The persistent labour given by these monkish chroniclers to works, the interest and importance of which were largely outside the routine of their home monasteries and had in many cases no direct connection with religious observances, indicates that they were looking to a larger circle of readers than could be secured within the walls of their own homes. While the evidences concerning the arrangements for the circulation of these chronicles are at best but scanty, the inference is fairly to be drawn that through the interchange of books between the libraries of the monasteries, by means of the services of travelling monks, and in connection with the educational work of the majority of the monasteries, there came to be, as early as the ninth century, a very general circulation of the long series of chronicles among the scholarly readers of Europe. Even the literary style in which the majority of the chronicles were written gives evidence that the writers were addressing themselves, not to one locality or to restricted circles of readers, but to the world as they knew it, and that they also had an assured confidence in the preservation of their work for the service and information of future generations. The historian Stenzel (himself a Protestant) points out that these monkish historians wrote under certain exceptional advantages which secured for their work a larger amount of impartiality and of accuracy of statement than could safely be depended upon with, for instance, what might be called Court chronicles, that is to say, histories which were the work of writers attached to the Courts. The monks, said Stenzel, in daring to speak the truth of those in power, had neither family nor property to endanger, and their writings, prepared under the eye of their monastic superiors and under the sovereign protection of the Church, escaped at once the coercion or the influence of contemporary rulers and the dangers of flattery for immediate popular appreciation.[78] In the same strain, Montalembert contends that the literary monks worked neither for gain nor for fame, but simply for the glory of God. They wrote amidst the peace and freedom of the cloister in all the candour and sincerity of their minds. Their only ambition was to be faithful interpreters of the teaching which God gives to men in history by reminding them of the ruin of the proud, the exaltation of the humble, and the terrible certainty of eternal judgment. He goes on to say that if princes and nobles never wearied of founding, endowing, and enriching monasteries, neither did the monks grow weary of chronicling the services and the exploits of their benefactors, in order to transmit these to posterity. Thus did they pay to the Catholic chivalry a just debt of gratitude.[79]