ABSTRACT
Matthew Paris was the most remarkable and prolific of the monk-historians of St Albans of the thirteenth century; a man of many talents, historian, hagiographer, draughtsman, artist and calligrapher; not an accurate historian, for he cared more for airing his prejudices than for historical accuracy, but a marvellous index to the prejudices and attitudes of well-informed Englishmen of the mid-thirteenth century - so long as we do not make the mistake of supposing that all his contemporaries had views so strongly held and eccentrically expressed as his. This passage was probably written in the late 1230s, and shows how quickly the new Order of Friars Minor had aroused the jealousy of a member of one of the old Benedictine houses. On Matthew, see R. Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge, 1958); this passage is from Chronica Maiora, ed. H. R. Luard (Rolls Series, London, 1876), Vol. 3, pp. 332–4; I have used the translation by J. A. Giles, Matthew Paris’s English History, Vol. 1 (edn. of 1889), pp. 5–6, slightly corrected.
