The third abbey, that of St. Evrau or St. Evroul, called in Latin, Monasterium Uticense, was one of the most renowned throughout Normandy.  The abbey dates its origin from St. Evroul himself, a nobleman, who lived in the reign of Childebert, and was attached to the palace of that monarch, “from which,” to use the words of the chronicles, “he made his escape, as from shipwreck, and fled to the woods, and entered upon the monastic life.”—­The legend of St. Ebrulfus probably savors of romance, the almost inseparable companion of traditional, and particularly of monastic, history:  it is safer, therefore, to be contented with referring the foundation of the monastery to the tenth century, when William Gerouis, after having been treacherously deprived of his sight and otherwise maimed, renounced the world; and, uniting with his nephews, Hugh and Robert de Grentemaisnil, brought considerable possessions to the endowment of this abbey.  The abbey was at all times protected by the especial favor of the kings of France.  No payment or service could be demanded from its monks; they acknowledged no master without their own walls, besides the sovereign himself; they were entitled to exemption from every kind of burthen; and they had the privilege of being empowered to castellate the convent, and to compel the people of the surrounding district to contribute their assistance for the purpose.

St. Evroul, however, principally claims our attention, as the sanctuary where Ordericus Vitalis, to use his own expressions, “delighted in obedience and poverty.”—­This most valuable writer was an Englishman; his native town being Attingesham, on the Severn, where he was born in the year 1075.  He was sent to school at Shrewsbury, and there received the first rudiments, both of the humanities and of ecclesiastical education.  In the tenth year of his age, his father, Odelerius, delivered the boy to the care of the monk Rainaldus.  The weeping father parted from the weeping son, and they never saw each other more.  Ordericus crossed the sea, and arrived in Normandy, an exile, as he describes himself, and “hearing, like Joseph in Egypt, a language which he understood not.”  In the eleventh year of his age, he received the tonsure from the hands of Mainerius, the abbot of St. Evroul.  In the thirty-third year of his age, he was ordained a priest; and thenceforward his life wore away in study and tranquillity.  Aged and infirm, he completed his Ecclesiastical History, in the sixty-seventh year of his age; and this great and valuable work ends with his auto-biography, which is written in an affecting strain of simplicity and piety.—­The Ecclesiastical History of Ordericus is divided into parts:  the first portion contains an epitome of the sacred and profane history of the world, beginning with the incarnation, and ending with Pope Innocent IInd.  The second, and more important division, contains the history of Normandy, from the first invasion of the country, down to the year 1141.—­Though professedly an ecclesiastical historian, yet Ordericus Vitalis is exceedingly copious in his details of secular events; and it is from these that his chronicle derives its importance and curiosity.  It was first published by Duchesne, in his collection of Norman historians, a work which is now of rare occurrence, and it has never been reprinted.