DUKE HUMPHREY'S LIBRARY. 13 the royal library. It may, therefore, be readily conceived how welcome were the bards and historical poets, who formed the only medium by which the gratification of curiosity could be supplied, the only source of imaginative recreation. In process of time, as it is well known, however, this state of things, both in France and England, was changed. Charles the Fifth of France first formed a library in the Palace of the Louvre, out of the presents of books which were sent to him from the remotest parts of France, in compliment to his known taste for reading. He ordered them to be carefully transcribed and richly illuminated; and placed them in what was long called La Tour de la Libraire,' in the Louvre. So much did this monarch honour his books that he caused the three rooms in which he placed his treasures to be wainscoted with Irish oak, with ceilings of cypress wood, beautifully carved. He could not foresee that in 1425 the English should conquer France, march into Paris, and send all his valued collection to England, where Duke Humphrey obtained them, and they became the foundation of his vaunted collection. Books, in fact, fetched such excessive prices that none but princes and nobles could hope ever even to look into them; witness the enormous sum paid for John of Meun's Roman de la Rose,' which was sold about 1400, before the palace gate of Paris, for forty crowns, or thirtythree pounds six shillings and sixpence. The enthusiasm for letters which marked the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First was confined, in the dark era to which we now refer, to professional poets and ecclesiastics, and was exhibited but rarely in the palace or the castle. The examples, therefore, of Charles the Fifth and of Duke Humphrey were the more notable. Many circumstances combined to favour the production of romantic literature more greatly amongst the French than in England, before the period when Chaucer and Gower flourished. The French seigneurs lived in far greater magnificence than our old English barons of the 12th and 13th centuries. Their feudal system was more complete; they held their lands by rights almost royal; they maintained schools in their castles, in which youths were taught the rules and practice of chivalry; and these high-born boys soon learned to put into practice what they had acquired in the splendid tournaments in which the French noblesse delighted. The troubadours of Provence are said by several authorities to have been the first writers of metrical romance; and, discarding the use of Latin, in which hitherto all works had been written, they composed their verses in the Provençal dialect, so that their poems became the delight, not only of princes and nobles, but of an inferior and larger class of persons. The works of the earliest troubadours consisted of satires, fables, love-sonnets, and allegories. Gallantry,' says Fontenelle, was the parent of French poetry.' After the Crusades a different order of troubadours arose; and chivalric deeds and romantic adventures became the theme of the Provençal poets. The connexion of French literature with that of England was close, and long continued. The English Court, during two hundred years after the Conquest, was, it must be remarked, completely French; and our monarchs, from alliances and early prepossessions, seem to have been almost more intimately connected with France than with England. Our scholars were sent to Paris for education; our best romance writers of that day preferred writing in French to adopting the unpolished vernacular tongue of the English. The people, in fact, spoke either Norman-Saxon or DanishSaxon, adulterated with French; children at school were forbidden to read their own language, and were taught Norman only; the poor natives, of the lower class, were, in fact, during this dreary period, reduced to so low a state LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE. 15 of servitude and misery, that the English name was used as a term of reproach; even the Saxon way of writing was allowed to fall into disuse, and the knowledge of that tongue would soon have wholly died away had it not been necessary to maintain it in order to comprehend the ancient charters in that language. The Court spoke French only; and if some vernacular idiom was suffered to appear it was condemned as vulgar; and to avoid such a barbarism boys were sent to French monasteries that they might there forget their mother tongue, and adopt another less offensive to ears polite. Amongst numerous specimens of NormanSaxon poetry Warton gives one, of which the following lines form the commencement: it is the earliest love-song in that language known. It is taken from the Harleian MSS., and is of the date 1300: 'Blow northerne wynd, Sent thou me my suetyng; Blou, blou, blou. Ichot a burde in boure bryht, This specimen will probably content the modern reader. In such sonnets, and in metrical romances in the same tongue, the enslaved English, long after the Conquest, delighted. It was reserved for a later period to restore our language, and to revive with it our national character. Mean * Knew not. 16 MASTER HENRY, THE MINSTREL. time, our Norman ancestors, in their stately castles, were listening to metrical tales, which have been, in many instances, lost, or which are only partly traceable in those old English romances, which long constituted a large portion of the Literature of Society.' 6 After the preceding specimen of the Norman-Saxon language, we shall not be disposed to censure Henry the Third, of England, who invited from the remote town of Avranches Master Henry to become his minstrel at the British court. Master Henry the versifier,' as he was called, received as his stipend, one hundred shillings annually. He had the bad taste, thus patronized as he was, to reflect on the rusticity of the Cornish men; probably not without reason, Edward the First encouraged Robert of Gloucester, a monk of Gloucester Abbey. Robert de Brunne, or Bourne, a Gilbertine monk from Depyng in Lincolnshire, next enjoyed his patronage. He was chiefly a translator; yet to him the great antiquary Hearne, attributes the old metrical romance of 'Richard Cuer de Lyon '—produced, perhaps, in the leisure of monastic life. In similar seclusion was the famous 'History of Guy Earl of Warwick' written by Waller of Exeter, a Franciscan friar, who flourished at Carocus, in Cornwall, in the year 1292. Strange to say, monastic libraries were full of romances. Fancy, passion, perhaps recollection, broke the old rules of conventual routine. The monks-sometimes old soldiers delighted in annals of heroism; sometimes converted and penitent courtiers, they cherished the gay science, as the art of minstrelsy was termed, and concealed among their Missals and Psalters, books full of love sonnets or of amorous chronicles. Human nature crept out; and when the commissioners employed to search the convents in the time of Henry the Eighth turned over a mass of homilies and Psalters in old monastic libraries, there fell out 'Sir Tristram,' 'Guy de Burgoyne,' or Meun's 'Roman de la Rose,' the precious WHAT WE OWE TO CONVENTS. 17 recreation of the saintly fathers in their long and pensive leisure hours. A friar, according to Pierce Plowman in his Visions,' was far more conversant with the rhymes of Robin Hood and of Randal of Chester than with his Paternosters, nor were the monks without their social pleasures. Sometimes the conventual edifice rang with the songs of minstrels, who were admitted and well paid at festivals. When a certain Bishop of Winchester visited the convent of St. Swithin's, in that city, he was entertained by Herbert, a minstrel, who sang 'Queen Emma delivered from the ploughshare.' 'Jeffrey the Harper,' as he was called, had, moreover, a regular pension from the Benedictines at Hide, near Winchester. In the Abbeys of Conway and Stratflur a Bard was always retained; and in the convents of Wales the poetry of the Bards was preserved. It was to the recesses of the convent, therefore, that the Court often owed the preservation of the most popular romances. Among the most fashionable works of the day was the Anglo-Norman romance of Richard Coeur de Lion," before referred to. It is in this metrical tale that Richard is described as tearing out the lion's heart, and eating it before the astonished King of Almain. Hence the appellation of Coeur de Lion. Yevis, as I understand can, This romance, we are assured, was sung to the harp in Provence whilst Richard, meantime, was cultivating the * Ellis's 'Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances,' vol. ii., p. 201. VOL. I. C |