Mixed Language.
Of the transition stage, as it was called, there are narrative poems of record, which were written with a couplet in Norman French, and then a couplet in English. There were medleys, too, of these times, in which the friars mingled the three tongues of Latin, French, and English.[26] Blood mingled as languages mingled; and by the middle of the fourteenth century a man was no longer foreign because he was of Norman descent, and no longer vulgar because he was of Saxon.
To this transition time—in Henry III.’s day (who had a long reign of fifty-six years—chiefly memorable for its length), there appeared the rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester;[27]—what we should call a doggerel story of England from fabulous times down, and worthy of mention as the first serious attempt at an English-written history—others noticed already being either merely bald chronicles, or in scholastic Latin, or in French metric form. I give you a little taste of his wooden verse—
——Lyncolne [has] fairest men,
Grantebrugge, and Hontyndon most plente ò deep fen,
Ely of fairest place, of fairest site Rochester,
Even agen Fraunce stonde ye countre ò Chichester,
Norwiche agen Denemark, Chestre agen Irelond,
Duram agen Norwei, as ich understonde.
Yet he tells us some things worth knowing—about every-day matters—about the fish and the fruits and the pastures, and the things he saw with his own eyes. And we learn from these old chroniclers how much better a story a man can make, and how much more worth it is—in telling of the things he has really seen, than of the things he has not seen. Most of these old writing people must needs begin at the beginning—drawling over the ancient fables about the Creation and Siege of Troy, keeping by the conventional untruths, and so—very barren and good for nothing, until they get upon their own days, when they grow rich and meaty and juicy, in spite of themselves, and by reason of their voluble minuteness, and their mention of homely, every-day unimportant things. They cannot tell lies, without fear of detection, on their own ground: and so they get that darlingest quality of all history—the simple truth.
But if a man wanders otherwheres and makes report, he may tell lies, and the lies may amuse and get him fame. Thus it happened with another well-known but somewhat apocryphal writer of this Transition English epoch; I mean Sir John Mandeville, whose book of travels into distant countries had a very great run.