Chapter XVI WHEN ENGLISH SLEPT
"William came o'er the sea,
With bloody sword came he.
Cold heart and bloody sword hand
Now rule the English land."
The Heimskringla
WILLIAM THE NORMAN ruled England. Norman knights and nobles filled all the posts of honor at court, all the great places in the land. Norman bishops and abbots ruled in church and monastery. The Norman tongue was alone the speech in court and hall, Latin alone was the speech of the learned. Only among the lowly, the unlearned, and the poor was English heard.
It seemed as if the English tongue was doomed to vanish before the conquering Norman, even as the ancient British tongue had vanished before the conquering English. And, in truth, for two hundred years it might have been thought that English prose was dead, "put to sleep by the sword." But it was not so. It slept, indeed, but to awake again. For England conquered the conqueror. And when English Literature awoke once more, it was the richer through the gifts which the Norman had brought.
One thing the Normans had brought was a liking for history, and soon there sprang up a whole race of chroniclers. They, like Bede, were monks and priests. They lived in monasteries, and wrote in Latin. One after another they wrote, and when one laid down his pen, another took it up. Some of these chroniclers were mere painstaking men who noted facts and dates with care. But others were true writers of literature, who told their tales in vivid, stirring words, so that they make these times live again for us. The names of some of the best of these chroniclers are Eadmer, Orderic Vitalis, and William of Malmesbury.
By degrees these Norman and Anglo-Norman monks became filled with the spirit of England. They wrote of England as of their home, they were proud to call themselves English, and they began to desire that England should stand high among the nations. It is, you remember, from one of these chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmout (see chapter vi.), that we date the reawakening of story-telling in England.
As a writer of history Geoffrey is bad. Another chronicler* says of him, "Therefore as in all things we trust Bede, whose wisdom and truth are not to be doubted: so that fabler with his fables shall be forthwith spat out by us all."
*William of Newbury.
But if Geoffrey was a bad writer of history, he was good as "a fabler," and, as we have seen in chapter vii., it was to his book that we owe the first long poem written in English after the Conquest.
The Norman came with sword in hand, bringing in his train the Latin-writing chroniclers. But he did not bring these alone. He brought minstrels also. Besides the quiet monks who sat in their little cells, or in the pleasant cloisters, writing the history of the times, there were the light-hearted minstrels who roamed the land with harp and song.