Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/466

 408 exposed and the range of knowledge at their disposal. What did they know and how did they know the things of the past, and what kind of knowledge was popular (i.e. acceptable to their readers and listeners)? The atmosphere of a society colours every product and moulds, consciously or unconsciously, the mental activity of the bard and of the poet.

Two or three points deserve our close attention. In the first place, what was the occupation of the authors, especially the authors of the prose romances which we rnay assume precede every romantic poem? (For the story is first written down, and afterwards taken up by the trouvére and versified, as it is to be sung before the barons at the festive board and later on, when it has become a popular tale or a shorter ballad, among the lower bourgeoisie.) The art of writing was in that early period known to but few. The little knowledge which the Middle Ages possessed was almost a monopoly of the clergy. The clerk, as the name denotes, was in most cases a cleric. The historiographers and chroniclers were as a rule monks and priests, and they wrote as often as not for the special edification of those readers and for the praise and honour of those places, with which they stood in close contact. Every clever writer would enhance and extol the virtues of his special saint and of the church devoted to the memory of that saint. His miracles would be retailed to a believing and loving public almost to the exclusion of any other saint, and the worship of the local shrine was thus continued from olden times in a new setting. The clerical authors drew their inspiration from the religious literature with which they lived in daily connection. They saw things only and solely through the glasses of ancient legendary lore and could not find greater praise for their own saints and heroes than to liken them to those that shone to them from the pages of the old books they so much revered