from the Origins To the Renaissance (continued 3)

And thus it happened that next to authors, French by race and language, subjects of the kings of England, were found others employing the same idiom, though of English blood. They strove, to the best of their possibility, to imitate the style in favour with the rulers of the land, they wrote chronicles in French, as did, in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Jordan Fantosme[157] and Peter de Langtoft; religious poems, as Robert of Greteham, Robert Grosseteste, William of Wadington did in the thirteenth; romances in verse, like those of Hue of Rotelande (twelfth century); moralised tales in prose, like those of Nicole Bozon; lyric poems,[158] or fabliaux,[159] like those composed by various anonymous writers; ballads such as those we owe, quite at the end of the period, in the second half of the fourteenth century, to Chaucer's friend, John Gower.

At this distance from the Conquest, French still played an important, though greatly diminished, part; it remained, as will be seen, the language of the Court; the accounts of the sittings of Parliament continued to be written in French; a London citizen registered in French on his note-book all that he knew concerning the history of his town.[160] As Robert of Gloucester had said, the case was an unparalleled one. This French literature, the work of Englishmen, consisted, of course, mainly in imitations of French models, and need not detain us long; still, its existence must be remembered, for no other fact shows so well how thorough and powerful the French invasion had been.

What, then, were the models copied by these imitators, and what the literature and ideas that, thanks to the Conquest, French-speaking poets acclimatised in lately-Germanic England? What sort of works pleased the rulers of the country; what writings were composed for them; what manuscripts did they order to be copied for their libraries? For it must not be forgotten, when studying the important problem of the diffusion of French ideas among men of English race, that it matters little whether the works most liked in England were composed by French subjects of the king of France, or by French subjects of the king of England; it matters little whether these ideas went across the Channel, carried over by poets, or by manuscripts. What is important is to see and ascertain that works of a new style, with new aims in them, and belonging to a new school of art, enjoyed in England a wide popularity after the Conquest, with the result that deep and lasting transformations affected the æsthetic ideal and even the way of thinking of the inhabitants. What, then, were these ideas, and what was this literature?

II.

This literature little resembled that liked by the late masters of the country. It was as varied, superabundant, and many-coloured as the other was grand, monotonous, and melancholy. The writings produced or simply admired by the conquerors were, like themselves, at once practical and romantic. They had, together with a multitude of useful works, a number of charming songs and tales, the authors of which had no aim but to please.

The useful works are those so-called scientific treatises in which everything is taught that can be learned, including virtue: "Image du Monde," "Petite Philosophie," "Lumière des laïques," "Secret des Secrets," &c.[161]; or those chronicles which so efficaciously served the political views of the rulers of the land; or else pious works that showed men the way to heaven.

The principal historical works are, as has been seen, those rhymed in the twelfth century by Gaimar, Wace, and Benoit de Sainte-More, lengthy stories, each being more flowery than its predecessor, and more thickly studded with digressions of all sorts, and descriptions in all colours, written in short and clear verse, with bell-like tinklings. The style is limpid, simple, transparent: it flows like those wide rivers without dykes, which cover immense spaces with still and shallow water.[162]

In the following century the most remarkable work is the biography in verse of William le Maréchal, earl of Pembroke, one of those knights of proud mien who still appear to breathe as they lie on their tombs in Temple Church. This Life is the best of its kind and period; the anonymous author who wrote it to order has the gift, unknown to his predecessors, of condensing his subject, of grouping his characters, of making them move and talk. As in the Temple Church, on the monument he erects to them, they seem to be living.[163]

Another century passes, the fashion of writing history in French verse still subsists, but will soon die out. Peter de Langtoft, a true Englishman as his language sufficiently proves, yet versifies in French, in the fourteenth century, a history of England from the creation of the world to the death of Edward I. But the times are changing, and Peter, last representative of an art that is over,[164] is a contemporary of that other Englishman, Robert of Gloucester, first representative of an art that begins, a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay. In sedate and manly, but somewhat monotonous strains, Robert tells in his turn the history of his country; differing in this respect from the others, he uses the English tongue; he is by no means cosmopolitan, but only and solely English. In the very first lines he makes this characteristic declaration: "England is a very good land; I ween the best of any.... The sea goes all about it; it stands as in an isle; it has the less to fear from foes.... Plenty of all goods may be found in England."[165]

The way to heaven is taught, after the Conquest, in innumerable French works, in verse and prose, paraphrases of the psalms and gospels, lives of the saints, manuals of penitence, miracles of Our Lady, moralised tales, bestiaries, and sermons.[166] The number of the French-speaking population had so increased in the kingdom that it was not absurd to preach in French, and some of the clergy inclined all the more willingly to so doing that many of the higher prelates in the land were Frenchmen. "To the simple folk," says, in French, an Anglo-Norman preacher, "have I simply made a simple sermon. I did not make it for the learned, as they have enough writings and discourses. For these young people who are not scholars I made it in the Romance tongue, for better will they understand the language they have been accustomed to since childhood."

Religious works, as well as the chronicles, are mainly written in a clear, thin, transparent style; neither sight nor thought is absorbed by them; the world can be seen through the light religious veil; the reader's attention wanders. In truth, the real religious poems we owe to the Normans are those poems in stone, erected by their architects at Ely, Canterbury, York, and Durham.

Much more conspicuous was the literature of the imagination composed for them, a radiant literature made of numberless romaunts, songs, and love-tales. They had no taste for the doleful tunes of the Anglo-Saxon poet; his sadness was repellent to them, his despairs they abhorred; they turned the page and shut the book with great alacrity. They were happy men; everything went well with them; they wanted a literature meant for happy men.

III.

First of all they have epic tales; but how different from "Beowulf"! The Song of Roland, sung at Hastings, which was then the national song of the Normans as well as of all Frenchmen, is the most warlike poem in the literature of mediæval France, the one that best recalls the Germanic origins of the race; yet a wide interval already separates these origins from the new nation; the change is striking.[168] Massacres, it is true, still occupy the principal place, and a scent of blood pervades the entire poem; hauberks torn open, bodies hewn in two, brains scattered on the grass, the steam rising from the battle, fill the poet's heart with rapture, and his soul is roused to enthusiasm. But a place is also kept for tender sentiments, and another for winged speeches. Woman is not yet the object of this tenderness; Charlemagne's peers do not remember Aude while they fight; they expire without giving her a sigh. But their eyes are dim with tears at the recollection of fair France; they weep to see their companions lie prostrate on the grass; the real mistress of Roland, the one to whom his last thought reverts, is not Aude but Durandal, his sword. This is his love, the friend of his life, whose fate, after he shall be no more, preoccupies him. Just as this sword has a name, it has a life of its own; Roland wishes it to die with him; he would like to kill it, as a lover kills his mistress to prevent her falling into the hands of miscreants. "The steel grates, but neither breaks nor notches. And the earl cries: Holy Mary, help me!... Ah! Durandal, so dearly beloved, how white and clear thou art! how thou shinest and flashest in the sunlight.... Ah! Durandal, fair and holy art thou!"[169] In truth, this is his love. Little, however, does it matter to ascertain with what or whom Roland is in love; the thing to be remembered is that he has a heart which can be touched and moved, and can indeed feel, suffer, and love.

At Roncevaux, as well as at Hastings, French readiness of wit appears even in the middle of the battle. Archbishop Turpin, so imposing when he bestows the last benediction on the row of corpses, keeps all through the fight a good-humour similar to that of the Conqueror. "This Saracen seems to me something of a heretic,"[170] he says, espying an enemy; and he fells him to earth. Oliver, too, in a passage which shows that if woman has no active part assigned to her in the poem she had begun to play an important one in real life, slays the caliph and says: Thou at least shalt not go boasting of our defeat, "either to thy wife or to any lady in thy land."[171]

It will finally be noticed that the subject of this epic, the oldest in France, is a defeat, thus showing, even in that far-distant age, what the heroic ideal of the nation was to be, that is, not so much to triumph as to die well. She will never lay down her arms merely because she is beaten; she will only lay them down when enough of her sons have perished. Even when victory becomes impossible, the nation, however resigned to the inevitable, still fights for honour. Such as we see her in the Song of Roland, such she appears in Froissart, and such she has ever shown herself: "For never was the realm of France so broken, but that some one to fight against could be found there."[172]

The conquerors of England are complete men; they are not only valiant, they are learned; they not only take interest in the immediate past of their own race; they are also interested in the distant past of other civilised nations; they make their poets tell them of the heroes of Greece and Rome, and immense metrical works are devoted to these personages, which will beguile the time and drive ennui away from castle-halls. These poems form a whole cycle; Alexander is the centre of it, as Charlemagne is of the cycle of France, and Arthur of the cycle of Britain.

The poets who write about these famous warriors endeavour to satisfy at once the contradictory tastes of their patrons for marvels and for truth. Their works are a collection of attested prodigies. They are unanimous in putting aside Homer's story, which does not contain enough miracles to please them, and, being in consequence little disposed to leniency, they reject the whole of it as apocryphal. I confess, says one of them, that Homer was a "marvellous clerk," but his tales must not be believed: "For well we know, past any doubt, that he was born more than a hundred years after the great host was gathered together."[173]

But the worst forger of Alexandria obtains the confidence of our poets; they read with admiration in old manuscripts a journal of the siege of Troy, and the old manuscripts declare the author of this valuable document to be Dares the Phrygian. The work has its counterpart executed in the Grecian camp by Dictys of Crete. No doubt crosses their mind; here is authenticity and truth, here are documents to be trusted; and how interesting they are, how curious! the very journal of an eye-witness; truth and wonder made into one.

