Mr. Ellis computes that it was in 1180 [5], placing it thus late, because Wace took a great many years to translate his "Brut" from Geoffrey of Monmouth; and because Layamon, who translated that "Brut," was probably twenty-five years engaged in the task. But this is attempting to be precise in dates, where there is no ground for precision. It is quite as easy to suppose that the English translator finished his work in ten as in twenty years; so that the change from Saxon to English would commence in 1265 [1165?], and thus the forty years' Exodus of our language, supposing it bounded to 1216, would extend to half a century. So difficult is it to fix any definite period for the commencing formation of English. It is easy to speak of a child being born at an express time; but the birth-epochs of languages are not to be registered with the same precision and facility+. Again, as to the end of Mr. Ellis's period: it is inferred by him, that the formation of the language was either completed or far advanced in 1216, from the facility of rhyming displayed in Robert of Gloucester, and in pieces belonging to the [⚫ Wace finished his translation in 1155, after, Mr. Ellis supposes, thirty years' labour: Layamon, he assumes, was the same period, finishing it in 1185; "perhaps," he says, "the earliest date that can be assigned to it." Specimens of Early English Poetry, vol. i. pp. 75-6. "Layamon's age," says Mr. Hallam, " is uncertain; it must have been after 1155, when the original poem was completed, and can hardly be placed below 1200. His language is accounted rather Anglo-Saxon than English." Lit. Hist. vol. i. p. 59.] [ Nothing can be more difficult, except by an arbitrary line, than to determine the commencement of the English language. When we compare the earliest English of the thirteenth century with the Anglo-Saxon of the twelfth, it seems hard to pronounce why it should pass for a separate language, rather than a modification or simplification of the former. We must conform, however, to usage, and say that the Anglo-Saxon was converted into English-1st, by contracting or otherwise modifying the pronunciation and orthography of words; 2ndly, by omitting many inflections, especially of the nouns, and consequently making more use of articles and auxiliaries; 3rdly, by the introduction of French derivatives; 4thly, by using less inversion and ellipsis, especially in poetry. Of these, the second alone I think can be considered as sufficient to describe a new form of language; and this was brought about so gradually, that we are not relieved from much of our difficulty-whether some compositions shall pass for the latest offspring of the mother, or the earliest fruits of the daughter's fertility. It is a proof of this difficulty, that the best masters of our ancient language have lately introduced the word Semi-Saxon, which is to cover everything from 1150 to 1230.—HALLAM, Lit. Hist. vol. i. p. 57.] [ Robert of Gloucester, who is placed by the critics in the thirteenth century, seems to have used a kind of inter middle of the thirteenth century, or perhaps to an earlier date. I own that, to me, this theorizing by conjecture seems like stepping in quicksand. Robert of Gloucester wrote in 1280 §; and surely his rhyming with facility then, does not prove the English language to have been fully formed in 1216. But we have pieces, it seems, which are supposed to have been written early in the thirteenth century. To give any support to Mr. Ellis's theory, such pieces must be proved to have been produced very early in the thirteenth century. Their coming towards the middle of it, and showing facility of rhyming at that late date, will prove little or nothing. But of these poetical fragments supposed to commence either with or early in the thirteenth century, our antiquaries afford us dates which, though often confidently pronounced, are really only conjectural; and in fixing those conjectural dates, they are by no means agreed. Warton speaks of this and that article being certainly not later than the reign of Richard I.; but he takes no pains to authenticate what he affirms. He pronounces the lovesong, "Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow!" to be as old as the year 1200 |. Mr. Ellis puts it off only to about half a century later. Hickes places the "Land of Cokayne" just after the Conquest. Mr. Warton would place it before the Conquest, if he were not deterred by the appearance of a few Norman words, and by the learned authority of Hickes ¶. Layamon would thus be superseded, as quite a modern. The truth is, respecting the "Land of Cokayne," that we are left in total astonishment at the circumstance of men, so well informed as Hickes and Warton, placing it either before mediate diction, neither Saxon nor English; in his work, therefore, we see the transition exhibited.-JOHNSON.] [§ As Robert of Gloucester alludes to the canonisation of St. Louis in 1297, it is obvious, however much he wrote before, he was writing after that event. See Sir F. Madden's Havelok, p. liii.] [ Warton says, "before or about," which is lax enough. Price's Warton, vol. i. p. 28. Ed. 1824.] [¶It is not of the "Land of Cokayne" that Warton says this, but of a religious or moral ode, consisting of one hundred and ninety-one stanzas. Price's Warton, vol. i. p. 7. Of the "Land of Cokayne" he has said that it is a satire, which clearly exemplifies the Saxon adulterated by the Norman, and was evidently written soon after the Conquest, at least soon after the reign of Henry II., p. 9. Mr. Price (p. 7) follows Mr. Campbell in the age he would attach to the verse quoted in the first section of Warton, which is, he says, very arbitrary and uncertain.] € 2 or immediately after the Conquest, as its language is comparatively modern. It contains allusions to pinnacles in buildings, which were not introduced till the reign of Henry III*. Mr. Ellis is not so rash as to place that production, which Hickes and Warton removed to near the Conquest, earlier than the thirteenth century; and I believe it may be placed even late in that century. In short, where