Edward, thou dudest ase a shreward, Richard, thah thou be ever trichard, 92. To the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272) is supposed to belong the remarkable poem of The Owl and Nightingale, written probably by the Maister Nichole of Guldeforde' (Guildford), who is named in it, or else by his brother John of Guildford, the author of the piece which, in the Cottonian MS., precedes that which we have under consideration. Perched on a spray, whence she looks down with sovereign contempt on her unmelodious adversary, the Nightingale challenges the Owl to a contest and controversy regarding their respective qualities of song. The Owl consents; a dialogue follows, in which the Owl stands chiefly on the defensive, maintaining that her song is less harsh, and her appetite for mice and small birds less ravenous, than the proud Nightingale would allow. In the end they agree to go to Portesham, and submit their dispute to Master Nicholas of Guildford. The Owl says that she can repeat all that has been said : 'Telle ich con word after worde; ('I can tell word after word, and if it seemeth to thee that I mis-state, do thou stand against me and stop judgment.' With these words forth they fared, all without army and without followers, until they reached Portesham. But how they sped in their judgment, I can no more tell you; here is no more of this story.) It was The poem is nearly 1,800 lines long; it is in the dialect of the South of England, with many Danish forms. probably imitated from the Roman de Rose, or rather suggested by it. In that famous and widely influential poem, frequent mention is made of birds and their singing powers. The garden which the poet sees in his dream is alive with them : In many places were nyghtyngales, 1 Forsake thine uncle's teaching. and various other birds, That songen for to wynne hem prys, 93. In Hickes' Thesaurus, part of a moral poem of 119 stanzas is given, which the learned editor placed just after the Conquest, and to which Warton (Eng. Poetry, § 1) would assign a still earlier date. The progressive changes in the language being now better understood, no modern critic would think of placing this poem much before the middle of the thirteenth century. From a MS. in the Bodleian the following specimen is taken : Early English Prose: The Ancren Riwle; Ayenbite of Inwyt. 94. It would not be easy to point out any considerable work in English prose, belonging to the period between the cessation of the Peterborough Chronicle in 1154 and the end of the twelfth century. Early in the thirteenth, the Ancren Riwle, or Rule for Anchorites, was written. This interesting treatise partakes of three characters; it is a rule of daily life, a manual of instruction in those portions of the Christian doctrine which relate to counsels of perfection, and a guide to devotion. It was edited for the Camden Society in 1853. It has been ascribed to 1 Romaunt of the Rose, as translated by Chaucer. 2 In winters and also in learning. 3 been. 4 though. 5 young. The reader will observe how this letter g, which represented a guttural sound in the early language, was replaced in course of time, in some words by g or gh, in others by y. 6 earth; A.S. middangeard. 7 through the devil's rancour; A.S. anda. Simon of Ghent, who died in 1315; but considering the very archaic character of the language, the opinion which holds a former bishop of Salisbury, Richard le Poore, to be the author, appears to me preferable. Bishop le Poore, the commencer, and in great part the builder, of the glorious cathedral at Salisbury, died in 1237. The work was written for a small society, consisting of three religious ladies, residing at Tarente, now Tarrant-Kaimes, in Dorsetshire. At a later period their house received the Cistercian rule, but at this time they appear not to have belonged to any regular order. The dialect is considered to be West of England; it much resembles that of Lazamon, but differs from it in respect of the large number of French and Latin words which it admits. I quote a sentence from the extract printed in Mr. Kington Oliphant's Standard English:- 'A lefdi [lady] was, bet was mid hire voan [foes] biset al abuten, and hire lond al destrued, and heo [she] al povre, wiðinnen one eordene castle. On [a] mihti kinges luve was pauh [however] biturned upon hire, so un-imete [measureless] swude [very], pet he vor [for] wouhlecchunge [wooing] sende hire his sonden [messengers], on efter oder, and ofte somed [at once] monie [many]: and sende hire beaubelet [baubles, jewels] bode veole [many] and feire, and sukurs of livened [victuals], and help of his heie hird [army] to holden hire castel.' 