"Whener folk fastid [feasted, qu.] and fed, fayne wolde thei her [i.e. hear]
Some farand thing, &c."
It is well observed by Mr. Tyrwhitt on Chaucer's sneer at this old alliterative metre (vol. iii. p. 305), viz.:
"——I am a Sotherne [i.e. Southern] man,
I cannot geste, rom, ram, raf, by my letter,"
that the fondness for this species of versification, &c. was retained longest in the northern provinces: and that the author of Pierce Plowman's Visions is in the best MSS. called William, without any surname. See vol. iv. p. 74.
[The Rev. Walter W. Skeat, editor of Piers Plowman, for the Early English Text Society, has written An Essay on Alliterative Poetry, for Hales and Furnivall's edition of the Percy folio MS., which will be found in the third volume of that work (pp. xi.-xxxix.). He gives a list of all the poems he has met with that have been written as alliterative, yet without rhyme, since the Conquest, and ends his essay with the following note:—"The reader must be warned against three extraordinary mis-statements in this (Percy's) essay, following close upon one another near the end of it. These are (1) that Robert of Gloucester wrote in anapæstic verse, whereas he wrote in the long Alexandrine verse, containing (when perfect) six Returns; (2) that the French alone have retained this old Gothic metre [the twelve-syllabled Alexandrine] for their serious poems, whereas we may be sure that Michael Drayton, the author of the Polyolbion, meant his poem seriously; and (3) that the cadence of Piers Plowman 'so exactly resembles the French Alexandrine, that I believe no peculiarities of their versification can be produced which cannot be exactly matched in the alliterative metre.' This is indeed a curious craze, for the alliterative metre is founded on Dominants, the Alexandrine on Returns. Percy gives some examples, and the metre which he selects for numbering is the French one, as the reader may easily judge for himself when he finds that the line
"Lĕ sŭccēs fŭt toŭjoūrs | ŭn ĕnfānt dĕ l'aŭdāce"
is marked by him as it is marked here, and is supposed to consist of four Anapæsts! Yet one more blunder to be laid at the door of the 'Anapæsts!' Would that we were well rid of them, and that the 'longs' and 'shorts' were buried beside them.">[