grew inquisitive about revolutions in Norway, the state of parties in Germany, the geography of Spain.  They copied despatches and treaties.  They asked endless questions of every traveller as to what was passing abroad, and noted down records which have since become authorities for the histories of foreign states.  Political and historical questions were eagerly debated.  Gerald of Wales and Glanville, as they rode together, would discuss why the Normans had so fallen away in valour that now even when helped by the English they were less able to resist the French than formerly when they stood alone.  The philosophic Glanville might suggest that the French at that time had been weakened by previous wars, but Gerald, true to the feudal instincts of a baron of the Norman-Welsh border, spoke of the happy days before dukes had been made into kings, who oppressed the Norman nobles by their overbearing violence, and the English by their insular tyranny; “For there is nothing which so stirs the heart of man as the joy of liberty, and there is nothing which so weakens it as the oppression of slavery,” said Gerald, who had himself felt the king’s hand heavy on him.

One of the most striking features of the court was the group of great lawyers which surrounded the king.  The official nobility trained at the Exchequer and Curia Regis, and bound together by the daily work of administering justice, formed a class which was quite unknown anywhere on the continent.  It was not till a generation later that a few clerks learned in civil law were called to the king’s court of justice in France, and the system was not developed till the time of Louis IX.; in Germany such a reform did not take place for centuries.  But in England judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific study of English law.  Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the Dialogus de Scaccario, an elaborate account of the whole system of administration.  Glanville, the king’s justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we have of the Conqueror’s laws and the English usages which still prevailed in the inferior jurisdictions.  A few years later he wrote his Tractatus de Legibus Angliae, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the Norman lawyers for the King’s Court and its travelling judges.  Thomas Brown, the king’s almoner, besides his daily record of the king’s doings, left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom.