"Merrily sang the monkes in Ely,
When Cnut the king rowed by ;
Row, knightes, near the land,

And hear ye the monkes' song."

When Cnut got the throne, the English king, whose unfortunate name in history is Ethelred the Unready, fled to Normandy, where the descendants of Rolf were flourishing. Probably the reason he went there was because his wife, Queen Emma, was a Norman woman, a great-granddaughter of the famous Rolf. And the son of this unfortunate Ethelred and Emma, the gracious young prince Edward, exiled from his English home during the reign of Cnut, spent all his youth in the Norman court, spoke its language, and took on the manners and polish of its best society, esteemed in those days a very polished and elegant society indeed. For you must understand that the rough Normans who came to Northern France one hundred and fifty years before the time of Prince Edward, had been wonderfully improved during this lapse of time. The French among whom they settled had imparted to them their civilization. Southern Europe, especially Italy, had sent to them pious pilgrims, who carried learning and religion to foreign lands. These wandering scholars had been hospitably received in Normandy, and one of them, the celebrated Lanfranc, had established a school there, which became one of the most famous in Europe.

Another people, who greatly aided in the spread of learning in Europe, were the Arabs, who had overrun Italy, conquered a large part of Spain, and made incursions into France during the century before Rolf came to Normandy. These Arabs were far in advance of the Europeans in all kinds of knowledge. They had instituted splendid libraries in Spain, had opened schools there, and their systems of teaching had an influence all over Europe. These Arabians, too, were great story-tellers, — the Arabian Nights' Entertainments bears testimony to that, and among them were also musical poets. When the Norman mercenaries, following their taste for adventure, went into Southern Europe to

help the Italians in battle against these Arabs, they must, even in so rough a meeting, have imbibed some of the culture of their foes. And in the mingling of all these influences which had touched him on all sides, it is certain that the Norman, who was always hospitable to new ideas, and held fast to all that came to him, either of an intellectual or a material kind, must have been very much improved and polished. So when young Prince Edward, son of Ethelred and Emma, and consequently descended on one side from Alfred the Great, and on the other from Rolf the Dane, was made king of England, after the death of Cnut and his sons, he took back to the English court the language and the manners in which he had been bred in the Norman court.

With this Edward, known as Edward the Confessor, the first Norman influence came to England, although it was not Edward who fixed and confirmed it there. It was a much greater and stronger man than Edward the Confessor,

no other than the great Duke of Normandy, whom we know best as William the Conqueror. William claimed that Edward had promised that his successor on the English throne should be the Norman duke; and the story is also told that William had extorted an unwilling promise from Harold, King Edward's brother-in-law, that he would favor the Norman claim. As soon as Edward the Confessor died, however, Harold took the throne. But Duke William was on the alert to urge his claim. A man like a lion was this William of Normandy, so strong and so brave that we can but admire him. In a very few months after Edward's death he had crossed the English Channel with his troops, beaten the army of Harold in the battle of Hastings, in which Harold was slain, and had made himself the crowned king of England, - the first of a long line of Norman kings. This Norman victory had an influence on literature which ranks as an event second in succession and importance only to the coming of Augustine and his monks with their parchments of the Scriptures.

As the knights of William the Conqueror spurred to

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battle upon the field of Hastings, the king's minstrel, Taillefer, who could fight all the better, doubtless, because he could sing, made the English welkin ring with the strains of the Song of Roland, which celebrated the deeds of Charlemagne's heroes against Arabian foes. As the song rang gayly from the minstrel's lips, the arrow of a foeman silenced him forever. In this musical war-cry, so suddenly hushed in death, the new literary influence first made itself heard in England.

VII.

ON LITERATURE UNDER THE NORMANS, ESPECIALLY IN THE REIGN OF HENRY II.; AND THE LEGENDS OF ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE.

NOT

OTWITHSTANDING the pious labors of monks, beginning with the venerable Beda, there were few books in England at the time of the Norman conquest, or indeed for years after. When the Norman came to France he brought with him little that could be called literature. Romance, the spoken language of Normandy, was hardly a written language in William's time. However, the fact that a language is not a written language does not prevent the making of songs in the vulgar tongue or the singing of them by the people's minstrels. It was not long after the coming of the Normans to England that all sorts of minstrels swarmed in France and Germany, Trouveres, Troubadours, Jongleurs, Minnesingers, all singing like the lark, until France, and especially the South of France, was like a sky full of birds. Thus, although the Norman did not bring many books when he came to England, he brought an impetus to poetry, and the form in which to clothe it. You will recognize that the spirit inherent in these descendants of the Northmen was akin to that which had inspired the heroic lines of Beowulf, acted upon by the

refining forces it had met in France and Southern Europe. But this spirit had now taken upon itself a new form. The verses, without rhyme or rhythmic grace, in which the Teutonic gleeman had sung the high deeds of his fathers, were not heard among Norman singers. Poetry put itself into melodious numbers, and the soft consonances of rhyme took the place of the old-fashioned alliteration of the earliest age of English poetry.

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It is to the credit of the Norman kings that they were always favorable to learning. William the Conqueror, although his reign was busy with the broils. and intrigues which engaged a king struggling to keep his hold on a new kingdom, was never deaf to the claim of letters. As soon as he was fairly at home in England, he brought over the good Lanfranc, the Italian scholar who had founded the famous school in Normandy, and made him Archbishop of Canterbury. William's son, Henry I., bore the surname of Beauclerc, “ Fine Scholar ; " and there were few princes of the Norman line in England who did not feel, or pretend to feel, an interest in literature.

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The history of England was still kept up in Latin. The first great successor of Beda and Alfred in this field was Ordericus Vitalis, who brought English history down to the year 1141; following him came William of Malmesbury, who told the story of the English from their landing in Britain to the reign of King Stephen; and then came Henry of Huntingdon, who ended his work about the time Henry II. came to the throne.

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In the reign of Henry II. literature took a great stride forward. There were many events that helped to this. The king himself was a patron of literary men, and his queen, Eleanor, had come from the very home and birthplace of the Troubadours, and could herself make songs such as the singers of that day sang to their gay lutes. There had been two crusades to the Holy Sepulchre, and the united armies of Europe had brought back from the East many refinements of taste

and many poetical ideas new to them. The system of chivalry, which did much to polish manners, was the ruling force in society; and it was this spirit that found expression in the lays of the Troubadour, and exalted the office of the singer till knights and princes were proud to be called verse-makers. With these influences to foster literature it is not surprising that a number of remarkable names should appear in England in this reign.

Among the first of these names is that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was not English, but Welsh, and belonged to the old British nation, so long since driven to Wales by the English advance into British territory. These Britons had imparted very little to their English conquerors, although, as I have told you previously, they had a literature of which they were justly proud.

The Welsh felt less bitterness against the Norman than his ancestors had felt against the English, and the tendency of Norman rule had been to break down the barriers which kept all knowledge of British history and poetry out of England, and thus to bring a fresh element into our literature. In 1147 this Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a priest living under the patronage of the English court, wrote a history of his people which is very interesting indeed. Geoffrey says he was not the author of this book, but that it was a translation of the ancient Kymric tongue, which he, like all true Britons, could read and speak, and that it was one of the old books which the Welsh had carried over to Brittany when some of them fled there after the English invaded England. This book is very interesting to us, because in it we find the history of the famous King Arthur and his prophet Merlin, and an account of how the order of the Knights of the Round Table was founded.

The history begins by telling us that the race of Britons began with Brutus, a great-grandson of Æneas of Troy, who, after the manner of his famous grandsire, took his household gods and went to found a city in the island of Albion. After slaying a number of giants he found there,