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interest to students of the language, but of slight interest as literature, is the Ancren Riwle (Rule of the Anchoresses), which seems to have been written by a Bishop Poor, who died in 1237. It was intended for the guidance of a small household of women withdrawn from the world for service of God, at Tarrant Keynstone, in Dorsetshire.

To the reign of Henry III., and about the year 1250, belongs an English poem kindred in spirit to the "Ormulum," and, indeed, illustrative of the same feature in English character which was marked at the outset of our literature by Cadmon's "Paraphrase." This is a version of the Scripture narrative of Genesis and Exodus. Like "The Owl and the Nightingale," it illustrates the adoption of rhyme into our native poetry, by use of the octosyllabic rhyming verse common in many French romances. The poem of "Genesis and Exodus" is by an unknown author, and represents East Midland Transition English of the middle of the thirteenth century. It has been suggested that the author of the "Ormulum " belonged to Lincolnshire ; the author of the "Genesis and Exodus" to Suffolk. In the 4,162 lines of "Genesis and Exodus," there are only about fifty words of Norman origin. The writer begins by saying that men ought to love those who enable the unlearned to love and serve the God who gives love and rest of the soul to all Christians, and that Christian men should be glad as birds are of the dawn to have the story of salvation turned out of Latin into their own native speech.

The same spirit among the people is represented, from the date of Layamon onward, by Homilies, metrical Creeds, Paternosters, Gaudia, or Joys of the Virgin, and short devotional or moral poems, of which MSS. remains. There is also a Bestiary, in English, apparently of the same date, and produced in the same part of England as the metrical story of "Genesis and Exodus." The "Bestiary" is a version from a Latin "Physiologus," by a Bishop Theobald, and in its 802 lines, except one or two Latin names of animals, which had already been adopted in First English, there are not more than eight words of Romance origin. To what has been said of the early origin of books of this kind, when we found them imitated in First English, (ch. ii. § 12), it may be added that Epiphanius, a Jewish Christian bishop and opponent of Origen, referred, at the close of the fourth century, in his book against heresies, to the two natures of the serpent, with the phrase "as the Physiologues say ;" and

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that, as collections of such natural history allegories multiplied, there came to be a sort of canonical rule as to the moral allegory connected with each animal. There was a "Physiologus" ascribed to Epiphanius. In the year 496 Gelasius II. declared

at a Church Council that a 66 Physiologus," then ascribed to St. Ambrose, was apocryphal and heretical; and Latin MSS. of such work date from the eighth century. Early in the twelfth century, a metrical "Bestiary" was written in French by Philippe de Thaun, and in the time of which we are now speaking, there was produced in France, "Le Bestiaire Divin de Guillaume, Clerc de Normandie."

31. There was translation also of popular romances from French into English verse during the reign of Henry III. The most notable of these were "King Horn" and the "Romance of Alexander."

King Horn belongs to an Anglo-Danish cycle of romance, from which the Norman trouvères drew material. Another of the tales of this cycle was "Havelok the Dane," formed into a French lay in Henry I.'s time, but translated some years later than "King Horn." Another tale of the same group, afterwards translated into English as a metrical romance, was that of "Guy of Warwick and Colbrond the Dane." Horn put to sea in a small boat, landed in Westernesse, where he became page to King Aylmer, and loved Aylmer's daughter Rimenhild. He was dubbed a knight, and achieved great things. Banished for his love, he bade Rimenhild wait for him seven years. Many things happened before and after King Horn's marriage with Rimenhild. While he was gone to recover his native land from the infidel, a false friend, Fykenild, seized his wife. But Horn went as a harper into Fykenild's castle, killed him, and recovered Rimenhild.

King Alexander was a very famous subject of romance poetry. A Greek romance upon him had been written about the year 1060 by Simon Seth, keeper of the imperial wardrobe in the palace of Antiochus at Constantinople, founded upon Oriental legends that abounded among the Persians and Arabians as "Mirrors of Iskander," "The Two-Horned Alexander," &c. This Greek romance was translated into Latin, and from Latin even into Hebrew. It became also the groundwork of many French and English poems. In the year 1200 Gaultier de Chatillon turned it into an 66 Alexandreis," which was one of the best Latin poems of the Middle Ages, and about the same time, at

the beginning of the reign of John in England, the great French romance of Alexander was composed in nine books, containing altogether about 20,000 of the twelve-syllabled lines since known, from their use in that poem, as Alexandrines. All the lines in one of its paragraphs, even though they may be a hundred, rhyme together. The Alexander romance was adopted in Spain, Italy, and even in Scandinavia. A German Alexandries, in six books, was produced during our Henry III.'s reign by a Suabian, Rudolph of Hohenems; and towards the close of the same reign, about the year 1265, there was produced an English free version of the famous poem as the Romance of King Alexander, which has been ascribed without good reason, to an Adam Davie, Marshal of Stratford-at-Bow.

To the reign of Henry III. also may belong the English metrical version of the romance of Sir Tristrem, ascribed to Thomas of Erceldoune, in the county of Berwick, the earliest Scottish poet, who was born about 1219, alive in 1286, and dead before 1299. He was in repute in his own day not only as poet, but as prophet also.

