form, read the Chanson de Roland, the French national epic (which the Normans first put into literary form), in contrast with Beowulf, which voices the Saxon’s thought and feeling before the profound mystery of human life.  It is not our purpose to discuss the evident merits or the serious defects of Norman-French literature, but only to point out two facts which impress the student, namely, that Anglo-Saxon literature was at one time enormously superior to the French, and that the latter, with its evident inferiority, absolutely replaced the former.  “The fact is too often ignored,” says Professor Schofield,[45] “that before 1066 the Anglo-Saxons had a body of native literature distinctly superior to any which the Normans or French could boast at that time; their prose especially was unparalleled for extent and power in any European vernacular.”  Why, then, does this superior literature disappear and for nearly three centuries French remain supreme, so much so that writers on English soil, even when they do not use the French language, still slavishly copy the French models?

To understand this curious phenomenon it is necessary only to remember the relative conditions of the two races who lived side by side in England.  On the one hand the Anglo-Saxons were a conquered people, and without liberty a great literature is impossible.  The inroads of the Danes and their own tribal wars had already destroyed much of their writings, and in their new condition of servitude they could hardly preserve what remained.  The conquering Normans, on the other hand, represented the civilization of France, which country, during the early Middle Ages, was the literary and educational center of all Europe.  They came to England at a time when the idea of nationality was dead, when culture had almost vanished, when Englishmen lived apart in narrow isolation; and they brought with them law, culture, the prestige of success, and above all the strong impulse to share in the great world’s work and to join in the moving currents of the world’s history.  Small wonder, then, that the young Anglo-Saxons felt the quickening of this new life and turned naturally to the cultured and progressive Normans as their literary models.

II.  LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD

In the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh there is a beautifully illuminated manuscript, written about 1330, which gives us an excellent picture of the literature of the Norman period.  In examining it we are to remember that literature was in the hands of the clergy and nobles; that the common people could not read, and had only a few songs and ballads for their literary portion.  We are to remember also that parchments were scarce and very expensive, and that a single manuscript often contained all the reading matter of a castle or a village.  Hence this old manuscript is as suggestive as a modern library.  It contains over forty distinct works, the great bulk of them