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HANDWRITING 549
by the new French literature, which was now spreading like
wildfire across Europe. The French language has no great place
in the specialized history of handwriting, but its social inv
portance in medieval England was immense. So French in/
deed did society become that a local offshoot arose in England,
with a literature of its own, known as Anglo/Norman: and
this, we may suspect, meant more to the tiny minority who
then aspired to 'education' than all the Latin learning of the
period. Yet in the long period, the most important ofpost/Con/ quest developments was the increased knowledge of Latin
which had always been c
in short supply* among the Anglo/
Saxons. Learning and letters in England were at last caught up
into the main stream of European civilization, and at the very
moment when the religious
life of medieval Europe was at its
highest pitch
offervour. The new monastic orders the Clun/
iacs, the Cistercians, the Canons Regular, and the Gilber/
tines were heavily endowed by the new French nobility.
Scores of new monasteries were founded, which not only col/
lected great libraries, but were themselves, not seldom, writing
centres of repute. The old Benedictine houses of Anglo/Saxon
times, soon full of French/speaking and Latin/minded monks
foundations like Canterbury, Worcester, Durham, and
Winchester continued to produce Latin books in their
scriptoria, which were masterpieces of calligraphy, though the
French minuscule in which they were now written was rather
different from that of pre/Conquest days. In the twelfth cen/
tury the best elements of continental learning were thus fused
with the older English tradition, while in the thirteenth a new
foreign stimulus was supplied by the mendicant orders of
Friars, especially the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose
houses became centres of learning and writing. In the British
Museum, the Bodleian, the college libraries of Oxford and
Cambridge, our old cathedrals, and even in private hands,
finely written Latin manuscripts of these centuries survive in
thousands: a great field for palaeographers, still less than halt*
explored.
Yet, though today we value the middle ages chiefly for their