6 Pref. Sax. Gram.
One among the earliest specimens of the use of rhyme in the Island of Great Britain, is to be found in the Saxon Chronicle. The author says that he himself had seen the Conqueror, and we may thence infer that the lines were written in the reign of William Rufus, or at farthest in that of his brother and successor Henry. It may be as well before quoting this literary curiosity, to notice a distich in itself trifling, and only worth noticing as the very earliest specimen of Saxon Rhyme, on record.
Aldred, Archbishop of York, threw out two rhyming verses against one Urse, sheriff of Worcestershire, not long after the conquest:
| "Hatest thou Urse—Have thou God's curse." Vocaris Ursus—Habeas dei maledictionem. |
William of Malmsbury, who has preserved this precious morsel, says that he inserts this English, "quod Latina verba non sicut Anglica concinnati respondent." The concinnity I presume consisted in the rhyme, and would scarcely have been deemed worth repeating if rhyme in English had not been a rare thing. It is quite apparent that rhyme and an improved metre were introduced by the Normans, among whom composition in their own dialect had been long before attempted in imitation of the jingling Latin rhythm.
The lines in the Saxon Chronicle to which I have referred, are a comment upon the changes effected by William. I will set them down in legible characters.
| Thet he nam he rihte And mid mycelan un-rihte He foette mycel deor-frith And he loegde laga therwith— He forbead the heortas Swylce Eac tha baras; Swa swithe he lufode the hea-deor Swylce he waere heora faeder, Eac he sætte be tham haran, That hi mosten freo faran.— |
This may be translated after somewhat the following fashion: "He took money by right and unright—He made many deer parks and established laws by which," whosoever slew a hart or a hind was deprived of his eye-sight—"He forbade men to kill harts or boars, and he loved the tall deer as if he were their father. He decreed that the brindled hares should go free."
In addition to these, Matthew Paris mentions a canticle which 'the blessed Virgin' was pleased to dictate to Godric, a hermit near Durham.
From this time to the reign of Henry II, which began in 1154, we find no records of rhyming poetry. In that reign, one Layamon, a priest of Ernleye, near Severn, as he terms himself, translated from the French of Wace, a fabulous history of the Britons, entitled, "Le Bruit;" which, Wace himself, about the year 1150, had translated from the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth. This poem is for the most part after the Old Saxon fashion, without rhyme, except so far as a jingle at intervals may be so called. We next, if guided by the actual records of written poetry, are forced to pass over an interval of 100 years—to the middle of Henry the third's reign. The reasons of this gap are perhaps these—