In the course of the twelfth century the leadership in learning passes from the regular to the secular clergy, and the monastic schools decline before the cathedral schools of Laon, Tours, Chartres, Orleans, and Paris, two of which, Paris and Orleans, soon break the bounds of the older curriculum and develop into universities. As the current of scholars sets toward these new centres, Normandy is left at one side; no longer a leader, its students must learn their theology and philosophy at Paris, their law at Orleans and Bologna, their medicine at Salerno and Montpellier. The principal Norman philosopher of the new age, William of Conches, the tutor of Henry II, is associated with Paris rather than with the schools of Normandy. Perhaps the most original work of the pioneer of the new science, the _Questiones naturales_ of Adelard of Bath, is dedicated to a Norman bishop, Richard of Bayeux, but its author was not a Norman, nor do we find Norman names among those who drank deep at the new founts of Spain and Sicily. For a measure of the intellectual activity of the Norman monasteries and cathedrals nothing could serve better than an examination of the contents of their libraries, where we might judge for ourselves what books they acquired and copied and read. This unfortunately we can no longer make. The library of Bec, partly destroyed by fire in the seventeenth century, was scattered to the four winds of heaven in the eighteenth, and while the legislation of 1791 provided for the transfer of such collections to the public depositories of the neighboring towns, the libraries of Avranches, Alençon, and Rouen, reënforced by the Bibliothèque Nationale, have garnered but a small part of the ancient treasures of Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul, and the establishments of the lower Seine. Works of importance as well as curiosities still survive--autograph corrections of Lanfranc, the originals of the great histories of Robert of Torigni and Ordericus Vitalis, service-books throwing light on the origins of the liturgical drama, cartularies of churches and abbeys,--but for a more comprehensive view of the resources of the twelfth century we must turn to the contemporary catalogues which have come down to us from the cloisters of Saint-Évroul, Bec, Lire, and Fécamp, and the cathedral of Rouen. After all, as that delightful academician _Silvestre Bonnard_ has reminded us, there is no reading so easy, so restful, or so seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts; and there is no better guide to the silence and the peace of the monastic library, as one may still taste them in the quiet of the Escorial or Monte Cassino. Let us take the most specific example, the collection of one hundred and forty volumes bequeathed to Bec by Philip, bishop of Bayeux, at his death in 1164, or rather the one hundred and thirteen which reached the monastery, twenty-seven having fallen by the way and being hence omitted from the catalogue. Like the other libraries of the time,