printed, in folio, at Westminster, by Caxton in 1482, at the same place by Wynken de Worde in 1485, and at Southwark in 1517, and again in 1527. Besides many insertions, Caxton has added a continuation of the History down to 1460; but it appears that he has also omitted several passages which are found in Trevisa's MS. now in the Harleian collection.

John Fordun, the earliest of the regular Scottish chroniclers, also belongs to the fourteenth century. His History, entitled Scotichronicon, beginning with the creation, comes down only to the end of the reign of David I. (A. D. 1153), but is continued by Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm, to the death of James I. (A. D. 1437), the materials for the space from 1153 to 1385 having been collected by Fordun. The portion of the Scotichronicon actually written by Fordun, being the first five of the sixteen books, was printed by Gale among his Scriptores Quindecim (pp. 563–701); and the whole was published by Hearne, at Oxford, in 5 vols. 8vo. in 1722, and again by Walter Goodall, at Edinburgh, in 2 vols. folio, in 1759.

The most important of the monastic chronicles belonging to this period, which has been preserved, is that called (it does not appear for what reason) the Chronicle of Lanercost. It has now been printed for the Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs, under the superin

tendence of Mr. Joseph Stevenson, 4to., Edinburgh, 1839. Before this it existed only in one or two very incorrect modern tra scripts, and in a single original codex (the Cotton MS. D. vii.), where it is appended, without any break, to an imperfect copy of what is printed by Savile as Hoveden's History. Hoveden ends on the reverse of what is numbered as folio 172 of the MS., having filled from folio 66 inclusive: the continuation, or Lanercost Chronicle, goes on in one handwriting to the end of the volume on the reverse of fol. 242. The time which it comprehends is from A. D. 1201 to 1346; and Mr. Stevenson thinks that it was transcribed about the latter date from the contemporary register kept, most probably, in the Minorite monastery of Carlisle. As printed it fills 352 4to. pages; and it abounds in curious and valuable information relating to the course of events both in England and in Scotland during the period over which it extends.

USE AND STUDY OF THE LATIN AND GREEK, THE HEBREW AND OTHER ORIENTAL TONGUES.

LATIN was also, for a great part of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the usual language of the law, at least in writing. There may, indeed, be some doubt perhaps as to the Charter of John. It is usually given in Latin; but there is also a French text first published in the first edition of D'Achery's Spicilegium (1653–57), xii. 573, &c., which there is some reason for believing to be the original. "An attentive critical examination of the French and Latin together," says Mr. Luders, "will induce any person capable of making it to think several chapters of the latter translated from the former, and not originally composed in Latin." Yet the Capitula, or articles on which the Great Charter is founded, are known to us only in Latin. And all the other charters of liberties are in that language. So is every statute down to the year 1275. The first that is in French is the Statute of Westminster the First, passed in that year, the 3d of Edward I. Throughout the remainder of the reign of Edward they are sometimes in Latin, sometimes

1 Tracts on the Law and History of England (1810), p. 393. D'Achery's French text may also be read in a more common book, Johnson's History of Magna Charta, 2d edit. (1772), pp. 182-234