Besides these greater works, an enormous number of fables and satires appeared in this age, copied or translated from the French, like the metrical romances.  The most famous of these are “The Owl and the Nightingale,”—­a long debate between the two birds, one representing the gay side of life, the other the sterner side of law and morals,—­and “Land of Cockaygne,” i.e.  “Luxury Land,” a keen satire on monks and monastic religion.[57]

While most of the literature of the time was a copy of the French and was intended only for the upper classes, here and there were singers who made ballads for the common people; and these, next to the metrical romances, are the most interesting and significant of all the works of the Norman period.  On account of its obscure origin and its oral transmission, the ballad is always the most difficult of literary subjects.[58] We make here only three suggestions, which may well be borne in mind:  that ballads were produced continually in England from Anglo-Saxon times until the seventeenth century; that for centuries they were the only really popular literature; and that in the ballads alone one is able to understand the common people.  Read, for instance, the ballads of the “merrie greenwood men,” which gradually collected into the Geste of Robin Hood, and you will understand better, perhaps, than from reading many histories what the common people of England felt and thought while their lords and masters were busy with impossible metrical romances.

In these songs speaks the heart of the English folk.  There is lawlessness indeed; but this seems justified by the oppression of the times and by the barbarous severity of the game laws.  An intense hatred of shams and injustice lurks in every song; but the hatred is saved from bitterness by the humor with which captives, especially rich churchmen, are solemnly lectured by the bandits, while they squirm at sight of devilish tortures prepared before their eyes in order to make them give up their golden purses; and the scene generally ends in a bit of wild horse-play.  There is fighting enough, and ambush and sudden death lurk at every turn of the lonely roads; but there is also a rough, honest chivalry for women, and a generous sharing of plunder with the poor and needy.  All literature is but a dream expressed, and “Robin Hood” is the dream of an ignorant and oppressed but essentially noble people, struggling and determined to be free.

Far more poetical than the ballads, and more interesting even than the romances, are the little lyrics of the period,—­those tears and smiles of long ago that crystallized into poems, to tell us that the hearts of men are alike in all ages.  Of these, the best known are the “Luve Ron” (love rune or letter) of Thomas de Hales (c. 1250); “Springtime” (c. 1300), beginning “Lenten (spring) ys come with luve to toune”; and the melodious love song “Alysoun,” written at the end of the thirteenth century by some unknown poet who heralds the coming of Chaucer: