From Chaucer to Tennyson
such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and
William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the
Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his
work in 1273. About 1300, Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a
chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the
Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in
the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon
times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. All
real knowledge of the period dwindled away until in Capgraves's
_Chronicle of England_, written in prose in 1463-1464, hardly any thing
of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten
their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that
Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from
authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of
ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland--as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth,
respectively--ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who
gives in the second book of his _Faerie Queene_ a _resume_ of the reigns
of fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth,
his royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings of early England.
So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to
the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been
dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed
their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors.
In the _Roman de Rou_, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy,
written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings
the French _jongleur_, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of
William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of
"Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at
Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman
song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines which
Taillefer sang were from the _Chanson de Roland_, the oldest and best of
the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts
of France in the 10th century, had become in the course of one hundred
and fifty years completely identified with the French. They had accepted
Christianity, intermarried with the native women, and forgotten their
own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe.
The warlike, adventurous spirit of the vikings mingled in its blood with
the French nimbleness of wit and fondness for display. The Normans were
a nation of knights-errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy.
Their architecture was at once strong and graceful. Their women were
skilled in embroidery, a splendid sample of which is preserved in the
famous Bayeux tapestry, in which the conqueror's wife, Matilda, and the
ladies of her court wrought the history of the Conquest.
This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the
ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in
literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to
English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These were
sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every
great feudal baron, or by the _jongleurs_, who wandered from court to
castle. There is a whole literature of these _romans d'aventure_ in the
Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are very long--often
thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines--written sometimes in a strophic
form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the short,
eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of them were turned into
English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The translations
were usually inferior to the originals. The French _trouvere_ (finder
or poet) told his story in a straightforward, prosaic fashion, omitting
no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses,
trappings, gardens, etc. He invented plots and situations full of fine
possibilities by which later poets have profited, but his own handling
of them was feeble and prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old
French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of
the _trouveres_ which the rude, unformed English failed to catch.
The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick, and
Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of
Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favorite
hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh
legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach
invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and
literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their
Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the English
speech, such as _bard_ and _druid_; but in the old Anglo-Saxon
literature there are no more traces of British song and story than if
the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers
for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own national
traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the
isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into
the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the
old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England
and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of
Cymric race, and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric
dialect akin to the Welsh.
About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh
descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward
bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called _Historia Britonum_,
in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of AEneas, came to
Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city of
New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of
historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact
chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author
referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he
said, by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that line
of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern
readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and
his three daughters; Cymbeline; Gorboduc, the subject of the earliest
regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562;
Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen and his daughter Sabrina, who gave her
name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in
Milton's _Comus_ and became the heroine of the tragedy of _Locrine_,
once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther
Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace, the author
of the _Roman de Rou_, turned Geoffrey's work into a French poem
entitled _Brut d'Angleterre_, "brut" being a Welsh word meaning
chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished by Layamon, a
priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon's _Brut_
is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but
written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. The style is
rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. Wace had amplified
Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions,
derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border. In
particular, the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like
fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the
unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever, and the treachery of his
nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great battle between Arthur
and Modred; of the wounding of the king--"fifteen fiendly wounds he had,
one might in the least three gloves thrust"--; and of the little boat
with "two women therein, wonderly dight," which came to bear him away to
Avalun and the Queen Argante, "sheenest of all elves," whence he shall
come again, according to Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all
this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his _Passing of
Arthur._
This new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman
romancers. The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were
afloat. Walter Map, a gentleman of the court of Henry II., in two French
prose romances connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or
holy cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which
Joseph of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it
miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly
quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an
adventure only to be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of
that Launcelot who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in
Geoffrey's history as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner the
love-story of Tristan and Isolde, which came probably from Brittany or
Cornwall, was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-saga.
Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed
shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day
and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a
more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his
_Idyls of the King_, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. There
were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and
continental French dialects, in English, in German, and in other
tongues. But the final form which the saga took in mediaeval England was
the prose _Morte Dartur_ of Sir Thomas Malory, composed at the close of
the 15th century. This was a digest of the earlier romances, and is
Tennyson's main authority.
Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister.
There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English,
consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the
_Ancren Riwle_ (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225, and the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_
(Remorse of Conscience), 1340, in prose; the _Handlyng Sinne_, 1303, the
_Cursor Mundi_, 1320, and the _Pricke of Conscience_, 1340, in verse;
metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the
Ten Commandments; the Gospels for the Day, such as the _Ormulum_, or
Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems in praise of
virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five joys of the Virgin,
the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the seven deadly
sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment; and dialogues between
the soul and the body. These were the work not only of the monks, but
also of the begging friars, and in smaller part of the secular or parish
clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety and superstition of the
Middle Age, the childish belief in the marvelous, the allegorical
interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of
hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body and the
loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a single
poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level
of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal
feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse.
A poem so distinguished is, for example, _A Luve Ron_ (A Love Counsel),
by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the
French poet Villon's _Balade of Dead Ladies_, with its refrain--
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
"Where are the snows of yester year?"