? ; « *?mm I " &£r^*^ ^ ■ J :: ''JSh'<^^^ Nf&f ^ • |jfl^mV ^* p^p tW^ft i ^"^ \ ^^fegfr^^^^ i(Si&*i ^i ^'¥' :: ^^ *■ '?j/^r ; : ; ESSAYS ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL SUBJECTS. ESSAYS ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL SUBJECTS, AND ON VARIOUS QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE HISTORY OF ART, SCIENCE, AND LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. BY THOMAS WRIGHT, Esq. M.A., F.S.A., M.R.S.L., Etc. CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL INSTITUTE OF FRANCE (ACADEMIE DES INSCRIPTIONS ET BELLES LETTRES.) IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON : JOHN RUSSELL SMITH, SOHO SQUARE. 1861. CONTENTS. Page Chapter XIII. On the Ancient Map of the World preserved in Hereford Cathedral, as illustrative of the History of Geography in the Middle Ages . 1 XIV. On the History of the English Language . 28 XV. On the Abacus, or Medieval System of Arith- metic qi XVI. On the Antiquity of Dates expressed in Arabic Numerals 74 XVII. Kemarks on an Ivory Casket of the beginning of the Fourteenth Century .... 88 XVIII. On the Carvings of the Stalls in Cathedral and Collegiate Churches 1 1 1 XIX. Illustrations of some questions relating to Archi- tectural Antiquities : — (a) Medieval Architecture Illustrated from Illuminated Manuscripts . 129 (b) A word on Mediaeval Bridge- Builders . 137 VI CONTENTS. Chapter Page (c) On the Remains of proscribed Races in Mediceval and Modern Society, as ex- plaining certain peculiarities in old Churches ..... 141 XX. On the Origin of Rhymes in Mediaeval Poetry, and its bearing on the Authenticity of the Early Welsh Poems 151 XXI. On the History of the Drama in the Middle Ages 169 XXII. On the Literature of the Trobadours . .194 XXIII. On the History of Comic Literature during the Middle Ages 230 XXIV. On the Satirical Literature of the Reformation 272 PLATES. Ivory Casket of Fourteenth Century, Plate L, to face . 95 „ Plate II. „ . 98 ERRATA. P. 94, note, for Brit. MS. read Brit. Mus. P. 166. My conjecture on the date of the " Black Book of Caer- marthen" is merely founded on the description by others. I have since received information which leads me to believe that this manu- script is of a considerably later date. P. 168, 1, 16, for to as late a date, read to a later date. ESSAYS ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL SUBJECTS. XIII. ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD PRE- SERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL, AS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES. N the final breaking up of the Roman Empire, polite literature suffered much more than science. While there were iyi few, if any, of the barbarians who estab- lished themselves in the Imperial provinces, capable of appreciating the pure models of composition be- queathed to them by the classic writers, many, ex- cited by the novelties offered to their view on every side, were seized with an ardent thirst after know- ledge. We know with what avidity the sciences of the Greeks and the Romans were taken up by the Arabian conquerors, who subsequently gave to them an extraordinary development. In the west, during several centuries, the knowledge received from the Ro- mans made little or no advance ; and almost the only works on science, previous to the eleventh century, II. B 2 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD were little better than compendiums and school-books, such as the writings of Isidore and Bede. To people who were conquering and colonizing, no science would be more attractive than that of geo- graphy, especially when they were at the same time receiving a new faith, founded on events which had occurred in countries far distant from their own homes. Many circumstances which have escaped the ravages of time, show us how much attention was paid by the Germanic conquerors to geography in the dark ages immediately following the overthrow of the "Western Empire. Even the song of the bard ap- pears to have been most welcome when it told of the different countries through which he had wandered. The fragment which has been published, under the title of the Traveller's Song, is one of the most re- markable relics of early Anglo-Saxon poetry. At a later period than that to which this piece evidently belongs, in the beginning of the eighth century, we learn from the letters of Boniface that, among the manuscripts then brought continually from the con- tinent into this island, our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were particularly desirous of possessing treatises on cosmography. There are extant two treatises on geographical science of a somewhat remarkable character, belong- ing to the earlier period of the middle ages. The first of these pretends to have been written by a " philo- sopher" of Istria named Ethicus, in a strange lan- guage, of which the alphabet is given at the end, and to have been translated or re-written in Latin by the celebrated St. Jerome, which would carry it back to the fourth century of the Christian era. But the barbarous Latin, totally dissimilar from the style of PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 3 St. Jerome, seems to condemn this account as a mere fable. It is, however, a work of great antiquity ; for the age of manuscripts still preserved carries it back as far as the eighth century, and various points of internal evidence seem to fix it to a still more remote period. Its pretended author, Ethicus, is represented as a great traveller in search of geographical know- ledge : at one time we find him penetrating into the depths of Asia ; at another, exploring the Western Ocean, and almost reaching America — he alludes apparently to the peak of TenerifFe ; and then again we find him wandering through the Britannic isles, and extending his researches to the northernmost parts of Europe. Whether he really visited the places thus described may be considered as a matter that admits of great doubt ; but, concealed under an af- fectedly poetical but barbarous style of writing, often unintelligible, we perceive traces of geographical knowledge which we should little expect ; and it is by no means improbable that in Spain he may have picked up stories of the adventures of some of the daring navigators of its western ports, whom storms or their own bold curiosity had carried out into the trackless ocean, — the extent and bounds of which were then wrapped in fearful obscurity. The cos- mography of Ethicus appears, by the number of ma- nuscripts written in this country, to have been ex- tremely popular in England from the eighth to the eleventh (and even to the twelfth) century ; but it is as yet inedited, although an excellent edition is pre- paring by one of the most learned geographers of the present day, M. D'Avezac of Paris.* In the kingdoms founded by the Goths in Italy * This has since been published, with a very learned dissertation. 4 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD and in Spain, literature and science were extensively cultivated by men who rather affectedly took to them- selves the Greek title of " philosophers." Unfortu- nately nearly all their writings have perished amid the convulsions of a succession of wars, during which the Goths ceased to exist as a people. It was pro- bably to one of these " philosophers" that we owe the so-called cosmography of Ethicus. Another of these Goths, who is generally considered as having lived at Ravenna, the capital of the Gothic kingdom in Italy, and as having flourished in the seventh century, but whose name is unknown, has left us a much more intelligible treatise on geography, though written in equally barbarous Latin. A remarkable feature of the work of the Geographer of Ravenna, the title by which this writer is commonly known, is the number of other writers on the same subject, or (as he calls them) "philosophers," who appear to have lived a little before his own time, who are cited by him, but who are otherwise totally unknown to us. In fact, it is through this writer alone that we are at all ac- quainted with the geographical literature of the pre- ceding age. Among the rather numerous writers quoted by this anonymous geographer, are three " philosophers of the Goths " ( Gothorum philosophi), whose names, Aithanarid, Edelwald, and Marcomir, at once evince the race to which they belonged. He quotes also frequently two Homano- African geo- graphers, Probus and Melitianus ; two Graeco-Egyp- tians, named Cyachoris and Blantasis, who had tra- velled to the south of Egypt in search of knowledge ; two Persians, who had written "a picture of the universe" in Greek, and whom he names Arsatius and Aphrodisianus ; two Greeks, Hylas and Sardonius ; PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. D and two Romans, Lallianus and Castorius. The last of these is the writer whose authority the geographer of Ravenna follows most largely. All the works of the schools represented by these names are now lost. The treatise of the geographer of Ravenna, divided into five books, consists, in a great measure, of lists of towns in each country ; and from the way in which they are given, his authorities seem often to have been maps or geographical tables like those of Ptolemy, whom also he quotes. But he has mixed the names together in so confused a manner, that, joined with the corrupt orthography, this has rendered it almost impossible now to identify many of them, although we can have no doubt that such places did exist. In Britain especially, where his list is remarkably full, he seems to have run his eye backwards and for- wards in so careless a way 5 that he has in several instances repeated the name of the same place, as though he had found it in different parts of the island ; and it is not at all improbable that he may have so far wandered beyond the limits, as to import into Britain two or three towns from the opposite coasts of Gaul and Germany. In the writings of this geographer we meet with those theological prejudices which were beginning to trespass on the scientific discoveries of the Greeks and Romans. He shows an unwillingness to speak of any but known countries ; and he evidently had no distinct conception of the form of the globe. He will not even allow, with the majority of the geo- graphers who had gone before him, that the earth was entirely surrounded by the sea. For, says he, if such were the case, where should we find Paradise, which 6 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WOULD the holy Scripture describes as lying in the east. He therefore states as his opinion, founded on the authority of St. Athanasius, that beyond India lay a trackless desert of unknown extent, which no mortal was permitted to pass, beyond which lay Paradise, forming the extreme east. From Paradise, as he believed, sprang the four rivers — Geon, Physon, Tigris, and Euphrates ; and he could only be induced to accord any credit to the "gentile" philosophers who believed that the two latter rivers had their rise in the mountains of Armenia, on the supposition that they had come thither from Paradise by an invisible course. He believed that the ocean which washed the extremities of the earth with its waves was bounded at an unknown distance by lofty mountains, behind which the sun dropped at night as into a pit, passing under the earth to rise next morning in the east. Barbarisms like these had already been introduced into science in the east by the Christian ascetics. An Egyptian monk of the earlier part of the sixth cen- tury, named Cosmas, and termed, from the presumed fact of his having travelled into India, Cosmas Indi- copleustes, has left us a treatise on geography, which he designates by the title of The Christian Topogra- phy of the World, intimating thereby that it was the only system which conformed with the notions of orthodox Christianity- A system which he combats as most heretical and absurd, was that which gave to the earth the form of a globe, and which had been held by the " heathen " philosophers. He describes it as a vast oblong plain, surrounded by an immense wall which supported the blue vault of the firmament. He believed, like the geographer of Pavenna, that the sun set behind a great mountain. If we over- look the gross errors of his system, the treatise of PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 7 Cosmas gives us some slight glimpses of the condi- tion of countries which were soon afterwards lost sight of by the Christian world for several centuries. The treatise of the