another. But often there was only one alliterative letter in the first half-verse; and the metre was further varied by the addition of unaccented syllables. The lays made after the Conquest illustrate the transition from the old alliterative metre to the short line and rhyme which were soon established by the Anglo-Normans when they began to write in English. The Poema Morale (of which an account will be found below, with specimens, at page 40) is thought by some to have first taken shape early in the twelfth century. In that case, it and other twelfth-century poems of little account bring us still nearer to Middle English poetry, if they do not form part of it; but it is best, when we speak of literature, to make Middle English poetry properly begin with the first noble piece of poetic literature, with the Brut of Layamon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The MS. of Beowulf is in the Cottonian Library in the British Museum, and Judith is in the same MS. The Exeter Book is in the library of Exeter Cathedral, and was placed there by Bishop Leofric in 1071. It contains the Riddles, the Elegies, the Crist, the St Guthlac, the Phenix, the Juliana, the Widsith, the Complaint of Deor, and other poems. It is a kind of anthology. The Vercelli Book, found at Vercelli in 1822, contains, interspersed among homilies, the Andreas, the Fates of the Apostles, the Dream of the Rood, the Elene, and two unimportant poems. The Junian MS. of the so-called Cædmonian poems is in the Bodleian. The Fight at Finnsburg was found on the cover of a MS. of Homilies at Lambeth, Waldhere on two vellum leaves at Copenhagen; the Battle of Brunanburh is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Battle of Maldon in a copy of the original MS. made by Hearne. Only one MS. of each of these poems exists. Of Elfred's translations we have many MSS.-three of the Cura Pastoralis, five of Bada's History, two of the Orosius, two of the De Consolatione, four of the Laws. The Soliloquia are in the MS. containing Beowulf. Of Elfric's works there are many MSS. Seven MSS. of the English Chronicle exist. MS. A, the Parker MS. written at Winchester, is at Cambridge; MS. B is at the British Museum, and was made at Canterbury; MS. C is at the British Museum, and is an Abingdon MS.; MS. D, also at the Museum, is the Worcester Chronicle; MS. E, now at the Bodleian (the Laud MS.), was done at Peterborough; MS. F, at the British Museum, was probably kept at Canterbury; MS. G, also probably kept at Canterbury, is at the British Museum, and is likely to be a copy of MS. A. [When Modern English was beginning to show its full powers in the hands of the early Elizabethan writers, the oldest stage of the tongue was almost forgotten, save for the little knowledge required by those whose business it was to spell out and interpret Anglo-Saxon charters and the like. At the Reformation AngloSaxon religious literature was looked up for controversial purposes; Archbishop Parker gathered and edited MSS., and greatly promoted 'Saxon' studies. Verstegen shows he knew some AngloSaxon in his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1606); and Spelman was driven to make his Glossarium (Part I. 1626) by the difficulties he met in studying our oldest laws. Francis Junius, or Du Jon, a Continental Protestant who settled in England in 1621, devoted himself to the study of Anglo-Saxon and the cognate Teutonic tongues, edited the so-called Cædmon and other Old English books, and gave his name to the Junian MS. Hickes, the nonjuring bishop, published the first edition of his Anglo-Saxon and Moso-Gothic Grammar in 1689; and all students of early English history owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Hearne, who studied and preserved antiquities.' Percy in his Reliques takes no cognisance of the oldest poetry. Warton's History of English Poetry (vol. i. 1774) professedly begins with the close of the tenth century; but what he says by way of introduction on the three successive 'dialects of Saxon'-British Saxon (till the Danish occupation), Danish Saxon ('British Saxon corrupted by the Danes'), and Norman Saxon (Danish Saxon adulterated with French')-shows how far he was to seek in this field; the spurious Cadmon's beautiful poetical paraphrase of the Book of Genesis' he names as written in Danish Saxon. Gray's knowledge of Icelandic and his interest in Welsh poetry and in 'Ossian' make it certain that, had he carried out his projected History of Poetry, the section on what he called 'the introduction of the poetry of the Goths into these islands by the Saxons and Danes' would have received fuller attention than heretofore. Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (first of many editions, 1783) does not include this period within its scope. The first edition of Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790) has nothing earlier than Surrey and Wyatt; but the 1801 edition gives not only Middle English poems, but the old song of Brunanburh, with a literal translation, and the ingenious rendering made by Hookham Frere, when an Eton schoolboy, into Rowleylike fourteenth-century English. In the notes Ellis accepts for Anglo-Saxon words derivations from 'Chaldaic' and Latin as unhesitatingly as from Gothic.' Rask the Dane put the study on a sounder philological footing by his Grammar (1817), which Thorpe translated; and the works of Thorpe, Bosworth, and Kemble in the first half of the century revived in the English people interest in their old language and literature. Conybeare's Specimens of Anglo-Saxon Poetry appeared in 1826. Campbell begins his Specimens of the British Poets (7 vols. 1819) with Chaucer and the King's Quair; and in the earlier issues and reprints of this Cyclopædia (1844-74) Anglo-Saxon literature was dismissed in less than three pages. For further study the reader may be referred to English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (1898), by the writer of the preceding section of this work, Dr Stopford A. Brooke, or to his History of Early English Literature (2 vols. 1892), which describes and appreciates still more fully the whole of the Anglo-Saxon literature down to the accession of Ælfred; to Professor Earle's little handbook (1884); to Wülker's Grundriss der Angelsächsischen Litteratur (1885); to the first volume of Ten Brink's History of English Literature (1877; transl. 