THE ANGLO-NORMAN POETS AND CHRONICLERS.—­Norman literature had already made itself a name before William conquered England.  Short jingling tales in verse, in ballad style, were popular under the name of fabliaux, and fuller epics, tender, fanciful, and spirited, called Romans, or Romaunts, were sung to the lute, in courts and camps.  Of these latter, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Roland were the principal heroes.

Strange as it may seem, this langue d’oil, in which they were composed, made more rapid progress in its poetical literature, in the period immediately after the conquest, in England than at home:  it flourished by the transplantation.  Its advent was with an act of heroism.  Taillefer, the standard-bearer of William at Seulac, marched in advance of the army, struck the first blow, and met his death while chanting the song of Roland: 

    Of Charlemagne and Roland,
    Of Oliver and his vassals,
    Who died at Roncesvalles.

    De Karlemaine e de Reliant,
    Et d’Olivier et des vassals,
    Ki moururent en Renchevals.

Each stanza ended with the war-shout Aoi! and was responded to by the cry of the Normans, Diex aide, God to aid.  And this battle-song was the bold manifesto of Norman poetry invading England.  It found an echo wherever William triumphed on English soil, and played an important part in the formation of the English language and English literature.  New scenes and new victories created new inspiration in the poets; monarchs like Henry I., called from his scholarship Beauclerc, practised and cherished the poetic art, and thus it happened that the Norman poets in England produced works of sweeter minstrelsy and greater historical value than the fabliaux, Romans, and Chansons de gestes of their brethren on the continent.  The conquest itself became a grand theme for their muse.

RICHARD WACE.—­First among the Anglo-Norman poets stands Richard Wace, called Maistre Wace, reading clerk, (clerc lisant,) born in the island of Jersey, about 1112, died in 1184.  His works are especially to be noted for the direct and indirect history they contain.  His first work, which appeared about 1138, is entitled Le Brut d’Angleterre—­The English Brutus—­and is in part a paraphrase of the Latin history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had presented Brutus of Troy as the first in the line of British kings.  Wace has preserved the fiction of Geoffrey, and has catered to that characteristic of the English people which, not content with homespun myths, sought for genealogies from the remote classic times.  Wace’s Brut is chiefly in octo-syllabic verse, and extends to fifteen thousand lines.