The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout Christendom; miracles were wrought at the martyr’s tomb; he was canonized, and became the most popular of English saints.  The stately “martyrdom” which rose over his relics at Canterbury seemed to embody the triumph which his blood had won.  But the contest had in fact revealed a new current of educated opinion which was to be more fatal to the Church than the reforms of the king.  Throughout it Henry had been aided by a silent revolution which now began to part the purely literary class from the purely clerical.  During the earlier ages of our history we have seen literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself against the ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical privileges.  Almost all our writers from Baeda to the days of the Angevins are clergy or monks.  The revival of letters which followed the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bee had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature, patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this time a part of every religious house of any importance.  But the literature which found this religious shelter was not so much ecclesiastical as secular.  Even the philosophical and devotional impulse given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics.  The literary revival which followed the Conquest took mainly the old historical form.  At Durham Turgot and Simeon threw into Latin shape the national annals to the time of Henry the First with an especial regard to northern affairs, while the earlier events of Stephen’s reign were noted down by two Priors of Hexham in the wild border-land between England and the Scots.

These however were the colourless jottings of mere annalists; it was in the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern’s lives of the English saints or in Eadmer’s record of the struggle of Anselm against the Red King and his successor, that we see the first indications of a distinctively English feeling telling on the new literature.  The national impulse is yet more conspicuous in the two historians that followed.  The war-songs of the English conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, an Archdeacon of Huntingdon, who wove them into annals compiled from Baeda, and the Chronicle; while William, the librarian of Malmesbury, as industriously collected the lighter ballads which embodied the popular traditions of the English kings.  It is in William above all others that we see the new tendency of English literature.  In himself, as in his work, he marks the fusion of the conquerors and the conquered, for he was of both English and Norman parentage and his sympathies were as divided