This was the Romance (Romane or lingua Romana) tougue of France. In former times it was divided into two great dialects, taking their titles from their different modes of expressing assentthe LANGUE D'OYL (Northern or Norman-French) and the LANGUE D'Oc (Occitanian or Provençal), Oyl and Oc corresponding in either case to our affirmative 'Yes.' The former was spoken to the north, and the latter to the south, of the River Loire. The French brought over by the Normans was, of course, a modification of the Langue d'Oyl; but when, in 1154, those portions of South-Western France which Henry II. had acquired with Eleanor of Guienne were added to the English territories, the Langue d'Oc also became known in this country, and Henry's son, the Troubadour King, Richard I., is said to have written poems in the Southern Dialect. A Sirvente or Military poem, attributed to him, and said to have been composed in his German prison, has been preserved.* The following is the first verse in Provençal and Norman-French respectively : LANGUE D'OC. Jà nuls hom près non dirà sa razon Soi sai dos yvers pres. LANGUE D'OYL. La! nus homs pris ne dira sa raison 9. Progress of the English Language.-At first, the language of the conquerors proved stronger than that of the conquered; and although the Saxon Chronicle, a work in the vernacular (see p. 14, s. 7), comes down as far as 1154, the English Language, for a long period after the date of the Norman Conquest, ceased to be employed in literature, or by the governing classes. Normans filled the Ecclesiastical, State, and Court offices; Normans for the most part held the land; and the military were Norman. Latin was the language of the laws and of the learned; in popular literature, the trouvères or minstrels of the Normans displaced the native scops or gleemen, and the elder English was for the time suppressed and ignored. Yet, to use the happy simile of Mr. Campbell,† 'the influence of the Norman Conquest upon the language of England was like that of a great inundation, which at first buries the face of the landscape under its waters, but which, at last subsiding, leaves behind it the elements of new beauty and fertility.' There still existed among the inferior classes an unquenchable * Sismondi's Lit. of the South of Europe, Bohn's ed. i. 116. The Provençal verse has been corrected from Raynouard, Poésies des Troubadours, iv. 183. ↑ Essay on English Poetry, 1848, 1. vernacular, vital and vigorous enough to rear itself against oppression, to effect its own re-construction, to gather new strength from the very tongue of its oppressors, and finally, simplified and renewed, to resume its ascendency. It may be well to describe, in fuller detail, this transformation of the language. Although continuing essentially English it under. went two material changes-the one acting upon its structure, the other upon its substance. To these phases in its history the names of FIRST and SECOND GREAT REVOLUTIONs have been very sugges tively applied. The former practically belongs to the present chapter; the latter, partly to the present and partly to the next. Before the arrival of the Normans the language may be defined as ' a highly-inflected language with a vocabulary of native growth,' and these characteristic features it retained until the Conquest. Subsequent to that period the disintegration or breaking-up of its inflectional system which constitutes its First Revolution, was gradually effected. It became an illiterate patois,' to which various names have, at times, been applied; of these, the term, Transition Old English,' employed by Mr. Sweet, would seem most appropriate. With the precise cause of this alteration we cannot deal, and although it can by no means be entirely attributed to the Norman invasion, it nevertheless practically coincided with the new order of things, social and political, which ensued from that event. During the third century after the Conquest, the struggle for supremacy between Norman-French and English began to decline; the conquerors relinquished their attempts to impose their own tongue upon their subjects, and, on the contrary, began to learn and write English themselves. The English, upon their side, began to admit Norman words into their vocabulary. In this combination of a Romance, Norman, or French element with the Teutonic dialects the Second Revolution consists. Its more active period belongs to the succeeding chapter. But its commencement may in a general way be said to correspond with the beginning of the Early Middle English' stage, 1200-1300 (see p. 3, n.). For a long time the two languages, French and English, kept almost entirely apart. The English of 1200 is almost as free from French words as the English of 1050; and it is not till after 1300 that French words began to be adopted wholesale into English.' * 10. The Literature of the Anglo-Normans.-With the peaceful accession of Edward the Confessor, it has been said, an Sweet, New Eng. Grammar, 1892, § 617. See also §§ 610-628. Skeat's Principles of Eng. Philology, Pt. II. 1891, chaps. i.-xii. deals with the philological side of the subject. Prof. Lounsbury's Hist. of the Eng. Lang. 1894, pp. 48-114, gives a clear general account. opportunity appeared to have at last arrived for the revival of English literature from the degradation into which it had fallen after the time of Alfred. But, practically, Edward's ascent of the throne in 1042 only prepared the way for the change which the Norman Conquest subsequently effected, viz., the stifling of the vernacular literature for nearly a century and a half. The new King was a middle-aged man, who had been educated in France. He was nearly related to the Dukes of Normandy, and his sympathies and opinions were naturally French. In his reign the inroad of Norman modes of thought and speech, so powerful under his immediate successors, had already commenced; and for nearly the whole of the long period of which the present chapter treats, Latin and NormanFrench were the recognised vehicles of literature, the former being employed in the graver work of history or science-for the records of the chronicler or the speculations of the scholastic philosopher, and the latter-until the voice of English was once more heard-in the popular narratives of Romance and Chivalry. The native tendencies of the Saxons,' says Prof. Masson, 'bad been rather to the practical and ethical.' Widely differing in character were the lively fabliaux and chivalrous romances which the Norman minstrels and jongleurs made familiar in court and castle. The chief exponents of this lighter literature were the trouvèrcs or menestrels of Northern France. The lyric poetry