95. The Ayenbite of Inwyt, or Remorse of Conscience, is a translation by Dan Michel, of Northgate, Kent, made in 1340, of the French treatise, 'Le Somme des Vices et des Vertus,' composed near the end of the thirteenth century by Frère Lorens. The dialect is the Kentish, and exceedingly rough. It was edited by Dr. Morris for the Early English Text Society in 1866. 77 CHAPTER I. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD, 1350-1450. 1. HITHERTO such English writers as we have met with since the Conquest have generally appeared in the humble guise of translators or imitators. In the period before us we at last meet with original invention applied on a large scale: this, therefore, is the point at which English literature takes its true commencement. The Latin and French compositions, which engaged so much of our attention in the previous period, may in this be disposed of in a few words. That Englishmen still continued to write French poetry, we have the proof in many unprinted poems by Gower, and might also infer from a passage, often quoted, in the prologue to the Testament of Love.1 But few such pieces are of sufficient merit to bear printing. In French prose scarcely anything can be mentioned besides the despatches, treaties, &c., contained in Rymer's Foedera and similar compilations, and the original draft of Sir John Maundevile's Travels in the Holy Land. Froissart's famous Chronicle may, indeed, be considered as partly belonging to us, since it treats largely of English feats of arms, and its author-the son of a painter of armorial bearings-entered in early youth the service of Queen Philippa in the capacity of secretary, and held for many years a post in the household of Edward III. 2. In Latin poetry there is nothing that deserves mention except the Liber Metricus of Thomas Elmham, concerning the career of Henry V., edited by Mr. Cole for the Rolls series in 1858. Elmham, who flourished about the year 1440, was a Benedictine monk in the monastery of St. Austin's, Canterbury. The poem contains 1,349 lines, and is, as Byron would have 1 Lette than clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the propertie of science, and the knowing in that facultie: and lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also enditen their queinte termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us showe our fantasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.' said, not so much poetry as 'prose run mad;' in proof of which let these lines suffice : Hic Jon Oldcastel Christi fuit insidiator, Amplectens hæreses, in scelus omne ruens; Obicibus Regis fert mala vota sacris. Whether the last line means 'he wishes ill to the king's devout objects,' or what else it means, it is hard to say. 3. In Latin prose, we have a version, made by himself, of Maundevile's Travels, and the chroniclers (amongst others of less note), Robert de Avesbury, Henry Knyghton, Thomas Walsingham, and John Fordun. Robert de Avesbury was registrar of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Court, and wrote a fair and accurate history of the reign of Edward III. (published by Hearne in 1720) coming down to the year 1356, in which or in the following year he died. Henry Knyghton, the date of whose death is unknown, was a canon regular of Leicester; he is the author of Compilatio de Eventibus Angliæ a tempore Regis Edgari usque ad mortem Regis Ricardi II. His account of the rise of Lollardism, though written with a strong antiWycliffite bias, is highly interesting and valuable. 4. The Historia Anglicana of Thomas Walsingham, a work to which all modern historians continually refer in writing of the events of the fourteenth and earlier portion of the fifteenth centuries, was edited by Mr. Riley for the Rolls series in 1864. Scarcely anything is known of Walsingham except that he was a monk of St. Albans, that he compiled, besides the Historia, an account of Normandy, called Ypodigma Neustria, and that he was still alive in 1419. The Historia, as it stands, extends from 1272 to 1422; but Mr. Riley shows some ground for supposing that the portion compiled by Walsingham himself may reach no further than to 1392, the only really original and valuable part even of this being the fifteen years between 1377 and 1392, while the concluding thirty years were added by some unknown hand. 5. John Fordun, a secular priest of Kincardineshire, is the author of the Scotichronicon, a history of Scotland in Latin prose, written towards the close of the fourteenth century. The entire work contains sixteen books; but of these only five and part of the sixth were composed by Fordun, the remainder being the work of Abbot Bower, who brings down the story to the death of James I. in 1437.1 1 Irving's History of Scottish Poetry, edited by Dr. Carlyle, p. 116. |