Page:The study of the Anglo-Norman.djvu/22

 accounted for natural phenomena, and explained their inner and higher significance. History proved equally attractive to the Normans. Whilst in France, with a few notable exceptions, it continued to be written in Latin down to the time of Froissart, England was flooded with a mass of chronicles rhymed in French. Some of the earliest, those of Wace in particular, reveal fine workmanship and a real desire to supply trustworthy information. The later products are generally much inferior, in point both of style and of trustworthiness; but even they can be turned to useful account by the modern historian.

The Renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was to some extent the outcome of a religious revival, which received its strongest impulse from Cluny, but found nowhere a wider scope than under the aegis of the Norman Rulers. Their people, although too deeply engrossed in the affairs of this world to be much given to mysticism, were nevertheless keenly interested in religion. As Jusserand puts it, 'The real religious poems we owe to the Normans are those poems in stone, erected by their architects at Ely, Canterbury, York, and Durham.' Not content to provide stately buildings for monks and clerks, they claimed a share of their knowledge. The earliest translation into French of any section of the Bible, that of the Books of Kings, was made in this country. Versions of the Psalter, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Book of Revelation, &c., followed in course of time. Poems based on Biblical stories are numerous and still imperfectly known, but they are surpassed in number by treatises on the Deadly Sins, the follies of mankind, poems on the Love of God,