The7 scholars of the age affected to write in Latin—which they called the universal language. The more skilful poets who lived, as is usual with the race, upon the bounty of the great nobles, out of compliment to these their Norman benefactors, framed their verse into the Norman French; while the low and popular singers—then the only true English poets—left nothing worth preservation. I will pass on hurriedly through this uninteresting portion of my slight history of written poetry, to the nearest resting-place, and thence take a back view of minstrelsy as nourished in the courts of the English Kings, and principally in that of Richard Coeur de Lion.
7 The poems of this interval have been translated into the English of Elizabeth's time, when the rage for gathering scraps of ballad into "garlands" was at its full. It is, however, impossible to distinguish them from the numerous pieces, really French—i.e. written not only in the French language, but in France, bearing similar date, and translated at the same time. It is impossible to draw hair lines or any kind of lines between these; or if possible, needs a more skilful antiquary, than the author of these cacoethes scribendi.
In the reign of Henry III, we find that one Orm or Ormin, wrote a paraphrase of the gospel histories, entitled, Ormulum. Hickes and Wanley have both given large extracts from this, without discovering that it was poetry. But a close examination will render evident to any one, with any ear for metre, that the Ormulum is written very exactly, in verses of fifteen syllables8 without rhyme, in imitation of the most common species of the Latin, tetrameter iambic. Another piece, a moral poem on old age, bears date about the same reign; it is more remarkable for a corrupt MS., from which the only print of the poem at all common, seems to have been taken, than for any thing else.
8 This metre is the same metre with that of the Modern Greeks, which Lord Byron tells us, shuffles on to the old tune: A captain bold of Halifax, &c.
The next interval from the end of Henry the third's reign, to the middle of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer came upon the dais, was filled up with a swarm of 'small poets.' These were principally translators of popular poems from the Roman or French authors, and their compositions were thence called Romances. They neither improved on the material before gathered, nor added anything of value to the store. And so we come to Geoffrey Chaucer—whence, let me recur to another branch of the subject in hand.
I have said that minstrels were known among the Saxons before the conquest, and that these were in high repute at the Saxon courts. That Alfred himself was a poet, and on one occasion, a minstrel. The Normans brought with them their harpers and troubadours9 and the profession received a great acquisition of strength and honor. Every Baron had his own joculator, and we find amongst the records of the Old English families, items of largesse to wandering harpers. Such were at all seasons welcomed by the feudal nobles—perhaps for the same reason that our modern aristocrats of Virginia were hospitable—from a love of news. Minstrels as news-gleaners—often coming too from the royal court—were a source of entertainment to the lords, who, immured in their solitary castles among swampy moors, or perched on hill-tops almost inaccessible to man, seldom heard other than an enemy at their gates.
9 Vid. the story of Taillefer—Du Cange.
At the court of Henry I,—to whom Sir Walter Scott refers in those lines of his rambling epistle to George Ellis—
| "But who shall teach my harp to gain A sound of the romantic strain, Whose Anglo-Norman tones whilere Could win the royal Henry's ear,— Famed Beauclerc called, for that he loved, The minstrel, and his lay approved?" |
Minstrels and minstrelsy were especially favored.