84 
Rt. Rev. Dr. Gasquet on the other, hoth able and impartial 
historians, bear testimony to the fact of the wholesale and 
unscrupulous destruction of vast numbers of rare and valuable 
books and manuscripts through the ignorance and fanaticism 
of Henry the Eighth’s Inquisitors and Commissioners. 
In Oxford—-the city of learning and scholarship in the 16th 
Century—-cartioads of valuable books and MSS. were removed 
from Merton College, from Balliol, and New College, and 
ruthlessly destroyed. 
“In many of those old illuminated books, done by pious 
devotees in retired abbeys years ago, standing silent among 
the corn-seas ; there are wrought into the borders of the 
Gospels and other books, the whole life and soul and _ history 
of the men who did them, but tenderly veiled. In a remote 
corner of a crowded page there may be trivial forms that 
ring out to the mental ear like huge golden bells in the 
eternal clime.’’ 
Petrus Blesensis was a type of the class of students who, 
in the 11th and 12th Centuries, assisted in those notable 
collections of ancient literature, religious and secular, in the 
monasteries of St. Albans, Westminster, Canterbury, Croyland, 
Abingdon, and Bath; the last named was second only to St. 
Albans, and was celebrated not on'y for its relics, but especially 
for its library, the nucleus of which was formed by A#lphege 
(born at Bath and one of the first Abbots of the monastery 
there), with the generous assistance of King Eadgar after his 
coronation in Bath Abbey Church, A.D. 973. In the year 
1167 Peter left the University of Paris for Sicily, in company 
with the Bishop of Palermo. Here he entered on a wider 
sphere of usefulness. He was at once appointed tutor to the 
young King William II., who, when he had completed his 
education, made him Keeper of the Privy Seal, and, subse- 
quently, Secretary to Queen Eleanor. He, however, dis- 
liked Court life, and sought ecclesiastical employment, either 
in the service of the Church, or under the immediate direction 
of the Pope. 
The King reluctantly gave him permission to retire, and in 
1170 Henry II. invited him to England, where he spent the 
remainder of his life, frequently visiting the Continent on 
diplomatic business of State, or in arranging theological 
disputes between dignitaries of the Church and the Pope. 
In 1173 he is found engaged in a mission from the King to 
Paris, where for a time he entered the service of the Arch- 