geographer of Ravenna seems to have been totally lost to the world until the manu- script was discovered and printed in the seventeenth century ; and the cosmography of Ethicus, although evidently much read, appears to have had very little influence upon geographical science in succeeding ages. For we find that the books on this subject down to the twelfth century are almost all founded on Pliny, Solinus, and Isidore. Even at the end of the tenth century, the text-book on geography in Eng- land was the metrical Periegesis of Priscian, a trans- lation from the Greek Periegesis of Dionysius. It is surprising how little improvement had at this time been made in geographical science as taught in the schools, when we consider the many distant voy- ages which had been made by Anglo-Saxons in search of knowledge, and the eagerness with which accounts of distant lands had been grasped at. With the seventh century our forefathers began to pay frequent visits to the east, and several narratives of travels have been preserved. In the year 825, an Irish monk in France, named Dicuil, published a treatise on geo- graphy, under the title of De Mensura Orbis (Of the Measure of the World), which was still based on Pliny, Solinus, Orosius, Isidore, and Priscian; but Dicuil has inserted in it original information, gathered on the one hand from a traveller who had visited Syria and Egypt a little before the year 767 ; and on the other hand, from some clerks who had sailed among the northern islands of Scotland, and had even reached Thule or Iceland about the year 795. When king Alfred translated the historical work of Orosius, he 8 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD inserted into the prefatory description of the world an account of central and northern Europe as it then existed, and very exact original information relating to the coasts of Scandinavia, which he had obtained orally from two northern navigators, Ohthere and Wulfstan. The royal translator is also said to have sent out messengers to distant India, who returned with many curiosities; and who, if the relation be true, must have delivered to the king an interesting account, the loss of which is in the highest degree to be regretted. I look upon it that there was no im- possibility, or even great difficulty, in such a journey in the peculiar state of political relations, when the empire of the Arabs was at its highest point of gran- deur. Expeditions like these, we should naturally think, ought to have added to the knowledge pre- viously in existence ; yet ages afterwards we still find the popular system founded as before on the older Roman treatises, and even the Roman names pre- served at a time when they can only have existed in books. It is impossible now to say how far the teachers in the schools explained orally these ancient denominations and descriptions according to their modern names, and what instruction was there given on the modern state of things. In the earlier mediaeval schools, teaching appears to have been a mere lecture, in a great measure gram- matical, on one popular text-book, from which masters and scholars, from generation to genera- tion, ventured rarely, if ever, to depart. The com- mentary of Bridferth of Ramsey, on the scientific writings of Bede, represents this course as pursued in the monastic school at Ramsey in the tenth century. Bridferth was, however, a man rather in advance of his age, and we find him sometimes appeal- PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. V ing to experiment in his teaching. He was educated in some of those schools on the continent which were then paving the way for a more solid extension of learning and knowledge, which, towards the end of the eleventh century, received a sudden and extra- ordinary development, in the midst of which arose those remarkable institutions of the middle ages, the universities. The Christian scholars of the west were now no longer satisfied with what was to be derived from their old text-books, or with the ordinary routine of learning which had been so long persevered in ; what they could not find at home, they sought in distant lands, and among the Arabs of Spain and of Syria they found not only new elements, but they imbibed new principles of study, and new views as to its objects, which had a powerful effect on the pro- gress of science in future ages. The science of the Greeks, as the empire sank into intellectual imbecility, was received and cherished by the Arabs, and they in their turn, as the empire of the Koran began to totter, handed it over to another race, in whose hands it ultimately led to that grander development which it has taken in modern times. It was in the midst of that great intellectual blaze which distinguished the twelfth century, that the first decidedly new element was introduced into geo- graphical science in the west. The Arabs, like the barbarian conquerors of Western Europe, had derived their first principles of geographical knowledge from the treatises of the ancients ; but they adopted and preserved Ptolemy, and probably some of the other writers who were used by the Gothic " philosophers," and had been exchanged in the west for mere ele- mentary treatises. The Arabs, moreover, who had B 2 10 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OE THE WORLD. applied themselves to all the sciences with extra- ordinary ardour, were, by the great extent of their conquests, placed in a peculiarly advantageous position for extending and improving their knowledge in geo- graphy. They were, thus, far in advance of the Christians of the west ; who, from their intercourse with them, derived not only new knowledge, but a new energy in the pursuit of science, and above all, they adopted that practical skill in astronomical obser- vations, which soon dispelled the superstitious ignor- ance which had previously clogged their steps. The Anglo-Saxon scholars understood perfectly well that the earth was a globe. They considered it to be the centre of the firmament, which they ima- gined to be an immense concave surface, on which the stars were in some way or other attached. Two stars, the north polar star and the south polar star, directly opposite to each other, were the axles upon which the firmament turned its endless round. The Anglo-Saxon Manual of Astronomy , composed by Alfric, tells us that, " the firmament is always turn- ing round about us, under this earth and above, and there is an incalculable space between it and the earth. Four-and-twenty hours have passed, that is one day and one night, before it is once turned round, and all the stars which are fixed in it turn round with it. The earth stands in the centre, by God's power so fixed, that it never swerves either higher or lower than the almighty creator established it." The notion was, that all the continents and islands known to us as inhabited, belonged to one of five zones, that it was divided from another equally temperate zone in- habited by the antipodes, by a torrid zone, the heat of which rendered it impossible for human beings to pass from one temperate zone to the other. Each PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 11 temperate zone was bounded by a frigid zone, the cold of which rendered it equally uninhabitable and inaccessible with the central torrid zone. " Truly," says Alfric, " the sun's intense heat makes five parts in the world, which we call in Latin quinque zonas, that is, fiye girdles. One of the parts is in the centre, raging hot and uninhabitable on account of the sun's nearness, on which no earthly man dwells on account of the insupportable heat. Then there are on two sides of the heat two parts that are temperate, neither too hot nor too cold. On the north part dwell all mankind, under the broad circle which is called zodiacus. There are still two parts on two sides, a good deal to the southward and northward of the limits of this circuit, cold and uninhabitable, because the sun never comes to them, but stops on either side at the solstices." One of the popular Latin writers of this age com- pares the world to an egg, in which the shell repre- sents the firmament, — with the yolk, our earth, in the middle. There were also more popular views of science ; according to some of which it would appear as though the earth, while it was agreed that its shape was globular, was believed to be swimming in the ocean like an orange, the inhabited portion being that part of the surface which emerged from the water, while the sun dived into the ocean each even- ing, and emerged from it in the morning. An Eng- lish poem, of a later period (the thirteenth century) assures us that the — " Urthe is amidde the see a lute (little) bal and round." I have already observed that the geographer of Ravenna appears to have had maps before him when he compiled his book. We have, in fact, at nearly 12 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD all times, allusions to the existence of maps. In earlier times these maps were attempts to lay down the positions of countries according to longitudes and latitudes, as in those of Ptolemy, and probably in those used by the Gothic " philosophers," or by iti- nerary distances, as in the celebrated Peutingerian tables. The maps which belong more especially to the middle ages, are mere attempts of the teacher or scholar to represent pictorially to the eye the supposed facts of the science, combined with his notion of their relative position, and of what he supposed to be the outlines of continents and islands. One of the most ancient maps of the world alluded to by medieval writers, was that which was possessed by St. Gall, who, in the sixth century, founded the monastery which has ever since been known by his name. Charlemagne is said to have had three tables or plates of silver, on which were represented the world, and the cities of Eonie and Constantinople. But silver was a dangerous metal for the preservation of a monument of science; and, some years afterwards, the great emperor's grandson, Lothaire, being in want of money, broke up one of these tables in order to pay his mutinous troops. One of the earliest — perhaps the earliest — mediaeval map we now possess, is a very interesting one pre- served in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century, in the Cottonian library. It is of a square, or rather oblong square form, and, as it accompanies the text of the Periegesis of Priscian, and as it is far more correct in its general disposition than those of a later date, it is probable that it was formed on a much more ancient model. The names are generally ancient, but in the PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 13 western and northern parts of Europe and in Eng- land, the author has evidently intended to introduce improvements to suit the position of things at the time he wrote. In Armorica, for instance, he has placed the people, whom he calls in Saxon Su^S-brettas. In England, Wintonia, or Winchester — the capital of the Anglo-Saxon kings — stands equally prominent with London, and these are the only . two towns named. The cities represented in this map, by their magnitude, as the most eminent in the world, are Babylon, Jerusalem, Borne, Constantinople, Alex- andria, and Carthage. A small and rude Greek map, accompanying a manuscript of the Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, said to be of the ninth century, represents the earth in a similar elongated square form with that given to it in the Anglo-Saxon map. A belief had arisen among the ecclesiastical geo- graphers, based upon a literal interpretation of the allegorical language of Scripture, that the holy city of Jerusalem occupied the exact centre of the world. A centre rather naturally implied a circular circum- ference, and this is the form almost universally given to maps of the world from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. The monkish geographers also adopted the belief long before enunciated by the geo- grapher of Ravenna, that Paradise occupied the eastern extremity of Asia, and to hinder any mistake that might arise upon this subject, they take care to figure in that position in their maps, not only the garden and the tree, but Adam and Eve standing beside it. The forms and positions of the different parts of the world are much more distorted than in the Anglo-Saxon map. Five cities now hold pre- eminence — Babylon, Jerusalem, Troy, Home, and 14 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD Carthage. Since the commencement of the crusades, Constantinople and Alexandria had diminished in importance. Babylon, the oldest of cities, and the supposed site of the tower of Babel, — Jerusalem, the holy city, -par excellence, — Rome, the head of the Catholic world, were objects of universal reverence in the west. Troy had obtained an extraordinary cele- brity in the course of the twelfth century, not only from the circumstance of its history having become a popular subject of romance, but because, in the eth- nological fables of that age, founded upon Virgil, it was looked upon as the point from whence had sprung the different peoples by whom western Europe was inhabited ; and the map-makers seem entirely to have forgotten that the warlike city (as they called it) had long since ceased to exist. It is not so easy to account for the continued celebrity of Carthage. