an incapacity for business, perhaps a defect of temper. So he died an archdeacon—not of Bath indeed, but of London; and his latest letters are pathetic protests to the pope that he has no revenue to support his title, and that the new precentor of St Paul's has ousted him from his stall which was the second in honour to that of the dean.
It is impossible to make a hero of Peter, but his story has much of human interest, and it runs in and out among the great events of a fascinating period of history. His letters indeed are indispensable to the historian; for again and again they take him behind the scenes. Not only do they present him with a famous picture of K. Henry II, but they show him the back-stairs of the court, and quaintly portray the sufferings of the courtiers of second rank as they were hurried from place to place, wearied and famished, fleeced by officials, and distracted by the caprice of a monarch for ever changing his plans. Clerical and monastic life is also vividly depicted; the bishop with his hawks, his nephews and his flatterers; the monk who would leave the Chartreuse for a less exacting order, and is urged to join the Cistercians rather than the less devout Cluniacs with their tedious musical repetitions and 'farcing' of psalms; the abbot, so lately a humble, contemplative monk, now pestered with legal business and forced to expend 'the patrimony of the Crucified' not on feeding the poor, but on over-feeding proud nobles who else would work woe to his house.
Peter collected and published his letters, as he tells us, at K. Henry's request. The collection must have appeared in more than one edition; it never was arranged chronologically, and as it grew it became an inextricable tangle which no editor has yet attempted to unravel. Some two hundred letters are preserved which are certainly genuine, though some of them present inconsistencies, which may be partly due to the writer's own revision at a later date. An accurate text is greatly needed, and there is a multitude of manuscripts waiting to be used. Meanwhile something can be done to straighten out Peter's own story, and to correct the mistakes of fact and date which mar the current accounts of his career.
Of the father of Peter of Blois we should know nothing had he not been unkindly spoken of after his death in a controversy concerning Peter's claim to the provostship of Chartres. Peter in his indignant rejoinder (Ep. 49) tells us that his father and mother were of good Breton stock; that his father was an exile, of small means but not actually poor, of high character and ability, though not trained in letters. Of other members of his family we hear only of William his brother, who had some talent in writing poems and plays, and who
