proved not merely a unifying but a quickening influence. The note of our island patriotism is struck by Robert of Gloucester in the opening lines of his Metrical Chronicle :

England is a well good land, I ween of lands the best,
Set at the one end of the world, all in the west.
The sea goeth it all about, it stands as in an isle ;
Of foes they need the less them doubt, but it be through
guile.1

The purely dynastic and predatory objects of the Hundred Years' War with France did not foster this spirit, and it is not until after the Armada- -or perhaps, if we are to look carefully for its first notes, after the great rupture with Rome earlier in the sixteenth century-that patriotism becomes a force in English poetry. But the negative influence of the new conception was potent. Old English history and traditions soon ceased to interest our poets, the use of the forms of Old English poetry gradually died out, and English writers took their inspiration more and more from foreign sources. Welsh legends, French romances and miracle-plays; French allegory and love poetry; the stories of Troy and Thebes, of Theseus and Alexander, as filtered through Latin and Romance versions; the masterpieces of Virgil and Ovid; Eastern tales brought home by the Crusaders; lastly, the splendid new literature of Italy-these were the quickening influences in English literature from the days of Layamon till a new tide of foreign-born ideas began a fresh epoch in the sixteenth century. The blood which ran in the veins of the singers was, in the main, English, and to this we owe that continuityperhaps, rather, that continual recurrence-of the Old English temper and way of thinking which constitutes a real unity amid the striking differences of our literature at different periods. But just as the English race assimilated Briton, Dane, and Norman, modified itself thereby, and yet remained English, so our English literature now, in all appearance, breaks wholly with its own past, in order to take to itself these foreign traditions, forms, and ideals, and yet. never ceases to maintain its own individuality.

For us now it is easy to see that the gain which the Norman Conquest brought to English literature more than counterbalanced the loss. But for generations not merely our old litera

1 England his a wel god lond, ich wene ech londe best,
I-set in the on ende of the worlde as al in the west.
The see geth him al aboute, he stond as in an yle;
Of fon hii dorre the lasse doute, bote hit be thorgh gyle.
(Cotton text, ed. Wright.)

ture, but the English speech itself, seemed in danger of extinction, and the loss of this would have been irreparable. To the reality of this danger the evidence of contemporaries is strikingly explicit. Himself the author of a long rhyming chronicle in English, and writing about a century after English imaginative literature had made its new start in Layamon's Brut, Robert of Gloucester gives this account of the relative positions of the French and English languages at the end of the thirteenth century. He has been describing the submission of the Londoners to William the Conqueror, and proceeds:

And thus came England into the Normans' hand, And the Normans could speak then but their own speech,

And spake French as they did at home, and their children so did teach.

So that high men of this land, that of their blood come,
Hold all to that same speech that they of them nome. took
For but a man know French men count of him lute; little
But low men hold to English and to their own speech
yute.

I ween that there be in all the world countries none
That hold not to their own speech save England alone.
But well men wot that to know both well it is,
For the more that a man knows the more worth he is.?
(Lines 7537-7547-)

yet

Robert of Gloucester wrote his Chronicle, probably, soon after 1297, and if we rely implicitly on written testimony, the popularity of French must have gone on increasing during the next fifty years. Writing in Cheshire about 1350, Ranulph Higden tells us that the English, who had always had three forms of speech, Northern, Midland, and Southern, owing to the different German races from which they had sprung, had had their native language further corrupted by contact with Danes and Normans. This corruption, he goes on, 'has made great progress in our own times from two causes, because boys at school, contrary to the usage of all other nations, from the first coming of the Normans are obliged, leaving their own vulgar tongue, to translate [their Latin] into French; also because the children of the nobles from their first baby talk are trained to the

2 Thus com, lo! Engelond into Normandies hond,

& the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote hor owe speche,

& speke French as hii dude atom & hor children dude also
teche.

So that heiemen of this lond that of hor blod come,
Holdeth alle thulke speche that hii of hom nome.
Vor bote a man conne Frenss me telth of him lute;
Ac lowe men holdeth to Engliss & to hor owe speche yute.
Ich wene ther ne beth in al the world contreyes none,
That ne holdeth to hor owe speche bote Engelond one.
Ac wel me wot vor to conne bothe wel it is,
Vor the more that a mon can the more wurthe he is.

