Nor was the new intellectual activity confined to the court. The whole country shared in the movement. Good classical learning might be had in England, if for the new-fashioned studies of canon law and theology men had to go abroad; but conservative scholars grumbled that now law and physics had become such money-making sciences that they were beginning to cut short the time which used to be given to classical studies. Gerald of Wales mourned over the bringing in from Spain of "certain treatises, lately found and translated, pretended to have been written by Aristotle," which tended to foster heresy. The cathedral schools, such as York, Lincoln, or London, played the part of the universities in our own day. The household of the Archbishop of Canterbury had been the earliest and the most distinguished centre of learning. Of all the remarkable men of the day there was none to compare with John of Salisbury, the friend of Theobald and of Becket, and his book, the __Polycraticus_ (1156-59), was perhaps the most important work of the time. It begins by recounting the follies of the court, passes on to the discussion of politics and philosophy, deals with the ethical systems of the ancients, and hints at a new system of his own, and is everywhere enriched by wide reading and learning acquired at the schools of Chartres and Paris London could boast of the historian Ralph of Diceto, always ready with a quotation from the classics amid the court news and politics of his day. Monasteries rivaled one another in their collection of books and in drawing up of chronicles. If their brethren were more famed for piety than for literary arts, they would borrow some noted man of learning, or even a practised scribe, who would for the occasion write under a famous name. The friends and followers of Becket told on every side and in every way, in prose or poetry, in Latin or Norman-French, the story of their master's martyrdom and miracles. The greatest historian of his day, William of Newburgh, was monk in a quiet little Yorkshire monastery. Gervase, a monk of Canterbury, began the Chronicle that bears his name in 1185. The historical workers of Durham, of Hexham, and of Melrose started into a new activity. A canon of the priory of St. Bartholomew's in London wrote before Henry's death a life of its founder Rahere, and noted the first cases received into the hospital. Joseph of Exeter, brother of Archbishop Baldwin, was the brilliant author of a Latin poem on the _Troy Story_, and of a poetic history of the first crusade. There was scarcely a religious house in the whole land which could not boast of some distinction in learning or literature.