we have harm; and nowhere do they speed, and ever they spend; and all the good we do them they blithely receive it, and only thanklessness comes to us for our good deeds. They do us much dishonour : our men they beat; my father has too many idle men. All the fourth part let us thrust forth; thirty is enough for him to wait at table. Ourselves have cooks to go to the kitchen; ourselves have porters and cupbearers enough. Leave we some of these many folk to go where they will; as ever I hope for mercy I will suffer it no more.' This heard Maglan that his queen spake thus, and he answered her with noble speech: 'Lady, thou art very wrong; hast not thou riches enough? but keep thy father in bliss, he will not live long. For if foreign kings heard the tidings that we did this to him, they would reproach us. But suffer him to have his folk as he will; and this is my counsel, for soon hereafter he will be dead, and we also shall have in our hand the half of his kingdom.' Then said Goneril: 'Lord, be thou still; let me do everything and I will send them away.' She sent with her snares to the knights' house; she bade them go their way, for she would feed them no more; many of the thanes, many of the men that were come thither with Lear the king. This heard King Lear, therefore he was very wroth. Then spake the king with woful words, and thus said the king, sorrowful in mood: 'Woe worth the man that hath land with honour and giveth it to his child while he yet may hold it; for oft it happens that he repents thereof.'"1 Layamon, who was stirred thus deeply by the genius of the ancient Saxon poetry, naturally sought to mould his matter in the traditional forms of song. But his metrical style remains a striking monument of the inward changes wrought in the language since it had passed from the lips of the singer to the pen of the literary composer. It was not only that terminations had been assimilated, genders confused, inflections dropped, the weak ending of the preterite tense substituted for the internal change of 1 Layamon, Brut, 3277. the vowel: the whole character of the metrical sentence had been altered by the introduction of the article, by the frequent use of conjunctions, and by the constant association of the preposition "to" with the infinitive mood. The abrupt, energetic effects of the ancient recitation were modified to suit the literary style of the historian, and the rhythmical period was broken up by the insertion of numerous wedges, in the shape of small auxiliary words, which pointed the logic of the thought, while they destroyed the compactness of the syntax. In a measure distinctively Teutonic the influence of French verse is of course scarcely perceptible; Layamon's vocabulary contains scarcely more foreign elements than Ormin's. The laws of alliteration, however, are not strictly observed; in many verses the dominant letter is capriciously distributed; in others it is altogether absent; and the alliterative couplet is often replaced by a rhyming one. Compared with Beowulf, the metrical structure of the Brut resembles those debased forms of architecture in which the leading external features are reproduced long after the reason for their invention has been forgotten. Ormin had done something to approximate the movement of Anglo-Saxon to the cadence of Anglo-Norman verse. Layamon, by catching his inspiration from a French history of what was now the native country of both races, had helped to propagate among his countrymen a new feeling of poetical patriotism. But a wider and stronger influence was needed to bring the stubborn Saxon genius into perfectly familiar relations with French literary models. That influence was supplied by the encyclopædic training of the Latin Church. In the monastery the devotion of the Saxon monk to Rome, and the Norman zeal for orthodoxy, could join in frank alliance, and each was affected in the same way by the educational discipline which there prevailed. From the beginning of the eleventh century a great intellectual movement had been expanding the aims of the monastic schools. They still adhered with tenacity to the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and to the authority of the early Fathers, but the temper of the age had given that first impulse to the study of mathematical and physical science, which was carried on with ardour by the fathers of scholastic Philosophy. One of the favourite subjects for treatment in Latin was the Computus, which dealt with the divisions of time, especially in their relations to the festivals of the Church; Physiologi in various forms were frequently produced; at the beginning of the twelfth century Saxon writers were acquainted with the science of the Arabs; and by the middle of the same century John of Salisbury showed himself equal to a review of the various systems of ancient philosophy. Stimulated by this intellectual atmosphere Norman and Saxon scholars rivalled each other in reproducing in their own vernacular tongues the learning they had acquired from Latin texts. In the early years of the twelfth century Philip de Thaun of Normandy wrote a Computus in French verse of three accents, and a few years afterwards