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 Ellis nevertheless tells us that the vulgar English, not gradually, but suddenly, superseded the legitimate Saxon.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.HALLAN, 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 terin 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 Foniface'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, The Cnut Ching reuther by, Roweth Cnites noer the land, And here we thes Muniches sang." Merry sang the Monks in Ely, When Canute King was sailing by: Row, ye knights, near the land, 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 rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ingenuity, and design, sufficient to distinguish it from the dry and dreary chronicle. The reign of French metrical romance may be chiefly assigned to the latter part of the twelfth, and the whole of the thirteenth century; that of English metrical romance, to the latter part of the thirteenth, and the whole of the fourteenth century. Those ages of chivalrous song were, in the mean time, fraught with events which, while they undermined the feudal system, gradually prepared the way for the decline of chivalry itself. Literature and science were commencing, and even in the improvement of the mechanical skill employed to heighten chivalrous or superstitious magnificence, the seeds of arts, industry, and plebeian independence were unconsciously sown. One invention, that of gunpowder, is eminently 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, according 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 inter-marked out as the cause of the extinction of est, 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 instruction in war, and the improvement of tacthe 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 romance. Till the middle of the twelfth cenwho 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. Chivalry; but even if that invention had not taken place, it may well be conjectured that the contrivance of other means of missile de tics, would have narrowed that scope for the prominence of individual prowess which was necessary for the chivalrous character, and that the progress of civilisation must have ultimately levelled its romantic consequence. But to anticipate the remote effects of such causes, if scarcely within the ken of philosophy, was still less within the reach of poetry. Chivalry was still in all its glory; and to the eye of the poet appeared as likely as ever to be immortal. The progress of civilisation even ministered to its external importance. The early arts made chivalrous life, with all its pomp and ceremonies, more august and imposing, and more picturesque as a subject for description. Literature, for a time, contributed to the same effect, by her jejune and fabulous *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 the romancers [Ellis's Met. Rom. vol. i. p. 75.] Popular 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 Norman verse dwelt for a considerable time in the tedious historic style, before it reached Twelfth 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 Archaeologia by Mr. Conybeare, who supposes 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. And 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.] [§ Ellis (p. 44) says, Henry I., whom he professes to have Warton (p. 67) says he was educated at Caen, was canon of Bayeux, and chaplain to Henry II.] seen. [ 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.] Saxon Muse*. Of the dialect of Layamon, Mr. Mitford, in his Harmony of Languages, observes, that it has "all the appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of those who spoke it. It is truly neither Saxon nor English+." Mr. Ellis's opinion of its being simple Saxon has been already noticed. So little agreed are the most ingenious speculative men on the characteristics of style, which they shall entitle Saxon or English. We may, however, on the whole, consider the style of Layamon to be as nearly the intermediate state of the old and new languages as can be found in any ancient specimen :-something like the new insect stirring its wings, before it has shaken off the aurelia state. But of this work, or of any specimen supposed to be written in the early part of the thirteenth century, displaying a sudden transition from Saxon to English, I am disposed to repeat my doubts. Without being over credulous about the antiquity of the Lives of the Saints, and the other Thirteenth fragments of the thirteenth century, century. which Mr. Ellis places in chronological succession next to Layamon, we may allow that before the date of Robert of Gloucester, not only the legendary and devout style, but the amatory and satirical, had begun to be rudely cultivated in the language. It was customary, in that age, to make the minstrels sing devotional strains to the harp, on Sundays, for the edification of the people, instead of the verses on gayer subjects which were sung at public entertainments; a circumstance which, while it indicates the usual care of the Catholic church to make use of every hold over the popular mind, discovers also the fondness of the people for their poetry, and the attrac * Two specimens of the ancient state of the language, viz., the stanzas on old age, beginning" He may him sore adreden," and the quotation from the Ormulum, which Dr. Johnson placed, on the authority of Hickes, nearly after the Conquest, are considered by Mr. Tyrwhitt to be of a later date than Layamon's translation. Their language is certainly more modern. [t Mitford, p. 170. In the Specimen of Layamon published by Mr. Ellis, not a Gallicism is to be found, nor even a Norman term: and so far from exhibiting any appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of those who spoke it," nearly every important form of Anglo-Saxon grammar is rigidly adhered to; and so little was the language altered at this advanced period of Norman influence, that a few slight variations might convert it into genuine Anglo-Saxon.-PRICE, Warton, vol. i. p. 109.] tions which it had already begun to assume. Of the satirical style I have already alluded to one example in the "Land of Cokayne,” an allegorical satire on the luxury of the church, couched under the description of an imaginary paradise, in which the nuns are represented as houris, and the black and grey monks as their paramours. This piece has humour, though not of the most delicate kind; and the language is easy and fluent, but it possesses nothing of style, sentiment, or imagery, approaching to poetry. Another specimen of the pleasantry of the times is more valuable; because it exhibits the state of party feeling on real events, as well as the state of the language at a precise time. It is a ballad, entitled "Richard of Alemaigne," composed by one of the adherents of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, after the defeat of the royal party at the battle of Lewes, in 1264. In the year after that battle the royal cause was restored, and the earl of Warren and Sir Hugh Bigod returned from exile, and assisted in the king's victory. In this satirical ballad, those two personages are threatened with death, if they should ever fall into the hands of their enemies. Such a song and such threats must have been composed by Leicester's party in the moment of their triumph, and not after their defeat and dispersion; so that the date of the piece is ascertained by its contents §. This political satire leads me to mention another, which the industrious Ritson published ||, and which, without violent anachronism, may be spoken of among the specimens of the thirteenth century; as it must have been composed within a few years after its close, and relates to events within its verge. It is a ballad on the execution of the Scottish patriots, Sir William Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser. The diction is as barbarous as we should expect from a song of triumph on such a subject. It relates the death and treatment of Wallace very minutely. The circumstance of his being covered with a mock crown of laurel in West "Though some make slight of Libels," says Selden, yet you may see by them how the wind sits; as, take a straw, and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times, so well as ballads and libels."-Table Talk. [§ See it in Percy's Reliques, and in Wright's Political Songs of England, p. 69.] Ritson's Ancient Songs. |