refined touches which belong to this class of compositions were not suited to the rude intelligences of the Englishspeaking population in the Norman period, and would have been utterly thrown away upon them. The only instance of a fabliau given by Ellis is the version of the Indian story before mentioned of the Seven Wise Masters, supposed to have been made from the French about the year 1330. Under the head of satire, there exists a curious poem, entitled the Land of Cokaygne, the date of which is not certainly known, though Warton is undoubtedly wrong in placing it as early as the twelfth century. It is a biting satire on the monastic orders, and bears the stamp of the flippant age of Boccaccio rather than that of the grave and earnest century of St. Bernard. Nothing is known about the author, nor is the French original, from which it was evidently taken, in existence. Of the metrical chroniclers, who, in imitation of Wace and his fellow-labourers, related the history of England in English verse for the entertainment of the laity, the earliest in date is Layamon, a monk of Ernley-on-Severn, in Gloucestershire, who about the close of the twelfth century produced an amplified imitation of Wace's Brut d'Angleterre. This curious work, the earliest existing poem of considerable magnitude in the English language, extends to about 14,000 long lines of four accents. To produce the effect of metre, Layamon employs both alliteration and rhyme, both of the rudest description; sometimes, too, he seems unable to achieve either the one or the other. The writer seems to have been balancing between the example of his French prototype, who uses rhyme, and the attractions of the old native Saxon poets, who employed nothing but alliteration. This may be seen even in the following short extract, borrowed from Ellis's specimens : "Tha the king wes i-seten Mid his monnen to his mete His kinc-helm hæhne (For than mucle golde The king hine beren n'alde) On thas kinge's hafde. And seoth-then he gon do Athere quene alswo." The language of Layamon is far less altered from the Saxon than that of the concluding portion of the Saxon Chronicle, although its date is some forty years later. The reason of this clearly is, that he lived in a remote country district, being priest of Areley-on-Severn,* a village in the north-western corner of Worcestershire, and held scarcely any intercourse with men of Norman lineage. Not more than fifty non-Saxon words have been detected in the entire work. An interval of nearly a hundred years separates Layamon from the next of the rhyming chroniclers, Robert of Gloucester. Robert, as he follows Geoffrey of Monmouth, travels partly over the same ground as Layamon, whose prototype, Wace, also followed Geoffrey. But in everything else but their subject, the difference between the two chroniclers is enormous. Divest Robert of his strange orthography, and he becomes a readable, intelligible English writer. A monk of a great monastery in an important frontier city, his style is that of a man who is fully au courant with the civilisation, and familiar with the literature of his age, while Layamon's bespeaks the simple parish priest, moving among a rustic population, whose barbarous dialect he with a meritorious audacity adapts as best he can to literary purposes. Robert's chronicle, which is in long fourteen-syllable lines, is continued to the * So the village of Ernley is now called. year 1272. To Robert of Gloucester succeeds Robert Manning, a monk of the Gilbertine monastery of Brunne, or Bourn, in South Lincolnshire. Manning composed a rhyming chronicle in two parts: the first, a translation of . the everlasting Brut by Wace, of which the reader has already heard so much; the second, a version of Peter Langtoft's French metrical chronicle, ending with the death of Edward I. in 1307. The opening of the second part explains so simply and clearly the motives which induced the rhyming chroniclers to employ themselves on a task which to our modern notions involves a strange misapplication of poetical power, that we think it right to insert it here: "Lordynges that be now here, If ye wille listene and lere Als Robert Mannyng wryten it fand, And on Inglysch has it schewed For tho that on this lond wonn For to hauf solace and gamen In felauschip when tha sitt samen ; And it is wisdom for to wytten The state of the land, and hef it wryten, What manere of folk first it wan, And of what kynde it first began; And gude it is for many thynges For to here the dedis of kynges, Whilk were foles, and whilk were wyse, In what tyme, and of what law, Manning's language, though his chronicle is said to have been not finished till the year 1338, is scarcely, if at all, more polished than that of Robert of Gloucester. Of the numerous religious poems in English which remain to us from this period, some are metrical versions of psalms; some (as Bishop Grossetête's Manuel des Péchés, translated by Robert Manning), didactic poems on some point of Christian doctrine or morality; some, Lives of Saints; some, lastly, short poems on devotional topics, such as the Crucifixion, and the Blessed Virgin under the Rood. In each of these classes poems are extant, the antiquated style and language of which require us to place them as early as the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century. In one or two poems of the last class, passages of which are given by Warton, there shines out from under the terrible barbarism of the language, a beautiful pathos, and a tender purity of devotion; so that it would be a good work if some competent person were so far to modernize them as to make them accessible to modern readers. The religious poems were probably written by ecclesiastics; but the occasional and miscellaneous poems of the period are evidently for the most part the productions of laymen. Some of these will come under review in the critical section of this volume; but there is one which the certainty of its date, and the remarkable character of its contents, render so important in an historical point of view, that it must be noticed here. This is a poem (given by Warton in extenso) composed after the battle of Lewes in 1264, by an adherent of Simon de Montfort. The number of French words which it contains, and the vigour and ease with which they are handled, unite to prove that the new English language was well on in the process of formation, conditioned always by the necessity, which this writer frankly accepts, of incorporating a vast number of French words, expressive of the ideas which England owed to the Norman invasion. Again, the broad hearty satire, the strong anti-royalist, or rather anti-foreigner, prejudices of the writer, the energy of resolution which the lines convey, point unmistakably to the rise, which indeed must any way be dated from this reign, of a distinct English nationality, uniting and reconciling the Norman and Saxon elements. A portion of this poem is subjoined "Sitteth alle stille, and herkneth to me; The kyng of Alemaigne, bi mi leautė, Richard, thah thou be ever trichard*, "Sire Simond de Mountfort hath suore bi ys chyn, Shuld he never more come to is yn **, Ne with sheld, ne with spere, ne with other gyn††, Richard," &c. Treacherous. † Weened. Mill. § Their. A military engine. |