For Alexander they have a no less precious text: the Pseudo-Callisthenes, composed in Greek at Alexandria, of which a Latin version of the fourth century still exists. They are all the better disposed towards it that it is a long tissue of marvels and fabulous adventures.[174] For the history of Thebes they are obliged to content themselves with Statius, and for that of Rome with Virgil, that same Virgil who became by degrees, in mediæval legends, an enchanter, the Merlin of the cycle of Rome. He had, they believed, some weird connection with the powers of darkness; for he had visited them and described in his "Æneid" their place of abode: no one was surprised at seeing Dante take him for a guide.

What these poets wished for was a certificate of authenticity at starting. Once they had it, they took no further trouble; it was their passport; and with a well-worded passport one can go a long way. After having blamed Homer and appealed to Dares, they felt themselves above suspicion, laid hands on all they could, and invented in their turn. Here is, for example, an episode in the romance of Alexander, a story of maidens in a forest, who sink underground in winter and reappear in spring in the shape of flowers: it will be vainly sought for in Callisthenes; it is of Eastern origin, and is found in Edrisi. For want of better, and to avoid the trouble of naming names, the authors will sometimes refer their public to "Latin books," and such was the renown of Rome that the reader asked nothing more.

No need to add that manners and dresses were scarcely better observed than probability. Everything in these poems was really translated; not only the language of the ancients, but their raiment, their civilisation, their ideas. Venus becomes a princess; the heroes are knights, and their costumes are so much in the fashion of the day that they serve us to date the poems. The miniatures conform to the tale; tonsured monks bear Achilles to the grave; they carry tapers in their hands. Queen Penthesilea, "doughty and bold, and beautiful and virtuous," rides astride, her heels armed with huge red spurs.[175] Œdipus is dubbed a knight; Æneas takes counsel of his "barons." This manner of representing antiquity lasted till the Renaissance; and till much later, on the stage. Under Louis XIV., Augustus wore a perruque "in-folio"; and in the last century Mrs. Hartley played Cleopatra in paniers on the English stage.

In accordance with these ideas were written in French, for the benefit of the conquerors of England, such tales as the immense "Roman de Troie," by Benoit de Sainte-More, in which is related, for the first time in any modern language, the story of Troilus and Cressida; the "Roman de Thèbes," written about 1150; that of "Eneas," composed during the same period; the History of Alexander, or the "Roman de toute Chevalerie," a vast compilation, one of the longest and dullest that be, written in the beginning of the thirteenth century by Eustace or Thomas of Kent; the Romance of "Ipomedon," and the Romance of "Prothesilaus," by Hue of Rotelande, composed before 1191; and many others besides[176]: all romances destined to people of leisure, delighting in long descriptions, in prodigious adventures, in enchantments, in transformations, in marvels. Alexander converses with trees who foretell the future to him; he drinks from the fountain of youth; he gets into a glass barrel lighted by lamps, and is let down to the bottom of the sea, where he watches the gambols of marine monsters; his army is attacked by wild beasts unaffrighted by flames, that squat in the midst of the fires intended to scare them away. He places the corpse of the admiral who commanded at Babylon in an iron coffin, that four loadstones hold to the vault. The authors give their imagination full scope; their romances are operas; at every page we behold a marvel and a change of scene; here we have the clouds of heaven, there the depths of the sea. I write of these more than I believe, "equidem plura transcribo quam credo," Quintus Curtius had already said.[177]

Just as they had curiously inspected their new domains, appropriating to themselves as much land as possible, so the conquerors inspected the literatures of their new compatriots. If, as will be seen, they drew little from the Saxon, it is not because they were absolutely ignorant of it, but because they never could well understand its genius. Amongst the different races with which they now found themselves in contact, they were at once attracted by intellectual sympathy to the Celtic, whose mind resembled their own. Alexander had been an amusement, Arthur became a passion. To the Anglo-Norman singers are due the most ancient and beautiful poems of the Briton cycle that have come down to us.

In the "matter" of France, the heroic valour of the defenders of the country forms the principal interest of the stories; in the matter of Rome, the "mirabilia"; and, in the matter of Britain, love. We are farther and farther removed from Beowulf.

At the time of the Conquest a quantity of legends and tales were current concerning the Celtic heroes of Britain, some of whom were quite independent of Arthur; nevertheless all ended by being grouped about him, for he was the natural centre of all this literature: "The Welsh have never ceased to rave about him up to our day," wrote the grave William of Malmesbury in the century after the Conquest; he was a true hero, and deserved something better than the "vain fancies of dreamers." William obviously was not under the spell of Arthurian legends.[178]

Wales, Brittany, and Cornwall were the centres where these legends had developed; the Briton harpists had, by the beauty of their tales, and the sweetness of their music, early acquired a great reputation. It was a recommendation for a minstrel to be able to state that he was a Briton, and some usurped this title, as does Renard the fox, in the "Roman de Renart."[179]

One thing, however, was lacking for a time to the complete success of the Arthurian epic: the stamp of authenticity, the Latin starting-point. An Anglo-Norman clerk furnished it, and bestowed upon this literature the Dares it needed. Professional historians were silent, or nearly so, respecting Arthur; Gildas, in the sixth century, never mentions him; Nennius, in the tenth, only devotes a few lines to him.[180] Geoffrey of Monmouth makes up for this deficiency.[181]

His predecessors knew nothing, he knows everything; his British genealogies are precise, his narratives are detailed, his enumerations complete. The mist had lifted, and the series of these kings about whom so many charming legends were afloat now appeared as clear as the succession of the Roman emperors. In their turn they present themselves with the authority conferred at that time in the world by great Latin books. They ceased to be the unacknowledged children of anybody's fancy; they had to own them, not some stray minstrel, but a personage of importance, known to the king of the land, who was to become bishop of St. Asaph, and be a witness at the peace of 1153, between Stephen of Blois and the future Henry II. In 1139, the "Historia Regum Britanniæ" had appeared, and copies began to circulate. Henry of Huntingdon, passing at the Abbey of Bec, in Normandy, in the month of January of that year, finds one, and is filled with astonishment. "Never," writes he to one of his friends, "had I been able to obtain any information, oral or written, on the kings from Brutus to Cæsar.... But to my amazement I have just discovered—stupens inveni—a narrative of these times."[182] It was Geoffrey's book.

The better to establish his authority, Geoffrey himself had been careful to appeal to a mysterious source, a certain book of which no trace has ever been found, and which he pretends was given him by his friend Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Armed with this proof of authenticity, which no one could contest, he ends his history by a half-serious, half-joking challenge to the professional chroniclers of his time. "I forbid William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon to speak of the British kings, seeing that they have never had in their hands the book Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought me from Brittany." Cervantes never spoke with more gravity of Cid Hamet-ben-Engeli.

Such a book could not fail of success; it had a prodigious fame. Some historians lodged protests; they might as well have protested against Dares. Gerald de Barry cried out it was an imposture; and William of Newbury inveighed against the impudence of "a writer called Geoffrey," who had made "Arthur's little finger bigger than Alexander's back."[183] In vain; copies of the "Historia Regum" multiplied to such an extent that the British Museum alone now possesses thirty-four of them. The appointed chronicler of the Angevin kings, Wace, translated it into French about 1155, with the addition of several legends omitted by Geoffrey, that of the Round Table among others.[184] It was turned into Latin verse, into French alexandrines, into Welsh prose; no honour was denied it. From this time dates the literary fortune of Arthur, Merlin, Morgan the fairy, Percival, Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, whose deeds and loves have been sung from century to century, down to the day of Shakespeare, of Swinburne, and Tennyson.

The finest poems the Middle Ages devoted to them were written on English ground, and especially the most charming of all, dedicated to that Tristan,[185] whom Dante places by Helen of Troy in the group of lovers: "I beheld Helen, who caused such years of woe, and I saw great Achilles ... Paris and Tristan."[186]

Tristan's youth was spent in a castle of Léonois, by the sea. One day a Norwegian vessel, laden with stuffs and with hunting-birds, brings to before the walls. Tristan comes to buy falcons; he lingers to play chess with the merchants; the anchor is weighed, and Tristan is borne off in the ship. A storm drives the vessel on the coast of Cornwall, and the youth is conducted before King Marc. Harpers were playing; Tristan remembers Briton lays; he takes the harp, and so sweet is his music that "many a courtier remains there, forgetting his very name."[187] Marc (who turns out to be his uncle) takes a fancy to him, and dubs him knight. "Should any one," says the author of one of the versions of Tristan, "inquire of me concerning the dress of the knights, I will tell him in a few words; it was composed of four stuffs: courage, richness, skill, and courtesy."

