Peter of Clugni, known as Peter the Venerable, became abbot of the monastery in 1122. Clugni, the _Caput Ordinis_, was at that time the most considerable of the Benedictine foundations, and might, in fact, be termed the most important monastery of its age. The correspondence of Peter and of his secretary Nicholas, who was for a time also secretary of Bernard of Clairvaux, forms an important contribution to the monastic history of the country and contains not a few references throwing light on the literary conditions of the time. Nicholas had, in addition to his business as the Abbot’s amanuensis, what Mabillon calls a _librorum commercium_ with various persons. It appears from his letters that he used to lend books on condition that a copy should be returned with the volume lent. Nicholas, while a diligent scribe and an active-minded scholar, was discovered later, to be a very untrustworthy person. He left Clairvaux with books, money, and gold service that did not belong to him, and also (which Abbot Bernard mentions as a special grievance) with three seals, his own, the prior’s, and the abbot’s. His further career was a checkered one, but does not belong to this narrative. Abbot Peter of Clugni, writing to Master Peter of Poitiers in 1170, lays some emphasis on the inadvisability of devoting too much time to the study of the ancients. “See, now, without the study of Plato, without the disputations of the Academy, without the subtleties of Aristotle, without the teaching of philosophers, the place and the way of happiness are discovered.... You run from school to school, and why are you labouring to teach and to be taught? Why is it that you are seeking through thousands of words and multiplied labours, what you might, if you pleased, obtain in plain language and with little labour? Why, vainly studious, are you reciting with the comedians, lamenting with the tragedians, trifling with the metricians, deceiving with the poets and deceived with the philosophers? Why is it that you are now taking so much trouble about what is not in fact philosophy but should rather (if I may say it without offence) be called foolishness.” Counsels of this kind give some indication at least of the tendency in Poitiers, and doubtless also in Clugni, to devote to the old-time poetry and philosophy some of the hours which, under a stricter observance, should be reserved for the Scriptures or the Fathers. The venerable Abbot must himself have had some fairly comprehensive knowledge of the literature he was criticising, and the gentle satire of the phrase “deceived with the philosophers” does not give one the impression of coming from a clumsy-minded and ignorant monk such as Robertson describes Peter the Venerable to have been.