French idiom.

Desiring to resemble the nobles, that they may thus seem of greater consequence, the country people use every endeavour to talk French. In this way, to a surprising degree, the natural and proper speech of Englishmen, though confined in a single island, has become diverse' in its very pronunciation, while the Norman speech, coming from abroad, remains very much the same with every one. As to this aforesaid threefold Saxon speech, which has with difficulty still survived among a few rustic folk, the east-countrymen agree more closely with the west (as living in the same latitude) than do northerners with southerners.'1

John Trevisa, who translated the Polychronicon, when he came to this passage in 1385, interpolated the comment that after the Black Death of 1348 John Cornwall (whose name deserves to be honoured) caused his pupils to translate their Latin into English instead of French, and that the change had become general, ‘also gentilmen haveth now moche i-left for to teche here children frensche.' It is quite plain, however, that the whole passage in the Polychronicon is both carelessly written and exaggerated. Higden, who seems to have been a very aristocratic monk, is clearly speaking all the time of well-to-do people, ignoring the great bulk of the population beneath them. But even if we stretch a point and make his 'rurales homines' and 'pauci agrestes' refer to people of the franklin class, it is plain that he was a bad observer. In 1362, within a dozen years or so of his writing the Polychronicon, the citizens of London prevailed on Edward III. to allow their suits in the law-courts to be pleaded in English instead of French; in the same year Langland was writing his first draft of his famous Vision; seven years later Chaucer was at work on his first original poem, the Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse. By 1370 English had definitely triumphed over French, and the stream of English literature, original as well as translated, which flows steadily from

1 Hæc quidem nativæ linguæ corruptio provenit hodie multum ex duobus: quod videlicet pueri in scholis, contra morem cæterarum nationum, a primo Normannorum adventu, derelicto proprio vulgari, construere gallice compelluntur: item, quod filii nobilium ab ipsis cunabulorum crepundiis ad gallicum idioma informantur. Quibus profecto rurales homines assimilari volentes, ut per hoc spectabiliores videantur, francigenare satagunt omni nisu. Ubi nempe mirandum videtur quomodo nativa et propria Anglorum lingua, in unica insula coartata, pronunciatione ipsa sit tam diversa, cum tamen Normannica lingua, quæ adventitia est, univoca maneat penes cunctos. De prædicta quoque lingua Saxonica tripartita, quæ in paucis adhuc agrestibus vix remansit, orientales cum occiduis tanquam sub eodem cœli climate lineati, plus consonant in sermone quam boreales cum austrinis.-Polychronicon, Book I. ch. lix.

Robert of Gloucester onwards shows that English cannot have been in any serious danger at any time after the reign of Henry III. Nevertheless, we must not forget that as late as 1320 or 1330 a preaching friar like Nicholas Bozon thought it well to write popular sermons for English audiences in French, and that as late as the reign of Richard II. the excellent Gower sought immortality as a poet in French and Latin as well as in the language with which Chaucer was content. Clearly French continued to be much spoken as a fashionable and polite language til nearly the end of the fourteenth century, and we may remember that in the miracle-plays great persons, like Herod and Pilate, often begin their speeches in it.

During the period when the English language was still little used by cultivated people there was no lack of literary production in England. The bulk of this was written in Latin, and alike for its quantity, its variety, and the talent displayed in it, the Latin literature of England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is very remarkable. In history within less than fifty years we have the Chronicon ex Chronicis of Florence of Worcester (d. 1118); the Historia Novorum and Vita Anselmi of Eadmer of Canterbury (d. 1124); the Historia de Gestis Anglorum of Simeon of Durham (d. 1130); the De Gestis Regum Anglorum (449-1120), Historia Novella (a continuation to the year 1143), the De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum, Life of Aldhelm, and treatise on the antiquities of Glastonbury, all by William of Malmesbury; the Historica Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis (c. 1142); and the Historia Anglorum of Henry of Huntingdon, which is brought down to the year 1154. Geoffrey of Monmouth's imaginative history of the kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britannia), to which we shall refer again, seems to have acted as a discouragement to sober chroniclers; but towards the end of the century we have the works of the Welshman Gerald de Bary (Giraldus Cambrensis) on Ireland and Wales, and the Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newbury (1198). The Annals of Roger de Hoveden end with the year 1201, the Chronicle of Roger of Wendover in 1235; while in his Historia Major, Historia Minor, and Lives of the Abbots of St Albans, Matthew Paris (d. 1259) glorified the office of history-writer to St Albans Abbey, which had been created before 1183, and which produced a series of chronicles extending over more than

