Creseide,’
which the moralist had thought only good enough for the indolent worshipper to dream of in church (Mir. 5253), yet the dedication must have been in part at least due to respect for the literary taste of the persons addressed.
If however we must on the whole pronounce the literary value of the Speculum Meditantis to be small, the case is quite different with regard to the Balades, that is to say, the collection of about fifty love-poems which is found in the Trentham manuscript. These will be discussed in detail later, and reasons will be given for assigning them to the later rather than to the earlier years of the poet’s life. Here it is enough to say that they are for the most part remarkably good, better indeed than anything of their kind which was produced in England at that period, and superior in my opinion to the balades of Granson, ‘flour of hem that make in France,’ some of which Chaucer translated. But for the accident that they were written in French, this series of balades would have taken a very distinct place in the history of English literature.
The period to which the Speculum Meditantis belongs, about the beginning of the last quarter of the fourteenth century, is that in which the fusion of French and English elements from which the later language grew may be said to have been finally accomplished. Thanks to the careful work of English and German philologists in recent years, the process by which French words passed into the English language in the period from the beginning of the thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century has been sufficiently traced, so far as regards the actual facts of their occurrence in English texts. Perhaps however the real nature of the process has not been set forth with sufficient clearness. It is true that before the end of the reign of Edward III the French element may be said to have been almost fully introduced into the vocabulary; the materials lay ready for those writers, the Wycliffite translators of the Bible, Chaucer, and Gower himself, who were to give the stamp of their authority to the language which was to be the literary language of England. Nevertheless, French words were still French for these writers, and not yet English; the fact that the two languages were still used side by side, and that to every Englishman of literary culture the form of French which existed in England was as a second mother tongue, long preserved a French citizenship for the borrowed words. In the earlier part of this period they came in simply as aliens, and their meaning was explained when they were used, ‘in desperaunce, that is in unhope and in unbileave,’ ‘two manere temptaciuns, two kunne vondunges’; and afterwards for long, even though they had been repeatedly employed by English writers, they were not necessarily regarded as English words, but when wanted they were usually borrowed again from the original source, and so had their phonetic development in French rather than in English. When therefore Anglo-Norman forms are to be cited for English etymology, it is evidently more reasonable that the philologist should look to the latter half of the fourteenth century and give the form in which the word finally passed into the literary language, than to the time of the first appearance of the word in English, under a form corresponding perhaps to the Anglo-Norman of the thirteenth century, but different from that which it assumed in the later Anglo-Norman, and thence in English. More precision in these citations is certainly to be desired, even though the time be past when etymologists were content to refer us vaguely to ‘Old French,’ meaning usually the sixteenth-century French of Cotgrave, when the form really required was of the fourteenth century and Anglo-Norman. It is not unreasonable to lay down the rule that for words of Anglo-Norman origin which occur in the English literary language of the Chaucer period, illustration of forms and meanings must first be looked for in the Anglo-Norman texts of that period, since the standard writers, as we may call them, that is those who contributed most to fix the standard of the language, in using them had the Anglo-Norman of their own day before their minds and eyes rather than any of the obscure English books in various dialects, where the words in question may have been already used to supply the defects of a speech which had lost its literary elements. Moreover, theories as to the pronunciation of the English of Chaucer’s day have been largely supported by reference to the supposed pronunciation of the French words imported into English and the manner in which they are used in rhyme. Evidently in this case the reference ought to be to the Anglo-Norman speech of this particular period, in the form in which it was used by those writers of English to whose texts we refer.
But this is not all: beside the question of language there is one of literary history. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Anglo-Norman literature had sunk into a very degraded condition. Pierre de Peccham, William of Waddington, Pierre de Langtoft, and the authors of the Apocalypse and the Descente de Saint Paul make the very worst impression as versifiers upon their modern French critics, and it must be allowed that the condemnation is just. They have in fact lost their hold on all the principles of French verse, and their metres are merely English in a French dress. Moreover, the English metres which they resemble are those of the North rather than of the South. If we compare the octosyllables of the Manuel des Pechiez with those of the Prick of Conscience we shall see that their principle is essentially the same, that of half-lines with two accents each, irrespective of the number of unaccented syllables, though naturally in English the irregularity is more marked. The same may be said of Robert Grosseteste’s verse a little earlier than this, e.g.
‘Deu nus doint de li penser,
De ky, par ki, en ki sunt
Trestuz li biens ki al mund sunt,
Deu le pere et deu le fiz
Et deu le seint esperiz,