The passion for pilgrimages was universal among our ancestors as far back as we can trace them.  For at least a thousand years it was their chief delight, and is not yet extinct.  To feel the art of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres we have got to become pilgrims again:  but, just now, the point of most interest is not the pilgrim so much as the minstrel who sang to amuse him,—­the jugleor or jongleur,—­ who was at home in every abbey, castle or cottage, as well as at every shrine.  The jugleor became a jongleur and degenerated into the street-juggler; the minstrel, or menestrier, became very early a word of abuse, equivalent to blackguard; and from the beginning the profession seems to have been socially decried, like that of a music-hall singer or dancer in later times; but in the eleventh century, or perhaps earlier still, the jongleur seems to have been a poet, and to have composed the songs he sang.  The immense mass of poetry known as the “Chansons de Geste” seems to have been composed as well as sung by the unnamed Homers of France, and of all spots in the many provinces where the French language in its many dialects prevailed, Mont-Saint-Michel should have been the favourite with the jongleur, not only because the swarms of pilgrims assured him food and an occasional small piece of silver, but also because Saint Michael was the saint militant of all the warriors whose exploits in war were the subject of the “Chansons de Geste.”  William of Saint-Pair was a priest-poet; he was not a minstrel, and his “Roman” was not a chanson; it was made to read, not to recite; but the “Chanson de Roland” was a different affair.

So it was, too, with William’s contemporaries and rivals or predecessors, the monumental poets of Norman-English literature.  Wace, whose rhymed history of the Norman dukes, which he called the “Roman de Rou,” or “Rollo,” is an English classic of the first rank, was a canon of Bayeux when William of Saint-Pair was writing at Mont-Saint-Michel.  His rival Benoist, who wrote another famous chronicle on the same subject, was also a historian, and not a singer.  In that day literature meant verse; elegance in French prose did not yet exist; but the elegancies of poetry in the twelfth century were as different, in kind, from the grand style of the eleventh, as Virgil was different from Homer.

William of Saint-Pair introduces us to the pilgrimage and to the jongleur, as they had existed at least two hundred years before his time, and were to exist two hundred years after him.  Of all our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors who were going on pilgrimages in the middle of the eleventh century, the two who would probably most interest every one, after eight hundred years have passed, would be William the Norman and Harold the Saxon.  Through William of Saint-Pair and Wace and Benoist, and the most charming literary monument of all, the Bayeux tapestry of Queen Matilda, we can build up the story of such a pilgrimage which shall be as historically exact as the battle of Hastings, and as artistically true as the Abbey Church.