Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/430

Rh 410 E N a L 1 IS H LITERATURE [EARLY ENGLISH. rare and costly. That lie discovered so much as he did chiefly in chemistry and optics is a thing to wonder at. Vague reports of these discoveries circulating among the ignorant populace caused Roger Bacon to be deemed a conjuror or necromancer; the chap-books and low comedies of the reign of Elizabeth represent him exclusively in this light. Orosse- v In the reign of Henry III. a strong effort was made to teste. make French the exclusive literary language of the English people. It was a struggle between the tongue of the upper class and the tongue of the middle class. Robert Grosseteste, the admired and venerated bishop of a great see, was surrounded by ecclesiastics of rank, and in constant intercourse with earls and barons. All such persons would speak French ; those that were laymen would stand in great need of spiritual and moral instruction, and this could not well be conveyed to them in any language but their own ; it was quite natural, therefore, that the bishop should encourage the writing of French treatises ; and it is probable that he sincerely thought the English tongue not to be worth cultivating for the purposes of literature. He may be excused for holding this opinion, if the only specimens of it which he had seen on paper were such as the Ormulum, or even as Layamou s Brut. A French work, the Manuel de Peche, treating of the decalogue and the seven deadly sins, which arc illustrated with many legendary stories, was formerly ascribed to Grosseteste it is now known to have been the work of William of Waddington; yet if the statemsnt be true, that it is a version of a little known Latin treatise, there remains a probability that the bishop, in pursuance of a general plan of action, encouraged Waddington to make his version. To the Chastel d Amour, a work of devotion dwelling on the mode of the miraculous incarnation of the Redeemer, Grosseteste s claim seems to be better founded ; if he did not write it, he certainly caused it to be written. The same despair of making anything of English, or the same connexion with a circle of readers in the upper ranks of society, led Peter Langtoft, a canon of Bricllington, in spite of his unmistakably English name, to write in French a rhyming chronicle of English history, which he brings down to 1307. Other cases might be mentioned; in fact, as Warton says, &quot;anonymous French pieces both in prose and verse, and written about this time, are innumerable in our manuscript repositories.&quot; There were French originals of Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamtoun, and many other romances, although few of them are now extant. But if the attack was vigorous, the defence was sturdy and persistent, with a tenacity which spoke of final victory. Ornrin. Ormin s rhythmic gospels (supposed to have been written about 1225), though the orthography proceeds upon a theory, and is so far interesting, presents, it must be admitted owing to the strangeness of the spelling, the want of rhyme, and the paucity of words of Latin origin a barbarous, almost repulsive, aspect to the reader. The war df the barons in Henry Ill. s reign, in which the cause of Leicester and other French-speaking aristocrats was taken up by the mass of the people with unmeasured enthusiasm, certainly had the effect of introducing a number of French words into the popular speech. This may be gathered from the remarkable English ballad on the battle of Lewes (1264), written by a partisan of Leicester, the phraseology of which is marked by almost the same proportion of words of French origin as prevails in modern English. Moreover, the movement of the verse is vigorous and free, and such as befits a language that is fast rising into importance, and has a great destiny before it. In the reign of Edward I. Robert appeared the English rhyming chronicle of Robert of of Glou- Gloucester. The early portion of it is founded on Wace s Unit, but the author continues the history down to 1272, tester. the date of Edward s accession. Robert is a plodding dull writer, but his work proves that he knew of a considerable class of persons who knew no French, yet were capable of deriving pleasure from literature ; it is for this class that his somewhat ponderous poem was intended. The pretty poem describing a contest between an owl and a nightingale (date about 1270) is in the dialect of the south of England, It is no translation, but seems to have been suggested by passages in the Roman de la Rose. Many English romances, e.g., Ilavelok, King Horn, King Alexander, Richard I., Guy of Warwick, &c., date from the reign of Edward L, or, say, from the last twenty years of the 13th century. Most of these are translations from the French ; in the case of Ilavelok, however, this remains Have to be proved, no French version (other than the sketch, much earlier in date, given in Gairnar s Estorie] being now extant. There is a French version of King Horn, but it differs greatly from the English romance, and there is good reason for believing that the English poem is the earlier of the two. Both Ilavelok and King Horn are founded on Anglo-Danish traditions current in the east of England ; on this account, and in consideration of the long intellectual blight which the Danish inroads produced in those parts of the country, they are extremely interesting and valuable. They abound in French words, and on reading them we feel that a language which has become so fluent, flexible, and accommodating cannot but make its way and attain to pre dominance. Perhaps the works of no single writer contributed so much to this result as those of Robert Manning, or, as he Mam is also called, Robert of Brunne. Robert was a monk of the order founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham ; his monastery was in South Lincolnshire. He belongs to the reigns of Edward II. and Edward III. ; the date of his death is unknown ; but it was probably about 1340. He executed a new version of W ace s Brut in octosyllabic rhyming verse, and added to it a translation of the French rhyming chronicle of Peter Langtoft, mentioned in a previous paragraph. He also translated Waddington s Manuel des Pcches, adding many characteristic and lively passages which make his version much more entertaining than the original work. To all these labours the good monk was impelled, not by the love of fame, which would have been more easily gratified if he had written in French, but by the benevolent desire to give his lay friends and acquaintances something pleasant to read and talk about, &quot; For to haf solace and gamen, In felauschip when tha sit saraen [together].&quot; We have found that by degrees men of better, or at least equal, mark have taken to writing in English, as compared with those who preferred French ; for instance, Robert Manning is at least equal as a versifier to Peter Langtoft. In the next section will be described the rise of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, and the final victory of the native speech. IV. Early English Literature, 1350-1477 The period at which we have arrived comprises about 120 years, end ing at the date of the introduction of printing into England. During all this time the scholastic philosophy reigned undisturbed at the universities. Wickliffe, so far as his Wick methods of argument and reliance on logic were concerned, llffe&amp;gt; was as much a schoolman as the friars who contended with him. The time was not yet come when a churchman would be found, like Colet, to decry the scholastic methods, and rely on literature rather than on logic. Wickliffe s first attacks upon the established order were directed, not against doctrine, but against the encroachments of the church upon the state, against the holding of temporal lordship &quot; or authority by ecclesiastical persons, and