Peter of Blois did not take criticism well, which was unfortunate because his career as a member of the secular clergy made him extremely vulnerable to several different traditions of satire and invective. We detect what would appear to be a persecution complex in an epistolary tract that he wrote to an anonymous regular canon sometime around 1198, a tract titled Invectiva in depravatorem in most of the extant manuscripts.1 Peter's unknown adversary must have hit his mark, for the tract responds passionately and defensively to protect Peter's reputation from charges that he had a less-than-stellar intellect, that as a secular cleric his morality could not match that of his monastic counterparts, and, perhaps most damagingly, that he had played an inappropriate role in secular affairs at the English royal court. Indeed, it is when he turns to his role as a secular cleric at the courts of the great that the tract reaches its rhetorical climax. ‘You call a man a flatterer of princes and an enemy of holy orders, and you do not even know him!’ His indignation obviously aroused, he continues: ‘The Spirit of God is my spirit's witness that never was I a vendor of oil, nor am I wont to encourage magnates in their sins.’

Peter's language here is instantly recognizable as that of so-called courtly criticism, the attack on the culture of secular courts and especially of clerical involvement in secular government that was so prevalent in the late twelfth century.