two centuries, only ending in 1388. Turning Turning to other learned subjects, we have in the twelfth - century the treatise of Athelard of Bath on natural history and philosophy, and his translation of Euclid; the De Naturis Rerum of Alexander Neckham; the famous Dialogus de Scaccario, or treatise on the Exchequer, written in 1176-78 by Richard Fitz-Neal; and the work on the Laws of England attributed to the Chief Justiciary Ranulph de Glanvil. Nearly a century later another work with the same title, De Legibus Anglia, and founded on Glanvil's, was written by Henry de Bracton; and in 1268 Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar, was writing the Opus Majus, in which and its successors, the Opus Minus and Opus Tertium, he embodied so much of the learning of his time and of his own genius, which so greatly transcended it.

Nor was this Latin literature confined to learned subjects only. Perhaps the Polycraticus, de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, which John of Salisbury finished in 1156, ought to come under this head, for the triflings of courtiers and footsteps of the philosophers are surveyed in a purely moral and didactic spirit. But the work for which, a generation later, Walter Map took part of the same title (De Nugis Curialium) is entirely literary, running over the whole range of courtiers' small-talk, with an abundance of anecdotes, cleverly told. With Map's name also are connected the satires on the corruption and evil-living of the clergy in the person of the bibulous Bishop Golias. The Brunellus of Nigel Wireker is another lively satire, this time on medieval philosophy. The attempt of Joseph of Exeter to write a Latin poem on the Trojan War is perhaps worth noting, as is also the composition (c. 1195) by Geoffrey of Vinsauf of a treatise on poetry. In the following century at least a considerable part of the great medieval storybook, the Gesta Romanorum, had its origin in England. Quite at the close of the period of literary Latin (c. 1344) comes the Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, the book-loving bishop, a work which those who share his hobby still treasure, and which may remind us that from the twelfth to the fourteenth century the art of book-production in England, alike in beauty of writing and in splendour of illustration, attained the very highest excellence, equalling that of France itself.

The fact that the liturgies of the Church were all in Latin accounts for the last point we have to notice the beginning, that is,

of the drama in England in the form of Latin miracle-plays, which were acted in church on various high festivals as part of the service of the day. The earliest mention we have of a play of this kind is of one in honour of St Catherine, performed at Dunstable by a certain Geoffrey, who by 1119 had become Abbot of St Albans; but in the Life of St Thomas à Becket written, about 1182, by William Fitzstephen we are told that plays representing the miracles and sufferings of the martyrs of the Church were at that time frequently performed in London. The plays

of Hilarius, an Englishman, which have come down to us, already show touches of humour; but the early dramas on such subjects as the Resurrection are thoroughly religious in feeling, following closely the Bible narrative and introducing appropriate hymns.

Besides this literature in Latin there existed a second, more popular, quite as prolific, and nearly as varied in its contents-the literature of books written in England, or by subjects of the English king, in the French or AngloNorman language. Probably the largest section of this French literature was that of the various kinds of books written with a religious aim-devotional treatises, translations or explanations of the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Apocalypse, sermons, lives of the saints, moralisations on the properties of beasts and things (Bestiaires, Lapidaires), &c. In addition to these there were what may be called educational works of all sorts, abridgments of history, treatises on geography and natural history, law-books, &c. Many of these have perished utterly; many others have never been edited in modern times or printed in any form. Besides the mere abridgments of Latin works, there were original metrical chronicles of much higher value, such as the Roman de Rou of the Jersey poet Wace (c. 1100-1170), an account of the Norman Conquest which gives the best description of the battle of Hastings; or, again, the Song of Dermot and the Eart (edited by Mr C. H. Orpen in 1892), which is of considerable value for the history of Ireland about 1170.