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the maps — which are all of this round form, and follow one or two types, chiefly distinguished by the form given to the Mediterranean sea, — are not uncommon in manu- scripts. They are all covered with inscriptions, and with figures of animals and of towns, which make them veritable treatises on geography. A map of the world, in a manuscript of the thirteenth century, in the British Museum, contains a curious note, in which the author refers to four maps which were then looked upon in England as being of chief authority. These were, the map of Robert de Melkeleia, that of the abbey of Waltham, that in the king's chamber at Westminster, and that of Matthew Paris. The map to which more especially I have now to call attention, is, as far as I can judge from the fac- simile, of the earlier half of the thirteenth century, PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 15 and is certainly one of the most remarkable monu- ments of this kind now in existence. Its history is obscure ; it is preserved in Hereford Cathedral, and I understand that it was discovered under the floor of one of the chapels of that edifice. I have not been able to meet with the slightest traces of the person by whose orders it was made, who has caused himself to be represented in one corner as a knight on horseback attended by his page and his greyhound, and who has commemorated himself under the name of Richard of Haldhwham and LafFord : on the other side we read the following Anglo-Norman rhymes : — " Tuz ki cest estorie ont, Ou oyront, ou luront, ou veront, Prient a Jhesu en deyte, De Richard de Haldingham e de L afford eyt pite, Ki l'at fet e compasse, Ke joie en eel li seit done." This large map is founded on the popular cosmo- graphical treatises of the time, which generally com- mence with stating that Augustus Csesar sent out three philosophers to measure and survey the three divisions of the world, and that all geographical know- ledge was the result of their observations. The ground-work of this fable is found in the too literal interpretation of a passage of the Gospel of St. Luke: in the map before us, the philosophers are named Nichodoxus, Theodotus, and Policlitus ; and the em- peror is delivering to them their written orders, con- firmed by a very handsome mediaeval seal. The world is here represented as round, surrounded by the ocean. At the top of the map, which represents the east, we see Paradise, with the tree, and the 16 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD figures of our first parents. Above is a large group representing the day of judgment, with the Virgin Mary interceding for those who have been faithful to her worship. The map is chiefly filled with long in- scriptions, comprising passages taken from Solinus, Isidore, &c, with figures of towns, and with draw- ings of the monstrous animals and peoples with which the mediaeval cosmographers peopled distant parts of the world. Many of the figures on this map manifest a remarkable degree of simplicity on the part of the author; such, for example, as the figure of Lot's wife changed into a statue of salt ; the labyrinth of Crete ; the columns of Hercules ; and the singular representations of Scylla and Charybdis. The four great cities are made especially prominent : Jerusalem is very distinctly figured as the centre of the world ; Babylon has its famous tower : Rome, the capital of the world, bears the inscription, — Roma caput mundi tenet orbis frena rotundi ; and Troy is described as Troja civitas bellicosissima. It will be seen at once that nearly the whole of this remarkable map is founded upon the more com- mon and older element of mediaeval geographical science, — that derived from the popular Roman writers. It was some time before much of the other two elements — the knowledge derived from the Ara- bians, and the result of mediaeval voyages of dis- covery, — found its way into monuments of this des- cription. The only particulars I have observed in the map which appear to be derived from the Arabs, are the mekesus civitas on the confines of Egypt and Arabia, which is perhaps Mecca, and Samarcand, which is here mentioned. On the western coast of PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 17 Africa, the Canary Islands are indicated, which our geographer follows Pliny in supposing were inhabited by large dogs (canes), from which he derives the name. When we turn our eyes to the eastern part of the Hereford map, we cannot help being struck with the confused form given to the whole of Asia. This might certainly have been corrected by the know- ledge which must then have been derived from the frequent communications with the Arabs. As that knowledge increased, the limits of this part of the world were gradually carried further and further, until at length its figure was traced more correctly ; but it was long before people were disabused of the idea that Paradise occupied, as it does in our map, the extremity of the eastern continent. Perhaps many an adventurous monk wandered over the inter- vening lands in the hope of reaching this final object of his worldly pilgrimage, who might have told an interesting story of his adventures. They related in the monasteries of the east an old legend of a holy man who traversed Central Asia to the very precincts of Paradise, which he was not allowed to enter ; and they told how he met with pious hermits in the soli- tudes of the intervening countries. If we read the travels of the Arabian Ebn Batuta, we shall find that he also saw hermits in the interior of Asia, but they were the religious fanatics of India, and not Chris^ tians. This coincidence, however, would lead us to believe that there was some foundation for the monkish legend to which I have alluded. The great eagerness in the west for information relating to the interior of Asia was first roused by the fearful intelligence of the devastating irruption of the Tartars into Europe under Ghengis Khan, at 18 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD the beginning of the thirteenth century. The dismay which this intelligence caused, even in England, can now with difficulty be imagined; and there were many who supposed that it was the bursting forth of the hordes of Gog and Magog, the precursors of the end of the world. Others took them for a race of demons. In this uncertainty, several monks were successively sent on pretended embassies to Ghengis Khan, but really with the object of gaining informa- tion as to the character of the people who followed his standard, and as to the countries from which they came. Some of these missionaries were carried into the in- terior of Asia as far as Thibet and the borders of China, and obtained information which tended ma- terially to alter the previously-existing geographical notions relating to that part of the world. The re- lations published by two of these ambassadors, Jean du Plan de Carpin and Guillaume de Rubruquis, both Frenchmen, are full of the most interesting details, and will bear a comparison with the works of travellers of a much later date. The free cities of Italy had now begun to show their pre-eminence in navigation, and displayed an extra- ordinary spirit of commercial enterprise. In the midst of the terrors excited by the conquests of the Tartars, Italian merchants were venturing even into the countries they were ravaging to seek a mart for their wares. It was with this view that the well-known Marco Polo of Venice, whose father and uncle had twenty years before travelled as far as Bokhara, accom- panied them in 1271 into the interior of Asia, and suc- ceeded in reaching China, where they gained the favour of the emperor and remained seventeen years. They returned slowly by way of Persia, and at last reached PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 19 Venice in safety after an absence of twenty-four years. By the relation afterwards published by Marco Polo, the mystery which had so long enveloped the geography of Asia was entirely dispelled. Their success produced a number of imitators, and many attempts were made to reach the interior of Asia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of the most remarkable of these travellers was our countryman, sir John Maundeville, who, however, evidently never visited one quarter of the localities he describes, and who has disfigured his narrative with a number of marvellous stories, totally unworthy of credit, either exaggerated misrepresentations of what he had learnt from hearsay, or a mere repetition of the old fables of Solinus and Isidore, which ought now to have been expunged from the maps. There is one passage in the relation of sir John Maundeville which deserves our notice, as proving that the form of the earth was still, in the fourteenth century, a matter of discussion. In the seventeenth chapter of his Voiage and Travaile, Maundeville speaks of the " evylle customs used in the yle of Lamary," and adds : — " In that lond, ne in many othere beyonde that, no man may see the sterre transmontane, that is clept the sterre of the see, that is unmevable, and that is toward the northe, that we clepen the lode sterre. But men seen another sterre, the contrarie to him, thatjs toward the southe, that is clept antartyk. And right as the schipmen taken here avys here and governe hem be the lode sterre, right so don schip- men beyonde tho parties be the sterre of the southe, the whiche sterre apperethe not to us. And this sterre that is toward the northe, that wee clepen the 20 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD lode sterre, ne apperethe not to hem. For whiche cause, men may wel perceyve that the lond and the see ben of rownde schapp and forme. For the partie of the firmament schewethe in o contree, that schew- ethe not in another contree. And men may well preven be experience and sotyle compassement of wytt, that gif a man fond passages be schippes, that wolde go to serchen the world, men myghte go be schippe alle aboute the world, and aboven and benethen." After giving, in support of his views, a series of astronomical observations he professes to have made with the astrolabe in different countries through which he had passed, Maundeville continues : — " And also I have seen the 3 parties of alle the roundnesse of the firmament, and more yit 5 degrees and an half. Be the whiche I seye you certeynly, that men may envirowne alle the erthe of alle the world, as wel undre as aboven, and turnen agen to his contree, that hadde companye and schippynge and conduyt ; and alle weyes he scholde fynde men, londes, and yles, als wel as in this contree. For yee wyten welle, that thei that ben toward the antartyk, thei ben streghte feet agen feet of hem that dwellen undre the transmontane ; als wel as wee and thei that dwellyn under us, ben feet agenst feet. For alle the parties of see and of lond han here appositees, habi- tables or trepassables, and thei of this half and beyond half." And in further confirmation, he repeats the follow- ing curious story, which is peculiarly interesting, as showing the popular notions which were then gradually spreading themselves abroad : — " And therfore hathe it befallen many tymes of o PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 21 thing that I have herd cownted, whan I was yong, how a worthi man departed somtyine from oure con- trees for to go serche the world. And so he passed Ynde, and the yles beyonde Ynde, where ben mo than 5000 yles : and so longe he wente be see and lond, and so enviround the world be many seysons, that he fond an yle, where he herde speke his owne langage, callynge on oxen in the plowghe suche wordes as men speken to bestes in his owne contree ; whereof he