of her female hearers, only recently introduced to the luxuries of the East, by dwelling in her verse on the silks of Constantinople, the purple cloth of Alexandria, basins of enamelled gold, mantles of ermine, and beds carved in gold, inlaid with precious stones, cypress, and ivory, in value above the price of a whole castle. word, she may be described without exaggeration as the founder of the art of poetry both in France and England. As a fabulist she showed the way to La Fontaine. In a As a story-teller she joined the brilliance and vivacity of Boccaccio to a chivalrous refinement of feeling which is too often absent from the tales of the Decameron. Chaucer himself studied with care and advantage the style of a poet who had preceded him by one hundred and fifty years. While the genius of Anglo-Norman poetry thus expanded in the patronage of a splendid court, and under the intellectual stimulus of the Crusades, and while it drew fresh nourishment from the various sources of Latin, Celtic, and Oriental imagination, Saxon literature sank into torpor and decay. Though "Englisc" was still the language of the vast majority of the people, it was banished from use in school, laws, law-court, court, and castle. Its last literary asylum was the monastery. Since the restoration of the strictness of Benedictine rule under the direction of Dunstan, there had been a great revival of monasticism in England, and many of the regular clergy were patriotically anxious to preserve the standards of the national literature, as well as to promote the interests of the convent to which they belonged. Even here, however, there was little opportunity for arresting the progress of decline. The genius of the old poetry had been sapped by the introduction of Christianity, and the intellectual energy of the race had been turned by the efforts of Alfred into the channel of prose, without however being recruited by many fresh sources of invention. Except in the way of histories, homilies, and translations, there were few compositions in Anglo-Saxon prose; and for the third class even of these, there was, in consequence of the decline of general culture after the death of Alfred A but little demand. The Saxon clergy were trained to express themselves in Latin as well as in their native language, and therefore needed no translations; the homily, where it was not simply transcribed from ancient models, was naturally affected by the forms of contemporary speech; to chronicle current events became, accordingly, almost the only surviving motive of composition. valuable example of these histories remains in the Peterborough Chronicle; but its necessarily narrow range of interests, its corrupted vocabulary, and rude syntax, are the outward signs of an expiring literature. The grammatical framework of the Anglo-Saxon language was perishing from disuse. Two influences from outside conspired to hasten its dissolution. One was the rapid change in the current speech of the country, to which the homilist in his sermons strove to conform, and to which, whenever he reduced his addresses to writing, he adapted, as well as he could, his system of orthography. This tendency is best illustrated in the Ormulum, a series of metrical homilies composed by Ormin, or Orm, a canon regular of the order of St. Augustine, who must have written in the northern part of the country about the beginning of the thirteenth century. The object of Ormin was to convey instruction to the people by means of homilies, and, with this end in view, he paraphrased the Gospel of each day in the Anglian dialect, adding an exposition of the doctrine to be derived from it. The opening of one of these homilies will serve to illustrate the author's style, and will show the extent to which he had departed from primitive literary models 1 : An preost was onn Herodes dazz, Amang Judissken theode, And he wass, wiss to fulle soth, gehatenn Zacharize, And haffde an duhhtiz wif that wass Off Aärones dohtress; 1 1 A priest there was in the days of Herod, among the people of the Jews, and he was, certainly in full sooth, called Zacharias; and he had a virtuous wife that was of the daughters of Aaron; and she was, certainly And 3ho wass, wiss to fulle soth, And tezz wærenn biforennn Godd For eytherr here zede swa Rihht affterr Godess lare, Thatt nan mann noht ne fand onn hemm To tælenn ne to wrezenn, Noff whatt menn mihhtenn habbenn nith Ne wratthe zæn heore owwther. There is not a single word in this passage derived from the French; the vocabulary of the language is still completely Teutonic. On the other hand we see that the inflections of words have in some instances disappeared, and, what is far more remarkable, the syntax has undergone something like a revolution. The words now follow almost exactly the order of the thought; and the sentences and clauses, instead of being cumulative as in the old language, are linked to each other by conjunctions. Lastly, alliteration is discarded; and though the verse does not rhyme, yet in the number and fall of its accents, and in the equalisation of the number of syllables in each verse, it anticipates the "ballad metre" of later days. The Ormulum is a valuable literary monument, in so far as it shows the secret process of reconstruction by