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magne and Roland. As he sang, he played with his sword, throwing it high into the air, and catching it with his right hand. The Normans repeated these strains, or cried "God help! God help!"

"Taillefer qui mult bien chantoit

Sor un cheval qui tost alout,

Devant le Duc alout chantoit
De Karlemagne et de Rollant
Et d'Olivier et des vassaux

Qui moururent à Roncevaux."

These rhymes are by Wace, but Geoffry Gaimar gives many more particulars concerning Taillefer. It is curious to observe how customs change and are nevertheless perpetuated. The drum-major, who tosses his cane into the air and catches it at the head of his regiment, is a tradition of the military jongleur.

There exists another instance, more ancient than even the battle of Hastings, of the provocations of military song. In 1054, William defeated the French at Mortemer in Normandy. One of his servants, climbing a tree, kept crying all the night :

Franceis, Franceis, levez! levez!
Tenez vos veies; trop dormez ;

Allez vos amis enterrer

Ki sont occis à Mortemer.

This singular herald-at-arms, thus insulting the vanquished enemy from the top of an oak, exhibits a striking picture of the simple manners of those times.

THIRD AND FOURTH EPOCHS

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

ANGLO NORMAN AND NORMAN-FRENCH EPOCHS FROM WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, AND FROM HENRY II. TO HENRY VIII.

ANGLO-NORMAN TROUVÈRES

AFTER the Norman conquest, the middle ages begin, and the aspect of things is changed. England has undergone in its language revolutions unknown to other countries. The Teutonic of the Angles drove back the Gaelic of the Britons into the mountains of Wales; the Danish, Scandinavian, or Gothic, cooped up the Erse among the Scotch highlanders, and adulterated the pure Saxon; the Norman, or the old French, confined the Anglo-Saxon to the conquered English.

Under William and his first successors, people wrote and sung in Latin, Caledonian, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, the Roman of the trouvères, and

VOL. I.

F

sometimes the Roman of the troubadours. There were poets, bards, jongleurs, minstrels, conteors, fableors, gesteors, harpeors. Poetry assumed all sorts of forms, and gave to its productions all sorts of names: lays, ballads, rotruenges, carols, chansons de gestes, tales, sirventois, satires, fabliaux, jeux-partis, dictiés. So far back as the sixth century, Fortunatus gives the name of lays, leudi, to the songs of the barbarians. There were romances of love, romances of chivalry, romances of St. Graal, romances of the Round Table, romances of Charlemagne, romances of Alexander, and sacred poems. In the " Dream of the God of Love," the bridge leading to the palace of the deity is composed of rotruenges, stanzas accompanied with the viol; the planks are made of dits and chansons, the rafters of sounds of the harp, and the piles of sweet British lays.

Robert de Courthose, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror, who was confined for twenty-eight years in the castle of Cardiff on the sea shore, learned the language of the Welsh bards. From the windows of his prison, he saw an oak towering above the wood which covered the promontory of Penarth. This oak he thus apostrophised: "Oak, planted in the bosom of the woods, whence thou beholdest the

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