Malmesbury the main thread is often of less real value than the mass of varied adornment and illustration with which it is overlaid. William is no Bæda; but, Bæda excepted, there are few of our medieval historians who can vie with him in the telling of a story. His long and frequent digressions into foreign affairs are often of great intrinsic value, and they show a depth of insight into the history of other nations and a cosmopolitan breadth of thought and feeling quite without parallel in his time. His penetration into individual characters, his power of seizing upon their main features and sketching them to the life in a few rapid skilful strokes--as in his pictures of the Norman kings or of the Angevin counts--has perhaps not many rivals at any time. Even when his stories are most utterly worthless in themselves, there is a value in the light which they throw upon the writer’s own temper or on that of the age in which he lived. Not a few of them have a further interest as fragments saved from the wreck of a popular literature whose very existence, but for William and his fellow-historians, we might never have known. The Norman conquest had doomed to gradual extinction a vast growth of unwritten popular verse which, making its way with the wandering gleeman into palace and minster, hall and cottage, had coloured the whole social life and thought of England for four hundred years. The gleeman’s days were numbered. He had managed to hold his ground against the growing hostility of the Church; but the coming of the stranger had fatally narrowed his sphere of influence. His very language was unintelligible to the nobles who sat in the seat of his former patrons; _jongleur_ and _ménestrel_ from over sea had taken in the king’s court and the baron’s castle the place which the gleeman had once filled in the halls of ealdorman and thegn, and only the common people still hailed his appearance as a welcome break in the monotonous drudgery of their daily life. Before his day was quite over, however, the new school of patriotic historians had arisen; and they plunged into the mass of traditional and romantic lore of which he was the depositary as into a treasure-house from whose stores they might fill up the gaps and deck the bare outlines of the structure which they were building up on the meagre foundations of the Chronicle. Florence was the first to enter upon this somewhat dangerous process. William drank more deeply of a stream whose source lay at his own door: a simple English ballad which the country-folk around Malmesbury in his day still chanted as they went about their work was the spell by which S. Ealdhelm had drawn their forefathers to listen, first to his singing and then to his preaching, four hundred years before.[220] The same spell of song, handed on from generation to generation, and passing from the gleeman’s lips into the pages of the twelfth century historians with William at their head, has transformed the story of