So popular was his book that, not only in England, but, in an even greater degree, on the Continent, writers were soon at work, collecting and making more stories about the greatest of his kings, Arthur.  By some it is thought that the Normans took such delight in the knightly deeds of Geoffrey’s heroes that they spread the story in France when they visited their homes in Normandy.  Moreover, they were in a good position to learn other tales of their favourite knights, for Normandy bordered on Brittany, the home of the Bretons, who, being of the same race as the Welsh, honoured the same heroes in their legends.  So in return for Geoffrey’s tales, Breton stories, perhaps, found their way into England; at all events, marvellous romances of King Arthur and his Round Table were soon being told in England, in France, in Germany and in Italy.

Now, to some it may seem strange that story-tellers should care to weave their stories so constantly about the same personages; strange, too, that they should invent stories about men and women who were believed actually to have existed.  But it must be remembered that, in those early days, very few could read and write, and that, before printing was invented, books were so scarce that four or five constituted quite a library.  Those who knew how to read, and were so fortunate as to have books, read them again and again.  For the rest, though kings and great nobles might have poets attached to their courts, the majority depended for their amusement on the professional story-teller.  In the long winter evening, no one was more welcome than the wandering minstrel.  He might be the knightly troubadour who, accompanied by a jongleur to play his accompaniments, wandered from place to place out of sheer love of his art and of adventure; more often, however, the minstrel made story-telling his trade, and gained his living from the bounty of his audience—­be it in castle, market-place, or inn.  Most commonly, the narratives took the form of long rhyming poems; not because the people in those days were so poetical—­indeed, some of these poems would be thought, in present times, very dreary doggerel—­but because rhyme is easier to remember than prose.  Story-tellers had generally much the same stock-in-trade—­stories of Arthur, Charlemagne, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Southampton, and so on.  If a minstrel had skill of his own, he would invent some new episode, and so, perhaps, turn a compliment to his patron by introducing the exploit of an ancestor, at the same time that he made his story last longer.  People did not weary of hearing the same tales over and over again, any more than little children get tired of nursery rhymes, or their elders turn away from “Punch and Judy,” though the same little play has been performed for centuries.  As for inventing stories about real people, that may well have seemed permissible in an age when historians recorded mere hearsay as actual fact.  Richard III., perhaps, had one shoulder higher than the other, but within a few years of his death grave historians had represented him as a hunchbacked deformity.