Even the feudal nobles caught the prevailing temper. A baron was not content to have only his household dwarf or jester, he must have his household poet too. Intellectual interest and curiosity began to spread beyond the class of clerks to whom Latin, the language of learning and worship, was familiar, and a demand began to spring up for a popular literature which could be understood of the unlearned baron or burgher. Virgil and Statius and Ovid were translated into French. Wace in 1155 dedicated to Eleanor his translation into Norman-French of the _History of Geoffrey of Monmouth_, a book which came afterwards to be called the _Brut d'Engleterre_, and was one of the sources of the first important English poem, Layamon's _Brut_. Later on, in honour of Henry, Wace told in the _Roman de Rou_ the story of his Norman ancestors, and the poem, especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas--poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel, but marked by special characteristics of thought and feeling. Meanwhile English, as the speech of the common folk, still lived on as a tongue apart, a tongue so foreign to judges and barons and Courtiers that authors or transcribers could not copy half a dozen English lines without a mistake. The serfs and traders who spoke it were too far removed from the upper court circle to take into their speech foreign words or foreign grammatical forms; the songs which their minstrels sang from fair to fair only lived on the lips of the poor, and left no echo behind them. CHAPTER XI THE DEATH OF HENRY In the last nine years of Henry's reign his work lay elsewhere than in his English kingdom. They were years spent in a passionate effort to hold together the unwieldy empire he had so laboriously built up. On the death of Louis in 1180 the peaceful and timid traditions of his reign were cast aside by the warlike Philip, who had from childhood cherished a violent hatred against Henry, and who was bent on the destruction of rival powers, and the triumph of the monarchy in France. Henry's absorbing care, on the other hand, was to prevent war; and during the next four years he constantly forced reconciliation on the warring princes of France. "All who loved peace rejoiced at his coming," the chroniclers constantly repeat. "He had faith in the Lord, that if he crossed over he could make peace." "As though always at his coming peace should certainly be made."