this consisted chiefly of theology--the writings of the Fathers and of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian commentators and theologians, ending with Philip’s contemporaries, St. Bernard, Gilbert de la Porrée, Hildebert of Tours, and Hugh of St. Victor, and his metropolitan, Hugh of Amiens. Wise in the wisdom of this world, the bishop possessed the whole _Corpus Juris Civilis_ in five volumes, as well as the leading authorities on canon law, Burchard, St. Ives, and the _Decretum_ of Gratian. He had none of the Roman poets, although they were not unknown to Norman writers of his age, but a fair selection of prose works of a literary and philosophical character--Cicero and Quintilian, Seneca and the Younger Pliny, besides the mediæval version of Plato’s _Timæus_. There is a goodly sprinkling of the Roman historians most in vogue in the Middle Ages, Cæsar, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Florus, Eutropius, and the Latin version of Josephus, besides such of their mediæval successors as came nearest to Anglo-Norman affairs. Science was confined to Pliny’s _Natural History_ and two anonymous treatises on mathematics and astronomy, while the practical arts were represented by Palladius on agriculture and Vegetius on tactics. On the whole a typically Norman library, deficient on the imaginative side, but strong in orthodox theology, in law, and in history; not in all respects an up-to-date collection, since it contained none of those logical works of Aristotle which were transforming European thought, and, save for a treatise of Adelard of Bath, showed no recognizable trace of the new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had “discoursed allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems of the Prophets.”[55] After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the confused but valuable _Gesta_ of William of Jumièges, at last restored to us in a critical edition,[56] the _Chronicle_ of Robert of Torigni, and especially the great _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis, the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Norman historiography and the most important historical work written in France in the twelfth century.