Note 57 — Chapter I

Roquefort, Glossaire de la Langue Romane, p. 25, and État de la Poésie Française, p. 42, and 206, mentions several religious works in the royal library, and also a metrical romance in the British Museum, lately published in France on the fabulous voyage of Charlemagne to Constantinople. Raynouard has collected a few fragments in Provençal. But I must dissent from this excellent writer in referring the famous poem of the Vaudois, La Nobla Leyczon, to the year 1100. Choix des Poésies des Troubadours, vol. ii. p. cxxxvii. I have already observed, that the two lines which contain what he calls la date de l’an 1100, are so loosely expressed, as to include the whole ensuing century. (Hallam’s Middle Ages, iii. 467.) And I am now convinced that the poem is not much older than 1200. It seems probable that they reckoned 1100 years, on a loose computation, not from the Christian era, but from the time when the passage of Scripture to which these lines allude was written. The allusion may be to 1 Pet. i. 20. But it is clear that, at the time of the composition of this poem, not only the name of Vaudois had been imposed on those sectaries, but they had become subject to persecution. We know nothing of this till near the end of the century. This poem was probably written in the south of France, and carried afterwards to the Alpine valleys of Piedmont, from which it was brought to Geneva and England in the seventeenth century. La Nobla Leyczon is published at length by Raynouard. It consists of 479 lines, which seem to be rhythmical or aberrant Alexandrines; the rhymes uncertain in number, chiefly masculine. The poem censures the corruptions of the church, but contains little that would be considered heretical; which agrees with what contemporary historians relate of the original Waldenses. Any doubts as to the authenticity of this poem are totally unreasonable. M. Raynouard, an indisputably competent judge, observes, Les personnes qui l’examineront avec attention jugeront que le manuscrit n’a pas été interpolé, p. cxliii.