With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years.  The thread of the nation’s story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent.  The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon chronicle.  The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his work in 1273.  About 1300, Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century.  In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend.  All real knowledge of the period dwindled away until in Capgraves’s Chronicle of England, written in prose in 1463-1464, hardly any thing of it is left.  In history as in literature the English had forgotten their past, and had turned to foreign sources.  It is noteworthy that Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland—­as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, respectively—­ignores the Saxon period altogether.  And Spenser, who gives in the second book of his Faerie Queene a resume of the reigns of fabulous British kings—­the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron—­has nothing to say of the real kings of early England.  So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets.  The Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors.

In the Roman de Rou, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings the French jongleur, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of William’s army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of “Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at Roncesvals.”  This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England.  The lines which Taillefer sang were from the Chanson de Roland, the oldest and best of the French hero sagas.  The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the course of one hundred and fifty years completely identified with the French.  They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue.  The race thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe.  The warlike, adventurous spirit of the vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and fondness for display.  The Normans were a nation of knights-errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy.  Their architecture was at once strong and graceful.  Their women were skilled in embroidery, a splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in which the conqueror’s wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court wrought the history of the Conquest.