The academic movement was not all clear gain.  The humanism, of the twelfth century was crushed beneath the weight of the specialised science and encyclopaedic learning of the thirteenth.  We should seek in vain among most theologians or the philosophers of our period for any spark of literary art; and the tendency dominant in them affected for evil all works written in Latin.  Even the historians show a falling away from the example of William of Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden.  The one English chronicler of the thirteenth century who is a considerable man of letters, Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half of it, before the academic tradition was fully established, and even with him prolixity impairs the art without injuring the colour of his work.  The age of Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism, is recorded in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry bones live.  Walter of Hemingburgh, the most attractive historian of the time, belongs to the next generation:  and his excellencies are only great in comparison with his fellows.  Something of this decadence may be attributed to the falling away of the elder monastic types, whose higher life withered up from want of able recruits, for the secular and mendicant careers offered opportunities so stimulating that few men of purpose, or earnest spiritual character, cared to enter a Benedictine or a Cistercian house of religion.  Something more may be assigned to the growing claims of the vulgar tongue on literary aspirants.  But the chief cause of the literary defects of thirteenth century writers must be set down to the doctrine that the study of “arts”—­of grammar, rhetoric and the rest—­was only worthy of schoolboys and novices, and was only a preliminary to the specialised faculties which left little room for artistic presentation.  Science in short nearly killed literature.

It was the same with the vulgar tongues as with Latin.  French remained the common language of the higher classes of English society, and the history of French literature belongs to the history of the western world rather than to that of England.  The share taken in it by English-born writers is less important than in the great age of romance when the contact of Celt and Norman on British soil added the Arthurian legend to the world’s stock of poetic material.  The practical motive, which destroyed the art of so many Latin writers, impaired the literary value of much written in the vernacular.  We have technical works in French and even in English, such as Walter of Henley’s treatise on Husbandry, composed in French for the guidance of stewards of manors, and translated, it is said by Grosseteste, into English for the benefit of a wider public.  Grosseteste is also said to have drawn up in French a handbook of rules for the management of a great estate, and he certainly wrote French poetry.  The legal literature, written in Latin or French, and illustrated by such names as Bracton, Britton, and “Fleta,”