Without the monks, says Marsham (a Protestant writer), we should have been as ignorant of our history as children.[74] England, converted by her monks, has special reason to be proud of the historians furnished by her abbeys.[75] One chronicler, Gildas, has painted with fiery touches the miseries of Great Britain after the departure of the Romans. To another, the Venerable Bede, author of the ecclesiastical history of Britain, we owe the detailed account of the Catholic Renaissance under the Saxons. Bede’s chronicle extends to the year 731. Its author died four years later. Among later monkish chroniclers may be mentioned Ingulphus, Abbot of Croyland, whose history extends to 1091; Vitalis, a monk of Shrewsbury, whose chronicle reached to 1141, and many others. The chronicle of Vitalis gives an animated picture of the struggle between the Saxons and the Normans, and of the vicissitudes during this period of the Church of England. Later monastic historians were: William of Malmesbury (_circa_ 1095-1143), Geoffrey of Monmouth (_circa_ 1090-1154), Henry of Huntingdon (_circa_ 1120-1180), Roger of Wendover (_circa_ 1169-1237), Matthew Paris (_circa_ 1185-1259), and Ralph Higden (_circa_ 1280-1370). Further reference to the work of these English chroniclers is made in the chapter on Books in England during the Manuscript Period. This series of monkish chronicles presents, says Montalembert, an inexhaustible amount of information as to the manners, laws, and ideas of the times, and unites with the important information of history the personal attractiveness of biography.[76] Among the chroniclers of France are to be noted S. Gregory of Tours; S. Abbon, of St. Germain des Prés, who wrote the history of the wars of King Eudes and an account of the sieges of Paris by the Normans; Frodoard, who died in 968, and who wrote the annals of the tenth century; Richer, whose history covers the period between 880 and 995; Helgaud, who wrote the life of King Robert; Aimoin, a monk of Fleury, who died in 1008, and who wrote a very curious life of S. Abbon and a record of the miracles at Fleury of S. Bénoît; Chabanais, a monk of St. Cybar in Angoulême, who died in 1028, and whose record reaches to 1025. It has been republished by Pertz in the fourth volume of the _Scriptores_. Raoul Glaber, a monk of St. Germain d’Auxerre, wrote a history of his own time in five books, which covers the period from the accession of Hugh Capet to 1046. Hugh, Abbot of Flavigny, wrote with considerable detail the history of the eleventh century. These various monkish chronicles have served as a basis for the first national and popular monuments of French history. The famous chronicles of S. Denys, which were written very early in Latin, were translated into French in the beginning of the thirteenth century. They contain the essence of the historic and poetic traditions of old France.