One of the most striking features of the court was the group of great lawyers which surrounded the king. The official nobility trained at the Exchequer and Curia Regis, and bound together by the daily work of administering justice, formed a class which was quite unknown anywhere on the continent. It was not till a generation later that a few clerks learned in civil law were called to the king's court of justice in France, and the system was not developed till the time of Louis IX.; in Germany such a reform did not take place for centuries. But in England judges and lawyers were already busied in building up the scientific study of English law. Richard Fitz-Neal, son of Bishop Nigel of Ely and great-nephew of Roger of Salisbury, and himself Treasurer of the Exchequer and Bishop of London, began in 1178 the _Dialogus de Scaccario_, an elaborate account of the whole system of administration. Glanville, the king's justiciar, drew up probably the oldest version which we have of the Conqueror's laws and the English usages which still prevailed in the inferior jurisdictions. A few years later he wrote his _Tractatus de Legibus Angliae_, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the Norman lawyers for the King's Court and its travelling judges. Thomas Brown, the king's almoner, besides his daily record of the king's doings, left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom. The court became too a great school of history. From the reign of Alfred to the end of the Wars of the Roses there is but one break in the contemporary records of our history, a break which came in the years that followed the outbreak of feudal lawlessness. In 1143 William of Malmesbury and Orderic ceased writing; in 1151 the historians who had carried on the task of Florence of Worcester also ceased; three years later the Saxon Chronicle itself came to an end, and in 1155 Henry of Huntingdon finished his work. From 1154 to 1170 we have, in fact, no contemporary chronicle. In the historical schools of the north compilers had laboured at Hexham, at Durham, and in the Yorkshire monasteries to draw together valuable chronicles founded on the work of Baeda; but in 1153 the historians of Hexham closed their work, and those of Durham in 1161. Only the monks of Melrose still carried on their chronicle as far as 1169. The great tradition, however, was once more worthily taken up by the men of Henry's court, kindled by the king's intellectual activity. A series of chronicles appeared in a few years, which are unparalleled in Europe at the time. At the head of the court historians stood the treasurer, Richard Fitz Neal, the author of the _Dialogus_, who in 1172 began a learned work in three columns, treating of the ecclesiastical, political, and miscellaneous history of England in his time--a work which some scholars say is included in the _Gesta Henrici II_ that was once