"Not for the lerid bot for the lewed, In felawschip when thay sitt samen' They are to enjoy this new literature in common, be it religious, be it imaginative or historical; they will discuss it and it will improve their minds; it will teach them to pass judgments even on kings: "And gude it is for many thynges For to here the dedis of kynges Whilk were foles and whilk were wyse." 1 In their turn the English poets sang of Arthur; in all good faith they adopted his glory as that of an ancestor of their own. Among them a man like Layamon accepted the French poet Wace for his model, and in the beginning of the thirteenth century, devoted thirty-two thousand lines to the Celtic hero; nor was he ever disturbed by the thought that Arthur's British victories might have possibly been English defeats.2 Then came innumerable poems, translated or imitated from French romances, on Charlemagne and Roland, Gawain and the Green Knight, Bovon of Hanstone, Percival, Havelock the Dane, King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Alexander, Octavian, and the Trojan War.3 "The Story of England," A.D. 1338, ed. F. J. Furnivall, London, 1887, two vols. 8vo, vol. i. p. 1. 2 "Layamon's Brut," ed. Madden, London, 1847, three vols. 8vo. 3 See, among others, the publications of the Early English Text Society, the Camden Society, he Percy Society, the Roxburghe Club, the Bannatyne Club, the Altenglische Bibliothek of E Hundreds of manuscripts, some of them splendidly illuminated, testify at the present day to the immense popularity of these imitations of French originals, and provide endless labour for the many learned societies that in our century have undertaken to print them. Layamon's indifference to the price paid by his compatriots for Arthur's glory was not peculiar to himself. It is characteristic of a policy of amalgamation deliberately followed from the beginning by the Normans. As soon as they were settled in the country they desired to unify the traditions of the various races inhabiting the great island, in the belief that this was a first and necessary step towards uniting the races themselves. Rarely was literature used for political purposes with more cleverness and with more important results. The conquerors set the example themselves, and from the first adopted and treated all the heroic beings who had won glory in or for England, and whose fame lingered in ballads and popular songs, as if they had been personal ancestors of their own. At the same time they Kölbing (Heilbronn); the "Metrical Romances of the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries," of H. W. Weber (Edinburgh, 1810, three vols. 8vo); the "Catalogue of MS. Romances in the British Museum," by H. L. D. Ward (London, 1887); "Bishop Percy's Folio MS.; Ballads and Romances," cd. J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, London, Ballad Society, 1867, &c. The publications of the Early English Text Society include, among others, the romances of "Ferumbras," "Otuel," "Huon of Burdeux,' "Charles the Grete," Four Sons of Aymon," "Sir Bevis of Hanston," "King Horn," with fragments of "Floriz and Blauncheflur," "Havelok the Dane," "Guy of Warwick," "William of Palerne," "Generides," "Morte Arthure," Lonelich's History of the Holy Grail," "Joseph of Arimathie," "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight," &c. Others are in preparation. induced the conquered race to adopt the theory that mythic Trojans were their progenitors, a theory already discovered and applied by the French to their own early history, and about which fables were already current among the Welsh people: both races were thus connected together as lineal descendants, the one of Brutus, the other of Francus; and an indissoluble link united them to the classic nations of antiquity. So it The adoption by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the twelfth century, of Brutus the Trojan as father of the British race, as Nennius had done two centuries earlier, did much for the spreading of this belief; the popularity and authority of Geoffrey's fabulous history was so great that for several centuries the gravest English historians accepted his statements concerning Brutus without hesitation. Matthew Paris, the most accurate and trustworthy historian of the thirteenth century, gives an account of his coming to the island of Albion, "that was then inhabited by nobody but a few giants":"Erat tunc nomen insulæ Albion, quæ a nemine, exceptis paucis gigantibus habitabatur." Brutus proceeds to the banks of the Thames, and there founds his capital, which he calls the New Troy, Trojam novam, "quæ postea, per corruptionem vocabuli Trinovantum dicta fuerit" ("Chronica Majora," Rolls Series, I. pp. 21-22). In the fourteenth century Ralph, in his famous "Polychronicon," gives exactly the same account of the deeds of the Trojan prince, and they continued in the time of Shakespeare to be history. Here is the learned account Holinshed gives of these events in his "Chronicles": "Hitherto have we spoken of the inhabitants of this Ile before the coming of Brute, although some will needs have it that he was the first which inhabited the same with his people descended of the Troians, some few giants onelie excepted whom he utterlie destroied, and left not one of them alive through the whole ile. But as we shall not doubt of Brutes coming hither . . . &c. This Brutus or Brytus (for this letter Y hath of ancient times had the sounds both of V and I) . . . was the sonne of Silvius, the happened that in medieval England French singers were to be heard extolling the glory of Saxon kings, while English singers told the deeds of Arthur, the arch-enemy of their race. Nothing gives a better idea of this extraordinary amalgamation of races and traditions than a certain poem of the thirteenth century written in French by a Norman monk of Westminster, and dedicated to Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III., in which we read: "In the world, I may confidently say, there never was country, kingdom or empire, where so many good kings, and holy too, were found, as in the English island. . . . Saints they were, martyrs and confessors, of whom several died for God; others most strong and hardy, as were Arthur, Edmund, and Knut." I Rarely was the like seen in any literature; here is a poem dedicated to a Frenchwoman by a Norman of England, which begins with the praise of a Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane. The same phenomenon is to be noticed, after the Conquest in romances, chronicles and histories. sonne of Ascanius, the sonne of Aeneas the Trojan, begotten of his wife Creusa, and borne in Troie, before the citie was destroied " (book ii. chap. i.). I "En mund ne est (ben vus l'os dire) Pais, reaume, ne empire U tant unt esté bons rois E seinz, cum en isle d'Englois .. Ki pur Deu mururent plursurs; Li autre forze hardiz mutz, Cum fu Arthurs, Aedmunz, e Knudz." ("Lives of Edward the Confessor," ed. H. R. Luard, London, Rolls, 1858, 8vo.) Whoever the author may be, whether of French or English blood, the unity of origin of the two races receives almost invariably the fullest acknowledgment; the inhabitants of the great island cease to look towards Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia, for their ancestors or for the sources of their inspiration; they look rather, like their new French companions, to Rome, Greece and Troy. This policy produced not only momentous social results, but also very important literary consequences; the intellectual connection with the north being cut off, the Anglo-French allowed themselves to be drilled with the Latin discipline; the ancient models ceased to appear to them heterogeneous; they studied them in all good faith as the works of distant relations, with such result that they, unlike the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, were ready, when the time of the Renaissance came, to benefit by the great intellectual movement set on foot by southern neo-classic nations; and while Italy produced Ariosto and Tasso, while Spain possessed Cervantes, and France Montaigne, Ronsard and Rabelais, they were ready to give birth to the unparalleled trio of Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare. From the fourteenth century this conclusion was easy to foresee; for, even at that period, England took part in a tentative Renaissance that preceded the great one of the sixteenth century. At the time when Italy produced Petrarca and Boccaccio, and France had Froissart, England produced Chaucer, the greatest of the four. Famous as Chaucer was as a story-teller, it is strange that he was to have almost no influence on the development of the novel in England. When we read of Harry |