Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 6

who lived at the court of Henry the First and became
afterward bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called Historia
Britonum in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of
Aeneas, came to Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after
him, and his city of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later
London. An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh
legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British kings,
and the author referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book
given him, as he said, by a certain Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Here
appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so
familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of
Tennyson: Lear and his {22} three daughters; Cymbeline, Gorboduc,
the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed by
Sackville and acted in 1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen, and
his daughter Sabrina, who gave her name to the river Severn, was made
immortal by an exquisite song in Milton's Comus, and became the
heroine of the tragedy of Locrine, once attributed to Shakspere; and
above all, Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the
Table Round. In 1155 Wace, the author of the Roman de Rou, turned
Geoffrey's work into a French poem entitled Brut d' Angleterre, "brut"

being a Welsh word meaning chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace's
poem was Englished by Layamon, a priest of Arley Regis, on the
border stream of Severn. Layamon's Brut is in thirty thousand lines,
partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English
with hardly any French words. The style is rude but vigorous, and, at
times, highly imaginative. Wace had amplified Geoffrey's chronicle
somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions, derived, no doubt,
from legends current on the Welsh border. In particular the story of
Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness. He tells of the
enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's
queen, Guenever; and the treachery of his nephew, Modred. His
narration of the last great battle between Arthur and Modred; of the
wounding of the king--"fifteen fiendly wounds he had, one might in the
least {23} three gloves thrust--"; and of the little boat with "two women
therein, wonderly dight," which came to bear him away to Avalun and
the Queen Argante, "sheenest of all elves," whence he shall come again,
according to Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in
essentials, for Tennyson to add in his Death of Arthur. This new
material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers.
The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afloat.
Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II., in two French prose
romances, connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy
cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph
of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously
disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the
mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an adventure only to be
achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of the great Launcelot,
who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in Geoffrey's
history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner the
love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to the
Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus
there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed
shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day
and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a
more artistic {24} handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson
in his Idyls of the King, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many
others. There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in

Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German,
and in other tongues. But the final form which the Saga took in
mediaeval England was the prose Morte Dartur of Sir Thomas Malory,
composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the
earlier romances and is Tennyson's main authority.
Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister.
There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English,
consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the
Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225; the Ayenbite of Inwyt
(Remorse of Conscience), 1340, both in prose; the Handlyng Sinne,
1303; the Cursor Mundi, 1320; and the Pricke of Conscience, 1340, in
verse; metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the Creed,
and the