St. Evroul, however, principally claims our attention, as the sanctuary
where Ordericus Vitalis, to use his own expressions, "delighted in
obedience and poverty."--This most valuable writer was an Englishman;
his native town being Attingesham, on the Severn, where he was born in
the year 1075. He was sent to school at Shrewsbury, and there received
the first rudiments, both of the _humanities_ and of ecclesiastical
education. In the tenth year of his age, his father, Odelerius,
delivered the boy to the care of the monk Rainaldus. The weeping father
parted from the weeping son, and they never saw each other more.
Ordericus crossed the sea, and arrived in Normandy, an exile, as he
describes himself, and "hearing, like Joseph in Egypt, a language which
he understood not." In the eleventh year of his age, he received the
tonsure from the hands of Mainerius, the abbot of St. Evroul. In the
thirty-third year of his age, he was ordained a priest; and
thenceforward his life wore away in study and tranquillity. Aged and
infirm, he completed his _Ecclesiastical History_, in the sixty-seventh
year of his age; and this great and valuable work ends with his
auto-biography, which is written in an affecting strain of simplicity
and piety.
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