of the Provençal troubadour-the Languedocian equivalent for trouvère—although naturalised to some extent in England after the accession of Henry II., never made any lasting impression upon our literature. As has been already implied (p. 12), the narrative predominated over the true lyric element even in earlier days, and so vigorously was it now reinforced by the Trouvère influence that in the whole course of English literature since. one can see the narrative impulse ruling and the lyric subordinate.' * , The Trouvère poetry may generally be classed under the two heads of fabliaux, or short, humorous and frequently malicious stories in verse; and the longer and more ambitious romances of chivalry. The former, until the time of Chaucer, cannot be said to have greatly affected our literature. But an extraordinary impetus was given to the labours of the romancers by the appearance, by 1147, of the legends of Arthur and Merlin which Geoffrey of Monmouth had incorporated in his semi-fabulous History of the Britons. Here was a new and unworked field, and the writers who had been contented with inventing fresh episodes in new narratives of Charlemagne and Alexander, turned eagerly to the majestic figure of 'mythic Uther's son.' • Masson, British Novelisis and their Siyiès, 1859, 46-7. (3/ Geoffrey's history became the germ of the vast cycle of Romances, which, unexhausted even in our day, has furnished to the verse of Ld. Tennyson the themes for those lofty lessons of nobility and courtesy which he has interwoven with his Idylls of the King, 11. The Arthurian Romances.-Whether the incidents of Geoffrey's narrative were derived from Welsh originals or Breton traditions, or from both-and to what extent he has amplified or 'romanced' them, are enquiries of too lengthy and contradictory a nature to be attempted here.* It is sufficient to state that they immediately became popular and were at once reproduced in French, with considerable amplification, by Geoffrey Gaimar and Mestre Wace, and later by the English Layamon, who introduced them into his Brut d'Angleterre. Meanwhile an extensive development of the Arthurian story seems to have taken place. Whether the additions are due to the vigorous fancy of the narrators, or to the discovery of other traditions, which the general interest in the subject had facilitated, it is impossible to decide, but one thing is clear, viz., that at the end of the reign of Henry II. there were no less than five separate prose narratives or Romans upon the subject. The first of these -the Roman du Saint Graal (sometimes called the Roman de Joseph d'Arimathie), is the story of the holy vessel (graal, greal, greil a plate or dish) from which Our Lord ate at the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea employed to collect his blood, bringing both vessel and contents-so runs the traditionafterwards into Britain †: "Hither came Joseph of Arimathy, Who brought with him the holy grayle, (they say,) And preacht the truth; but since it greatly did decay?' (Spenser, Faery Queene, Bk. II. x. 53.) (2) The second is the Roman of the Prophet Merlin. The third-the Roman de Lancelot du Lac-records the adventures of that knight and his love of Guenever; the Quête (or seeking) du Saint Graal, which had been lost, forms the subject of the fourth, while in the last-the Roman de la Mort Artus-the death of the King is related. The manuscripts assign the last three of these to Walter Map, yet modern criticism has not allowed his claim to the works, as we now have them, to pass wholly unquestioned. Robert de Borron, to whom the other two are assigned, certainly wrote a verse rendering of the 'Joseph' legend, and the beginning of a 'Merlin.' Another writer, Luces, Seigneur de Gast (xii. Cent.), appears to have invented or discovered the character of Tristram, the 'first See M. A. Borderie's L'Historia Britonum attribuée à Nennius, 1883. † See A. Nutt's Studies on the Holy Grail, 1888. part' of whose achievements he recounted in the so-called Roman de Tristan. A second part was afterwards produced by Robert de Borron's brother or relative-Hélie de Borron, to whom we also owe a supplementary hero, Gyron le Courtois, and a fresh race of worthies.' To this list must be added, according to Sir Frederick Madden (from whose preface to Sir Gawayne the foregoing information is derived *), the metrical romances composed between 1170 and 1195, by the French poet, Chrestien de Troyes, and the prose of Rusticien de Pise, and other writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Chrestien's Free et Enide, re-told in the Idylls of the King, Perceval le Gallois ou le Conte du Grail, and the Chevalier au Lyon, re-appear in the collection of Welsh fairy tales translated by Lady Charlotte Guest from ancient Welsh MSS., and published, in 1838-49, under the title of the MABINOGION. Finally, in the reign of Edward IV., the Arthurian romances, chiefly those of Map and Robert de Borron, were re-compiled into one volume by a certain Sir Thomas Malory, and given to the world, in 1485, from the press of William Caxton. Malory's book is entitled Le morte Darthur. 'Notwithstondyng' (says the colophon) 'it treateth of the byrth, lyf, and actes of the sayd kynge Arthur, of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, theyr meruayllous enquestes, and aduentures, thachyeuyng of the sangreal, and in thende the dolourous deth and departyng out of thys world of them al.' The original edition of this 'prose epic' has been lately reprinted, together with a valuable study of the sources of the work.t 12. Writers in Latin.-By position and eminence, Lanfranc (1005-1089), a Lombard priest whom the Conqueror brought from his monastery of Bec in Caen to be Primate of England, is entitled to a prominent place among the Latin writers of this period. He is distinguished for his zealous encouragement of schools and scholars, and for his praiseworthy endeavours to cultivate the study of Latin in England, as already he had cultivated it in France. His literary reputation is based upon the logical acuteness with which, circa 1080, he defended the Real Presence against Berengarius in a Treatise on the Eucharist. Commentaries on the Psalms and St. Paul's Epistles are included among his remaining writings. Anselm (1034-1109), a Lombard like Lanfranc, and his successor both at Bec and Canterbury, also greatly furthered the extension of knowledge. But he is more famous for his dispute concerning the Trinity Sir Gawayne; a Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems, Bannatyne Club, 1839. By Mr. Nutt, in 3 vols. 1889-91, ed. H. Oskar Sommer. Several cheap editions-e.g. the Globe-also exist. |