The anecdotes and out-of-the-way pieces of information in the 'Chronica Majora,' which may be said to represent the _paragraphs_ of modern journalism, are countless. Brother Matthew enlivens his history with these cross-lights at every page, and what gives to these scraps an added charm is that Matthew himself seems to be always with us when he prattles on. Not even Herodotus has succeeded more entirely in impressing his quaint personality upon his narrative. It is always something which he has seen, or heard from some living man who saw it with his own eyes.
'There was my friend John of Basingstoke, had studied at Paris, and a wonder of learning he was, but he told me himself that his best teacher by far was the young lady Constantina, daughter of an archbishop she. Archbishop of Athens, too--archbishops may marry out there! Before she was twenty she knew all that men may know; she was worth two universities of Paris any day; she foretold the coming of plagues and storms, and eclipses--and--more wonderful still--the coming of earthquakes too: and John of Basingstoke was her scholar, and whatever he knew that was deep and rare, he learnt it of the lady Constantina, the Archbishop's daughter.'
Matthew is very great when he has to tell of omens and portents:
'We were scurvily treated by Pope Innocent III.,' he says, 'in the days of Abbot John. Spite of all our privileges and indulgences, the Pope would have him come to Rome every third year; a sore burden and harm to us all. Forthwith evil omens came. Thrice in three years was our tower struck by lightning. After that wrong of his Holiness it was no wonder that the impression of the papal seal in wax, which we had taken good care to fix on the top of the steeple, availed not to keep off the thunderbolt--small good you see in that kind of thing.'
Besides the miscellaneous paragraphs, there are periodical reports of the weather, and the storms, and the droughts, and the harvests. Moreover, there are what answer to our police reports, and details of criminal proceedings against Jew and Gentile, and births and deaths and marriages, and now and then brief notes upon the state of the markets, and sometimes hints and reflections upon the desirability of certain reforms in Church and State; and all this not in the spirit of modern journalism, which at its best too often bears the marks of haste, and betrays the literary soldier of fortune paid for his work at so much a column, but genuine, hearty, throbbing with a certain passionate loyalty to a tradition, or an idea which you may say is exploded, grotesque, or fanciful, but which in the 13th century honest men and devout ones lived by and lived for, and were trying in their own way to carry out into action.