VI.] ENGLISHMEN IN ITALY. 151 monastic interest, which found at Rheims such powerful protection in the Archbishop William of Champagne and the great family to which he belonged. Of Ralph of Sarr as a literary man I only know that he wrote fairly good Latin. These three men, you will observe, although sons of the Convent of Canterbury, were not monks; they were pupils of the great school of the monastery and, as clerks of the primate, affiliated to that Church. When they received foreign promotion they had to be released by a formal document from their allegiance to the Mother Church. John of Poictiers was one of the clerks whom Archbishop Baldwin, and Hubert after him, would have made canons of that college at Lambeth which they intended to set up as a centre of ecclesiastical learning and dignity, emancipated from monastic restrictions ; a scheme which, if it had succeeded, might have possibly fixed the University life of England, and its ecclesiastical centre, in London itself. Not to waste time upon minor names, we go on to Italy : there the greatest name of course is that of Nicolas Breakspere, the pupil of the Monastery of S. Alban's ; the great legate of the north, the confidential friend of John of Salisbury, the one English pope, and the bestower of Ireland on Henry II. His life and career lie only on the very edge of the period which we are considering; and I can say no more of him than that he is one of those figures of medieval history of which what little we know is suggestive of a great deal more that we should desire to know. He was unquestionably a great pope ; that is, a great constructive pope, not a controversial one, like those who preceded and followed ; a man of organising power and missionary zeal ; a reformer, and, although he did not take a wise way of showing it, a true Englishman. Next in dignity to him would come, if we were quite sure of anything respecting him, the great Robertus Pullus, who is said to have been