Our miserable populace had poets for themselves, whose looser carols were the joy of the streets or the fields. Unfortunately we only learn that they had such artless effusions, for these songs have perished on the lips of the singers. The monks were too dull or too cunning to chronicle the outpourings of a people whom they despised, and which assuredly would have often girded them to the quick. A humorous satire of this kind has stolen down to us in that exquisite piece of drollery and grotesque invention, “The Land of Cokaigne.”[1] They had historical ballads which were rehearsed to all listeners; and it was from these “old ballads, popular through succeeding times,” that William of Malmesbury tells us that “he learned more than from books written expressly for the information of posterity,” though he will not answer for their precise truth. They had also political ballads. A memorable one, free as a lampoon, made by one of the adherents of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, in the fugitive day of his victory in 1264, occasioned a statute against “slanderous reports or tales to cause discord betwixt king and people,” a spirit which by no means was put down by that enactment.[2] This was a ballad sung to the people, as appears by the opening line,—
| Sitteth all stille, and harkeneth to me! |
This ballad strikingly contrasts with another of unnerving dejection, after the irreparable defeat of the party, and the death of the Earl of Leicester, which, it is remarkable, is written in French, having been probably addressed solely to that discomfited nobility who would sympathise with the lament.[3]
The people, or the inferior classes of society, who despised the courtly French then in vogue, formed such a multitude, that it was for them that Robert of Gloucester wrote his Chronicle, and that Robert of Brunne translated the Chronicle of Peter Langtoft, and a volume of recreative tales from the French. The people even then were eager readers, or, more properly, auditors; and this further appears in the naïveté of our rhymer’s prologue to this Chronicle. The monk tells us, that this story of England which he now shows in English, is not intended for the learned, but the illiterate; not for the clerk, but the layman;
| Not for the lerid, but the lewed;[4] |
and he describes the class, “they who take solace and mirth when they sit together in fellowship,” and deem it “wisdom for to witten” (to know)
| The state of the land, and haf it written. |
The Hermit of Hampole expressly wrote his theological poems for the people, for those who could understand only English.
At a period when we glean nothing from any literature of the people, we find that it had a positive existence; for two chronicles and a collection of tales and theological poems were furnished for them in their native idiom, by writers who unquestionably sought for celebrity. The people, too, had what in every age has been their peculiar property,—all the fragmentary wisdom of antiquity in those “Few words to the Wise,” so daily useful, or so apt in the contingencies of human life; proverbs and Æsopian fables, delightedly transmitted from father to son. The memories of the people were stored with short narratives; for a startling tale was not easily forgotten. They had songs of trades, appropriated to the different avocations of labourers. These were a solace to the solitary task-worker, or threw a cheering impulse when many were employed together. Such Hall aptly describes as
| Sung to the wheel, and sung unto the payle.[5] |