Morolt, the giant, comes to claim a tribute of sixty youths and maidens, in the name of the king of Ireland. They were proceeding to select these victims, when Tristan challenges the giant and kills him; but he is wounded by a poisoned weapon, and, day by day, death draws nearer. No one can cure this poison except the queen of Ireland, sister of the dead man. Tristan, disguised as a poor harper, has himself put on a bark and arrives in Dublin, where the queen heals him. The queen had a daughter, Iseult, with fair hair; she begs the harper to instruct the young girl. Iseult becomes perfect: "She can both read and write, she composes epistles and songs; above all, she knows many [Briton] lays. She is sought after for her musical talent, no less than for her beauty, a silent and still sweeter music that through the eyes insinuated itself into the heart." All her life she remembered the teaching of Tristan, and in her sorrows had recourse to the consoling power of music. When sitting alone and sad, she would sing "a touching song of love," on the misfortunes of Guiron, killed for the sake of his lady. This lay "she sings sweetly, the voice accords with the harp, the hands are beautiful, the lay is fine, sweet the voice and low the tone."[188]

Tristan's task being accomplished, he returns to Cornwall. One day a swallow drops at the feet of King Marc a golden hair, so soft and brilliant, so lovable, that the king swears to marry no other woman but her of the golden hair.[189] Tristan starts in quest of the woman. The woman is Iseult; he brings her to Cornwall. While at sea the two young people swallow by mistake an enchanted draught, a "boivre" destined for Marc and his betrothed, which had the virtue of producing a passion that only death could end. The poison slowly takes effect; their sentiments alter. "All that I know troubles me, and all I see pains me," says Iseult. "The sky, the sea, my own self oppresses me. She bent forward, and leant her arm on Tristan's shoulder: it was her first caress. Her eyes filled with repressed tears; her bosom heaved, her lips quivered, and her head remained bent."

The marriage takes place. Marc adores the queen, but she thinks only of Tristan. Marc is warned, and exiles Tristan, who, in the course of his adventures, receives a present of a wonderful dog. This dog wore a bell on his neck, the sound of which, so sweet it was, caused all sorrow to be forgotten. He sends the dog to Iseult, who, listening to the bell, finds that her grief fades from her memory; and she removes the collar, unwilling to hear and to forget.

Iseult is at last repudiated, and Tristan bears her off by lonely paths, through forest depths, until they reach a grotto of green marble carved by giants in ages past. An aperture at the top let in the light, lindens shaded the entrance, a rill trickled over the grass, flowers scented the air, birds sang in the branches. Here nothing more existed for them save love. "Nor till the might of August"—thought the old poet, and said a more recent one—

King Marc's hunt passes by the grotto; through an opening at the top he chances to perceive her who had been "the springtide of his life, fairer than ever at this moment ... her mouth, her brow, every feature was so full of charm that Marc was fascinated, and, seized with longing, would fain on that face have pressed a kiss.... A wreath of clover was woven in her unbound locks.... When he saw that the sun overhead let fall through the crevice a ray of light on Iseult's face, he feared lest her hue should suffer. He took grass and flowers and foliage with which he closed the aperture, then blessing the lady, he commended her to God, and departed weeping."[191]

Once more the lovers are separated, this time for ever. Years pass; Tristan has made himself famous by his exploits. He is without news of his love, doubtless forgotten. He marries another Iseult, and lives with her near Penmarch in Brittany. Wounded to death in a fight, he might be cured by the queen of Cornwall, and in spite of his marriage, and the time that has elapsed, he sends her word to leave all and join him. If Iseult comes, the ship is to have a white sail; if she refuses, a black one. Iseult still loves. At the first word she puts to sea; but storms arise, then follows a dead calm; Tristan feels life ebb from him with hope. At last the vessel appears, and Tristan's wife sees it from the shore with its white sail. She had overheard Tristan's message; she returns, lies, and announces the arrival of a black sail. Tristan tears the bandage from his wound and dies. When the true Iseult lands, the knell is tolling from the steeples of Brittany; she rushes in, finds her lover's corpse already cold, and expires beside him. They were buried in the same church at Carhaix, one at each end; out of one of the tombs grew a vine, and out of the other grew a rose, and the branches, creeping along the pillars, interlaced under the vaulted roof. The magic draught thus proved stronger than death.

In the ancient epic poems, love was nothing, here it is everything; and woman, who had no part, now plays the first; warlike feats are henceforth only a means to win her heart. Grass has grown over the bloody vale of Roncevaux, which is now enamelled with flowers; Roland's love, Durandal, has ascended to heaven, and will return no more. The new poets are the exact antithesis of the former ones. Religion, virtue, country, now count for nothing; love defies, nay more, replaces them. Marc's friends, who warn him, are traitors and felons, vowed to scorn and hate, as were formerly Gannelons, who betrayed fair France. To be in love is to be worthy of heaven, is to be a saint, and to practise virtue. This theory, put forward in the twelfth century by the singers of the British cycle, has survived, and will be found again in the "Astrée," in Byron, and in Musset.

These tales multiply, and their worldly, courteous, amorous character becomes more and more predominant. Woman already plays the part that she plays in the novels of yesterday. A glance opens Paradise to Arthur's knights; they find in a smile all the magic which it pleases us, the living of to-day, to discover there. A trite word of farewell from the woman they cherish is transformed by their imagination, and they keep it in their hearts as a talisman. Who has not cherished similar talismans? Lancelot recalls the past to queen Guinevere: "And you said, God be with you, fair, gentle friend! Never since have these words left my heart. It is these words that shall make me a preux, if ever I am one; for never since was I in such great peril but that I remembered these words. They have comforted me in all my sorrows; these words have kept and guarded me from all danger; these words have fed me when hungry and made me wealthy when poor."

"By my troth," said the queen, "those words were happily spoken, and blessed be God who caused me to speak them. But I did not put into them as much as you saw, and to many a knight have I spoken the same without thinking of more than what they plainly bear."[192]

After being a saint, the beloved object becomes a goddess; her wishes are decrees, her mysterious caprices are laws which must not even be questioned; harder rules of love are from year to year imposed on the heroes; they are expected to turn pale at the sight of their mistress; Lancelot espying a hair of Guinevere well-nigh faints; they observe the thirty-one regulations laid down by André le Chapelain, to guide the perfect lover.[193] After having been first an accessory, then an irresistible passion, love, that the poets think to magnify, will soon be nothing but a ceremonial. From the time of Lancelot we border on folly; military honour no longer counts for the hero; Guinevere out of caprice orders Lancelot to behave "his worst"; without hesitating or comprehending he obeys, and covers himself with shame. Each successive romance writer goes a step farther, and makes new additions; we come to immense compositions, to strings of adventures without any visible link; to heroes so uniformly wonderful that they cease to inspire any interest whatever. Tristan's rose-bush twined itself around the pillars, the pillars are lacking now, and the clusters of flowers trail on the ground. Tristan was a harbinger of Musset; Guinevere gives us a desire for a Cervantes.

Meanwhile, the minstrels of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries enjoy their success and their fame; their number increases; they are welcomed in the castles, hearkened to in the towns; their tales are copied in manuscripts, more and more magnificently painted. They celebrate, in England as in France, Gauvain, "le chevalier aux demoiselles," Ivain, "le chevalier au lion"; Merlin, Joseph of Arimathea, Percival and the quest of the mysterious Graal, and all the rest of the Round Table heroes.[194]

IV.

They have also shorter narratives in prose and verse, the subject of which is generally love, drawn from French, Latin, Greek, and even Hindu legends,[195] stories like those of Amis and Amile, of Floire and Blanchefleur, lays like those of Marie de France.[196] Marie was Norman, and lived in the time of Henry II., to whom she dedicated her poems. They are mostly graceful love-tales, sweetly told, without affectation or effort, and derived from Celtic originals, some being of Armorican and some of Welsh descent. Several are devoted to Tristan and other Arthurian knights. In the lay of the Ash, Marie tells a story of female virtue, the main incidents of which will be found again later in the tale of Griselda. Her lay of the Two Lovers would have delighted Musset:

"Truth is that in Neustria, which we call Normandy," lived once a nobleman who had a beautiful daughter; every one asked her in marriage, but he always refused, so as not to part from her. At last he declared he would give his daughter to the man who could carry her to the top of the mountain. All tried, but all failed.

A young count falls in love with her, and is loved again. She sends him to an old aunt of hers, who lives at Salerno, and will give him certain potions to increase his strength. He does all she bids him. On the day appointed, provided with a draught to swallow during the trial, he takes the fair maiden in his arms. She had fasted for many days so as to weigh less, and had put on an exceedingly light garment: "Except her shift, no other stuff she wore";

He climbs half-way, then begins to flag; but he wishes to owe everything to his energy, and, without drinking, slowly continues to ascend. He reaches the top and falls dead. The young girl flings away the now useless flask, which breaks; and since then the mountain herbs moistened by the potion have wonderful healing powers. She looks at her lover and dies, like the Simonne of Boccaccio and of Musset. They were buried on the mountain, where has since been built "the priory of the Two Lovers."

The rulers of England delight in still shorter poems, but again on the same subject: love. Like the rest of the French, they have an innate fondness for a kind of literature unknown to their new compatriots: namely, chansons. They composed a great number of them, and listened to many more of all sorts. The subjects of the kings of England became familiar with every variety of the kind; for the Angevin princes now possessed such wide domains that the sources of French poetry, poetry of the North, poetry of the South, lyrical poetry of Poictou and of Maine, gushed forth in the very heart of their empire.[197]

Their English subjects got acquainted with these poems in two ways: firstly, because many of those songs were sung in the island; secondly, because many Englishmen, soldiers, clerks, minstrels, messengers, followed the king and stayed with him in the parts where the main wells and fountains of the French chanson happened to be.[198] They became thus familiarised with the "reverdies," May songs, which celebrate springtime, flowers, and free loves; "carols," or dancing songs; "pastourelles," the wise or foolish heroines of which are shepherdesses; "disputoisons" or debates, to which kind belongs the well-known song of "transformations" introduced by Mistral in his "Mireio," and set to music by Gounod; "aube" songs, telling the complaint of lovers, parted by dawn, and in which, long before Shakespeare, the Juliets of the time of Henry II. said to their Romeos:

"It is not yet near day, my sweet one; love be my help, the lark lies." In these songs, the women are slight and lithe; they are more gentle than doves; their faces are all pink and white: "If the flowers of the hawthorn were united to the rose, not more delicate would be their colour than that on my lady's clear face."

