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34

SEMI-SAXON WRITERS.

called Serventois, in addition to a complaint addressed from his dungeon to the barons of France and England, bewailing his long captivity. Of this latter poem Horace Walpole printed, in his "Royal and Noble Authors," a Provençal form, which he took from a manuscript in the library of San Lorenzo at Florence.

SEMI-SAXON WRITERS.

As was natural from the miserable state of the Saxon nation immediately after the Conquest-her braver spirits forced, like Hereward and Robin Hood, to take to the greenwood and the marshes, while her weaker souls were cowed into tame submission and slavery-the works written in English of the second stage were very few. The Saxon Chronicle, already noticed, runs on to the year 1154, when the registers come to an abrupt stop.

Two works are named as the chief remains of the Semi-Saxon literature. One, a Translation of Wace's "Brut," by Layamon, a priest of Ernleye (Areleye-Regis), near the Severn in Worcestershire, is placed by Hallam between the years 1155 and 1200. It rises in many passages beyond a mere translation of Wace's text, and runs to more than fourteen thousand long verses. Its language is said to be a western dialect of the Semi-Saxon. The Ormulum, so called from its writer, Ormin or Orm, is a metrical paraphrase of Scripture, which has been assigned to the second stage of the language. Dr. Craik, however, suggests that it probably belongs to the end of the thirteenth century. The language of the "Ormulum" is, beyond question, in a more advanced stage than that of Layamon's "Brut."

MINSTREL VERSUS MONK.

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FIRST ERA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

FROM THE BIRTH OF CHAUCER ABOUT 1328 A.D. TO THE INTRODUCTION OF PRINTING BY CAXTON IN 1474 A.D.

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THE literature of England, as indeed of all Europe, lay during the earlier and central periods of the Middle Ages in the hands of the Minstrels and the Monks. The minstrel, roaming through the land, sang ballads of love and war; the monk sat in his dim-lit cell penning tomes of unreadable theology, very useless logic, or dry but valuable history, and varying these sterner labours with the graceful task of copying and illuminating the manuscripts, which then held the place of our printed volumes. There was no love lost between the brotherhoods of the Harp and the Missal; for the minstrel wielded a weapon in his song which often hit monkery sly and terrible blows, and could, moreover, open wide the purses of rich nobles, whose coins were doled out with niggard hand to the Church. So it happened that the cloister doors were too often shut in the faces of the wearied gleemen; and grumbling Brother Ambrose, having shot the bolt, betook himself in wrath to his cell to write a Latin treatise, as ponderous as himself, against the abominations of minstrelsy and minstrels.

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THE MINSTREL IN THE CASTLE HALL.

In very early days the Bards and Scalds of northern Europe sang their own verses to the music of the harp, much as Homer used to sing by the shore of the sounding Ægean. The minstrels of later days recited sometimes their own compositions, but oftener the poems of others. And by no means ignoble was the occupation of these musical wanderers. When Alfred donned the minstrel's dress, he took a downward step, to be sure, but by no means so great a downward step as the Emperor Napoleon would take, if he laid aside the imperial purple for the robes of a first tenor in the Italian Opera. And when Alfred walked among the tents of Guthrum's camp, a servant bore his harp behind him—a thing which would have at once revealed the secret of the singer, if it had not been a very usual occurrence. Gleeman and Jogeler (our juggler; the French, jongleur; the Latin, joculator) were other names for the minstrel craft in old English days.

Nor was there any more honoured or more welcome guest than this wanderer, whose time of triumph came when the rough substantial supper had vanished before the hungry hunters and their dogs, and the cups of mead or wine began to circle round the hall. Mimicry and action accompanied the music and the song. And as the wine fumes mounted to the brain, and the wild torrent of melody drove their pulses into madder flow, the battle-day seemed to have come again. War-cries rang through the smoky hall; and in the ruddy light, which streamed from crackling logs or flaring pine-knots, flushed brows grew a darker red; and hands, veined as if with whip-cord, clutched fiercely at knife or bill-hook, and wheeled the weapon in flashing circles through the air. Love, too, was the minstrel's theme; and here the power of his song struck even deeper to those simple hearts than when he sang of war, although the eye gleamed with another light, and the stern warshout faded into gentler tones.

