Nearly a century after Layamon, in the same part of England, the monk, Robert of Gloucester, wrote his “Chronicle,” about 1280. This honest monk painfully indited for his brother-Saxons the whole history of England, in the shape of Alexandrine verse in rhyme; the diction of the verse approaches so nearly to prose, that it must have been the colloquial idiom of the west. The “Ingliss,” as it was called in the course of the century between Layamon and Robert of Gloucester, betrays a striking change; and modern philologists have given the progressive term of “middle English” to the language from this period to the Reformation.6 Our chronicler has fared ill with posterity, of whom probably he never dreamt. Robert of Gloucester, who is entirely divested of a poetical character, as are all rhyming chroniclers, has had the hard hap of being criticised by two merciless poets; and, to render his uncouthness still more repulsive, the black-letter fanaticism of his editor has vauntingly arrayed the monk whom he venerated in the sable Gothic, bristling with the Saxon characters.7 It has therefore required something like a physical courage to sit down to Robert of Gloucester. Yet in the rhymer whom Warton has degraded, Ellis has discovered a metrical annalist whose orations are almost eloquent, whose characters of monarchs are energetic, and what he records of his own age matter worthy of minute history.
Another monk, Robert Mannyng, of Brunne, or Bourne, in Lincolnshire, who had versified Piers Langtoft’s “Chronicle,” has left a translation of the “Manuel des Péchés,” ascribed to Bishop Grosteste, who composed it in politer French. In this “Manual of Sins,” or, as he terms it, “A Handlyng of Sinne,” according to monkish morality and the monkish devices to terrify sinners, our recreative monk has introduced short tales, some grave, and some he deemed facetious, which convey an idea of domestic life and domestic language. It is not without curiosity that we examine these, the earliest attempts at that difficult trifle—the art of telling a short tale, Robert de Brunne is neither a Mat Prior nor a La Fontaine, but he is a block which might have been carved into one or the other, and he shows that without much art a tale may be tolerably told.8 His octosyllabic verse is more fluent than the protracted Alexandrine of his “Chronicle.” The words fall together in natural order, and we seem to have advanced in this rude and artless “Ingliss.” But the most certain evidence that “the English” was engaging the attention of those writers who professedly were devoting their pens to those whom they called “the Commonalty,” is, that they now began to criticise; and we find Robert de Brunne continually protesting against “strange Ingliss.” This phrase has rather perplexed our inquirers. “Strange Ingliss” would seem to apply to certain novelties in diction used by the tale-reciters and harpers, for so our monk tells us,
| “I wrote In symple speeche as I couthe, That is lightest in manne’s mouthe. I mad (made) nought for no disoúrs (tale-tellers), Ne for no seggers nor harpoúrs, Bot for the luf (love) of symple menu That strange Inglis cann not ken.” |
It was about this time that the metrical romances, translated from the French, spread in great number, and introduced many exotic phrases. In the celebrated romance of “Alisaundre” we find French expressions, unalloyed by any attempt at Anglicising them, overflowing the page. The phrase is, however, once applied to certain strange metres which our monk avoided, for many “that read English would be confounded by them.”
Whatever Robert de Brunne might allude to by his “strange Ingliss,”9 the same cry and the identical expressions are repeated by a writer not many years afterwards—Richard Rolle, called “the Hermit of Hampole.” He produced the earliest versions of the Psalms into English prose, with a commentary on each verse; and a voluminous poem in ten thousand lines, entitled “The Prikke of Conscience,” translated from the Latin for “the unletterd men of Engelonde who can only understand English.” In the prologue to this first Psalter in English prose he says, “I seke no straunge Ynglyss, bot lightest and communest, and wilk (such) that is most like unto the Latyn; and thos I fine (I find) no proper Inglis I felough (follow) the wit of the words, so that thai that knowes noght (not) the Latyne, be (by) the Ynglys may come to many Latyne wordys.” Here we arrive at open corruption! Already a writer appears refined enough to complain of the poverty of the language in furnishing “proper Inglis” or synonymes for the Latin; the next step must follow, and that would be in due time the latinising “the Ynglys.”
A great curiosity of the genuine homeliness of our national idiom at this time has come down to us in a manuscript in the Arundel Collection, now in our national library. It is a volume written by a monk of St. Austin’s at Canterbury, in the Kentish dialect, about a century and a half after Layamon, and half a century after Robert of Gloucester, in 1340. This honest monk, like others of the Saxon brotherhood, was writing for his humbled countrymen, or, as he expresses himself, with a rude Doric simplicity,
Vor Vader and for Moder and for other Ken.
I throw into a note what I have transcribed of this specimen of the old Saxon-English, or, as it is called, “Semi-Saxon.”10 In this specimen of the language as spoken by the people the barbarism is native, pure in its impurity, and unalloyed by any spurious exotic. This English spoken in the Weald of Kent, Caxton tells us, in his time, was “as broad and rude English as is spoken in any place in England.” When contrasted with the diction of a northern bard, whom a singular accident retrieved for us,11 it offers a curious picture of the English language, so different at precisely the same period. The minstrel’s flow of verse almost anticipates the elegance of a writer of two centuries later.
The poems of Laurence Minot consist of ten narrative ballads on some of the wars of Edward the Third in Scotland and in France. The events this bard records show that his writings were completed in 1352. His editor is surprised that “the great monarch whom he so eloquently and so earnestly panegyrised was either ignorant of his existence or insensible of his merit.” Minot was probably nothing more than a northern minstrel, whose celebrity did not extend many leagues. His verses convey to us a perfect conception of the minstrel character, throwing out his almost extemporaneous “Lays” on the predominant incidents of his day. All these narrative poems open by soliciting the attention of the auditors:—
| Lithes! and I sall tell you tyll The bataile of Halidon Hyll. |
And in another—
| Herkins how long King Edward lay, With his men before Tournay. |
The singularity of these “Lays” consists in coming down to us in a written form, evidently with great care and fondness, bearing their author’s unknown name. They might have appropriately been preserved in Percy’s “Reliques of English Poetry.”12
Three centuries had now passed, and still the national genius languished in the Norman bondage of the language. But the commonalty were increasing in number and in weight, and an indignant sense of the destitution of a national language was not confined to the laity; it was attracting the attention of those who thought and who wrote. Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, who put forth the first bibliographical treatise by an Englishman, and may he ranked among the earliest critical collectors of a private library, in his celebrated treatise on the love of books, the “Philo-biblion,”13 breathes all the enthusiasm of study; but while he directs our attention to the classical writers of antiquity, he stimulates his contemporaries to emulate them by composing new books. Although he himself wrote in Latin, he regrets that no institution for children in the English