With these songs, Love ventures out of castles; we find him "in cellars, or in lofts under the hay."[201] He steals even into churches, and a sermon that has come down to us, preached in England in the thirteenth century, has for text, instead of a verse of Scripture, a verse of a French song: "Fair Alice rose at morn, clothed and adorned her body; an orchard she went in, five flowers there she found, a wreath she made with them of blooming roses; for God's sake, get you gone, you who do not love!" and with meek gravity the preacher goes on: Belle Alice is or might be the Virgin Mary; "what are those flowers," if not "faith, hope, charity, virginity, humility?"[202] The idea of turning worldly songs and music to religious ends is not, as we see, one of yesterday.

Tristan has led us very far from Beowulf, and fair Alice leads us still farther from the mariner and exile of Anglo-Saxon literature. To sum up in a word which will show the difference between the first and second period: on the lips of the conquerors of Hastings, odes have become chansons.

V.

Nothing comes so near ridicule as extreme sentiments, and no men had the sense of the ridiculous to a higher degree than the new rulers of the English country. At the same time with their chivalrous literature, they had a mocking one. They did not wait for Cervantes to begin laughing; these variable and many-sided beings sneered at high-flown sentiments and experienced them too. They sang the Song of Roland, and read with delight a romance in which the great emperor is represented strutting about before his barons, his crown on his head and his sword in his hand, asking the queen if he is not the most admirable prince in the world.[203] To his surprise, the queen says no, there is a better, there is King Hugon, emperor of Greece and of Constantinople. Charlemagne wishes to verify on the spot, and pledges his word that he will cut the queen's head off if she has not spoken truth. He mounts a donkey; the twelve peers follow his example, and in this fashion the flower of French chivalry takes its way to the East.

At Constantinople, the city of marvels, which had not yet become the city of mosques, but was still enriched by the spoils of Athens and Rome, where St. Sophia shone with all the glory of its mosaics intact, where the palace of the emperors dazzled the sight with its gold and its statues, the French princes could scarcely believe their eyes. At every step they were startled by some fresh wonder; here bronze children blowing horns; there a revolving hall set in motion by the sea-breeze; elsewhere a carbuncle which illuminated apartments at night. The queen might possibly have spoken truth. Evening draws on, they drink deep, and, excited by their potations, indulge in gabs, or boasts, that are overheard by a spy, and carefully noted. Ogier the Dane will uproot the pillar which supports the whole palace; Aïmer will make himself invisible and knock the emperor's head on the table; Roland will sound his horn so loudly that the gates of the town will be forced open. Threatened and insulted by his guests, Hugon declares they shall either accomplish their gabs or pay for their lies with their heads.

This is too much, and the author changes his tone. Will God permit the confusion of the emperor of the Franks, however well deserved it be? "Vivat qui Francos diligit Christus!" was already written in the Salic law: Christ continues to love the Franks. He takes their cause into His own hands, not because of their deserts but because they are Franks. By a miracle, one after another, the gabs are realised; Hugon acknowledges the superiority of Charles, who returns to France, enriches St. Denis with incomparable relics, and forgives the queen. This poem is exactly contemporaneous with the Song of Roland.

But there is better still, and the comedy is much more general in the famous "Roman de Renart."[204] This romance, of which the branches are of various epochs and by various authors, was composed partly in the continental estates of the kings of England, partly in the France of French kings. It was built up, part after part, during several centuries, beginning with the twelfth: built like a cathedral, each author adding a wing, a tower, a belfry, a steeple; without caring, most of the time, to make known his name; so that the poem has come down to us, like the poems in stone of the architects, almost anonymously, the work of every one, an expression and outcome of the popular mind.

For many Frenchmen of ancient France, a chanson was a sufficient revenge, or at least served as a temporary one. So much pleasure was taken in it, that by such means the tyranny of the ruler was forgotten. On more than one occasion where in other countries a riot would have been unavoidable, in France a song has sufficed; discontent, thus attenuated, no longer rose to fury. More than one jacquerie has been delayed, if not averted, by the "Roman de Renart."

In this ample comedy everybody has a part to perform; everybody and everything is in turn laughed at: the king, the nobles, the citizens, the Pope, the pilgrims, the monks, every belief and every custom,[205] religion, and justice, the powerful, the rich, the hypocrites, the simple-minded; and, so that nothing shall be wanting, the author scoffs at himself and his caste; he knows its failings, points them out and laughs at them. The tone is heroi-comical: for the jest to take effect, the contrast must be clearly visible, and we should keep in view the importance of principles and the majesty of kings:

"Lordings, you have heard many a tale, related by many a tale-teller, how Paris ravished Helen, the trouble it brought him, and the sorrow!... also gests and fabliaux; but never did you hear of the war—such a hard one it was, and of such great import—between Renard and Ysengrin."[206]

The personages are animals; their sentiments are human; king lion swears like a man[207]; but the way in which they sit, or stand, or move, is that of their species. Every motion of theirs is observed with that correctness of eye which is always found in early times among animal painters, long before painters of the human figure rise to the same excellence. There are perfect descriptions of Ysengrin, who feels very foolish after a rebuke of the king's, and "sits with his tail between his legs"; of the cock, monarch of the barn-yard; of Tybert the cat; of Tardif the slug; of Espinar the hedgehog; of Bruin the bear; of Roonel the mastiff; of Couard the hare; of Noble the lion. The arrival of a procession of hens at Court is an excellent scene of comedy.

"Sir Chanteclair, the cock, and Pinte, who lays the big eggs, and Noire, and Blanche, and la Roussette, were dragging a cart with drawn curtains. A hen lay in it prostrate.... Renard had so maltreated her, and so pulled her about with his teeth, that her thigh was broken, and a wing torn off her side."[208]

Pinte, moved to tears and ready to faint, like Esther before Ahasuerus, tells the king her woes. She had five brothers, Renard has devoured every one; she had five sisters, but "only one has Renard spared; all the rest have passed through his jaws. And you, who lie there on your bier, my sweet sister, my dear friend, how plump and tender you were! What will become of your poor unfortunate sister?"[209] She is very near adding in Racine's words: "Mes filles, soutenez votre reine éperdue!" Anyhow, she faints.

"The unfortunate Pinte thereupon fainted and fell on the pavement; and so did the others, all at once. To assist the four ladies all jumped from their stools, dog and wolf and other beasts, and threw water on their brows."[210]

The king is quite upset by so moving a sight: "His head out of anger he shakes; never was so bold a beast, a bear be it or a boar, who does not fear when their lord sighs and howls. So much afraid was Couard the hare that for two days he had the fever; all the Court shakes together, the boldest for dread tremble. He, in his wrath, raises his tail, and is moved with such pangs that the roar fills the house; and then this was his speech: 'Lady Pinte,' the emperor said, 'upon my father's soul'"[211]....

Hereupon follows a solemn promise, couched in the most impressive words, that the traitor shall be punished; which will make all the more noticeable the utter defeat which verbose royalty soon afterward suffers. Renard worsts the king's messengers; Bruin the bear has his nose torn off; Tybert the cat loses half his tail; Renard jeers at them, at the king, and at the Court. And all through the story he triumphs over Ysengrin, as Panurge over Dindenault, Scapin over Géronte, and Figaro over Bridoison. Renard is the first of the family; he is such a natural and spontaneous creation of the French mind that we see him reappear from century to century, the same character under different names.

One last point to be noted is the impression of open air given by nearly all the branches of this romance, in spite of the brevity of the descriptions. We are in the fields, by the hedges, following the roads and the footpaths; the moors are covered with heather; the rocks are crowned by oaken copse, the roads are lined with hawthorn, cabbages display in the gardens the heavy mass of their clustering leaves. We see with regret the moment when "the sweet time of summer declines." Winter draws near, a north wind blows over the paths leading to the sea. Renard "dedenz sa tour" of Maupertuis lights a great wood fire, and, while his little ones jump for joy, grills slices of eels on the embers.

Renard was popular throughout Europe. In England parts of the romance were translated or imitated; superb manuscripts were illustrated for the libraries of the nobles; the incidents of this epic were represented in tapestry, sculptured on church stalls, painted on the margins of English missals. At the Renaissance Caxton, with his Westminster presses, printed a Renard in prose.[212]

Above, below, around these greater works, swarms the innumerable legion of satirical fabliaux and laughable tales. They, too, cross the sea, slight, imperceptible, wandering, thus continuing those migrations so difficult to trace, the laws of which learned men of all nations have vainly sought to discover. They follow all roads; nothing stops them. Pass the mountains and you will find them; cross the sea and they have preceded you; they spring from the earth; they fall from heaven; the breeze bears them along like pollen, and they go to bloom on other stems in unknown lands, producing thorny or poisonous or perfumed flowers, and flowers of every hue. All those varieties of flowers are sometimes found clustered in unexpected places, on wild mountain sides, along lonely paths, on the moors of Brittany or Scotland, in royal parks and in convent gardens. At the beginning of the seventh century the great Pope St. Gregory introduces into his works a number of "Exempla," saying: "Some are more incited to the love of the celestial country by stories—exempla—than by sermons;"[213] and in the gardens of monasteries, after his day, more and more miscellaneous grow the blossoms. They are gathered and preserved as though in herbals, collections are made of them, from which preachers borrow; tales of miracles are mixed with others of a less edifying nature.