The minstrels in feudal times were probably divided into varions classes, which were distinguished as Squire minstrels, Yeoman minstrels, &c. Those attached to noble houses wore the arms of their patron, hung round the neck by a silver chain. The distinctive badge of the profession was the wrest or tuning-key. Many

THE PICTURE OF A MINSTREL.

37

minstrels carried a tabor; but some played on a viele, supposed to have been like a guitar, in the top of which one hand turned a handle, while the other touched the keys of the instrument. The minstrel's dress, of which an idea may be gathered from the following passage, bore some resemblance to that of the monks.

An old letter, written by a man who was present at the grand entertainment given at Kenilworth in 1575 to Queen Elizabeth, describes the dress of a minstrel, who took a prominent part in the pageant. He was dressed in a long gown of Kendal green, with sleeves hanging down to the middle of the leg; a red belt girt his waist; his tonsure, like a monk's, was shaven round; his head was bare; a red ribbon hung round his neck; his shoes were cleanly blacked with soot; all his ruffs (this fashion belonged to Elizabeth's own day) stuck stiffly out with the setting-sticks, which then did the work of starch; and round his neck were suspended the arms of Islington. Although this depicts the minstrel at a later stage than that of which we write, when the profession had fallen low in public esteem, it may yet serve to give us an idea of the kind of men who wandered from hall to hall, embalming in song those picturesque old histories of early English days, whose very roughness of flow is a new charm, and whose large admixture of highly-coloured fable, if detracting from their historic worth, yet endeared them all the more to the hearts of the simple people, whose delight it was to sing and hear them by the winter fire or beneath the summer trees.

The application of the word Minstrel changed a good deal during the decay of chivalry. At first used to denote those wandering historians of whom we have spoken, "abstracts and brief chronicles of the time," who sang of love or war in lordly halls, playing a musical accompaniment and gesturing with imitative motions, it came to apply afterwards chiefly to the musician. The song was dropped, and so were the gestures. The Poet took up the song; the Juggler and Tumbler took up the bodily movements; while the Minstrel remained a player of music only. Had Alfred Tennyson lived six hundred years ago, in order to win the laurelcrown which he worthily wears as first minstrel in the land, he

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FALL OF THE MINSTREL CRAFT.

would have needed, in addition to his fine poetic genius, something of the pliant muscle that bears Blondin along the perilous rope, and the rapid finger with which Ernst draws the music of the spheres from tightened cat-gut.

An Act of 1597, by which Elizabeth included wandering minstrels among rogues, vagabonds, and beggars, gave a mortal wound to the minstrel craft. Cromwell, too, denounced terrible penalties against fiddlers or minstrels. So low had the brotherhood of old Homer fallen!

In more enlightened days the poet and the musician have found once more something like their fitting station in society; but the tumbler, representing the mere physical element of the old minstrel craft, still remains among the dregs of the middle classesbut a step or two above the point where Elizabeth and Cromwell left the poor degraded minstrels.

MINSTRELSY. The poetry of the Saxons was distinguished from their prose by a peculiar kind of alliteration. Metre or rhyme they had none. These attributes of English verse were imported from the Continent by the Normans, who copied both from the decayed Latin. Even before the age of Constantine a species of rhythmical poetry, in which the metrical quantity of syllables was almost wholly disregarded, and the accent alone attended to in pronunciation, became common, especially in the mouths of the lower classes of those that spoke Latin. In this rhythmical verse the number of syllables was irregular. That rhyme was used in Latin poetry from the end of the fourth century is a distinctly proved fact.

No work, in which rhyme or metre was used, can be traced in our literature until after the Norman Conquest. A few lines in the Saxon Chronicle on the death of the Conqueror, and a short canticle, said by Matthew Paris to have been dictated by the Virgin Mary to a hermit of Durham, are perhaps the earliest specimens of rhyme in English verse. Through Layamon's poem, written in the time of Henry II., numbers of short verses are scattered which rhyme together pretty exactly. There are, besides, some eight-syllable lines in imitation of Wace's metre. But, on

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