The new intellectual movement, however, was by no means confined to the cloister. Clerk and layman had their share in it; king and queen encouraged it warmly, and their sympathy with the patriotic revival which animated it was marked enough to excite the mockery of their Norman courtiers, who nicknamed them “Godric and Godgifu.”[224] Learning and culture of every kind found a ready welcome at the court; Henry never forgot the favourite maxim of his youth, that “an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.”[225] His tastes were shared by his good queen Maude, who had received in her aunt’s convent at Romsey such an education as was probably given to few women of her time; and in her later years, when the king’s manifold occupations beyond sea left her alone in her palace at Westminster, the crowd of poor and sick folk on whom she bestowed her boundless charities was almost equalled by that of the scholars and poets who vied with each other to gain her ear by some new feat of melody or of rime.[226] Her stepson Earl Robert of Gloucester was renowned as a scholar no less than as a warrior and a statesman; to him William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief historical works, as to a comrade and an equal in the world of letters; it may even be that the “Robert” of whom we once catch a glimpse, sitting in the library at Malmesbury, eagerly turning over its treasures, and suggesting plans of work to the willing friend at his side, is no other than the king’s son.[227] The secular clergy had no mind to be outstripped by the regulars in literary activity; Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, a nephew of the justiciar, urged his archdeacon Henry of Huntingdon to compose a _History of the English_ in emulation of the _Gesta Regum_. Nor did history alone absorb the intellectual energy of the time. Natural science had its followers, among them the king himself, who studied it in characteristically practical fashion at Woodstock, where he kept a menagerie full of lions, leopards, camels, lynxes and other strange beasts collected from all parts of the world;[228] and the “Bestiary” of an Anglo-Norman poet, Philip de Thaun, found a patroness in his second queen, Adeliza of Louvain. A scholar of old English race, Adelard of Bath, carried his researches into a wider field. Towards the close of the eleventh century he had crossed the sea to study in the schools of Tours and Laon. At the latter place he set up a school of his own, but he soon quitted it to enter upon a long course of wandering in distant lands. He crossed the Alps, made his way to the great medical school at Salerno, thence into Greece and Asia Minor, and finally, it seems, to the great centre of Arab culture and learning at Bagdad, or what we now call Cairo. Thence, after seven years’ absence, he returned to England soon after the accession of Henry I., and published his first book, a philosophical allegory dedicated to Bishop William of Syracuse, whose acquaintance he had made in his travels. He next opened