But the Owl and the Nightingale[95] is another kind of thing. In the first place, it appears to be (though it would be rash to affirm this positively of anything in a form so popular with the French trouvères as the débat) original and not translated. It bears a name, that of Nicholas of Guildford, who seems to be the author, and assigns himself a local habitation at Portesham in Dorsetshire. Although of considerable length (nearly two thousand lines), and written in very pure English with few French words, it manages the rhymed octosyllabic couplet (which by this time had become the standing metre of France for everything but historical poems, and for some of these) with remarkable precision, lightness, and harmony. Moreover, the Owl and the Nightingale conduct their debate with plenty of mother-wit, expressed not unfrequently in proverbial form. Proverbs. Indeed proverbs, a favourite form of expression with Englishmen at all times, appear to have been specially in favour just then; and the "Proverbs of Alfred"[96] (supposed to date from this very time), the "Proverbs of Hendyng"[97] a little later, are not likely to have been the only collections of the kind. The Alfred Proverbs are in a rude popular metre like the old alliteration much broken down; those of Hendyng in a six-line stanza (soon to become the famous ballad stanza) syllabled, though sometimes catalectically, 8 8 6 8 8 6, and rhymed a a b c c b, the proverb and the coda "quod Hendyng" being added to each. The Owl and the Nightingale is, however, as we might expect, superior to both of these in poetical merit, as well as to the so-called Moral Ode which, printed by Hickes in 1705, was one of the first Middle English poems to gain modern recognition.
Robert of Gloucester.
As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries approaches, the interest of literary work increases, and requires less and less allowance of historical and accidental value. This allowance, indeed, is still necessary with the verse chronicle of Robert of Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with sufficient certainty at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in point of strict literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous but still real. It will almost invariably be found that those mediæval books which happen to have been made known before the formal beginning of scholarship in the modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not unnaturally put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries or fosterlings. Robert of Gloucester's work, with the later but companion Englishing of Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne, was published by Hearne in the early part of the last century. The contemporaries of that publication thought him rude, unkempt, "Gothick": the moderns have usually passed him by for more direct protégés of their own. Yet there is not a little attraction in Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first in any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history, old as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not to be despised—
"Engeland is a well good land, I ween of each land the best,
Yset in the end of the world, as all in the West:
The sea goeth him all about, he stands as an isle,
His foes he dares the less doubt but it be through guile
Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-seen while."
And in the same good swinging metre he goes on describing the land, praising its gifts, and telling its story in a downright fashion which is very agreeable to right tastes. Like almost everybody else, he drew upon Geoffrey of Monmouth for his early history: but from at least the time of the Conqueror (he is strongly prejudiced in the matter of Harold) he represents, if not what we should call solid historical knowledge, at any rate direct, and for the time tolerably fresh, historical tradition, while as he approaches his own time he becomes positively historical, and, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown row of 1263, the first Barons' Wars, the death of the Earl-Marshal, and such things, is a vigorous as well as a tolerably authoritative chronicler. In the history of English prosody he, too, is of great importance, being another landmark in the process of consolidating accent and quantity, alliteration and rhyme. His swinging verses still have the older tendency to a trochaic rather than the later to an anapæstic rhythm; but they are, so to speak, on the move, and approaching the later form. He is still rather prone to group his rhymes instead of keeping the couplets separate: but as he is not translating from chanson de geste form, he does not, as Robert of Brunne sometimes does, fall into complete laisses. I have counted as many as twenty continuous rhymes in Manning, and there may be more: but there is nothing of that extent in the earlier Robert.
Romances.
Verse history, however, must always be an awkward and unnatural form at the best. The end of the thirteenth century had something better to show in the appearance of romance proper and of epic. When the study of any department of old literature begins, there is a natural and almost invariable tendency to regard it as older than it really is; and when, at the end of the last century, the English verse romances began to be read, this tendency prevailed at least as much as usual. Later investigation, besides showing that, almost without exception, they are adaptations of French originals, has, partly as a consequence of this, shown that scarcely any that we have are earlier than the extreme end of the thirteenth century. Among these few that are, however, three of exceptional interest (perhaps the best three except Gawaine and the Green Knight and Sir Launfal) may probably be classed—to wit, Horn, Havelok, and the famous Sir Tristram. As to the last and best known of these, which from its inclusion among Sir Walter Scott's works has received attention denied to the rest, it may or may not be the work of Thomas the Rhymer. But whether it is or not, it can by no possibility be later than the first quarter of the fourteenth century, while the most cautious critics pronounce both Havelok the Dane and King Horn to be older than 1300.[99]
Havelok the Dane.
It is, moreover, not a mere accident that these three, though the authors pretty certainly had French originals before them, seem most likely to have had yet older English or Anglo-Saxon originals of the French in the case of Horn and Havelok, while the Tristram story, as is pointed out in the [chapter on the Arthurian Legend], is the most British in tone of all the divisions of that Legend. Havelok and Horn have yet further interest because of the curious contrast between their oldest forms in more ways than one. Havelok is an English equivalent, with extremely strong local connections and identifications, of the homelier passages of the French chansons de geste. The hero, born in Denmark, and orphan heir to a kingdom, is to be put away by his treacherous guardian, who commits him to Grim the fisherman to be drowned. Havelok's treatment is hard enough even on his way to the drowning; but as supernatural signs show his kingship to Grim's wife, and as the fisherman, feigning to have performed his task, meets with very scant gratitude from his employer, he resolves to escape from the latter's power, puts to sea, and lands in England at the place afterwards to be called from him Grimsby. Havelok is brought up simply as a rough fisher-boy; but he obtains employment in Lincoln Castle as porter to the kitchen, and much rough horse-play of the chanson kind occurs. Now it so happens that the heiress of England, Goldborough, has been treated by her guardian with as much injustice though with less ferocity; and the traitor seeks to crown his exclusion of her from her rights by marrying her to the sturdy scullion. When the two rights are thus joined, they of course prevail, and the two traitors, after a due amount of hard fighting, receive their doom, Godard the Dane being hanged, and Godric the Englishman burnt at the stake. This rough and vigorous story is told in rough and vigorous verse—octosyllabic couplets, with full licence in shortening, but with no additional syllables except an occasional double rhyme—in very sterling English, and with some, though slight, traces of alliteration.
King Horn.