Too much emphasis is usually laid upon the antagonism and separation between Saxons and Normans. In the popular mind the picture in Ivanhoe fairly represents conditions at the end of the twelfth century; whereas the distinction between Norman and Saxon had virtually disappeared within half a century after the Conquest. When Henry I, third of the Norman sovereigns of England, married a direct descendant of Alfred the Great, there could be no further ground for calling a man superior or inferior because he was a Norman or a Saxon. Henry, moreover, was born and educated in England, and almost certainly learned the English language in school.

Immediate Effect of Conquest on Language and Literature. - The English began immediately to adopt many NormanFrench words, though neither the written nor the spoken language became anything like French. The fact that even at the present time English has more words from other sources than from Anglo-Saxon does not signify that the native element of our vocabulary is small; for of the words used oftenest by us all, the Anglo-Saxon are far more numerous. For about a century and a half after the conquest, moreover, it does not appear that literature was greatly enriched by works in either Norman-French, English, or a mixture of the two. Latin was the literary language of Europe, and the meagre literary product of Britain was in the same language.

Geoffrey of Monmouth: Arthurian Legends. This British literature in Latin is chiefly in the form of chronicles, of which the work most important to English literature is the Historia Regum Britannia ("History of the Kings of Britain "), written about 1135 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey, a Welsh priest, claimed that he compiled his history from authentic sources; but his learned contemporaries

disputed his claim, and subsequent scholarship has not certainly discovered authorities for any large portion of his work.

Of Geoffrey's life we know almost nothing; but neither his life nor his literary antecedents can add to or detract from his importance to English literature. It is to Geoffrey's History that we must trace the stories used by Shakspere in King Lear and Cymbeline; and more important even than these, the stories of King Arthur. Whether or not Geoffrey invented the romance of Arthur will probably never be known; but the important fact to note is that Geoffrey first put the material into literary form. His work was soon done into French verse by one Wace, and from French into English about 1205 by Layamon. Parts of the legend were put into French by Chrétien de Troyes and others, into German by Wolfram von Eschenbach, into numerous anonymous romances, both prose and verse, in all the languages of Europe. A compilation from all sorts of sources was made toward the close of the fifteenth century by Malory; and from that day to our own the legend has attracted the pens of many poets, including Tennyson, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris.

Other Romances. Besides Arthur and his knights other heroes were made the subjects of romances. Some of these deal with Charlemagne and his peers, others with Alexander the Great, still others with purely Germanic figures like Bevis of Hampton, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn. Of most of these romances versions exist in various other languages, and it is usually impossible to say which is the original or whether the original is extant. Such a thing as literary property was unknown until very modern times; and writers 1 See page 38.

of either fiction or history were at liberty to use any matter that came to their hands.

Furthermore, in many cases the writers probably drew more largely from folk-tales current in all lands than from any written story. A possible example of this sort of procedure is the account of a hero's boyhood, of which the most famous

RUINS OF MONASTERY AT GLASTONBURY.
Where King Arthur was said to have been buried.

is the story of Perceval, one of Arthur's knights. This is told in romances extant in English, French, German, and Welsh; and in the opinion of most scholars it is impossible to determine whether any one of the four is the "original." The same sort of story, moreover, is told in folk-tales of almost every country, and of numerous heroes, one of Finn, in an Irish manuscript dating probably from the tenth century.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." One of the finest of the romances in English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a story belonging to the Arthurian cycle and dating in its extant form from the latter part of the fourteenth century. In this romance, as in many, two stories originally separate are brought together. The second deals with the testing of Gawain's purity. The first, regarding the origin and development of which a vigorous controversy between scholars has raged for years, deals with the testing of his bravery, and runs as follows:

On New Year's Day, when Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are just beginning a feast, a huge knight clad all in green and riding a horse of that color rides into the hall and demands a boon. In his hand he carries a huge axe; and he desires that some knight give him a blow with the axe, and promise to seek the Green Knight a year from that time and take without resistance a similar blow. Gawain, Arthur's nephew and the most courteous of the Round Table, accepts the challenge. After the blow is given, the Green Knight takes up his head and rides out, the head calling upon Gawain to keep his appointment next New Year's Day at the Green Chapel. Faithful to his word, Gawain reaches the chapel on the appointed day, and finds his antagonist awaiting him. The Green Knight makes only a feint of slaying Gawain, and then explains that the whole performance was planned merely to try "the most faultless knight that ever walked the earth."

Religious Works. Side by side with the romances appeared from about the year 1200 numerous religious works, most of which can be called literature only by exercise of great courtesy. Of these the most famous are the Poema Morale, or Moral Ode; Ormulum, a series of sermons in verse ; Ancren Riwle (pronounce Riwle as if written "Rula "), or Rule for Nuns, written for the guidance of three noble women who belonged to no order; Cursor Mundi, relating in rhyme the whole course of the world" from creation to

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doomsday, and adding many legends to the Bible narrative. With the exception of Ormulum, which was so named "because Orm composed it," we can attach no author's name to these works.

From the great mass of religious writing, however, the names of two writers stand out prominently; one by reason of his great influence, the other as producer of perhaps the most famous piece of "vision" literature in English. These writers are John Wiclif and William Langland.

Wiclif. Although satisfactory evidence regarding many events in Wiclif's life is lacking, we are reasonably sure that

JOHN WICLIF.

he was born from fifteen to twenty years before Chaucer; and we know that he died in 1384 about the time that Chaucer was maturing the plan for The Canterbury Tales. He was educated at Oxford, and in 1360 was master (that is, president) of one of the colleges there, Balliol (Bālyol). On becoming rector of a neighboring church not long after, he gave up his college position; and to the end of his life he was a zealous preacher and laborer for the good of the common people. Eight years before

his death he had been summoned before an ecclesiastical

court to give account of his preaching; and only the force of