and Jerusalem. There were few better places to collect materials for the writing of history, and there was no one who could make better use of them than Ordericus. He was fully launched in his great work by 1123, and he kept at it throughout the remaining eighteen years of his life, putting it aside in the winter when his fingers grew numb with the cold, but resuming it each spring in the clear round hand which meets us in many a manuscript of Saint-Évroul, and offering it at the end to future generations, a monument more lasting than the granite obelisk erected to his memory in 1912. His original purpose was limited to a history of his monastery, but the plan soon widened to include the principal movements of his time and finally grew to the idea of a universal history, beginning, indeed, with the Christian era instead of with the more usual starting-point of the Creation. Nevertheless, even in its final form the work of Ordericus is not a general history of the Christian centuries, for the general portion is chiefly introductory and comparatively brief; his real theme is Norman history, centring, of course, round the vicissitudes of his convent and the adjacent territory, but also giving a large place to the deeds of the Normans in that greater Normandy which they had created beyond the sea, in England, in Italy, and in Palestine. He is thus not only Norman but pan-Norman. The plan, or rather lack of plan, of his thirteen books reflects the changes of design and the interruptions which the work underwent; there