shall we fix upon the first poem that is decidedly English? and how shall we ascertain its date to a certainty within any moderate number of years? Instead of supposing the period of the formation of English to commence at 1180 [1185], and to end at 1216, we might, without violence to any known fact, extend it back to several years earlier, and bring it down to a great many years later. In the fair idea of English we surely, in general, understand a considerable mixture of French wordst. Now, whatever may have been done in the twelfth century, with regard to that change from Saxon to English which consists in the extinction of Saxon grammatical inflections, it is plain that the other characteristic of English, viz. its Gallicism, was only beginning in the thirteenth century. The English language could not be said to be saturated with French, till the days of Chaucer; i. e. it did not, till his time, receive all the French words which it was capable of retaining. Mr. Ellis nevertheless tells us that the vulgar English, not gradually, but suddenly, superseded the legitimate Saxon. When this sudden succession precisely began, it seems to be as difficult to ascertain, as when it ended. The sudden transition, by Mr. Ellis's own theory, occupied about forty years; and, to all appearance, that term might be lengthened, with respect to its commencement and continuance, to fourscore years at least. The Saxon language, we are told, had ceased to be poetically cultivated for some time previous to the Conquest. This might be the case with regard to lofty efforts of composition; but Ingulphus, the secretary of William the [* So says Gray to Mason (Works by Mitford, vol. iii. p. 305); but this is endeavouring to settle a point by a questionable date--one uncertainty by another.] [t In comparing Robert of Gloucester with Layamon, a native of the same county, and a writer on the same subject, it will appear that a great quantity of French had flowed into the language since the loss of Normandy.— HALLAM, Lit. Hist. vol. i. p. 61.] Conqueror, speaks of the popular ballads of the English, in praise of their heroes, which were sung about the streets; and William of Malmsbury, in the twelfth century, continues to make mention of them. The pretensions of these ballads to the name of poetry we are unhappily, from the loss of them, unable to estimate. For a long time after the Conquest, the native minstrelsy, though it probably was never altogether extinct, may be supposed to have sunk to the lowest ebb. No human pursuit is more sensible than poetry to national pride or mortification; and a race of peasants, like the Saxons, struggling for bare subsistence, under all the dependence, and without the protection, of the feudal system, were in a state the most ungenial to feelings of poetical enthusiasm. For more than one century after the Conquest, as we are informed, an Englishman was a term of contempt. So much has time altered the associations attached to a name, which we should now employ as the first appeal to the pride or intrepidity of those who bear it. By degrees, however, the Norman and native races began to coalesce, and their patriotism and political interests to be identified. The crown and aristocracy having become during their struggles, to a certain degree, candidates for the favour of the people, and rivals in affording them protection, free burghs and chartered corporations were increased, and commerce and social intercourse began to quicken. Mr. Ellis alludes to an Anglo-Norman jargon having been spoken in commercial intercourse, from which he conceives our synonymes to have been derived. That individuals, imperfectly understanding each other, might accidentally speak a broken jargon, may be easily conceived; but that such a lingua Franca was ever the distinct dialect, even of a mercantile class, Mr. Ellis proves neither by specimens nor historical evidence. The synonymes in our language may certainly be accounted for by the gradual entrance of French words, without supposing an intermediate jargon. The national speech, it is true, received a vast influx of French words; but it received them by degrees, and subdued them, as they came in, to its own idioms and grammar. Yet, difficult as it may be to pronounce pre + William of Malmsbury drew much of his information from those Saxon ballads. cisely when Saxon can be said to have ceased and English to have begun, it must be supposed that the progress and improvement of the national speech was most considerable at those epochs which tended to restore the importance of the people. The hypothesis of a sudden transmutation of Saxon into English appears, on the whole, not to be distinctly made out. At the same time, some public events might be highly favourable to the progress and cultivation of the language. Of those events, the establishment of municipal governments, and of elective magistrates in the towns, must have been very important, as they furnished materials and incentives for daily discussion and popular eloquence. As property and security increased among the people, we may also suppose the native minstrelsy to have revived. The minstrels, or those who wrote for them, translated or imitated Norman romances; and in so doing, enriched the language with many new words, which they borrowed from the originals, either from want of corresponding terms in their own vocabulary, or from the words appearing to be more agreeable. Thus, in a general view, we may say that, amidst the early growth of her commerce, literature, and civilisation, England acquired the new form of her language, which was destined to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprung. In the formation of English from its Saxon and Norman materials, the genius of the native tongue might be said to prevail, as it subdued to Saxon grammar and construction the numerous French words, which found their way into the language. But it was otherwise with respect to our poetry-in which, after the Conquest, the Norman Muse must be regarded as the earliest preceptress of our own. Mr. Tyrwhitt has even