a Bestiaire in lines partly of six syllables and partly of eight syllables.1 An English Bestiary made its appearance not long after the period of Ormin, composed in verse which evidently contains the germ of the octosyllabic measure, mixed however with remains of the alliterative principle.2 The matter of this book is borrowed entirely from the Physiologus of Theobaldus Episcopus, and consists of descriptions of animals such as the lion, the eagle, the serpent, the fox, the ant, the spider, the whale, the elephant, the turtle, and the panther, with short allegorical applications of their attributes to things human and divine. As the metrical forms of the Latin original are very varied, comprising hexameters, spurious Sapphics, and rhyming measures, it is not unlikely that the versification of the English version is modelled on that of the French Bestiaire; but there are English poems, certainly as old as the first half of the thirteenth century, which, evidently 3 1 See Wright, Popular Treatises on Science in the Middle Ages. The editor prints two rhyming lines as one. 2 See Morris, Specimens of Early English, Part i. p. 133. 3 The title of the Latin original is Phisiologus Theobaldi Episcopi de Naturis Duodecim Animalium. VOL. I K springing from a monastic source, may have rather imitated rhythmical movements in the Latin language. Such is the interesting Moral Ode, the oldest MS. of which dates back to A.D. 1250, but to which competent authorities have assigned still higher antiquity. This poem has an iambic movement of seven accents, contained within fourteen or fifteen syllables, resembling the metre of the Ormulum, except that the couplets are linked with rhymes, as in the following example :— Ich am eldre than ich wes a winter and eke on lore. Unneth lif ich habbe ilad and yet me thinkth ich lede. In some respects the Latin language provided the Anglo-Saxon, in its period of transition, with a more suitable model than the French, since the former, having preserved its synthetic framework, furnished, like the Saxon, a great number of double rhymes; it also suggested to the new English poets the form of the stanza in which masculine and feminine rhymes alternate, as in this Orison to the Virgin Mary :— Thu art hele and lif and liht, Thu zeve us weole and wunne ; Thu brohtest dai and Evë niht, Heo brohte woht, thou broghtest riht, Thu almesse and heo sunne. Bi-side to me, lavedi bright, Hwenne ich shall wende heonne, So wel thu miht.2 1 I am older than I was in winters as well as in learning; I know more than I did; my wit ought to be more. Full long have I been a child in work and also in deed: though I be old in winters, I am too young in counsel. Uneasy is the life I have led, and still methinks lead; when I think on it I am sore afraid.-Morris, Old English Miscellany, p. 58. Thou 2 Thou art healing, and life, and light, and helpest all mankind. hast well clothed us; thou givest us weal and joy; thou broughtest day and Eve night; she brought woe, thou broughtest right: thou mercy and she sin. Look upon me, lady bright, when I shall go hence, as well thou mightst.— Ibid. p. 160. French influence, however, undoubtedly determined the important question of the distribution of the accent in the infant English metres, as may be seen from the prevalence in our early poetry of verse of three accents, from the reduplication of which arose the "Alexandrine," and of the octosyllabic line of four accents, which, till the close of the medieval period, remained the most popular measure in the language. The beginnings of Alexandrine verse may be noted in the following stanza from a poem on "Domesday" of the thirteenth century: Hwenne ich thencke of Domesday Full sore ich may adrede : Ther shal after his werk Uych mon fongen mede: Ich habbe Crist agult Wyth thouhtes and wyth dede : Hwat is me to rede? 1 The earliest work in which we find the simple octosyllabic couplet used with any degree of artistic skill is the remarkable poem called The Hule and the Nightingale, a composition which deserves attention for other than metrical reasons. In almost all the surviving English poetry of the thirteenth century the influence of monastic education predominates. The subjects selected for metrical treatment are either of an exclusively religious nature, consisting, as we have seen, chiefly of homilies, hymns to the Virgin, and thoughts on the Last Judgment, or involve such scientific topics—Bestiaries and Calendars as fell within the circle of ecclesiastical study. The treatment of these subjects is for the most part conventional. Here and there, no doubt, particularly in poems expressive of the love of Christ or devotion to the Virgin, strong individual feeling prevails, and, as in the stanza from the Orison to the Virgin cited above, produces, on an imperfect metrical instrument, strains of a peculiar sweetness and melody. But, as a rule, the motive of composition is 1 When I think of Domesday sorely may I be afraid; then shall each man obtain his reward according to his work; I have offended against Christ with thought and with deed; Lord Christ, Son of God, what shall be my counsel? -Morris, Old English Miscellany, p. 163. |