1887); to the relevant parts of Professor Henry Morley's First Sketch, English Writers, and Library of English Literature, of Jusserand's History of the Literature of the English People (1896; transl. 1895), of Taine's History of English Literature (1863-64; transl. 1871), and of Wülker's Englische Litteraturgeschichte (1896); to Grein's Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa und Poesie, as re-edited by Wülker (1881-97); to the American Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (3 vols. 1883-88); to Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Readers, and Zupitza's; to the Grammar by Sievers, and Bosworth's Dictionary as edited by Toller. A bibliography giving the editions and translations of the various Anglo-Saxon works will be found in Dr. Stopford Brookes English Literature to the Conquest: thus there are five or six English editions of Beowulf, and as many translations, including the verse translation by William Morris.-ED.] MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE.* FROM THE ELEVENTH CENTURY TO THE SECOND HALF OF THE SIXTEENTH. A LTHOUGH her own literary production was as yet but small, in the eleventh century France was intellectually as well as politically the most vigorous country of Europe. Throughout the reign of Edward the Confessor, Norman-French cultivation had been making its way into England. After the Conquest its hold was intensified in every direction, and England was thus brought, definitely and irrevocably, into the full current of the intellectual life of Europe. Despite the preparations of the previous reign, the change came with the abruptness and violence of a revolution, and, like all revolutions, it was dearly paid for. The undercurrent of vernacular song and vernacular preaching did not cease to flow; but for four generations literary English became a memory treasured only by a few monks, and dwindled year by year, till it seemed altogether to lose creative power. When literary composition in English begins again, early in the thirteenth century, we find that both in form and matter it retains traces of its hereditary origin. But its face is no longer turned in the old direction. first English imaginative poem after the Conquest starts with the attempt to link the fortunes of our island with those of Troy, and this grafting upon English history of the classical traditions which form part of the heritage of The the Latin nations is all the more noteworthy because entirely fanciful and wilful. Still more noteworthy is the fact that the one hero of præ-Conquest days who has become a vivid figure in our literature is no English king, such as the great Alfred, but the British-that is, the Celtic-Arthur. The Normans brought with them a veritable Pax Romana, or Pax Britannica, as we now call it. Conquerors and conquered, Britons, English, and Danes, lost their old relative positions, and became the equal inhabitants of a common land., Bitter as, while it lasted, was the Norman supremacy over them all, the new theory of government thus offered a remedy for many rancours. Under the feudal system the monarch was recognised not as Rex Normannorum or Rex Anglorum, but as Rex Angliæ, king of the English land, and the peace and equality between race and race which this title symbolised became retrospective. In the beginning of the Arthurian cycle Arthur retained his semi-historical character as the bulwark of Britons against Saxons ; but the fighting with the Saxons was quickly pushed into the background, and Arthur became king of a purely romantic, non-historical Britain. This adoption of the common land as the rallying-point of the different races might easily, more especially after the loss of the French possessions of the English kings and the growth of feeling hostile to France, have * Copyright 1901 by J. B. Lippincott Company, to "The Arthurian Legend," page 35. 31 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, 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 abonte, 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, I ween that there be in all the world countries none 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 Thus com, lo! Engelond into Normandies hond, & the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote hor owe speche, So that heiemen of this lond that of hor blod come, 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 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 oxartata, pronunciatione ipsa sit tam diversa, cum tamen Normannica lingua, quæ adventitia est, univoca maneat penes cunctos. prædicta quoque lingua Saxonica tripartita, quæ in paucis adhuc agrestibus vix remansit, orientales cum occiduis tanquam sub eodem crli climate lineati, plus consonant in sermone quam boreales cum austrinis.-Polychronicon, Book I. ch. lix. De 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 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 Angliæ, 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 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 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 Earl (edited by Mr C. H. Orpen in 1892), which is of considerable value for the history of Ireland about 1170. a considerable part of the great medieval story-higher value, such as the Roman de Rou of book, 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, 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 |