being romances.  There are metrical or verse romances of French and Celtic and English heroes, like Roland, Arthur and Tristram, and Bevis of Hampton.  There are stories of Alexander, the Greek romance of “Flores and Blanchefleur,” and a collection of Oriental tales called “The Seven Wise Masters.”  There are legends of the Virgin and the saints, a paraphrase of Scripture, a treatise on the seven deadly sins, some Bible history, a dispute among birds concerning women, a love song or two, a vision of Purgatory, a vulgar story with a Gallic flavor, a chronicle of English kings and Norman barons, and a political satire.  There are a few other works, similarly incongruous, crowded together in this typical manuscript, which now gives mute testimony to the literary taste of the times.

Obviously it is impossible to classify such a variety.  We note simply that it is mediaeval in spirit, and French in style and expression; and that sums up the age.  All the scholarly works of the period, like William of Malmesbury’s History, and Anselm’s[46] Cur Deus Homo, and Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus, the beginning of modern experimental science, were written in Latin; while nearly all other works were written in French, or else were English copies or translations of French originals.  Except for the advanced student, therefore, they hardly belong to the story of English literature.  We shall note here only one or two marked literary types, like the Riming Chronicle (or verse history) and the Metrical Romance, and a few writers whose work has especial significance.

GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. (d. 1154).  Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae is noteworthy, not as literature, but rather as a source book from which many later writers drew their literary materials.  Among the native Celtic tribes an immense number of legends, many of them of exquisite beauty, had been preserved through four successive conquests of Britain.  Geoffrey, a Welsh monk, collected some of these legends and, aided chiefly by his imagination, wrote a complete history of the Britons.  His alleged authority was an ancient manuscript in the native Welsh tongue containing the lives and deeds of all their kings, from Brutus, the alleged founder of Britain, down to the coming of Julius Caesar.[47] From this Geoffrey wrote his history, down to the death of Cadwalader in 689.

The “History” is a curious medley of pagan and Christian legends, of chronicle, comment, and pure invention,—­all recorded in minute detail and with a gravity which makes it clear that Geoffrey had no conscience, or else was a great joker.  As history the whole thing is rubbish; but it was extraordinarily successful at the time and made all who heard it, whether Normans or Saxons, proud of their own country.  It is interesting to us because it gave a new direction to the literature of England by showing the wealth of poetry and romance that lay in its own traditions of Arthur and his knights.  Shakespeare’s King Lear, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King were founded on the work of this monk, who had the genius to put unwritten Celtic tradition in the enduring form of Latin prose.