Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/47

 Rh indeed we can carry the date much further back. Marie herself describes it as ancient, but we cannot lay much stress upon this. A work barely two generations old may well have seemed ancient in her eyes and in those of her contemporaries. Internal evidence affords surer ground. The lai must have been composed at a time when there was frequent and easy communication between Brittany and Southern England, and when the condition of the latter country was such that the Breton poet knew, or could imagine, that it was parcelled out between a number of petty kings. This seems to preclude a post-Conquest date. The Breton allies of the Conqueror received liberal grants of territory in South-Western England; in the second half of the 11th and the first half of the 12th century the chief men of the district were also leading members of the Breton nobility, so that a Breton minstrel of that period could hardly have been so far unaware of the real state of contemporary Southern England as to draw the picture of it we find in Eliduc. The mention of Totness gives us no precise date. We know that at the Conquest it was already a borough town and a considerable port, moreover that in the early 12th century it enjoyed legendary renown, as Geoffrey makes Brutus land there on his first arrival in England. Whether this is to be brought into any connection with early migrations between Britain and Armorica is perhaps doubtful, but it seems to argue a longstanding traditional belief that Totness was the chief port of South Devon. I think we may assign the composition of the contents of the lai, substantially as retold by Marie, to some period prior to 1056.

Turning from the material to the moral conditions of the lai, we note that although bigamy is held to be sinful, yet no form of divorce or other kind of ecclesiastical separation seems necessary. The arrangement between Eliduc and his two wives is apparently a family one, with which the Church has no concern. I do not profess to say how far this reflects possible historical conditions, or is simply to