which the Anglo-Saxon language was being transformed, and the influence indirectly exercised, by the iambic rhythm of Anglo-Norman verse, on the ear even of those who were least affected by French literary models. Ormin addressed himself to a homely audience. A different tendency is reflected in the verse of Layamon, who must have been Ormin's contemporary, but whose Brut exhibits, in a far more striking and interesting manner, the gradual fusion of the Norman with the Saxon genius. Layamon was the parish priest of Arley, near Bewdley, in Worcestershire, and his poem, written in the Mercian dialect, was evidently intended for a wider and in full sooth, called Elisabeth and they were before God righteous folk and good; for each of them walked so rightly after God's lore, that no man might find in them aught to blame or accuse, nor anything for which men might have envy or wrath against either.-Ormulum, Homiliæ secundum Lucam, I. : more instructed circle of readers than those who listened to the homilies of the Anglian canon. At the opening of Brut he recites his authorities, endeavouring, like all mediæval poets, to claim more historical weight for his performance than is justly due to it. His materials, he says, were obtained from a book in English by St. Bede, from another in Latin made by Sts. Albin and Austin, and from a third in French made by a clerk called Wace. From Bede's Ecclesiastical History, which he doubtless read in King Alfred's translation, he took nothing but the story of Gregory the Great and the Anglo-Saxons; the book of Albinus does not exist in a separate form; Layamon's sole original is, in fact, Wace's poem of the same name, which, as has been already said, is itself a metrical rendering of the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. the French text is treated with such true Anglo-Saxon expansiveness, that its meagre substance is swelled into a narrative of about 30,000 lines; and, though Layamon follows Wace's lead closely enough, he does not hesitate to introduce historical episodes of his own, or to touch here and there the Latin-Celtic legend with a colouring of Teutonic mythology.2 1 But In many passages of the Brut the spirit of the old scôp seems to revive, and to produce effects resembling those found in Cadmon's Paraphrase. As the simple Scripture narrative of patriarchal life touched primitive chords in the Anglo-Saxon imagination, causing it to transform the historic style of Genesis and Exodus into the language and imagery of minstrelsy, so Layamon, a genuine poet, felt the charm of Celtic romance even through the stolid disguise of Wace's version, and gave it new life in the heroic verse of his own nation. One of the 1 Among others he inserts the story of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne, and the killing of Gratian by Ælfwald and Ethelbald, "churls" of East Anglia.-Layamon, 11,917, 12,253 (Sir F. Madden's edition). 2 Arthur marching upon Bath arms himself for battle: "Then did he put on his helmet embroidered with steel, which an elvish smith made for him with his noble craft; he was called Wygar, who wittily wrought it." Brut, 21,130. This seems to be a reminiscence of the Teutonic legend of Wieland the Smith. most noticeable features in his narrative is its dramatic character, which furnishes a striking contrast to the bald manner of Wace, even where the latter has himself dramatised the simple narrative of Geoffrey. Take for example the passage in which each poet tells the story of King Lear's treatment by his daughter Goneril. This is Wace: "Goneril was too avaricious, and thought great scorn of her father, because he maintained so great a retinue, and did nothing for it. Much was she burdened with the cost; often to her lord she said: 'What are we to do with this crowd of men? By my faith, sire, we are mad in that we have brought here so many people. Nor does my father know what he is doing; he is entered into mad riot; he is old and doting. Evil be to him who shall keep him for a year, or shall feed so many people for him. His servants strive with ours, and ours run away from them. so great a press? He is false and his folk perverse. There is never a man who serves him willingly, for the more he gets the more he wastes. Very wrong is he who assembles so many people: there are too many of them; let them go on their way. My father has a train of fifty; from henceforth let them be forty in all with us; or let him depart with all his people; what does it matter to us ?""1 Who could endure Wace then proceeds to relate crudely how King Lear was turned out of doors, and obliged to go to Regan. But Layamon, though paraphrasing Wace's text, tells the story in a very different style : Then it came to pass soon afterwards that Goneril bethought her what she might do. Very ill it seemed to her with regard to her father's state, and she began to complain of it to Maglan, her lord, and said to him in bed as they lay together, 'Say to me, my lord-thou art dearest of men to me-methinks my father is no whit sane; no worship he knows; he has lost his wit; methinks the old man will dote anon. He keeps here forty knights day and night; he maintains here these thanes and all their men, hounds, and hawks: therefore 1 Wace, Brut, 1905. |