Stories of Charlemagne and the twelve Peers of France

OLIVER AND FIERABRAS.
AND THE TWELVE PEERS OF FRANCE
FROM THE OLD ROMANCES
By the
REV. A. J. CHURCH, M.A.
Formerly Professor of Latin in University College, London Author of Stories from Homer, etc.
With Illustrations by GEORGE MORROW
LONDON SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED 38, GREAT RUSSELL STREET 1902
PREFACE
I have endeavoured to tell in this volume the story of Charlemagne, the Charlemagne, it must be understood, not of history, but of Romance. The two personages are curiously different. Each writer of a romance had naturally a hero of his own. As he had to exalt this hero, he could hardly help depreciating the king. Charlemagne suffers by comparison with Roland and Reynaud very much as, in the Iliad, Agamemnon, the overlord of the Greeks, suffers by comparison with the subordinate King, Achilles. The real Charlemagne was a very great personality, one that impressed his age as deeply as any man has ever done; in these stories he often appears petty, capricious, and obstinate. Then the romance writers were Frenchmen, and they make the great king a Frenchman, holding his court in Paris, and surrounded by great French lords. They began to write when the air was full of the crusading spirit, and their work is coloured accordingly. The enemy is always a Saracen or a follower of Mahomet. There could not be a more curious instance of this than is to be found in the story of the death of Roland. In the romance Charlemagne's rearguard is destroyed by an overpowering force of Saracens. What really happened was that it was attacked, probably for the sake of plundering the baggage, by a gathering of mountaineers, who are called Gascons by the chroniclers, but were, in fact, Basques. Then, again, we find the romance writers in sympathy with the great feudatories, indicating the time before the French monarchy had become consolidated, when the king at Paris had all that he could do to hold his own against his powerful vassals, the Dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, and the English king.