hadde gret mervayle, for he knewe not how it myghte be. But I seye, that he had gon so longe, be londe and be see, that he had envyround alle the erthe, that he was comen agen envirounynge, that is to seye, goynge aboute, unto his owne marches, gif he wolde have passed forthe, til he had founden his contree and his owne knouleche. But he turned agen from thens, from whens he was come fro ; and so he loste moche peynefulle labour, as him self seyde, a gret while aftre, that he was comen horn. For it befelle aftre that he wente into Norweye ; and there tempest of the see toke him ; and he arry ved in an yle ; and whan he was in that yle, he knew wel that it was the yle where he had herd speke his owne lan- gage before, and the callynge of the oxen at the plowghe : and that was possible thinge." The discoveries in the east, as we have seen, took first a surpassing importance from accidental circum- stances. Multitudes of minor discoveries, known only within a small circle of persons, or committed to a single manuscript which was forgotten till it perished, never found a permanent place in science. It was only after the invention of printing, when copies of books were so easily multiplied, that facts once obtained became available to every scholar, and 22 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD thus contributed with certainty to the general ad- vance of knowledge. In the course of our researches into mediaeval documents, we are continually making the discovery that some of what are looked upon, with least hesitation, as the inventions of modern science were known to the scholars at that period, when science flourished in so extraordinary a manner in the mediaeval universities. Of these, one of the most remarkable instances is the mariner's compass, which is now known to have been in common use in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries among the English and French navigators, although, it is true, in rather a rude form. Two poems of the thirteenth century give very curious descriptions of the compass as then used. The Bible Guiot de Provins, a satire on the vices of the age, wishes that the pope were as safe a guide to Chris- tians as the polar star is to mariners, and adds : — " Un art font qui mentir ne puet " They make a contrivance which cannot lie Par la vertu de la maniete : By the virtue of the magnet : Une pierre laide et brunete, An ugly and brownish stone, Ou li fers volentiers se joint, To which iron spontaneously joins itself, Ont ; si esgardent le droit point. They have ; and they observe where it points, Puis c'une aguile i ont touchie, After they have caused a needle to touch it, Et en un festu 1'ont couchie, And placed this in a rush, [more. En l'eve le metent sanz plus, They put it in the water without anything Et li festuz la tient desus; And the rush keeps it on the surface ; Puis se torne la pointe toute Then its point turns direct Contre l'estoile si sanz doute, Towards the star with such certainty, Que ja nul horn n'en doutera, That no man will ever have any doubt of it, Ne ja por rien ne fausera. Nor will it ever for anything go false. Qant la mers est obscure et brune, When the sea is dark and hazy, Con ne voit estoile ne lune, That they can neither see star nor moon, Dont font a l'aguille alumer, Then they place a light by the needle. Puis n'ont il garde d'esgarer : After which they have no fear of going Contre l'estoile va la pointe, Towards the star goes the point, [wrong : Por ce sont li marinier cointe Whereby the mariners have the skill De la droite voie tenir. To keep the right way. C'est une ars qui ne puet faillir." It is an art which cannot fail." In a love song, of nearly the same date, the lover compares his mistress to the polar star, to which he, the magnet, ever points ; and describes in a similar manner how the voyagers by sea construct the com- PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 23 pass by which they discover the position of the polar star in dark or cloudy weather : — " Li marinier qui vont en Frise, En Gresse, en Acre, ou en Venisse, Sevent par li toute la voie." Similar descriptions of the use of the magnetic needle are found in the writings of Brunetto Latini, the preceptor of the poet Dante, which represent the invention, it is true, in a very primitive form ; but since the above was written, I have discovered in an earlier writer, Alexander Neckam, descriptions of the mariner's compass much more definite, and making us acquainted with the instrument in a more perfect form. The first of these descriptions is contained in the work of this author entitled De Utensilibus, compiled probably before the year 1187, and intended as a vocabulary of Latin words, by describing the various objects on which they were employed. In speaking of the things necessary on shipboard, Neckam says, the ship must also have a " needle placed on a pivot, which will turn about until the point is directed towards the north, and thus the navigators will know how to direct their course when the polar star is con- cealed by the state of the atmosphere, though this star never disappears under the horizon on account of the smallness of the circle it describes."* In an- other work by the same author, his treatise DeNaturis * Qui ergo munitam vult habere naveni .... habeat etiani acum jaculo superpositam ; rotabitur enini et circumvolvetur donee cuspis acus respiciat septentrionem, sicque comprehen- dent quo tendere debeant nautse cum cynosura latet in aeris turbatione, quamvis ea occasum nunquam teneat propter cir- culi brevitatem. 24 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WORLD Rerum, the mariner's compass is again described in the following terms : — " The navigators who pass the seas, when the light of the snn is concealed by clouds, or when the world is involved in the shades of night, and they know not to what point of the horizon their ship points, consult the needle or magnet, which moves about in a circle, until, when it becomes motion- less, its point is directed towards the north."* I have printed these curious notices in the " Volume of Vo- cabularies," published at the expense of Mr. Mayer, of Liverpool; but I give them in the notes below with the very ingenious emendations of the distin- guished geographer, my friend Monsieur D'Avezac, the president of the Geographical Society of Paris, which he has sucro-ested in a memoir in the transactions of that society. If M. D'Avezac's readings should not prove to be exactly those of Alexander Neckam's original text, I am satisfied that they give the exact sense of passages which were rather obscure in the text furnished by the manuscript. It is quite evi- dent from them that the mariner's compass, as now used, was well known in the twelfth century, and M. D'Avezac has shown good reasons for believing that all that was done by Flavio Gioia, the reputed inventor of the mariner's compass in the fifteenth century, was to place the needle and its pivot in a closed box, named in Italian bossolo, or bussolo, be- cause it was made of box-wood (bosso), and hence the * Nautae etiam mare legentes, cum beneficium claritatis solis in tempore nubilo non sentiunt, aut etiam cum caligine noctur- narum tenebrarum mundus obvolvitur, et ignorant in quern mundi cardinem prora tendat, acum sive magnetem inspiciunt, qua? circulariter circumvolvitur usque dum, ejus motu cessante, cuspis ipsius septentrionalem plagam respiciat. PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 25 Italian name bussolo, and the French boussole, were eventually given to the whole instrument. With the certainty that the mariner's compass was known to the mediaeval navigators, we have no diffi- culty in comprehending how they often ventured upon distant voyages, and even at times boldly threw themselves out upon the ocean in search of adven- tures and discoveries. But here, deeply implanted superstitions and prejudices of a variety of kinds came to place a bar to further discoveries, until they were broken down by some lucky accident, or by the superior intelligence of some extraordinary individual. The ancients supposed that the sea to the north of Britain was not navigable, on account of the rigour of the climate, which, as they imagined, rendered the water thick and stiff. The Arabs had precisely the same notion with respect to the sea of the torrid zone, the moisture of which they believed was so much sucked by the heat of the sun, that the water was thickened so as to be impassable by ships. This belief for a long time presented an insurmount- able check to the progress of discovery along the coast of Africa, until it was contradicted by the accidental experience of ships which were carried by stress of weather beyond the supposed limit, or by the bold- ness of individual enterprise. It is probable that many adventurers, who have left no memorial of their actions, led the way to the more important dis- coveries of the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. If we turn our eyes towards the west, we shall see that the middle ages have also left us a considerable number of mysterious traditions of voyages, which would seem to indicate attempts at least to explore the ocean in the direction of America. The Arabian II. c 26 ON THE ANCIENT MAP OF THE WOKLD navigators of Portugal are said to have sailed across the Atlantic in the middle of the twelfth century. The most remarkable of the Christian traditions on this subject is the marvellous legend of St. B randan, who, after wandering on the western seas for seven years, is said at length to have reached Paradise. Indeed, during the middle ages, all those who were initiated in science knew well that the earth was a sphere; and the idea of going to Paradise by sea, instead of going thither by land, must have struck many persons. We are even told that the sailors of Columbus, as they approached the coasts of Ame- rica, imagined for a time that they had reached the precincts of the terrestrial Paradise. But the bar- rier raised by superstition against proceeding in this direction, was stronger even than that which limited the progress of the ancient navigators to the south. It was easy to talk of science and theory, but when it was the moment to put this into practice, popular credulity often gained the mastery over science which was still uncertain; and in the particular instance now alluded to, every one was more or less awed by the mysterious fear, that if they advanced in that direction in search of Paradise, it was not impossible that midway they might fall into hell ! — for they were not sure that at a certain distance in the west there was not a gulf in the sea which conducted to the infernal regions. In an early Anglo-Saxon tract, intended to convey abstruse information in the form of dialogue, but filled with the popular legends of the age, to the question, " Tell me why is the sun so red in the evening ?" the answer is, " Because it looketh down upon hell." Moreover, although it was generally understood PRESERVED IN HEREFORD CATHEDRAL. 27 that the earth was spherical, there were various po- pular notions as to the manner in which it was sus- pended, and to the form and position of the ocean. Some seemed to think that it was like an egg in an egg-cup, the upper portion of which was alone ex- posed ; others thought, as I have already stated, that it was like an orange swimming in the sea. Some, unacquainted with the nature of gravitation, sup- posed that after you had passed a certain limit, you were in danger of dropping oif from the earth's sur- face. However, as early as the fourteenth century, such errors appear to have been gradually disappear- ing; and stories and conjectures, like those which I have quoted from Sir John Maundeville, were the real precursors of the discovery of America. XIV. ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. THINK few will deny that our attention could hardly be called to a more interest- ing or more important subject than that of the language we speak. Language is in a manner the index of our existence, it is intimately connected with all our domestic relations as well as with our relations to other peoples, and the history of our own language is specially to us that of ourselves as a race of mankind. We have reason, therefore, to be surprised that it is a subject with which people in general are little acquainted, and that it has hitherto been taught so imperfectly and so incorrectly in our ordinary course of education ; and this I am sure will be accepted as my excuse for taking it for my subject on the present occasion. Some fifteen centuries ago, a great portion of Europe was absorbed in the vast empire of Rome, which included this island, with the exception of the wild districts of the extreme north, and which on the continent had a varying frontier extending from the Rhine to the Danube. With few exceptions, such as those of the Armoricans and the Aquitanians (re- HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 29 presented by the modern population of Britany and the Basque countries) and that of Greece, Rome had imposed her own language upon the conquered provinces, and at the time of which I am speaking, the population of as much of western Europe as formed part of the empire, spoke generally the Latin tongue. I believe that this was strictly the case with the Roman province of Britain, and that nearly four hundred years of uninterrupted occupation, with a current of recruits of all sorts to the colonists, perhaps in proportion more continual even than that in modern times of the United States of America, had entirely effaced the primitive character of its population. The Celtic race, driven everywhere before the civilization of Rome or the hostility of the Teutons, had found its last refuge to the West in Ireland, and I am inclined to think that we must look to the Irish language as the real representative of the Celtic dialects which were spoken in Britain before its occupation by the Romans. It appears to me most probable that the population of the North of Scotland was Teutonic — German or Scandinavian. On the Continent, the vast sweep of territory to the north of the Roman frontier, in nearly its whole extent, was occupied by the great Teutonic race, in its various divisions of High German, in which the Goths were included, Low German, occupying the countries in the west up to the Danish peninsula, and Scandinavian, which included the Danes and the Swedes, the Norwegians, and North-western islanders — in fact, the Northmen. It is no part of my plan to enter further into the divisions of the Teutonic race on the Continent, or into their relations with the empire. You all know 30 ON THE HISTOEY OF THE that the Teutons eventually overrun and conquered the Roman provinces, and that three distinct tribes of the Low Germans, — the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, — made themselves masters of Britain. The establishment of the Teutons in the Roman provinces brought with it a change of language, as well as of manners and political feelings, on one part or the other, according to a variety of circumstances into which I will not now enter. On the Continent, over nearly the whole extent of the western empire, the modern languages are derived from the Latin, and were known during the whole period of the middle ages by the name of Roman. In England the Teutonic language completely superseded the Latin, for several causes, of which one was no doubt the circumstance, that for a long period previous to the final breaking up of the western empire, the population of Britain had been continually and largely increased by the immigration of German settlers, so that the German spirit was far more powerful than the Roman. The notion will naturally suggest itself to you, that, as three different Teutonic peoples conquered the island of Britain, they must have imported into it three languages instead of one. This notion, how- ever, is only correct in a certain sense; for the languages talked by the different German tribes, or states, had not at that time so far diverged in form as to hinder them from easily intermixing and coalesc- ing. The different branches of the Low Germans could not only understand one another with perfect ease, but they could probably intercommunicate with their next neighbours, either of the High German tongue or of the Scandinavian, with at least as little ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 31 difficulty as at the present day a Lancashire peasant would discourse with a Yorkshireman. In fact, what are now distinct languages were then repre- sented only by cognate dialects. There can be no doubt that there was a strong difference of dialect, from the earliest period of their settlement in this island, between the languages spoken by the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, and these divisions were the foundations of the great classes of the modern dialects of England. The Jutes, represented chiefly by the kingdom of Kent, were the least numerous of the three Teutonic peoples of Britain, and although, probably from their position, they had at an early period attained to a great degree of commercial pros- perity, riches, and power, they exercised no permanent influence, either political or much less literary, on the great Anglo-Saxon confederacy. It was the Angles, who were numerically by far the most powerful of the Teutonic settlers, who first took the lead in in- telligence and in literature. The earliest literary productions of the Anglo-Saxons, and the oldest Anglo-Saxon traditions known, appear to belong chiefly to the family of the Angles, and their influence over the rest was so great, that not only did these accept from them the general title of Englisc, but even the nations of the continent who had preserved the Roman language, generally agreed in giving to the Teutonic population of Britain the name of Angli, Thus we derive from this one branch of the triple composition of our race the national name of which we are proud, that of Englishmen, and it is from them that our language was called English. Neverthe- less, the Anglian division of the race fell in the course of the eighth century under the superior influence of 32 ON THE HISTOKY OF THE the Saxons, and Wessex, or the kingdom of the West-Saxons, not only gave us finally our line of kings, but furnished us with the model of our language and literature. The written English lan- guage of the present day is founded upon that dialect in which king Alfred wrote, and which held in Saxon England somewhat the same position as the Attic dialect in ancient Greece. With this change in the predominance of race, the term Saxon came into more frequent use to designate the Teutonic popula- tion of this island, and, as there continued to be Saxons on the Continent as well as in England, it has become the practice to call our own ancestors, by way of distinction, and not as indicating an amalga- mation of race, the Anglo-Saxons, that is, the Saxons of England. Yet so permanent are early ethnological principles, that though the Saxon dynasty, the Saxon dialect, and the Saxon laws, became those of the whole Anglo-Saxon people, the older and particular designation has outlived all changes in the names we now possess of Englishmen, the English language, and England. The Anglo-Saxon language — under which appella- tion we now include the language of the Teutonic settlers in Britain in its three great divisions — was one hardly less complicated in its grammatical forms and inflections, when first introduced into this island, than that of ancient Greece. But, at the earliest period at which we know it, the Anglo-Saxon language was already undergoing a degradation from its primi- tive forms and all the other changes to which lan- guages in general are subject. At the end of the Saxon period much of the language had already become obsolete. In the first place, it was very ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 33 copious in words, and one word to express a particu- lar idea was continually going out of fashion to give place to another. In the second* place, a very im- portant portion of the language in the earlier stage of its history, that of poetry, had become obsolete in the mass. The language of poetry in Anglo-Saxon was originally distinguished, not only by its peculiar phraseology, but by the use of a class of words which were rarely met with in the ordinary language of life, and which evidently belonged to the minstrel class, and to what we may call the heroic age. The writers of poetry at a later period seem to have lost the command of this language, and their verses, though still possessing the metrical forms, had become in other respects, of course with some exceptions, remarkably prosaic. I doubt whether people in general, at the close of the Anglo-Saxon period, understood the older language of poetry, and very few of its words were carried forward into semi- Saxon or preserved in later English. I am one of those who do not believe in the exist- ence of a Celtic element in the English language.* * It must not be forgotten that the Teutonic and Celtic languages are, after all, • only two branches from the same original stock, and we very naturally expect to find a great number of roots common to both, and similar forms of words presenting themselves with similar meanings, without any reason for supposing that the one language borrowed them from the other. Moreover, I am perfectly satisfied that the Welsh language, as we know it, contains a considerable number of words which have been taken directly, not only from Anglo- Saxon, or English, but from Anglo-Norman also, and the former perhaps, only came into the Welsh language since the Norman Conquest. These two circumstances seem to me quite sufficient to account for the verbal coincidences pointed out in a paper by the Rev. J. Davies, recently published by the Philo- c 2 34 ON THE HISTORY OF THE I have no doubt that the Anglo-Saxons found in this island a people talking Latin, and if any portion of the population really continued to use the Celtic tongue, it must have been a small and unimportant class, who are not likely to have exercised any in- fluence on the language of the new conquerors. The evidences of this are numerous, and, to me at least, very satisfactory, but they do not form a part of our subject upon which I can dwell at present. The German race had a term for those who were of a different race from themselves, which was represented in Anglo-Saxon by the noun wealh, a foreigner, and by the adjective wodisc or wylisc, foreign, but which, as the Romans were the only race quite different from their own with which they had much acquaint- ance, they applied especially and almost solely to people speaking the Latin tongue. During the middle ages, the term Welsh, in the German lan- guages of the Continent, meant especially French, but was applied also to other neo-Latin dialects ; in German of the present day the same word (walscli) is applied peculiarly to the language and people of Italy. It was no doubt for the same reason, namely, that they were a people speaking Latin, that the Anglo-Saxons applied this word to the population they found in Britain, and it probably became ex- tended to what we now call Wales and the Welsh, logical Society, as far as those coincidences are real. We are not unacquainted with the history of the Anglo-Saxons in this country, and I believe that that history is quite contrary to the notion that at the time of the Norman Conquest there was any such mixture of the Celtic race with the Teutonic population as could have exercised any influence either on the language or on the character of the people. ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 35 merely because, when they subsequently became acquainted with them, the Anglo-Saxons confounded the inhabitants of that district with the other old in- habitants of South Britain. You must bear in mind, in considering this question, that our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language is after all imperfect, for our nomenclature is made up from written documents of a partial description, and there no doubt existed a great number of words in the Anglo-Saxon language which are now entirely lost. No doubt many words now found in the English language, and especially in the provincial dialects, of which the origin is now unknown, had their originals in pure Anglo- Saxon. If I object to the notion of a Celtic element in our language, I object no less to that of a mixture with any other Teutonic dialect. Our older philologists believed in a modification of the Anglo-Saxon during a certain period which they termed Dano- Saxon, supposing that they traced in it the marks of Danish influence ; but this theory has been entirely aban- doned by the best of our modern scholars, and there certainly are no proofs that such an influence ever existed.