Stop before the house of this anchoress, secluded from the world, and absorbed in pious meditations, a holy and quiet place. An old woman sits under the window; the anchoress appears and a conversation begins. Let us listen; it is a long time since both women have been listened to. What is the subject of their talk? The old woman brings news of the outer world, relates stories, curious incidents of married and unmarried life, tales of wicked wives and wronged husbands. The recluse laughs: "os in risus cachinnosque dissolvitur"; in a word, the old woman amuses the anchoress with fabliaux in an embryonic state. This is a most remarkable though little known example, for we can here observe fabliaux in a rudimentary stage, and going about in one more, and that a rather unexpected way. Is the case of this anchoress a unique one? Not at all; there was scarcely any recluse at that day, "vix aliquam inclusarum hujus temporis," without a friendly old woman to sit before her window and tell her such tales: of which testifies, in the twelfth century, Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx.[214]

From the thirteenth century, another medium of diffusion, a conspicuous and well-known one, is added to the others: not only minstrels, but wandering friars now carry tales to all countries; it is one of the ways they count on for securing a welcome. Their sermons raise a laugh, the success of their fables encourages their rivals to imitate them; the Councils vainly interfere, and reiterate, until after the Renaissance, the prohibition "to provoke shouts of laughter, after the fashion of shameless buffoons, by ridiculous stories and old wives' tales."[215] Dante had also protested, and Wyclif likewise, without more success than the Councils. "Thus," said Dante, "the ignorant sheep come home from pasture, wind-fed.... Jests and buffooneries are preached.... St. Anthony's swine fattens by these means, and others, worse than swine, fatten too."[216] But collections succeeded to collections, and room was found in them for many a scandalous tale, for that of the Weeping Bitch, for example, one of the most travelled of all, as it came from India, and is found everywhere, in Italy, France, and England, among fabliaux, in sermons, and even on the stage.[217]

The French who were now living in England in large numbers, introduced there the taste for merry tales of trickery and funny adventures, stories of curious mishaps of all kinds; of jealous husbands, duped, beaten, and withal perfectly content, and of fit wives for such husbands. It already pleased their teasing, mocking minds, fond of generalisations, to make themselves out a vicious race, without faith, truth, or honour: it ever was a gab of theirs. The more one protests, the more they insist; they adduce proofs and instances; they are convinced and finally convince others. In our age of systems, this magnifying of the abject side of things has been termed "realism"; for so-called "realism" is nothing more. True it is that if the home of tales is "not where they are born, but where they are comfortable,"[218] France was a home for them. They reached there the height of their prosperity; the turn of mind of which they are the outcome has by no means disappeared; even to-day it is everywhere found, in the public squares, in the streets, in the newspapers, theatres, and novels. And it serves, as it did formerly, to make wholesale condemnations easy, very easy to judges who may be dazzled by this jugglery of the French mind, who look only at the goods exhibited before their eyes, and who scruple the less to pass a sentence as they have to deal with a culprit who confesses. But judge and culprit both forget that, next to the realism of the fabliaux, there is the realism of the Song of Roland, not less real, perhaps more so; for France has lived by her Song of Roland much more than by her merry tales, that song which was sung in many ways and for many centuries. Du Guesclin and Corneille both sang it, each one after his fashion.

On the same table may be found "La Terre," and "Grandeur et Servitude." In the same hall, the same minstrel, representing in his own person the whole library of the castle, used formerly to relate the shameful tale of Gombert and the two clerks, juggle with knives, and sing of Roland. "I know tales," says one, "I know fabliaux, I can tell fine new dits.... I know the fabliau of the 'Denier' ... and that of Gombert and dame Erme.... I know how to play with knives, and with the cord and with the sling, and every fine game in the world. I can sing at will of King Pepin of St. Denis ... of Charlemagne and of Roland, and of Oliver, who fought so well; I know of Ogier and of Aymon."[219]

All this literature went over the Channel with the conquerors. Roland came to England, so did Renard, so did Gombert. They contributed to transform the mind of the vanquished race, and the vanquished race contributed to transform the descendants of the victors.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III.

LATIN.

I.

The ties with France were close ones; those with Rome were no less so. William had come to England, politically as the heir of the Anglo-Saxon kings, and with regard to ecclesiastical affairs as the Pope's chosen, blessed by the head of Christianity. In both respects, notwithstanding storms and struggles, the tradition thus started was continued under his successors.

At no period of the history of England was the union with Rome closer, and at no time, not even in the Augustan Age of English literature was there a larger infusion of Latin ideas. The final consequence of Henry II.'s quarrel with Thomas Becket was a still more complete submission of this prince to the Roman See. John Lackland's fruitless attempts to reach absolute power resulted in the gift of his domains to St. Peter and the oath of fealty sworn by him as vassal of the Pope: "We, John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy, earl of Anjou, ... Wishing to humiliate ourselves for Him who humiliated Himself for us even unto death ... freely offer and concede to God and to our lord Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors, all the kingdom of England and all the kingdom of Ireland for the remission of our sins,"[220] May 15, 1213.

From the day after Hastings the Church is seen establishing herself on firm basis in the country; she receives as many, and even more domains than the companions of the Conqueror. In the county of Dorset, for instance, it appears from Domesday that "the Church with her vassals and dependents enjoyed more than a third of the whole county, and that her patrimony was greater than that of all the Barons and greater feudalists combined."[221]

The religious foundations are innumerable, especially at the beginning; they decrease as the time of the Renaissance draws nearer. Four hundred and eighteen are counted from William Rufus to John, a period of one hundred years; one hundred and thirty-nine during the three following reigns: a hundred and eight years; twenty-three in the fourteenth century, and only three in the fifteenth.[222]

This number of monasteries necessitated considerable intercourse with Rome; many of the monks, often the abbots, were Italian or French; they had suits in the court of Rome, they laid before the Pope at Rome, and later at Avignon, their spiritual and temporal difficulties; the most important abbeys were "exempt," that is to say, under the direct jurisdiction of the Pope without passing through the local episcopal authority. This was the case with St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Albans, St. Edmund's, Waltham, Evesham, Westminster, &c. The clergy of England had its eyes constantly turned Romewards.

This clergy was very numerous; in the thirteenth century its ranks were swelled by the arrival of the mendicant friars: Franciscans and Dominicans, the latter representing more especially doctrine, and the former practice. The Dominicans expound dogmas, fight heresy, and furnish the papacy with its Grand Inquisitors[223]; the Franciscans do charitable works, nurse lepers and wretches in the suburbs of the towns. All science that does not tend to the practice of charity is forbidden them: "Charles the Emperor," said St. Francis, "Roland and Oliver, all the paladins and men mighty in battle, have pursued the infidels to death, and won their memorable victories at the cost of much toil and labour. The holy martyrs died fighting for the faith of Christ. But there are in our time, people who by the mere telling of their deeds, seek honour and glory among men. There are also some among you who like better to preach on the virtues of the saints than to imitate their labours.... When thou shalt have a psalter so shalt thou wish for a breviary, and when thou shalt have a breviary, thou shalt sit in a chair like a great prelate, and say to thy brother: 'Brother, fetch me my breviary.'"[224]

Thirty-two years after their first coming there were in England twelve hundred and forty-two Franciscans, with forty-nine convents, divided into seven custodies: London, York, Cambridge, Bristol, Oxford, Newcastle, Worcester.[225] "Your Holiness must know," writes Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, to Pope Gregory IX., "that the friars illuminate the whole country by the light of their preaching and teaching. Intercourse with these holy men propagates scorn of the world and voluntary poverty.... Oh! could your Holiness see how piously and humbly the people hasten to hear from them the word of life, to confess their sins, and learn the rules of good conduct!..."[226] Such was the beginning; what followed was far from resembling it. The point to be remembered is another tie with Rome, represented by these new Orders: even the troubles that their disorders gave rise to later, their quarrels with the secular clergy, the monks and the University, the constant appeals to the Pope that were a result of these disputes, the obstinacy with which they endeavoured to form a Church within the Church, all tended to increase and multiply the relations between Rome and England.

The English clergy was not only numerous and largely endowed; it was also very influential, and played a considerable part in the policy of the State. When the Parliament was constituted the clergy occupied many seats, the king's ministers were usually churchmen; the high Chancellor was a prelate.

The action of the Latin Church made itself also felt on the nation by means of ecclesiastical tribunals, the powers of which were considerable; all that concerned clerks, or related to faith and beliefs, to tithes, to deeds and contracts having a moral character, wills for instance, came within the jurisdiction of the religious magistrate. This justice interfered in the private life of the citizens; it had an inquisitorial character; it wanted to know if good order reigned in households, if the husband was faithful and the wife virtuous; it cited adulterers to its bar and chastised them. Summoners (Chaucer's somnours) played the part of spies and public accusers; they kept themselves well informed on these different matters, were constantly on the watch, pried into houses, collected and were supposed to verify evil reports, and summoned before the ecclesiastical court those whom Jane's or Gilote's beauty had turned from the path of conjugal fidelity. It may be readily imagined that such an institution afforded full scope for abuses; it could hardly have been otherwise unless all the summoners had been saints, which they were not; some among them were known to compound with the guilty for money, to call the innocent before the judge in order to gratify personal spite.[227] Their misdeeds were well known but not easy to prove; so that Chaucer's satires did more to ruin the institution than all the petitions to Parliament. These summoners were also in their own way, mean as that was, representatives of the Latin country, of the spiritual power of Rome; they knew it, and made the best of the stray Latin words that had lodged in their memory; they used them as their shibboleth.