said, and his opinion seems to be generally adopted, that we are indebted for the use of rhyme, and for all the forms of our versification, entirely to the Normans +. Vide Tyrwhitt's Preface to the Canterbury Tales, where a distinct account is given of the grammatical changes exhibited in the rise and progress of English. It is likely that the Normans would have taught us the use of rhyme and their own metres, whether these had been known or not to the Anglo-Saxons before the Conquest. But respecting Mr. Tyrwhitt's position that we owe all our forms of verse, and the use of rhyme, entirely to the Normans, I trust the reader will pardon me for introducing a mere doubt on a subject which cannot be Whatever might be the case with regard to our forms of versification, the chief employinteresting to many. With respect to rhyme, I might lay some stress on the authority of Mr. Turner, who, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, says that the Anglo-Saxon versification possessed occasional rhyme; but as he admits that rhyme formed no part of its constituent character, for fear of assuming too much, let it be admitted that we have no extant specimens of rhyme in our language before the Conquest. One stanza of a ballad shall indeed be mentioned, as an exception to this, which may be admitted or rejected at the reader's pleasure. In the mean time let it be recollected, that if we have not rhyme in the vernacular verse, we have examples of it in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon churchmen-abundance of it in Bede's and Poniface's Latin verses. We meet also, in the same writers, with lines which resemble modern verse in their trochaic and iambic structure, considering that structure not as classical but accentual metre.-Take, for example, these verses: "Quando Christus Deus noster which go precisely in the same cadence with such modern trochaics as "Would you hear how once repining And we have many such lines as these: And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With masque, and antique pageantry." Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own eight syllable iambic. It is singular that rhyme and such metres as the above, which are generally supposed to have come into the other modern languages from the Latin rhymes of the church, should not have found their way from thence into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse. But they certainly did not, we shall be told; for there is no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon verse, before the Conquest. Of such specimens, however, it is not pretended that we have anything like a full or regular series. On the contrary, many Saxon ballads, which have been alluded to by Anglo-Norman writers as of considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very names of their composers. And from a few articles saved in such a wreck, can we pronounce confidently on the whole contents of the cargo? The following solitary stanza, however, has been preserved, from a ballad attributed to Canute the Great. "Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely, And let us hear these Monks' song." There is something very like rhyme in the Anglo-Saxon stanza. I have no doubt that Canute heard the monks singing Latin rhymes; and I have some suspicion that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas of Ely, ment of our earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant the fictions of the Norman school, and to naturalise them in our language. tury, or possibly later, no work of professed fiction, or bearing any semblance to epic fable, can be traced in Norman verse—nothing but songs, satires, chronicles, or didactic works, to all of which, however, the name of Romance, derived from the Roman descent of the French tongue, was applied in the early and wide acceptation of the word. To these succeeded the genuine Metrical Romance, which, though often The most liberal patronage was afforded to Norman minstrelsy in England by the first kings of the new dynasty. This encouragement, and the consequent cultivation of the northern dialect of French, gave it so much the superiority over the southern or troubadour dialect, that the French language, accord-rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ing to the acknowledgment of its best informed antiquaries, received from England and Normandy the first of its works which deserve to be cited. The Norman trouveurs, it is allowed, were more eminent narrative poets than the Provençal troubadours. No people had a better right to be the founders of chivalrous poetry than the Normans. They were the most energetic generation of modern men. Their leader, by the conquest of England in the eleventh century, consolidated the feudal system upon a broader basis than it ever had before possessed. Before the end of the same century, Chivalry rose to its full growth as an institution, by the circumstance of martial zeal being enlisted under the banners of superstition. The crusades, though they certainly did not give birth to jousts and tournaments, must have imparted to them a new spirit and interest, as the preparatory images of a consecrated warfare. And those spectacles constituted a source of description to the romancers, to which no exact counterpart is to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. But the growth of what may properly be called romantic poetry was not instantaneous after the Conquest; and it was not till "English Richard ploughed the deep," that the crusaders seem to have found a place among the heroes of ro mance. Till the middle of the twelfth cen who knew the whole song, translates his specimen of it in Latin lines, which, whether by accident or design, rhyme to each other. The genius of the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, periphrastical, and elliptical; but, according to that writer's conjecture, a new and humble but perspicuous style of poetry was introduced at a later time, in the shape of the narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive the possibility of rhyme having found a