* The language which our forefathers spoke in the middle of the eleventh century was the same Low German dialect which they had brought with them into the island, with the mere changes which any language would undergo in itself during the * Of course I do not deny that our local dialects, in the parts occupied by them, may have derived some words from the Danes, but the pure Anglo-Saxon language was certainly not influenced by them. It has been the fashion of late years to ascribe much more to the Danes than I believe them to have any claim to. This, however, is a question the discussion of which would take us too far away from the present subject. 36 ON THE HISTORY OF THE transmission, under the same circumstances, through several centuries. At the period just mentioned, a great political event, the Norman conquest, brought into our island a new language, one of those which had grown out of the language of the Koman empire, French, as it was then talked and written in Normandy; and Anglo-Norman, as this neo-Latin dialect is usually termed, continued during two centuries from that time to be exclusively the language of the aristocracy of England. There were thus two entirely distinct languages, bearing no resemblance to each other, co- existent in different classes of the same nation, for we must not suppose that, for a moment, the Anglo- Saxon, or, as we must henceforward call it, the Eng- lish tongue, was abandoned or fell into disuse. It was long, indeed, an uncontradicted statement of our historians, that William the Conqueror made a deli- berate attempt to suppress the use of the Anglo- Saxon tongue in his new kingdom, and Ingulph, or rather probably the pretender who assumed his name, asserts that it was banished from schools, and that the French or Anglo-Norman was used in its place in teaching children the rudiments of Latin grammar. The former of these statements no longer receives any credit, and the latter is disproved by an abun- dance of positive evidence. We cannot, indeed, doubt that the Anglo-Saxon grammar of the Latin language by Alfric continued to be used in the Eng- lish schools until late in the twelfth century. Hicks, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, had in his possession a manuscript of Alfric's grammar, with an interlinear gloss of some of the Saxon words in Anglo-Norman, and from the examples he gives we may probably ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 37 ascribe them to the first half of the twelfth century. This would seem to show that even a foreigner, employed as a teacher in England, had to use the Anglo-Saxon Latin grammar in his school, although his own knowledge of Anglo-Saxon was so imperfect that he was obliged to add a translation of the Anglo- Saxon words into Anglo-Norman for his own use. Further than this, Sir Thomas Phillipps found among the archives of Worcester cathedral some leaves of a copy of Alfric's grammar, written in the degraded form of the Anglo-Saxon language which prevailed in the middle and latter half of the twelfth century. The Anglo-Saxon language had, indeed, at this time under- gone considerable degradation from the form it pre- sented in the eleventh century. It was rapidly losing its grammatical inflections, and in its words broad sounds were exchanged for softer and quicker ones. Thus the final a was constantly exchanged for e, and the prefix ge was everywhere turned into y or i. For cempa, a champion, they said kempe ; for gemetung, a meeting, they said imeting ; and for gerefa, a prefect, they would say ireve. With this change, however, there was no considerable introduction of Norman words. It was pure Anglo-Saxon as to the substance, but degraded in its forms. Philologists have given to the language in this state of transition the name of semi- Saxon. We can trace its progress in several literary monuments of importance. The latter years of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued to 1145, exhibit the language as already breaking very fast ; in the metrical chronicle of Layamon, and in the metrical harmony of the gospels called the Ormulum, which were both probably written in the closing years of the twelfth century, the Anglo-Saxon 38 ON THE HISTORY OF THE grammatical forms have undergone an entire change, which is still more complete in the semi- Saxon text of the Regulce Inclusarum, or rule of nuns, in the earlier half of the thirteenth century. It is evident from the character of these, and other literary remains of less importance, that the use of the English lan- guage, during the twelfth and first half of the thir- teenth centuries, was by no means confined to the lower classes of society, but it prevailed generally among the middle and educated classes, and among the clergy and in the monastic houses, at least in those devoted to females. It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, when the national spirit of the English people showed itself in the great popular struggle under Simon de Montfort, that the English language, which had now emerged from that transition state under which it has been known as semi- Saxon, at length asserted what we may call its political rights, and reappeared in the court. The political songs, and other writ- ings, composed during the civil strife known as the barons' wars, show us not only two, but three lan- guages, co-existing in this country at the same time. These were, the English, the Anglo-Norman, (or, as it was usually called at the time, the French,) and the Latin, of which we need not take the latter into consideration, as it belonged almost exclusively to the clergy. The long continued existence of what we call the Anglo-Norman language in this country was not a mere accident, but it was a consequence of the poli- tical condition of Europe. The feudal aristocracy was united throughout the whole extent of feudalism, by a community of interests as well as feelings, to ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 39 such a degree, that the nobles of one country felt a closer relationship with those of another than with the unaristocratic classes of their own countries, or even with their own sovereign. This was so much the case that, until the spirit of feudal society began to decline, it was no uncommon thing for a baron to hold fiefs in the dominions of several different sove- reigns, and to form his alliances sometimes with the barons of one of these countries, and sometimes with those of another. A common language was, therefore, a necessary element in the system ; and as feudalism had originated in France, and took its greatest deve- lopment there, French became its universal language. It was, then, not only as the language of the Normans, but as that peculiarly of the feudal aristocracy in general, that French was introduced into England under William the Conqueror, and it was in that character that it continued to be the language of the aristocracy ofEngland until feudalism itself was broken down. It had ceased, however, to be their exclusive language in the thirteenth century. In the latter years of that century, a tract or treatise was written in French or Anglo-Norman verse, forming a sort of vocabulary of that language, and designed expressly for the purpose of teaching it to children. The num- ber of copies of this tract still preserved in MS. show that it was a popular elementary book, and that it was in extensive use. The compiler was Walter de Bibblesworth, a man known elsewhere as a writer of French verse and apparently belonging himself to the aristocratic class ; he was a friend of the great states- man of the reign of Edward I, Henry de Lacy earl of Lincoln and Salisbury, and compiled the treatise we are speaking of at the request of the lady Dionysia 40 ON THE HISTORY OF THE de Monchensey. Thus all the relations of the author and of his book were of an aristocratic character. Now Walter de Bibblesworth states his object to be to instruct the rising generation in the proper use of the words of the French language, and especially in the correct application of the genders, and the French words are explained in English, implying thus that the learner was acquainted with the English language before he began to learn French. We thus ascertain the very important fact that, before the end of the thirteenth century, the children of the aristocracy of England learned English before they were instructed in any other language, or, in other words, that Eng- lish had become their mother tongue. * Although, therefore, French was no doubt still looked upon as the peculiar language of the aristo- cracy, a new modification had taken place in the mutual position of the two languages, for, instead of their mere co-existence in the same country, but in two different classes or great divisions of society, we have them now co-existent in the same class. This change marked what may be considered as the birth of modern English literature. The English language now began among the aristocracy and at court to be adopted as that of our national poetry and prose, and to step into the place which had been usurped almost * This very curious monument of the educational system of the middle ages is printed in a volume of mediaeval vocabularies, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-JSTorman, and English, recently published at the expense of Mr. Joseph Mayer, of Liverpool, to whom not only the Historic Society, but the science of Archeo- logy in general, is under so many obligations. These vocabu- laries are extremely valuable, as illustrating not only the his- tory of our language, but the manners and condition of our forefathers. ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 41 exclusively by the French or Anglo-Norman lan- guage during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With it, also, began the intermingling of the two languages, in consequence of which a large portion of the Anglo-Saxon language gradually became obso- lete. It is necessary, however, that this process of inter- mingling and becoming obsolete should itself be ex- plained, for we should form a very erroneous opinion if we supposed, as some who have treated on the subject seem to suppose, that there was any design or plan in the mixture. You will easily conceive how people talk- ing equally among themselves two different languages would be continually tempted to use, in one language, a word or words taken from the other, either because it was a favourite word with them, or, more usually, because it presented a more familiar picture of the object it was used to designate. Much more would this interchange of words take place, in the inter- communication between the class which used both languages and that which used nothing but English in regard of a number of words from the French lan- guage which custom had begun to affix to certain objects. Thus, we know well that the Anglo-Saxon table was formed merely by placing a board upon trestles at the time of eating, and that it was desig- nated simply by the name of a hoard. Permanent tables were probably known to the Saxon portion of our population only through the Normans, and as the former constantly heard them spoken of by this French name of table, they would naturally learn the word themselves, and, if they did not use it at first indis- criminately for the old description of table as well as the new one, it would become so completely iden- 42 ON THE HISTORY OF THE tified with the latter, that we are not surprised at the older English word being lost as the old practice was discontinued. In fact the Saxon word for a table can hardly be said to belong to the English language at the present day, yet, though we should be surprised at hearing anybody call a table a board, we still use the word in certain phrases derived from ancient cus- toms, and we speak of a " festive board," and talk of giving people " board and lodging," and of sitting at a council or committee board. Again, we know that an Anglo-Norman would call a sheep a mutton, while an Englishman of the Saxon race would call it a sheep, Now we know that in feudal times nearly the whole of the animal provisions of the estate was swept off into the castle or mansion of the landlord, where it was consumed in extravagant hospitality or salted down to keep in store for occasions when fresh meat could not be procured. There can be little doubt, from what we know of the condition of the people in the feudal ages, that the agricultural population, who among themselves knew the various animals alive by their Anglo-Saxon names, rarely tasted their flesh except when they sat in the halls or kitchens of their landlords, where they would hear it spoken of, and must ask for it, only by its Anglo-Norman name. Hence they would gradually become accustomed to call the animal a sheep, and the flesh of it, when dead, mutton. Thus we see how our language has become enriched by adopting in some cases the originally synonymous words of the two languages, and giving them a somewhat different meaning. All the usual articles of animal food have fallen under the circum- stances of the example just given. We speak of beef, mutton, veal, pork, by their Anglo-Norman names, ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 43 while we continue to call the living animals by their Anglo-Saxon names of oxen, sheep, calves, and swine. Words connected with cooking have been similarly exchanged. