Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 4

had sung to his harp or
glee-beam, dwelling on the {15} emphatic syllables, passing swiftly
over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the
line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed
endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use,
a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English alliterative
verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century. But it
was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was
doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more
modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were
all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once
more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his
contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own
past by three centuries of foreign rule.
The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries
was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these
annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the
monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The

yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though
occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of
Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were
the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of
the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16}
king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.
Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by;
Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land, And here we thes muneches sang.
It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold
outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years
against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or
Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead) that
the chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest,
breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death.
Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern
man," and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and
his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its
treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the
Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later
portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more
modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical
standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical
monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness,
notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of
his death (1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time
dwelt in his court." {17} "He who was before a rich king, and lord of
many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . .
Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do
nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be forgotten
the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over
his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer
preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind,
he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were
their father."

With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history
written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of
the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers
partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these,
such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon,
and William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries
of the Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster,
finished his work in 1273. About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester,
composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the
authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other
rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century. In the hands of these the true
history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass
of fable and legend. All real knowledge of the period {18} dwindled
away until in Capgrave's Chronicle of England, written in prose in
1463-64, hardly any thing of it is left. In history as in literature the
English had forgotten their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is
noteworthy that Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes