of its rights by the new precentor of St Paul's embittered his old age, which must have been further saddened by the troubles of the Interdict. His property, which had been confiscated, was indeed given back to him immediately; but he died before peace had been restored to the Church. The exact date of his death is perhaps not quite certain: but, if it was not on 29 June 1211, it must have been in the early part of 1212.
The impression left on the reader's mind by a study of his letters, and of his life as reconstructed from his letters, is that Peter of Blois was an honest man. His honesty kept him poor, while it made him useful. If he be thought to have neglected his duties as archdeacon of Bath, it must be remembered that an archdeaconry was at that time a very usual source of income for a clerk in the king's service, that the office was chiefly of a judicial character and its functions could be discharged by a deputy, and that in Peter's case attendance not only upon the king, but also upon three archbishops in succession, was a plea of absence sufficient to satisfy his own conscience and to place him beyond reproach in the eyes of his contemporaries. It was not strictly a spiritual charge, it was not a cure of souls, and archdeacons were commonly not in priest's orders. Peter himself long resisted the pressure put upon him by more than one of his archiepiscopal patrons, as well as by a bishop of London, when they urged him to enter the priesthood, from which he shrank through a dread of its overwhelming responsibility. When at last he was ordained priest and had become the dean of Wolverhampton, his conscientiousness showed itself in a remarkable way. He laboured for some years to bring his canons to a life which should no longer be an open scandal to the church, and when his best efforts were in vain he resigned his deanery into the archbishop's hands, in the hope that the recalcitrant canons might be dispossessed in favour of Cistercian monks.
It may be hoped that this attempt to reconstruct the framework of Peter's career will do something to restore confidence in his general accuracy as a historical witness. The late Mr. W. G. Searle of Queens' College, Cambridge, devoted much time and labour to the collation of the MSS of his letters and to the investigation of the statements which they record. His materials, preserved in the University Library, will prove of great value to a future editor. But he was obsessed by the idea that nearly all the letters were the free composition of an anonymous writer, whom he called 'the epistolary Peter' in contrast to 'the historical Peter' whose story he did much to reconstitute from charters and other sources. When in 1912 he