32. From the rapid development of an English literature in the language of the people, we now pass to other illustrations of the energy of English thought during the reign of Henry III., and return to Robert Grosseteste, whom we left (§ 27), at the date of his appointment, in 1224, as the first rector of the Franciscans in Oxford. He had been Archdeacon of Wilts, was then Archdeacon of Northampton, and became afterwards Archdeacon of Leicester. At one time he was rector of St. Margaret's, Leicester. In 1232, after a severe illness, Grosseteste, who would no longer be a pluralist, gave up all his preferments except a prebend at Lincoln; and in 1235 he was made Bishop of Lincoln, then the largest and most populous diocese in the country, and very famous for its theological school. It was as Bishop of Lincoln that Grosseteste began the most energetic part of his career as Church reformer. Strictly interpreting the duties of his office, he devoted himself to the suppression of abuses. Within a year of his consecration he had, after a visitation of the monasteries, removed seven abbots and four priors. Next year he was, in a Council held in London, supporting the proposal to deprive pluralists of all their livings except one. His strictness produced outcry. The canons preached against their bishop in his own cathedral; a monk tried to poison him. In 1245 Grosseteste obtained the support of the pope for his visi.

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tations; and in 1246 he obtained another bull from the pope to prevent scholars at Oxford from graduating in arts without examination. When his visitations were resumed, his unrcserved inquiry into the morals of those who undertook the spiritual guidance of his diocese produced so much scandal that appeal was made to the king to check it. The king interfered by forbidding laymen to give evidence in such matters before Grosseteste's officials. Grosseteste battled against the greed of monks who seized for their monasteries possessions and tithes of the Church meant for the use of resident priests. But the monks made it worth the pope's while to be deaf to all the bishop's arguments upon that head. As he left the pope, Grosseteste said aloud, so that his holiness might hear, "O money, money, how much you can do! especially at the court of Rome." In 1252 Grosseteste caused a calculation to be made of the income of the foreign clergy thrust by the pope on English maintenance. It was 70,000 marks, three times the clear revenue of the king. In the following year, 1253, the last year of his life, Grosseteste made a famous stand against the avarice of Rome by refusing to induct one of the pope's nephews into a canonry at Lincoln. He died in the autumn of that year, accusing Rome of the disorders brought into the Church. He left his library to the Franciscans. The mere list of his own writings occupies three and twenty closely-printed quarto pages. He wrote a book of husbandry in Latin, of which there are also MSS. in French. He wrote sermons, treatises on physical and mental philosophy, commentaries on Aristotle, Latin and French verse, including a religious allegory of the Château d'Amour. He applied also a rare knowledge of Greek and Hebrew to the minutest study of the Scriptures. He battled against the corruption of the Church, not in the narrow spirit of an ascetic. Three things, he once told a Dominican, are necessary for temporal health food, sleep, and liveliness. Heartily in accord with the movement represented by the poverty of the Franciscans, he said that he liked to see the friars' dresses patched. But when one of them, mistaking a particular means for the great end that was sought thereby, praised, in a sermon, mendicancy as the highest step towards the attainment of all heavenly things, Grosseteste told him that there was a step yet higher, namely, to support one's self by one's own labour. One intimate friend of Grosseteste's was especially struck by his courage in facing both the king and the pope to maintain right; another, the most

famous of his pupils, Roger Bacon, was impressed most by his marvellous and almost universal knowledge.

33. Roger Bacon, born in 1214, was in his cradle in Somersetshire when the barons obtained from King John his signature to Magna Charta. He belonged to a rich family, sought knowledge from childhood, and avoided the strife of the day. He studied at Oxford and Paris, and the death of his father may have placed his share of the paternal estate in his hands. He spared no cost for instructors and transcribers, books and experiments; mastered not only Latin thoroughly, but also Hebrew and Greek, which not more than five men in England then understood grammatically, although there were more who could loosely read and speak those tongues. He was made Doctor in Paris, and had the degree confirmed in his own University of Oxford. Then he withdrew entirely from the civil strife that was arising, and joined the house of the Franciscans in Oxford, having spent all his time in the world and two thousand pounds of money in the search for knowledge. Roger Bacon's family committed itself to the king's side in the civil war which Henry III.'s greed, his corruption of justice, and violation of the defined rights of his subjects, brought upon him. The success of the barons ruined Bacon's family, and sent his mother, brothers, and whole kindred into exile. Meanwhile the philosopher, as one of the Oxford Franciscans, had come under Grosseteste's care, had joined an order which prided itself in the checks put by it on the vanity of learning. But, in spite of their self-denials, the Franciscans, at Oxford and elsewhere, included many learned men who, by the daily habit of their minds, were impelled to give to scholarship a wholesome practical direction. They were already beginning to supply the men who raised the character of teaching at the University of Oxford till it rivalled that of Paris. Friar Bacon was among the earliest of these teachers, so was Friar Bungay, who lives with him in popular tradition. Roger Bacon saw how the clergy were entangled in barren subtleties of a logic far parted from all natural laws out of which it sprang. He believed that the use of all his knowledge, if he could but make free use of it, would be to show how strength and peace were to be given to the Church. And then the pope, who had been told of his rare acquirements and his philosophic mind, bade Roger Bacon, disregarding any rule of his order to the contrary, write for him what was in his mind. Within his

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