Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely, Merrily sang the monks at Ely CHAPTER IV ANGLO-NORMAN WRITERS. ITH the Norman Conquest (1066), began a new era for England, in which its literature entered a new phase, influenced-yet never quite dominated by a new language. The conquerors brought the love of letters, and the Anglo-Saxon mind, in which the capacity for literature had been almost dormant, slowly awoke to its enjoyment and production. The authors of the twelfth century wrote mostly in Latin. There were a host of them. John of Salisbury (1120-1182), the secretary of Thomas à Becket, satirized the frivolities of courtiers and the follies of the scholastic philosophers. Ordericus Vitalis (10751143) wrote an "Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy," which tells more about the eleventh and twelfth centuries than any other work of the period. Then follows a group of writers who, under the general name of "old chroniclers," give, in a mixture of fact and fiction, the socalled annals of England from the age of fable to their own. The most important of these were William of Malmesbury, who wrote a "History of the Kings of England"; a painstaking work, authentic as far as his materials went; and Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh monk whose vivid fancy led him to set forth, under the title of "History of the Britons," a romance which caused a plodding historian of the next century to assert that Geoffrey falsified the facts of history. We of the nineteenth century are disposed to be more charitable, and think that Geoffrey was only indulging his imagination for the amusement of his countrymen, as many a writer of romance has done since, without expecting to be taken literally. We owe to him the story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and we should feel sorry to be without it; for, though we may not pin our faith to any one statement in it, we learn from it what our ancestors believed and enjoyed, and this knowledge has a historical value quite apart from the facts which the learned monk professed to relate. Many chroniclers besides the two already mentioned divided with them the honor of writing, with more or less fidelity, the early history of their country. Of those who flourished in the twelfth century, the best known are Gerald of Wales, Henry of Huntingdon and Roger of Wendover. At this time the Saxon and Norman tongues existed side by side as spoken languages, while all the books which have come down to us were written either in Latin or NormanFrench-far the larger proportion being in the former. Of the latter, the most interesting is the "Brut" (or Brutus) of Wace, an Anglo-Norman poet whose imagination seized upon the story told by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and reproduced it as a metrical romance of many hundred lines. Not to be outdone in patriotism, an English monk, Layamon, turned Wace's "Brut" into his own language, which may be called semi-Saxon, and thus produced the first English poem after the Conquest. It was a great thing for England, this beginning of storytelling in the native tongue. Englishmen who could understand neither the Latin of Geoffrey nor the French of Wace, were overjoyed at the opportunity of reading, in their own language, the story which had already become so famous; and the taste for fiction once acquired, the nation has advanced unceasingly in its fondness for this fascinating branch of literature. To Walter Map or Mapes, England owes a debt only half-recognized, for his services in bringing together and harmonizing the Arthurian legends of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his brother chroniclers (or fabulists). From his pen came the story of the search for the Holy Grail, as we now know it, and the romance of Sir Galahad. To these he added various legends of what is called "The Arthurian Cycle," blending them so skillfully that they all seem parts of one story. This work was written in Norman - French. His satires against the clergy, in Latin, found eager readers both in and out of the monasteries. An addition to the literature of the same age, in the latter tongue, is the collection called "Gesta," a collection of wildly improbable stories which served to amuse the monks, and the few scholars who were not monks, in the interval of severer study. It was in this same century, the twelfth, that we find the first traces of what afterward became so famous under the name of "Mysteries" and "Miracle Plays." These were an attempt to blend amusement with religious instruction. The first dealt only with Bible subjects; the second allowed the introduction of other matters, usually some incident in the lives of saints. Naturally, the two were often interwoven, and under the same general form continued to instruct and delight the illiterate until, in the sixteenth century, interludes and masques arose and led the way to the modern drama. The only other purely literary work of the thirteenth century worthy of mention is the rhymed chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, written in what has been called "Transitional English "- a step between the semi-Saxon of the twelfth century and the later English of Chaucer's time. With the thirteenth century, literature took a graver turn. Matthew Paris, who has been called the greatest of the old chroniclers, lived more than half through the century. Orm or Ormin, a monk (like most other writers during the same period), wrote in semi-Saxon English a paraphrase in verse of the church-service of each day, with the addition of a homily, or short sermon, also in verse. * The greatest name of the thirteenth century, and one of the greatest in any century, belongs not to literature but to science. It is that of Roger Bacon (1214-94). He was born of a good family, was educated at Oxford, took holy orders, and afterward spent some years in Paris, where he acquired a great reputation for theological learning. Returning to Oxford he devoted himself to teaching and study, and entered the strict order of the Franciscans, who discouraged learning, as a luxury, and even denied him the use of pen and ink. Clement IV, hearing of his rare acquirements, sent him a command to write down his thoughts without regard to the rules of his order. Here a new difficulty arose. The Franciscans, vowed to poverty, had no money for writing -materials (in those days a serious expense for it was not till 1300 that paper began to supplant parchment), and Bacon's own family had been ruined *A quotation will serve to show the change in spelling between the thirteenth century and our own. Thiss bocc is nemmnedd Orrmulum, Forrthi thatt Ormin it wrohhte. This book is named Ormulum Because that Orm it wrote. The object of doubling the final consonant occurring after a vowel, was apparently to serve as a guide to the pronunciation of the words by strangers, especially those of the Gallic race, which is prone to leave such consonants unpronounced. in the "Barons' Wars" of Henry III. To supply this want would cost him not less than sixty pounds, equivalent to more than a thousand dollars of our money now. Loans were obtained from friends, and with almost incredible industry, Bacon wrote, within a year and a half, his "Opus Majus" (great work) and two minor works, which summed up the study of a lifetime. He urged upon men the study of nature herself as a means of understanding her processes; and, as has been said, laid the foundations of that great system which afterward took form in the mind of the second Bacon; the Lord Chancellor of James I. CHAPTER V. THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. N entering the fourteenth century we must be prepared for a long step in advance. Before treating of Chaucer, the "day-star" of English poetry, and his contemporaries, we must mention some of lesser note. Robert de Brunne wrote a religious poem called "Handlynge Sinne," and translated some rhyming French chronicles. Laurence Minot made war-songs, celebrating the victories of Edward III. in France. Richard Rolle, "the Hermit of Hampole," whose life has in it an element of romance, wrote "The Pricke of Conscience." He had a strong leaning to the "religious life" and, knowing that his aspirations toward it would not be favored by his family, he begged from his sister two gowns, a white and a gray, which he fashioned as well as he could into a monkish dress, and from that time lived a life of retirement and devotion. Having satisfied his friends of his sanity, he was allowed to spend his years in a cell not connected |