In the thirteenth century we may mention two religious poems written in French, Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour, in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and William Waddington's Manuel des Pechez, speedily Englished by Robert Mannyng of Brunne as the Handlyng Synne (see page 41). Again, as late as the last quarter

of the fourteenth century we find John Gower writing long poems in Latin and French (see page 74) before he turned to English in his Latin-named Confessio Amantis. Gower also wrote French balades which have real literary merit, but he is the last English poet who seriously used a foreign language as the medium of poetry; and though later writers, such as Sir Thomas More and Bacon, used Latin for works in prose, this was with a view to appealing to a European audience rather than from any distrust of the capabilities of their native tongue. Coincident with this final disuse of Latin and French in literature intended for Englishmen, we find, a little before 1380, the beginning of a long series of translations of foreign works into Englishnot merely works of devotion and religious instruction as in the previous period, but works on every variety of subject. About 1380 also we have the beginning of a new influence in English poetry, for it was then that Chaucer turned from his French and Latin sources and enriched our literature from his study of the great Italian writers, Dante and Boccaccio. Thenceforth what we may call the literary or Court poetry of England takes an entirely new turn; for, though Chaucer's successors could but very imperfectly follow in his footsteps, it was yet in his footsteps that they tried to walk. Thus the period of some three hundred and fifty years from the first revival of the literary use of English after the Norman Conquest in Layamon's Brut (c. 1205) to the accession of Elizabeth, with the nearly coincident literary landmark, the publication of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, divides itself almost exactly at the half, about the year 1380. Before this date English is only one of three rival literary languages; after it English reigns supreme, and in prose advances unfalteringly. In poetry, as we shall see, there was no such steady progress, for until Surrey and Wyatt sought inspiration from the Italian models where Chaucer had found it, there was no English writer who could understand his secrets so as to prove in any way a worthy successor to him.

The Arthurian Legend.

The trilingual character of the literature written for Englishmen in the early part of our period is well illustrated by the fact that the legendary history of Britain with which English literature takes its new beginning appeared first in Latin, then in French, and only finally in English. It was the Historia Regum Britannia of Geoffrey

of Monmouth which started the legends on their literary career. This famous book, which differs widely from the ordinary Latin chronicles among which it has already been named, was extant, in a form now lost, before January 1139, and as we now have it dates from some eight or ten years later. Its author called himself Gaufridus Arturus (Geoffrey Arthur)—that is, the son of Arthur; his signature is found as witness to a charter of Oseney, near Oxford, in 1129; probably in 1140 he became Archdeacon of Monmouth; in 1152 he was consecrated Bishop of St Asaph; and in 1154 he died at Llandaff. He was certainly of Welsh origin, and Welsh tradition has it that he was born at Monmouth. He does not tell us, however, that what was new in his book was gathered from local Welsh tradition, but that he learnt it from a certain very ancient book in the British language which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Brittany and gave him, and in which he found the acts of all the British kings, from Brut to Cadwalader, set forth in their order. This Archdeacon Walter was one of the co-signatories of the Oseney charter of 1129, and the attempts made to get rid of both him and his Breton book are rather unnecessary. Brutus, the great-grandson of Eneas, the supposed founder of the royal line of Britain, is mentioned by the præ-Conquest historian Nennius, and Nennius and Bede speak of Lucius, the first Christian king; of Vortigern and Ambrosius Aurelius; while Arthur appears in Nennius as a warrior, not a king, who won twelve battles against the Saxons. The insertion of intermediate British kings-among them Leir, whose story, as Shakespeare knew it, here first appears-and the great development, though only in part, of the Arthur legend, were

Geoffrey's innovations on the received version of British history, and they sufficed to set the literary world of France and England on fire. Writing almost certainly in 1149 or the following year, Alfred of Beverley remarks that he found it was thought a proof of clownishness to know nothing of the stories of the Britons, about which every one was talking, and he therefore made an abridgment of Geoffrey's History. Three versions or abridgments were made at early dates in Welsh. It is hardly possible to doubt that the book was used by Geoffrey Gaimar in the lost first part of his Estorie des Engles; and another French poet, Wace, the author of the Roman de Rou, with the help of some additions, turned it into a metrical chronicle of over fourteen thousand lines, to which he gave the title Geste des Bretons, or Brut d'Angleterre. This was in 1155; and about the end of the century Wace's romance and two other works, identified as the Latin original of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica and the Anglo-Saxon version of it, fell into the hands of Layamon (Lazamon), a priest at Areley Regis, on the Severn, in north Worcestershire, and spurred him to write on the same subject a poem of some thirty-two