Moreover, the king called also to mind what he had himself seen in his early days, before all the harryings and burnings of recent times: how the churches of England had been well stored with books, and the clergy were numerous, but they had profited little by the books, because they could not understand them, as they were not written in their own language. At this point his eloquence rises to a dramatic pitch, and “It is,” he breaks out, “as if they had said: ‘Our ancestors, who were the masters of these sacred places, they loved wisdom, and by means of it they acquired wealth and left it to us. Here may yet be seen their traces, but we are not able to walk in their steps, forasmuch as we have now lost both the wealth and the wisdom, because we were not willing to bend our minds to that pursuit.’” Remembering all this, he had marvelled very exceedingly at those good scholars who were once so frequent in England, men who had completely mastered the Latin books, that they had not been willing to translate any part of them into their own language. But he soon answered himself and said, that they never could have anticipated the present utter decay, and it was their very zeal for learning which caused them to abstain from translating, because they thought that the path of education and knowledge lay through the study of languages. Then I remembered how the law of Moses was first known in Hebrew; and later, when the Greeks had learned it, they translated it into their own language, and all other books too. And later still the Latin people in the same manner, they by means of wise interpreters, translated all the books into their own speech. And so also did all the other Christian nations translate some portion of the books into their own speech.