Bishops kept seigneurial retinues, built fortresses[228] and lived in them, had their archers and their dogs, hunted, laid siege to towns, made war, and only had recourse to excommunication when all other means of prevailing over their foes had failed. Others among them became saints: both in heaven and on earth they held the first rank. Like the sovereign, they knew, even then, the worth of public opinion; they bought the goodwill of wandering poets, as that of the press was bought in the day of Defoe. The itinerant minstrels were the newspapers of the period; they retailed the news and distributed praise or blame; they acquired over the common people the same influence that "printed matter" has had in more recent times. Hugh de Nunant, bishop of Coventry, accuses William de Longchamp, bishop of Ely, and Chancellor of England, in a letter still extant, of having inspired the verses—one might almost say the articles—that minstrels come from France, and paid by him, told in public places, "in plateis," not without effect, "for already, according to public opinion, no one in the universe was comparable to him."[229]

Nothing gives so vivid an impression of the time that has elapsed, and the transformation in manners that has occurred, as the sight of that religious and warlike tournament of which England was the field under Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and of which the heroes were all prelates, to wit: these same William de Longchamp, bishop of Ely, and Hugh de Nunant, bishop of Coventry; then Hugh de Puiset, bishop of Durham, Geoffrey Plantagenet, archbishop of York, &c.

Hugh de Puiset, a scion of the de Puisets, viscounts of Chartres, grandson of the Conqueror, cousin to King Richard, bishop palatine of Durham, wears the coat of mail, fortifies his castles, storms those of his enemies, builds ships, adds a beautiful "Lady chapel" to his cathedral, and spends the rest of his time in hunting.

William de Longchamp, his great rival, grandson of a Norman peasant, bishop of Ely, Chancellor of England, seizes on Lincoln by force, lives like a prince, has an escort of a thousand horsemen, adds to the fortifications of the Tower of London and stands a siege in it. He is obliged to give himself up to Hugh de Nunant, another bishop; he escapes disguised as a woman; he is recognised, imprisoned in a cellar, and exiled; he then excommunicates his enemies. Fortune smiles on him once more and he is reinstated in his functions.

Geoffrey Plantagenet, a natural son of Henry II., the only child who remained always faithful to the old king, had once thought he would reach the crown, but was obliged to content himself with becoming archbishop of York. As such, he scorned to ally himself either with Longchamp or with Puiset, and made war on both impartially. Longchamp forbids him to leave France; nevertheless Geoffrey lands at Dover, the castle of which was held by Richenda, sister of the Chancellor. He mounts on horseback and gallops towards the priory of St. Martin; Richenda sends after him, and one of the lady's men was putting his hand on the horse's bridle, when our lord the archbishop, shod with iron, gave a violent kick to the enemy's steed, and tore his belly open; the beast reared, and the prelate, freeing himself, reached the priory. There he is under watch for four days, after which he is dragged from the very altar, and taken to the castle of Dover. At last he is liberated, and installed in York; he immediately commences to fight with his own clergy; he enters the cathedral when vespers are half over; he interrupts the service, and begins it over again; the indignant treasurer has the tapers put out, and the archbishop continues his psalm-singing in the dark. He excommunicates his neighbour Hugh de Puiset, who is little concerned by it; he causes the chalices used by the bishop of Durham to be destroyed as profaned.

Hugh de Puiset, who was still riding about, though attacked by the disease that was finally to carry him off, dies full of years in 1195, after a reign of forty-three years. He had had several children by different women: one of them, Henri de Puiset, joined the Crusade; another, Hugh, remained French, and became Chancellor to King Louis VII.[230]

These warlike habits are only attenuated by degrees. In 1323 Edward II. writes to Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Durham, reproaching a noble like him for not defending his bishopric any better against the Scotch than if he were a mutterer of prayers like his predecessor. Command is laid upon bishop Louis to take arms and go and camp on the frontier. In the second half of the same century, Henry le Despencer, bishop of Norwich, hacks the peasants to pieces, during the great rising, and makes war in Flanders for the benefit of one of the two popes.

Side by side with these warriors shine administrators, men of learning, saints, all important and influential personages in their way. Such are, for example, Lanfranc, of Pavia, late abbot of St. Stephen at Caen, who, as archbishop of Canterbury, reorganised the Church of England; Anselm of Aosta, late abbot of Bec, also an archbishop, canonised at the Renaissance, the discoverer of the famous "ontological" proof of the existence of God, a paradoxical proof the inanity of which it was reserved for St. Thomas Aquinas to demonstrate; Gilbert Foliot, a Frenchman, bishop of London, celebrated for his science, a strong supporter of Henry II.; Thomas Becket, of Norman descent, archbishop and saint, whose quarrel with Henry II. divided England, and almost divided Christendom too; Hugh, bishop of Lincoln under the same king, of French origin, and who was also canonised; Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, who contributed as much as any of the barons to the granting of the Great Charter, and presided over the Council of London, in 1218, where it was solemnly confirmed[231]; Robert Grosseteste,[232] famous for his learning and holiness, his theological treatises, his sermons, his commentaries on Boethius and Aristotle, his taste for the divine art of music, which according to him "drives away devils." Warriors or saints, all these leaders of men keep, in their difficulties, their eyes turned towards Rome, and towards the head of the Latin Church.

II.

At the same time as the monasteries, and under the shadow of their walls, schools and libraries multiplied. The Latin education of the nation is resumed with an energy and perseverance hitherto unknown, and this time there will be no relapse into ignorance; protected by the French conquest, the Latin conquest is now definitive.

Not only are religious books in Latin, psalters, missals and decretals copied and collected in monasteries, but also the ancient classics. They are liked, they are known by heart, quoted in writings, and even in conversation. An English chronicler of the twelfth century declares he would blush to compile annals after the fashion of the Anglo-Saxons; this barbarous manner is to be avoided; he will use Roman salt as a condiment: "et exarata barbarice romano sale condire."[233] Another, of the same period, has the classic ideal so much before his eyes that he makes William deliver, on the day of Hastings, a speech beginning: "O mortalium validissimi!"[234]

A prelate who had been the tutor of the heir to the throne, and died bishop palatine of Durham, Richard de Bury,[235] collects books with a passion equal to that which will be later displayed at the court of the Medici. He has emissaries who travel all over England, France, and Italy to secure manuscripts for him; with a book one can obtain anything from him; the abbot of St. Albans, as a propitiatory offering sends him a Terence, a Virgil, and a Quinctilian. His bedchamber is so encumbered with books that one can hardly move in it.[236] Towards the end of his life, never having had but one passion, he undertook to describe it, and, retired into his manor of Auckland, he wrote in Latin prose his "Philobiblon."[237] In this short treatise he defends books, Greek and Roman antiquity, poetry, too, with touching emotion; he is seized with indignation when he thinks of the crimes of high treason against manuscripts, daily committed by pupils who in spring dry flowers in their books; and of the ingratitude of wicked clerks, who admit into the library dogs, or falcons, or worse still, a two-legged animal, "bestia bipedalis," more dangerous "than the basilisk, or aspic," who, discovering the volumes "insufficiently concealed by the protecting web of a dead spider," condemns them to be sold, and converted for her own use into silken hoods and furred gowns.[238] Eve's descendants continue, thinks the bishop, to wrongfully meddle with the tree of knowledge.

What painful commiseration did he not experience on penetrating into an ill-kept convent library! "Then we ordered the book-presses, chests, and bags of the noble monasteries to be opened; and, astonished at beholding again the light of day, the volumes came out of their sepulchres and their prolonged sleep.... Some of them, which had ranked among the daintiest, lay for ever spoilt, in all the horror of decay, covered by filth left by the rats; they who had once been robed in purple and fine linen now lay on ashes, covered with a cilice."[239] The worthy bishop looks upon letters with a religious veneration, worthy of the ancients themselves; his enthusiasm recalls that of Cicero; no one at the Renaissance, not even the illustrious Bessarion, has praised old manuscripts with a more touching fervour, or more nearly attained to the eloquence of the great Latin orator when he speaks of books in his "Pro Archia": "Thanks to books," says the prelate, "the dead appear to me as though they still lived.... Everything decays and falls into dust, by the force of Time; Saturn is never weary of devouring his children, and the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, had not God as a remedy conferred on mortal man the benefit of books.... Books are the masters that instruct us without rods or ferulas, without reprimands or anger, without the solemnity of the gown or the expense of lessons. Go to them, you will not find them asleep; question them, they will not refuse to answer; if you err, no scoldings on their part; if you are ignorant, no mocking laughter."[240]

These teachings and these examples bore fruit; in renovated England, Latin-speaking clerks swarmed. It is often difficult while reading their works to discover whether they are of native or of foreign extraction; hates with them are less strong than with the rest of their compatriots; most of them have studied not only in England but in Paris; science has made of them cosmopolitans; they belong, above all, to the Latin country, and the Latin country has not suffered.

