Lille (l’Île) is said to date its origin from the time of Count Baldwin IV. of Flanders, who in 1030 surrounded with walls a little town which had arisen around the castle of Buc. In the first half of the 13th century, the town, which had developed rapidly, obtained communal privileges. Destroyed by Philip Augustus in 1213, it was rebuilt by Joanna of Constantinople, countess of Flanders, but besieged and retaken by Philip the Fair in 1297. After having taken part with the Flemings against the king of France, it was ceded to the latter in 1312. In 1369 Charles V., king of France, gave it to Louis de Male, who transmitted his rights to his daughter Margaret, wife of Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Under the Burgundian rule Lille enjoyed great prosperity; its merchants were at the head of the London Hansa. Philip the Good made it his residence, and within its walls held the first chapters of the order of the Golden Fleece. With the rest of Flanders it passed from the dukes of Burgundy to Austria and then to Spain. After the death of Philip IV. of Spain, Louis XIV. reclaimed the territory and besieged Lille in 1667. He forced it to capitulate, but preserved all its laws, customs, privileges and liberties. In 1708, after an heroic resistance, it surrendered to Prince Eugène and the duke of Marlborough. The treaty of Utrecht restored it to France. In 1792 the Austrians bombarded it for nine days and nights without intermission, but had ultimately to raise the siege.
See É. Vanhende, Lille et ses institutions communales de 620 à 1804 (Lille, 1888).
LILLEBONNE, a town of France in the department of Seine-Inférieure, 3½ m. N. of the Seine and 24 m. E. of Havre by the Western railway. Pop. (1906) 5370. It lies in the valley of the Bolbec at the foot of wooded hills. The church of Notre-Dame, partly modern, preserves a Gothic portal of the 16th century and a graceful tower of the same period. The park contains a fine cylindrical donjon and other remains of a castle founded by William the Conqueror and rebuilt in the 13th century. The principal industries are cotton-spinning and the manufacture of calico and candles.
Lillebonne under the Romans, Juliobona, was the capital of the Caletes, or inhabitants of the Pays de Caux, in the time of Caesar, by whom it was destroyed. It was afterwards rebuilt by Augustus, and before it was again ruined by the barbarian invasions it had become an important centre whence Roman roads branched out in all directions. The remains of ancient baths and of a theatre capable of holding 3000 persons have been brought to light. Many Roman and Gallic relics, notably a bronze statue of a woman and two fine mosaics, have been found and transported to the museum at Rouen. In the middle ages the fortifications of the town were constructed out of materials supplied by the theatre. The town recovered some of its old importance under William the Conqueror.
LILLIBULLERO, or Lilliburlero, the name of a song popular at the end of the 17th century, especially among the army and supporters of William III. in the war in Ireland during the revolution of 1688. The tune appears to have been much older, and was sung to an Irish nursery song at the beginning of the 17th century, and the attribution of Henry Purcell is based on the very slight ground that it was published in Music’s Handmaid, 1689, as “A new Irish Tune” by Henry Purcell. It was also a marching tune familiar to soldiers. The doggerel verses have generally been assigned to Thomas Wharton, and deal with the administration of Talbot, earl of Tyrconnel, appointed by James as his lieutenant in Ireland in 1687. The refrain of the song lilliburllero bullen a la gave the title of the song. Macaulay says of the song “The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other all classes were singing this idle rhyme.” Though Wharton claimed he had “sung a king out of three kingdoms” and Burnet says “perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect” the success of the song was “the effect, and not the cause of that excited state of public feeling which produced the revolution” (Macaulay, Hist. of Eng. chap. ix.).
LILLO, GEORGE (1693-1739), English dramatist, son of a Dutch jeweller, was born in London on the 4th of February 1693. He was brought up to his father’s trade and was for many years a partner in the business. His first piece, Silvia, or the Country Burial, was a ballad opera produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in November 1730. On the 22nd of June 1731 his domestic tragedy, The Merchant, renamed later The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell, was produced by Theophilus Cibber and his company at Drury Lane. The piece is written in prose, which is not free from passages which are really blank verse, and is founded on “An excellent ballad of George Barnwell, an apprentice of London who ... thrice robbed his master, and murdered his uncle in Ludlow.” In breaking through the tradition that the characters of every tragedy must necessarily be drawn from people of high rank and fortune he went back to the Elizabethan domestic drama of passion of which the Yorkshire Tragedy is a type. The obtrusively moral purpose of this play places it in the same literary category as the novels of Richardson. Scoffing critics called it, with reason, a “Newgate tragedy,” but it proved extremely popular on the stage. It was regularly acted for many years at holiday seasons for the moral benefit of the apprentices. The last act contained a scene, generally omitted on the London stage, in which the gallows actually figured. In 1734 Lillo celebrated the marriage of the Princess Anne with William IV. of Orange in Britannia and Batavia, a masque. A second tragedy, The Christian Hero, was produced at Drury Lane on the 13th of January 1735. It is based on the story of Scanderbeg, the Albanian chieftain, a life of whom is printed with the play. Thomas Whincop (d. 1730) wrote a piece on the same subject, printed posthumously in 1747. Both Lillo and William Havard, who also wrote a dramatic version of the story, were accused of plagiarizing Whincop’s Scanderbeg. Another murder-drama, Fatal Curiosity, in which an old couple murder an unknown guest, who proves to be their own son, was based on a tragedy at Bohelland Farm near Penryn in 1618. It was produced by Henry Fielding at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1736, but with small success. In the next year Fielding tacked it on to his own Historical Register for 1736, and it was received more kindly. It was revised by George Colman the elder in 1782, by Henry Mackenzie in 1784, &c. Lillo also wrote an adaptation of the Shakespearean play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with the title Marina (Covent Garden, August 1st, 1738); and a tragedy, Elmerick, or Justice Triumphant (produced posthumously, Drury Lane, February 23rd, 1740). The statement made in the prologue to this play that Lillo died in poverty seems unfounded. His death took place on the 3rd of September 1739. He left an unfinished version of Arden of Feversham, which was completed by Dr John Hoadly and produced in 1759. Lillo’s reputation proved short-lived. He has nevertheless a certain cosmopolitan importance, for the influence of George Barnwell can be traced in the sentimental drama of both France and Germany.
See Lillo’s Dramatic Works with Memoirs of the Author by Thomas Davies (reprint by Lowndes, 1810); Cibber’s Lives of the Poets, v.; Genest, Some Account of the English Stage; Alois Brandl, “Zu Lillo’s Kaufmann in London,” in Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturgeschichte (Weimar, 1890, vol. iii.); Leopold Hoffmann, George Lillo (Marburg, 1888); Paul von Hofmann-Wellenhof, Shakspere’s Pericles und George Lillo’s Marina (Vienna, 1885). There is a novel founded on Lillo’s play, Barnwell (1807), by T. S. Surr, and in “George de Barnwell” (Novels by Eminent Hands) Thackeray parodies Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram.