This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in literature.  The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales.  These were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every great feudal baron, or by the jongleurs, who wandered from court to castle.  There is a whole literature of these romans d’aventure in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French.  Many of them are very long—­often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines—­written sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet.  Numbers of them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries.  The translations were usually inferior to the originals.  The French trouvere (finder or poet) told his story in a straightforward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc.  He invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which later poets have profited, but his own handling of them was feeble and prolix.  Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the trouveres which the rude, unformed English failed to catch.

The heroes of these romances were of various climes:  Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander.  But, strangely enough, the favorite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach invaders and their victor in twelve great battles.  The language and literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors.  There are a few Welsh borrowings in the English speech, such as bard and druid; but in the old Anglo-Saxon literature there are no more traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over six hundred years.  But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe.  The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places:  in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of Cymric race, and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh.