VI.] NORSEMEN AT COURT. H3 of Henry II, there was an embassy from the kings of Norway. Henry received the envoys, and sent them back with ambassadors of his own and large presents ; and the next year there was a similar transaction with Sweden. Here at once opens up a field of interesting investigation. Norway and Sweden were about as far from England as they are now, but they seem to have been even more neighbourly. The Norse settlements in the islands had not forgotten their origin. The Bishop of Sodor and Man was expected to seek consecration at Drontheim. Just before Henry's accession, the Bishop of Bergen had visited Fountains Abbey and obtained a colony of Cistercians for a cell in Norway itself, called, after that beautiful custom of the order, the House of Light. Again, in 1164, another Norwegian prelate appears in the royal accounts as receiving a gift of £3 6s. 8d. ; and again, in 1182, the Archbishop Eystein, of Nidros, was maintained for 17 weeks at the expense of the English Court. These two dates synchronise with the Norwegian revolutions under Magnus Herlingson and Swerre Birkbain, and we thus learn how the detailed accounts of those revolutions came into the English Chronicles of Benedict and Roger of Hoveden, and William of Newburgh : it was at St. Edmund's that Archbishop Eystein was entertained at the king's expense from August 1181 to February 1182. And this leads us on to the recollection that it was the Englishman Nicolas Breakspere who had been legate of the Roman see for life settlement of the Scandinavian churches, before he became pope as Adrian IV, and so iiberally bestowed the realm of Ireland on the king of the English. The intercourse with Germany under Frederick Barbarossa was steady and probably continuous ; for although there was little love lost between England and the empire, and the Hohenstaufen were always somewhat drawn to France, the quarrel of Henry with Becket and that of Frederick with