Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald’s writings, the first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were avowedly composed for “laymen and uneducated princes,” and professed to tell “the doings of the people.”  He declared his intention to use common and easily understood words as he told his tales of Ireland and Wales, of their physical features, their ways and customs, and with a literary instinct that knew no scruple, added scandal, gossip, satire, bits of folk-lore or of classical learning or of Bible phrases, which might serve the purposes of literary artifice or of frank conceit.  The independent temper which had been stirred by the fight with the Church was illustrated in his Speculum Ecclesiae, a bitter satire on the monks and on the Roman Curia.  A yet more terrible scorn of the crime and vice which disgraced the Church inspired the Apocalypse and the Confession of Bishop Goliath, the work of Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, king’s chaplain ever since the days when Becket was chancellor, justiciar, ambassador, poet, scholar, theologian, satirist.  The greater part of the legends of the Saint Graal that sprang out of the work of Robert de Boron were probably woven together by his genius; and were used in the great strife to prove that the English Church originated independently of Rome.  His Courtier’s Triflings, suggested by John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus, is the only book which actually bears his name, and with its gossip, its odd accumulations of learning, its fragments of ancient history, its outbursts of moral earnestness, its philosophy, brings back to us the very temper of the court and the stir and quickening of men’s minds—­a stir which found expression in other works of bitter satire, in the lampoon of Ralph Niger, and in the violent attacks on the monks by Nigellus.

Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court.  The whole country shared in the movement.  Good classical learning might be had in England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning to cut short the time which used to be given to classical studies.  Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of “certain treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written by Aristotle,” which tended to foster heresy.  The cathedral schools, such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in our own day.  The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning.  Of all the remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the __Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the time.