The Latin country had two capitals, a religious capital which was Rome, and a literary capital which was Paris. "In the same manner as the city of Athens shone in former days as the mother of liberal arts and the nurse of philosophers, ... so in our times Paris has raised the standard of learning and civilisation, not only in France but in all the rest of Europe, and, as the mother of wisdom, she welcomes guests from all parts of the world, supplies all their wants, and submits them all to her pacific rule."[241] So said Bartholomew the Englishman in the thirteenth century. "What a flood of joy swept over my heart," wrote in the following century another Englishman, that same Richard de Bury, "every time I was able to visit that paradise of the world, Paris! My stay there always seemed brief to me, so great was my passion. There were libraries of perfume more delicious than caskets of spices, orchards of science ever green...."[242] The University of Paris held without contest the first rank during the Middle Ages; it counted among its students, kings, saints, popes, statesmen, poets, learned men of all sorts come from all countries, Italians like Dante, Englishmen like Stephen Langton.

Its lustre dates from the twelfth century. At that time a fusion took place between the theological school of Notre-Dame, where shone, towards the beginning of the century, Guillaume de Champeaux, and the schools of logic that Abélard's teaching gave birth to on St. Geneviève's Mount. This state of things was not created, but consecrated by Pope Innocent III., a former student at Paris, who by his bulls of 1208 and 1209 formed the masters and students into one association, universitas.[243]

According to a mediæval custom, which has been perpetuated in the East, and is still found for instance at the great University of El Azhar at Cairo, the students were divided into nations: France, Normandy, Picardy, England. It was a division by races, and not by countries; the idea of mother countries politically divided being excluded, in theory at least, from the Latin realm. Thus the Italians were included in the French nation, and the Germans in the English one. Of all these foreigners the English were the most numerous; they had in Paris six colleges for theology alone.

The faculties were four in number: theology, law, medicine, arts. The latter, though least in rank, was the most important from the number of its pupils, and was a preparation for the others. The student of arts was about fifteen years of age; he passed a first degree called "déterminance" or bachelorship; then a second one, the licence, after which, in a solemn ceremony termed inceptio, the corporation of masters invested him with the cap, the badge of mastership. He had then, according to his pledge, to dispute for forty successive days with every comer; then, still very youthful, and frequently beardless, he himself began to teach. A master who taught was called a Regent, Magister regens.

The principal schools were situated in the "rue du Fouarre" (straw, litter), "vico degli Strami," says Dante, a street that still exists under the same name, but the ancient houses of which are gradually disappearing. In this formerly dark and narrow street, surrounded by lanes with names carrying us far back into the past ("rue de la Parcheminerie," &c.), the most illustrious masters taught, and the most singular disorders arose. The students come from the four corners of Europe without a farthing, having, in consequence, nothing to lose, and to whom ample privileges had been granted, did not shine by their discipline. Neither was the population of the quarter an exemplary one.[244] We gather from the royal ordinances that the rue du Fouarre, "vicus ultra parvum pontem, vocatus gallice la rue du Feurre," had to be closed at night by barriers and chains, because of individuals who had the wicked habit of establishing themselves at night, with their ribaudes, "mulieres immundæ!" in the lecture-rooms, and leaving, on their departure, by way of a joke, the professor's chair covered with "horrible" filth. Far from feeling any awe, these evil-doers found, on the contrary, a special amusement in the idea of perpetrating their jokes in the sanctum of philosophers, who, says the ordinance of the wise king Charles V., "should be clean and honest, and inhabit clean, decent, and honest places."[245]

Teaching, the principal object of which was logic, consisted in the reading and interpreting of such books as were considered authorities. "The method in expounding is always the same. The commentator discusses in a prologue some general questions relating to the work he is about to lecture upon, and he usually treats of its material, formal, final, and efficient causes. He points out the principal divisions, takes the first member of the division, subdivides it, divides the first member of this subdivision, and thus by a series of divisions, each being successively cleft into two, he reaches a division which only comprises the first chapter. He applies to each part of the work the same process as to its whole. He continues these divisions until he comes to having before him only one phrase including one single complete idea."

Another not less important part of the instruction given consisted in oratorical jousts; the masters disputed among themselves, and the pupils did likewise. In a time when paper was scarce and parchment precious, disputes replaced our written exercises. The weapons employed in these jousts were blunt ones; but as in real tournaments where "armes courtoises" were used, disputants were sometimes carried away by passion, and the result was a true battle: "They scream themselves hoarse, they lavish unmannerly expressions, abuse, threats, upon each other. They even take to cuffing, kicking, and biting."[246]

Under this training, rudimentary though it was, superior minds became sharpened, they got accustomed to think, to weigh the pros and cons, to investigate freely; a taste for intellectual things was kept up in them. The greatest geniuses who had come to study Aristotle on St. Geneviève's Mount were always proud to call themselves pupils of Paris. But narrow minds grew there more narrow; they remained, as Rabelais will say later, foolish and silly, dreaming, stultified things, "tout niais, tout rêveux et rassotés." John of Salisbury, a brilliant scholar of Paris in the twelfth century, had the curiosity to come, after a long absence, and see his old companions "that dialectics still detained on St. Geneviève's Mount." "I found them," he tells us, "just as I had left them, and at the same point; they had not advanced one step in the art of solving our ancient questions, nor added to their science the smallest proposition.... I then clearly saw, what it is easy to discover, that the study of dialectics, fruitful if employed as a means to reach the sciences, remain inert and barren if taken as being itself the object of study."[247]

During this time were developing, on the borders of the Isis and the Cam, the Universities, so famous since, of Oxford and Cambridge; but their celebrity was chiefly local, and they never reached the international reputation of the one at Paris. Both towns had flourishing schools in the twelfth century; in the thirteenth, these schools were constituted into a University, on the model of Paris; they were granted privileges, and the Pope, who would not let slip this opportunity of intervening, confirmed them.[248]

The rules of discipline, the teaching, and the degrees are the same as at Paris. The turbulence is just as great; there are incessant battles; battles between the students of the North and those of the South, "boreales et australes," between the English and Irish, between the clerks and the laity. In 1214 some clerks are hung by the citizens of the town; the Pope's legate instantly makes the power of Rome felt, and avenges the insult sustained by privileged persons belonging to the Latin country. During ten years the inhabitants of Oxford shall remit the students half their rent; they shall pay down fifty-two shillings each year on St. Nicholas' day, in favour of indigent students; and they shall give a banquet to a hundred poor students. Even the bill of fare is settled by the Roman authority: bread, ale, soup, a dish of fish or of meat; and this for ever. The perpetrators of the hanging shall come barefooted, without girdle, cloak or hat, to remove their victims from their temporary resting-place, and, followed by all the citizens, bury them with their own hands in the place assigned to them in consecrated ground.

In 1252 the Irish and "Northerners" begin to fight in St. Mary's Church. They are obliged by authority to appoint twelve delegates, who negotiate a treaty of peace. In 1313 a prohibition is proclaimed against bearing names of nations, these distinctions being a constant source of quarrels. In 1334 such numbers of "Surrois" and "Norrois" clerks are imprisoned in Oxford Castle after a battle, that the sheriff declares escapes are sure to occur.[249] In 1354 a student, seated in a tavern, "in taberna vini," pours a jug of wine over the tavern-keeper's head, and breaks the jug upon it. Unfortunately the head is broken as well; the "laity" take the part of the victim, pursue the clerks, kill twenty of them, and fling their bodies "in latrinas"; they even betake themselves to the books of the students, and "slice them with knives and hatchets." During that term "oh! woe! no degrees in Logic were taken at the University of Oxford."[250] In 1364 war breaks out again between the citizens and students, "commissum fuit bellum," and lasts four days.

Regulations, frequently renewed, show the nature of the principal abuses. These laws pronounce: excommunication against the belligerents; exclusion from the University against those students who harboured "little women" (mulierculas) in their lodgings, major excommunication and imprisonment against those who amuse themselves by celebrating bacchanals in churches, masked, disguised, and crowned "with leaves or flowers"; all this about 1250. The statutes of University Hall, 1292, prohibit the fellows from fighting, from holding immodest conversations together, from telling each other love tales, "fubulas de amasiis," and from singing improper songs.[251]

The lectures bore on Aristotle, Boethius, Priscian, and Donatus; Latin and French were studied; the fellows were bound to converse together in Latin; a regulation also prescribed that the scholars should be taught Latin prosody, and accustomed to write epistles "in decent language, without emphasis or hyperbole, ... and as much as possible full of sense."[252] Objectionable passages are to be avoided; Ovid's "Art of Love" and the book of love by Pamphilus are prohibited.

From the thirteenth century foundations increase in number, both at Oxford and Cambridge. Now "chests" are created, a kind of pawnbroking institution for the benefit of scholars; now a college is created like University College, the most ancient of all, founded by William of Durham, who died in 1249, or New College, established by the illustrious Chancellor of Edward III. William of Wykeham. Sometimes books are bequeathed, as by Richard de Bury and Thomas de Cobham in the fourteenth century, or by Humphrey of Gloucester, in the fifteenth.[253] The journey to Paris continues a title to respect, but it is no longer indispensable.

III.

With these resources at hand, and encouraged by the example of rulers such as Henry "Beauclerc" and Henry II., the subjects of the kings of England latinised themselves in great numbers, and produced some of the Latin writings which enjoyed the widest reputation throughout civilised Europe. They handle the language with such facility in the twelfth century, one might believe it to be their mother-tongue; the chief monuments of English thought at this time are Latin writings. Latin tales, chronicles, satires, sermons, scientific and medical works, treatises on style, prose romances, and epics in verse, all kinds of composition are produced by Englishmen in considerable numbers.

