Learned’s _Cronica General_ was translated by his order. The only edition that we have, _Historia Geral de Hespanha_ (1863), is cut short in the reign of King Ramiro (cap. ccii, p. 192). The first ‘O’ of the preface in the manuscript contains the king in purple robe and crown of gold, pen in hand, with a book before him. The style is primitive, often a succession of short sentences beginning with ‘And’.[108] In the convents brief lives of saints, portions of the Bible, prayers and regulations were written in Portuguese. Thus we have thirteenth-or fourteenth-century fragments of the rules of S. Bento, _Fragmentos de uma versão antiga da regra de S. Bento_, with its traces of a Latin original (e. g. _os desprezintes Deos_ = _contemnentes Deum_); the _Actos dos Apostolos_, written in the middle of the fifteenth century by Frei Bernardo de Alcobaça and Frei Nicolao Vieira, that is, copied by them from an older manuscript; the eloquent prayers (_Libro de Horas_) translated by another Alcobaça monk, Frei João Claro (†1520?); the _Historias abreviadas do Testamento Velho_, printed from a manuscript of the fourteenth century, or of the thirteenth retouched in the fourteenth. The translation is close; the style foreshadows that of the _Leal Conselheiro_. The importance of these and other fragmentary versions of the Bible, in which there can rarely be a doubt as to the meaning of the words, is obvious. Extracts from the _Vida de Eufrosina_ and the _Vida de Maria Egipcia_, published in 1882 by Jules Cornu from the manuscripts formerly in the Monastery of Alcobaça, now in the Torre do Tombo, show that they were written in vigorous if primitive prose (14th c.). _A Lenda dos Santos Barlaam e Josaphat_ is perhaps a little later (end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century). The _Visão de Tundalo_, of which the Latin original, _Visio Tundali_, was written by Frei Marcos not long after the date of the vision (1140), exists in two Portuguese versions, probably both of the fifteenth century (Monastery of Alcobaça). The _Vida de Santo Aleixo_ also exists in two codices belonging to the middle and beginning of the fifteenth century, and Dr. Esteves Pereira, who published the latter, considers that the variants point to an earlier manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth or end of the thirteenth century. To about the same period (14th-15th c.) belong the _Lenda de Santo Eloy_, the _Vida de Santo Amaro_, the _Vida de Santa Pelagia_, and many similar short devout treatises and legends which concern literature less than the development of the Portuguese language. Both literature and philology are interested in the early fifteenth-century work printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos from the manuscript in the Vienna _Hofbibliothek_: _O Livro de Esopo_, which consists not of direct translations[109] from _Exopo greguo_ of Antioch but of _estorias ffremosas de animalias_, told in the manner of Aesop, half a century