place; because the verse would stand in need of that ornament to distinguish it from prose, more than in the elliptical and inverted manner. With regard to our anapæstic measure, or tripletime verse, Dr. Percy has shown that its rudiments can be traced to Scaldic poetry. It is often found very distinct in Langlande; and that species of verse, at least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a Norman origin. ingenuity, and design, sufficient to distinguish The practice of translating French rhyming romances into English verse, however, continued down to the reign of Henry VII. efforts at history, in which the athletic worthies of classical story and of modern romance were gravely connected by an ideal genealogy* Thus the dawn of human improvement smiled on the fabric which it was ultimately to destroy, as the morning sun gilds and beautifies those masses of frost-work, which are to melt before its noonday heat. The elements of romantic fiction have been traced up to various sources; but neither the | Scaldic, nor Saracenic, nor Armorican theory of its origin can sufficiently account for all its materials. Many of them are classical, and others derived from the Scriptures. The migrations of Science are difficult enough to be traced; but Fiction travels on still lighter wings, and scatters the seeds of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, till they surprise us by springing up with similarity in regions the most remotely divided †. There was a vague and unselecting love of the marvellous in romance, which sought for adventures, like its knights errant, in every quarter where they could be found; so that it is easier to admit of all the sources which are imputed to that species of fiction, than to limit our belief to any one of them. • Geoffrey of Monmouth's history, of which the modern opinion seems to be, that it was not a forgery, but derived from an Armorican original, and the pseudo-Turpin's Life of Charlemagne, were the grand historical magazines of Twelfth Norman verse dwelt for a considerable time in the tedious historic style, before it reached the shape of amusing fable; and we find century. the earliest efforts of the Native Muse confined to translating Norman verse, while it still retained its uninviting form of the chronicle. The first of the Norman poets, from whom any versifier in the language is known to have translated, was Wace, a native of Jersey, born in the reign of Henry II. § In the year 1155, Wace finished his "Brut d'Angleterre," which is a French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Great Britain, deduced from Brutus to Cadwallader, in 689. Layamon, a priest of Ernleye upon Severn, translated Wace's Metrical Chronicle into the verse of the popular tongue; and notwithstanding Mr. Ellis's date of 1180, [1185?] may be supposed, with equal probability, to have produced his work within ten or fifteen years after the middle of the twelfth century ||. Layamon's translation may be considered as the earliest specimen of metre in the native language, posterior to the Conquest; except some lines in the Saxon Chronicle on the death of William I., and a few religious rhymes, which, according to Matthew Paris, the Blessed Virgin was pleased to dictate to St. Godric, the hermit, near Durham; unless we add to these the specimen of Saxon poetry published in the the romancers. [Ellis's Met. Rom. vol. i. p. 75.] Popular Archaeologia by Mr. Conybeare, who supposes songs about Arthur and Charlemagne (or, as some will have it, Charles Martel), were probably the main sources of Turpin's forgery and of Geoffrey's Armorican book. Even the proverbial mendacity of the pseudo-Turpin must have been indebted for the leading hints to songs that were extant respecting Charlemagne. The stream of fiction having thus spread itself in those grand prose reservoirs, afterwards flowed out from thence again in the shape of verse, with a force renewed by accumulation. Once more, as if destined to alternations, romance, after the fourteenth century, returned to the shape of prose, and in many instances made and carried pretensions to the sober credibility of history. [ It is common fairness to Mr. Campbell, to say that the late Mr. Price has cited this passage as one distinguishable alike for its truth and its beauty,-that establishes the fact that popular fiction is in its nature traditive.-Introd. to Warton's Hist. p. 92.] [ Various theories have been proposed for the purpose of explaining the origin of romantic fiction. Percy contended for a Scandinavian, Warton for an Arabian, and Leyden for an Armorican birth, to which Ellis inclined; while some have supposed it to be of Provençal, and others of Norman invention. If every argument has not been exhausted, every hypothesis has. But all their systems, as Sir Walter Scott says, seem to be inaccurate, in so far as they have been adopted exclusively of each other, and of the general proposition,-that fables of a nature similar that composition to be posterior to the Conquest, and to be the last expiring voice of the to the Romances of Chivalry, modified according to manners and the state of society, must necessarily be invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows upon the surface of the soil in every climate and in every country. (Misc. P.W. vol. vi. p. 174). "In reality," says Southey, "mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full account; for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason, in other words, wherever there is man. in similar stages of civilisation, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the difference of time and scene." -Pref. to Morte D'Arthur.] And " [ş Ellis (p. 44) says, Henry I., whom he professes to have seen. Warton (p. 67) says he was educated at Caen, was canon of Bayeux, and chaplain to Henry II.] Two copies of Layamon's or Lazamon's Brut are in the British Museum, Cott, MSS. Calig. A ix. and Otho C 13. Warton and Price have only touched incidentally on Layamon, from Mr. Ellis and Mr. Campbell's showing, one of the most important authors in the English language.] |