One of them writes a poem in hexameters on the Trojan war, which doubtless bears traces of barbarism, but more resembles antique models than any other imitation made in Europe at the time. It was attributed to Cornelius Nepos, so late even as the Renaissance, though the author, Joseph of Exeter,[254] who composed it between 1178 and 1183, had dedicated his work to Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, and mentioned in it Arthur, "flos regum Arthurus," whose return was still expected by the Britons, "Britonum ridenda fides." Joseph is acquainted with the classics; he has read Virgil, and follows to the best of his ability the precepts of Horace.[255] Differing in this from Benoit de Sainte-More and his contemporaries, he depicts heroes that are not knights, and who at their death are not buried in Gothic churches by monks chanting psalms. This may be accounted a small merit; at that time, however, it was anything but a common one, and, in truth, Joseph of Exeter alone possessed it.

In Latin poems of a more modern inspiration, much ingenuity, observation, sometimes wit, but occasionally only commonplace wisdom, were expended by Godfrey of Winchester, who composed epigrams about the commencement of the twelfth century; by Henry of Huntingdon, the historian who wrote some also; by Alexander Neckham, author of a prose treatise on the "Natures of Things"; Alain de l'Isle and John de Hauteville, who both, long before Jean de Meun, made Nature discourse, "de omni re scibili"[256]; Walter the Englishman, and Odo of Cheriton, authors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of Latin fables,[257] and last, and above all, by Nigel Wireker, who wrote in picturesque style and flowing verse the story of Burnellus, the ass whose tail was too short.[258]

Burnellus, type of the ambitious monk, escapes from his stable, and wishes to rise in the world. He consults Galen, who laughs at him, and sends him to Salerno.[259] At Salerno he is again made a fool of, and provided with elixirs, warranted to make his tail grow to a beautiful length. But in passing through Lyons on his return, he quarrels with the dogs of a wicked monk called Fromond; while kicking right and left he kicks off his vials, which break, while Grimbald, the dog, cuts off half his tail. A sad occurrence! He revenges himself on Fromond, however, by drowning him in the Rhone, and, lifting up his voice, he makes then the valley ring with a "canticle" celebrating his triumph.[260]

What can he do next? It is useless for him to think of attaining perfection of form; he will shine by his science; he will go to the University of Paris, that centre of all light; he will become "Magister," and be appointed bishop. The people will bow down to him as he passes; it is a dream of bliss, La Fontaine's story of the "Pot au Lait."

He reaches Paris, and naturally matriculates among the English nation. He falls to studying; at the end of a year he has been taught many things, but is only able to say "ya" (semper ya repetit). He continues to work, scourges himself, follows the lectures for many years, but still knows nothing but "ya," and remains an ass.[261] What then? He will found an abbey, the rule of which shall combine the delights of all the others: it will be possible to gossip there as at Grandmont, to leave fasting alone as at Cluny, to dress warmly as among the Premonstrant, and to have a female friend like the secular canons; it will be a Thélème even before Rabelais.

But suddenly an unexpected personage appears on the scene, the donkey's master, Bernard the peasant, who had long been on the look-out for him, and by means of a stick the magister, bishop, mitred abbot, is led back to his stall.

Not satisfied with the writing of Latin poems, the subjects of the English kings would construct theories and establish the rules of the art. It was carrying boldness very far; they did not realise that theories can only be laid down with safety in periods of maturity, and that in formulating them too early there is risk of propagating nothing but the rules of bad taste. This was the case with Geoffrey de Vinesauf, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Geoffrey is sure of himself; he learnedly joins example to precept, he juggles with words; he soars on high, far above men of good sense. It was with great reason his work was called the New art of poetry, "Nova Poetria,"[262] for it has nothing in common with the old one, with Horace's. It is dedicated to the Pope, and begins by puns on the name of Innocent[263]; it closes with a comparison between the Pope and God: "Thou art neither God nor man, but an intermediary being whom God has taken into partnership.... Not wishing to keep all for himself, he has taken heaven and given thee earth; what could he do better?"[264]

Precepts and examples are in the same style. Geoffrey teaches how to praise, blame, and ridicule; he gives models of good prosopopœias; prosopopœias for times of happiness: an apostrophe to England governed by Richard Cœur-de-Lion (we know how well he governed); prosopopœia for times of sorrow: an apostrophe to England, whose sovereign (this same Richard) has been killed on a certain Friday:

"England, of his death thou thyself diest!... O lamentable day of Venus! O cruel planet! this day has been thy night, this Venus thy venom; by her wert thou vulnerable!... O woe and more than woe! O death! O truculent death! O death, I wish thou wert dead! It pleased thee to remove the sun and to obscure the soil with obscurity!"[265]

Then follow counsels as to the manner of treating ridiculous people[266]: they come in good time, and we breathe again, but we could have wished them even more stringent and sweeping. Such exaggerations make us understand the wisdom of the Oxford regulations prescribing simplicity and prohibiting emphasis; the more so if we consider that Geoffrey did not innovate, but merely turned into rules the tastes of many. Before him men of comparatively sound judgment, like Joseph of Exeter, forgot themselves so far as to apostrophise in these terms the night in which Troy was taken: "O night, cruel night! night truly noxious! troublous, sorrowful, traitorous, sanguinary night!"[267] &c.

IV.

The series of Latin prose authors of that epoch, grave or facetious, philosophers, moralists, satirists, historians, men of science, romance and tale writers, is still more remarkable in England than that of the poets. Had they only suspected the importance of the native language and left Latin, several of them would have held a very high rank in the national literature.

Romance is represented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in the twelfth century wrote his famous "Historia Regum Britanniæ," the influence of which in England and on the Continent has already been seen. Prose tales were written in astonishing quantities, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by those pious authors who, under pretext of edifying and amusing their readers at the same time, began by amusing, and frequently forgot to edify. They put into their collections all they knew in the way of legends, jokes, and facetious stories. England produced several such collections; their authors usually add a moral to their tales, but sometimes omit it, or else they simply say: "Moralise as thou wilt!"

In these innumerable well-told tales, full of sprightly dialogue, can be already detected something of the art of the conteur which will appear in Chaucer, and something almost of the art of the novelist, destined five hundred years later to reach such a high development in England. The curiosity of the Celt, reawakened by the Norman, is perpetuated in Great Britain; stories are doted on there. "It is the custom," says an English author of the thirteenth century, "in rich families, to spend the winter evenings around the fire, telling tales of former times...."[268]

Subjects for tales were not lacking. The last researches have about made it certain that the immense "Gesta Romanorum," so popular in the Middle Ages, were compiled in England about the end of the thirteenth century.[269] The collection of the English Dominican John of Bromyard, composed in the following century, is still more voluminous. Some idea can be formed of it from the fact that the printed copy preserved at the National Library of Paris weighs fifteen pounds.[270]

Everything is found in these collections, from mere jokes and happy retorts to real novels. There are coarse fabliaux in their embryonic stage, objectionable tales where the frail wife derides the injured husband, graceful stories, miracles of the Virgin. We recognise in passing some fable that La Fontaine has since made famous, episodes out of the "Roman de Renart," anecdotes drawn from Roman history, adventures that, transformed and remodelled, have at length found their definitive rendering in Shakespeare's plays.

All is grist that comes to the mill of these authors; their stories are of French, Latin, English, Hindu origin. It is plain, however, that they write for Englishmen from the fact that many of their stories are localised in England, and that quotations in English are here and there inserted into the tale.[271]

In turning the pages of these voluminous works, glimpses will be caught of the Wolf, the Fox, and Tybert the cat; the Miller, his son and the Ass; the Women and the Secret (instead of eggs, it is here a question of "exceedingly black crows"); the Rats who wish to hang a bell about the Cat's neck. Many tales, fabliaux, and short stories will be recognised that have become popular under their French, English, or Italian shape, such as the lay of the "Oiselet,"[272] the "Chienne qui pleure," or the Weeping Bitch, the lay of Aristotle, the Geese of Friar Philip, the Pear Tree, the Hermit who got drunk. Some of them are very indecent, but they were not left out of the collections on that account, any more than miniaturists were forbidden to paint on the margins of holy, or almost holy books, scenes that were far from being so. A manuscript of the decretals, for example, painted in England at the beginning of the fourteenth century, exhibits a series of drawings illustrating some of these stories, and meant to fit an obviously unexpurgated text.[273]

The Virgin plays her usual part of an indulgent protectress; the story-tellers strangely deviate from the sacred type set before them in the Scriptures. They represent her as the Merciful One whose patience no crime can exhaust, and whose goodwill is enlisted by the slightest act of homage. She is transformed and becomes in their hands an intermediate being between a saint, a goddess, and a fairy. The sacristan-nun of a convent, beautiful as may be believed, falls in love with a clerk, doubtless a charming one, and, unable to live without him, "throws her keys on the altar, and roves with her friend for five years outside the monastery." Passing by the place at the end of that time, she is impelled by curiosity to go to the convent and inquire concerning herself, the sacristan-nun of former years. To her great surprise she hears that the sister continues there, and edifies the whole community by her piety. At night, while she sleeps, the Virgin appears to her in a vision, saying: "Return, unfortunate one, to thy convent! It is I who, assuming thy shape, have fulfilled thy duties until now."[274] A conversion of course follows. A professional thief, who robbed and did nothing besides, "always invoked the Virgin with great devotion, even when he set out to steal."[275] He is caught and hanged; but the Virgin herself holds him up, and keeps him alive; he is taken down, and turns monk.