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon word brcedan or bredan, to roast, has disappeared from our language, and the word we have adopted in its place is derived from the Anglo-Norman rostir, the modern French rotir. Roasting was in the middle ages practised chiefly with regard to fowls and smaller animals, while substantial meat was much more commonly boiled, perhaps partly from the circumstance that so great a portion of it was salted. Hence the Anglo-Saxon word seothan, to boil, held its position in the language much longer than brcedan ; and its representative, to seethe, can hardly yet be said to have become obso- lete. Nevertheless, it has virtually been long dis- placed by the Anglo-Norman word, to boil. Similarly the Anglo-Saxon word, hyrstan, to fry, has been superseded by the Anglo-Norman equivalent. The adoption of Anglo-Norman words in cookery may be explained by the same causes which influenced the change of the names of meats. The artizan and the manufacturer, on the other hand, have generally pre- served the Anglo-Saxon names connected with their occupations, although we find these exchanged some- times for Anglo-Norman, under circumstances of which it would not be easy to give an explanation. Thus we learn from the vocabularies that the Anglo- Saxon name for a carpenter's plane was locer, which appears to have become obsolete early in the Anglo- Norman period, for we have long known no other than the Anglo-Norman name. Indeed, it would be most dangerous to attempt to form any general rule upon such examples as these, for, whatever rule it 44 ON THE HISTORY OF THE might be, when we attempt to apply it we should find nothing but exceptions. Thus, from the strict- ness with which game was preserved by the feudal barons, we might suppose that the different animals which came under that designation would have re- ceived Anglo-Norman names, yet the names the animals of the chase still bear in our language, such as a deer, a hart, a roe, a hare, are all Anglo-Saxon, while, singularly enough, among the birds which come under the head of game the partridge has lost its Anglo-Saxon names of ar^sc-henn or repining, the pheasant perhaps that of wor-hana, % and the heron that of hragra, in order to take their present name3 which are purely Anglo-Norman. As war was so peculiarly the business of the feudal aristocracy, we might suppose that at all events the names for arms would be Anglo-Norman, yet we find that this is not the case, for we speak of a sword and not of an epee, of bows and arrows instead of arcs and Jletches, and we even usually call the lance, the distinctive arm of the knight, by its Anglo-Saxon name of a spear. What is still more remarkable, our language has pre- served the Anglo-Saxon word knight to distinguish the feudal warrior himself, instead of his Anglo- Norman name of chevalier. In the derivative from * It has been said, I know not on what authority, that the pheasant is a comparatively modern importation into our island. I can only say that it was certainly commonly known here in the twelfth century, and I am not aware of any reason for sup- posing that it was then a novelty. In the treatises on cookery and the service of the table, compiled in the fourteenth cen- tury, we have directions for dressing and serving it, as well as for catching it in the books on Venerie. The early Anglo- Saxon vocabularies interpret the Latin phasianus by wor-hana, which has been conjectured to mean a weed-hen. ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 45 this word, however, although the two court poets of their age, Chaucer and Gower, used the English word knighthode, for chivalry, the French word has subse- quently superseded it. When we go to other classes of subjects, the caprice shoAvn in the adoption of words from either language is still more incompre- hensible. Thus, it would be difficult to say why, among flowers, we have adopted the Anglo-Norman names of lilies, violets, dandelion, germander, plan- tain, &c, and have retained the Anglo-Saxon ones of daisies, cowslips, thistles, honeysuckles, and a nume- rous list of others ; or why, in some cases, we have preserved the Anglo-Saxon names of fish, such as whales, seals, lobsters, crabs, eels,&c, when others have been abandoned to adopt in their places such names as salmon, tenches, sturgeons, gudgeons, perches, lampreys, and some others, which are Anglo-Norman. We can indeed discover no general law or rule which influenced in any degree the adoption of particular words from one language or the other. The two languages continued long to exist independently, and people who wrote in English might adopt at their own caprice a word from one or the other. In one respect, however, these two languages in England stood on a very different footing, for, while the Anglo-Norman words which were finally rejected from our written language, ceased to exist among us with the language itself, a vast number of the Anglo- Saxon words which disappeared from the English language as it was written and spoken in cultivated society, were preserved among the populace and the peasantry, and contributed to form the trivial lan- guage of the common people, or, much more exten- sively, of our provincial dialects. Words are easily 46 ON THE HISTORY OF THE rejected from the language of cultivated society, but the tenacity with which the peasantry especially, and the lower classes of the population generally, retain the old words and phraseology of their mother tongue, through many ages, is truly extraordinary. One or two examples have occurred to me which I think deserve to be remembered. The Anglo-Saxon voca- bulary of archbishop Alfric, compiled in the tenth century, gives the Latin and Anglo-Saxon equiva- lents, " constructio, vel instructio, hyrdung." The modern Anglo-Saxon lexicographers, puzzled by the Latin words, appear to have been able to make nothing of the Anglo-Saxon word hyrdung, and have given it in their dictionaries without explanation. The natural derivation of it would be from the verb hyrdan, to guard, or keep. Now, you can hardly pass for any length of time through the streets of our larger towns without seeing, in one place or another, a house in the process of repairing or rebuilding, and you will generally see that it is surrounded with a tolerably lofty and strong frame-work of boards, for the protection of the work and the workmen. If you ask the latter what they call this wooden frame- work, they will tell you at once a hoarding. I have little doubt that this is the identical hyrdung of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, especially as it is there placed among one or two other words connected with building; and you will thus see that our common builders have actually preserved, during the vicissi- tudes of eight centuries, a word which seemed so entirely lost to the world that by them alone we are able to give it an explanation in an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. An English-Latin dictionary of the fif- teenth century, known by the title of the Prompto- ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 47 rium Parvulorum, furnishes us with another example. You will there find, under the letter L, the words, " Locchester, wyrm," meaning that locchester was the name of a kind of worm, and the Latin equivalent multipes is added. Now, as the word worm had in Anglo-Saxon and Old-English a very extensive mean- ing, and as the Latin multipes, meaning simply an animal with many feet, was not much more definite ; the modern editor of the Promptorium Parvulorum, Mr. Way, was unable to fix the exact meaning of the English word — and there seemed no means left of ascertaining it, until, one day, my friend, Mr. Halliwell, walking in a garden in Oxfordshire, ac- cidentally overheard the gardener talking about lockchesters, and immediately asking him what these were, received for answer that they were woodlice. On a further inquiry he ascertained that lockchest, or lockchester, was not an uncommon word in some parts of Oxfordshire for a woodlouse, although it was rapidly going out of use. As the Promptorium Parvulorum was compiled in Norfolk, this must, in the fifteenth century, have been an ordinary word for a woodlouse, and not confined to a particular loca- lity. Again, reading one of the comedies of the age of Charles II, " The Cheats," published in 1662, the scene of which is laid in London, I meet with the following language, put into the mouth of one of the characters : " O my child, my child, thy father is prettie hoddie again, but this will break his heart quite." The old dictionaries give the word hoddy as meaning hearty, or strong ; but I have looked in vain for it in any dictionary of the present day, until I happened to open a glossary of the East Anglian dialect, in which I find that the word still exists in the 48 ON THE HISTORY OF THE sense of "well; in good spirits." It appears clear, from this and other examples which I could quote from the writings of the same period, that a multi- tude of words were in general use in the common language of England so late as the latter half of the seventeenth century, which now exist only in some local dialect. This shows us the great importance, in a philological point of view, if in no other, of col- lecting and publishing the words of our provincial dialects. These dialects show us in many ways the curious manner in which the Anglo-Saxon language was broken up for the formation of modern English. It must not be supposed that Anglo-Saxon words be- came obsolete merely because they were displaced from the English language by Anglo-Norman words, for words of Anglo-Saxon origin were continually displacing one another. In the first place, the Anglo- Saxon language, as I have remarked before, was copious in words, and it often happens that out of a number of names for the same thing, or verbs ex- pressing the same or a similar action, one or two only have survived. In the second place, it seems evi- dent that among; the Anglo-Saxons themselves there were numerous words, then only used in popular conversation or in particular districts, which, in the course of time, gained the superiority over their prouder synonyms, and finally superseded them. Hence, while a great number of what are known to have been good Anglo-Saxon words have been ex- pelled from the English language, their places have been taken by others, also no doubt Anglo-Saxon, which are so strange to us that all we can absolutely say of them is, that they are not Anglo-Norman. ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 49 This, also, will perhaps be best illustrated by a few examples. I will take the first from the language of agriculture. The only word we find used in the Anglo-Saxon writers for a plough is sulh, yet we are certain that some such word as ploh or plog, with this meaning, did exist in that language, not only because we know that plough is not an Anglo-Norman word, but because we find the word ploh used once in the Anglo-Saxon laws to signify what was afterwards called a ploughland, because an Anglo-Saxon eccle- siastical document speaks of a tax levied by the church on the agriculturists under the title of ploit-celmesse, for which another document gives the synonym sulh- celmesse, and because, further, we find the represen- tative of the word in the modern German is pflug. What, therefore, must have been in the Anglo-Saxon period only a popular, or an almost obsolete, name for a plough, has actually in the modern English lan- guage superseded the regular Anglo-Saxon name of a plough, sulk, which now only exists in the dialects of the West of England, where a plough is still called by the peasantry a sull, sullow, or sowl. * The Anglo- Saxons had several verbs to signify the operation of * It is curious that the word sullow for a plough, with ban- nut for a walnut, and one or two other words, now peculiar to the dialects in the west of England, and not found, as far as I know, in any of the old English writers, occur in a Latin and English vocabulary of the earlier part of the fifteenth century, printed in the same volume of vocabularies mentioned in a former note as published under the auspices of Mr. Mayer, and evidently compiled in that part of the island. This would seem to show that even the verbal peculiarities of the principal English dialects are much older than we might otherwise be led to suppose, and perhaps even this has some connection with the history of the wordsw/A and plough, as given in the text. ii. r> 50 ON THE HISTORY OF THE ploughing, such as erian, fyrian, and tilian. Of these, the first, in the form to ere or to ear, remained in general use in the English language until the six- teenth century, and is perhaps still in use in some of the local dialects. Fyrian is only retained in the sense of to furrow, or make furrows ; and tilian remains in the more general sense of to till the ground. We now, in English, call the operation only plough- ing, from the name of the machine used in perform- ing it. Again, the only Anglo-Saxon word we know for a window is eage-thyrl, meaning literally an eye- hole, from which we derive a more vivid picture of the sort of openings by which the interior of an Anglo- Saxon house was lighted than a long description would convey to us. Larger openings for light came into use probably in Norman times, and they, as well as all windows, were called by the Anglo-Normans fenestres, in modern French fenetres. It is a curious circumstance that the Teutonic dialects on the Con- tinent have generally adopted the French word, which of course represents the Latin fenestra ; in modern German a window is called afenster. Yet the Eng- lish language has thrown off what would have been its Anglo-Norman word fenester, and has retained in its place not the Anglo-Saxon word we know, but another, which does not occur among the words of the Anglo-Saxon language that have been preserved, though I think that the English word window is found as early as the thirteenth century, and it is doubtless a purely Anglo-Saxon word, and bears the same re- lation to wind which the Spanish word ventdna for a window bears to viento. Again, among the Anglo- Saxon names for a sword are siveord, seax, bill, brand, mece, and ord. Of these, the last signified literally ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 51 the edge of a weapon, and it and the three preceding words belonged properly to the language of poetry, and therefore soon became obsolete. The word seax has also been lost, and sword has superseded all the others. The principal Anglo-Saxon words for an arrow were arewa, fia, sceaft, and strcel. The first is the only one of the four which remains in its original sense, al- though fia, or flo was retained till the fifteenth cen- tury, and in Sussex they still call an arrow a streal. The common Anglo-Saxon names for a river, taking them in alphabetical order, were, becc, broc, burne, ea, flod, rith, or ryth, and stream. The precedence of all these has been taken by the Anglo-Norman word rivere. The word ea, which appears to have been the most general Anglo-Saxon word for a river, has only remained in the innumerable names of localities, into the composition of which it enters. Rith is also lost. Broc remains in the modern brook, while burn is preserved in a similar sense in the dialects of the North of England, and becc continues to exist in the beck of some of the northern provincial dia- lects, and in the bache of the dialects of the Welsh - border. Of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon names for a hall, heal, caffertun, inburh, sal, and sele, the first is the only one preserved in the English language, although the two last might have been supposed to have had the greater chance of lasting, as being iden- tical with the Anglo-Norman word sale. Another curious instance of the capricious character of these word-revolutions and vicissitudes in our language is furnished by the names of the rabbit. It is some- what remarkable that the Anglo-Saxon dictionaries give us no word for a rabbit, but from the thirteenth to the beginning of the last century the common English name for this animal was a conig or cony. 52 ON THE HISTOEY OF THE There is some room for doubt whether this word be Anglo-Norman, in which language a rabbit was called a connil or connin, or whether it be of Anglo-Saxon origin, for the same animal is still called in German kaninchen. Both, no doubt, represent the Latin cuniculus. But this word cony, for some cause or other, was in the last century entirely superseded by that of rabbit, which must no doubt have been an Anglo-Saxon word, because it is found in another Low German dialect, the Dutch, under the forms robbe and robbekin. It is found in the Prompto- rium Parvulorum of the fifteenth century with the signification of a young rabbit — "Rabet, yonge conye, cunicellus." I do not remember having met with the word in the English language at an earlier period. I may quote another example of the movements and vicissitudes of words in our language from the nomen- clature of birds. The Anglo-Saxon vocabularies give to the Latin word turdus, the two interpretations scric and steer, and they explain the Latin merula by thrisc or throsle. Yet the Latin turdus is usually understood as meaning a thrush, and merula as signi- fying a blackbird. Under the Anglo-Normans the word mauvis, anglicised into mavis, was introduced to signify a thrush, and almost superseded the latter word in the English language, although throstel, or more usually throstel-cock, continued to be used. At the same time, the Anglo-Norman word merle, from the Latin merula, came in to signify a blackbird. This shows that the original meaning of the Latin merula was well known, and would lead us almost to sup- pose that the Anglo-Saxons may have meant a black- bird by thrisc and throstle. The English glossaries of the fifteenth century still interpret merula by ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 53 thrystel-cock, and mauvis continued to be the English word for a thrush , and it long held its place in the language of literature. Nevertheless, the Anglo- Saxon words thrush and throstle have finally regained their position as the sole acknowledged names, in the English language, of the song- thrush, and have ex- pelled their Anglo-Norman equivalent mavis, and in this case it is the Anglo-Norman word that remains in our dialects. In the north of Essex, and I believe in other parts of East Anglia, a singing thrush is still called a mawis. One of the Anglo-Saxon equivalents of the Latin turdus is preserved in the schreech- thrush, a provincial name for the missel-thrush; and the other, stare, is now used in the signification of a star- ling. Again, the names cowslip, or cowslop, (cus- loppa,) and oxslip (oxan-slippd), are purely Anglo- Saxon, and have preserved their place in the language — though not quite undisputed, for another word paigle, the derivation of which seems very uncertain, though its form appears to bespeak an Anglo-Nor- man origin, had intruded itself into the English lan- guage before the sixteenth century. There is some reason for believing that the paigle was originally the oxslip. It was a word in common use among the English writers of the Elizabethan period ; yet it has now dropped into a provincial word, and, singularly enough, in Essex it seems to have changed places with cowslip. In the neighbourhood of Saffron- Walden the name paigle is given to the common cowslip (the primula veris), while the oxslip (the primula elatior), which is very abundant there, is called a cowslip. The language of natural history was especially rich and copious among our forefathers, whether Anglo-Saxon or English, which seems to show 54 ON THE HISTOKY OF THE the existence among all classes, and at all periods, of a great love for nature, and a tendency to observe natural objects. In the comparatively small propor- tion which remains of the popular language of the Anglo-Saxons, we find numerous synonyms for plants, animals, birds, &c, many of which have been since lost, though some are preserved in a remarkable man- ner, and where we should least expect it. It is from this class of words especially that our provincial dia- lects are enriched. Thus, our Anglo-Saxon fore- fathers called a grasshopper a gcers-hoppa, (grass- hopper), or a gozrs-stapa (grass-stepper), or a hama, or a hil-hama, or a secge-scere (sedge-shearer), the first of which names only is preserved in the English language, and I am not aware that any of the others exist even in our local dialects. I find a woodlouse called, in vocabularies of the fifteenth century, a loc- chester, a lokdore, and a icelbode ; and in those of the sixteenth a cheselip, or cheslop, a kitchin-bole, and a woodlouse. Of these, the last only will be found in a dictionary of modern English, but I have already remarked that the name of lochchester is preserved among the peasantry of Oxfordshire, and I may add, that the peasantry in the North of England still call a woodlouse a kitchin-ball, and that those of the Southern dialects call it a chissel-bol, which is per- haps the representative of cheslop. The other two names appear to have become quite obsolete. In the Nomenclator, a copious Latin and English vocabu- lary, published in the year 1585, we have three sy- nonyms for the glowworm, namely, glowbird, glow- worm, and lightworm. I think that I have heard a glowworm called a glowbird in some one of our local dialects. The same vocabulary gives to a well-known ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 55 plant, the leontodon taraxacum, the several names fol- lowing : dandelion, pries t's crown, swine's snout, monk's head, dog's teeth, and common cicorie. The first of these names, which is derived from the French, is the only one of them now acknowledged in the Eng- lish language ; I am not aware that any of the others are in use. The same vocabulary gives as synonyms, libbard's bane (i. e. leopard's bane), wolfs bane, and monk's hood. All these three names of plants are still preserved, but the first is applied to the doroni- cum pardalianches, and the two others to the aconitum napellus. Two names of the latter are recorded in the vocabularies of the Anglo-Saxon period, on- red and thung, neither of which is preserved in the language. These few examples, which might be mul- tiplied almost infinitely, will, I think, sufficiently explain how words have disappeared, and reappeared, in our language, and in its provincial dialects, and at the same time show that the further investigation of this part of the subject would not be without interest. But it is here a digression, which I must follow no longer. As I have already stated, the two languages representing Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman, but which at this period we may better describe as French and English, continued to exist in England indepen- dently during the whole of the fourteenth century, although there was a constant interchange of words going on between them. I do not mean to say that this interchange was then a permanent one, although a certain number of Anglo-Norman words had al- ready been firmly engrafted on the English tongue. We have no means of knowing what was the exact character of the language of popular conversation at this period, which we may, however, suppose to have 56 ON THE HISTORY OF THE been still very decidedly Saxon ; but we know that an English writer used just as many French words as he pleased, or as suited the class of readers to whom he addressed himself. Thus, one of the most remarkable poems in our language, the Visions of Piers Ploughman, which was put forth as the grand proclamation of a demand for popular reform and of the doctrines of popular freedom, is written not only in a language which contains a very small number of Anglo-Norman words, but it is composed in the same form of alliterative verse, without rhymes, which was peculiarly characteristic of pure Anglo-Saxon poetry. This sudden reappearance of the ancient Anglo-Saxon form of versification in the middle of the fourteenth century is itself a remarkable phenomenon, and it is an equally curious circumstance that this description of versification, which became thenceforward for some time popular among the people, is generally filled with a great number of purely Anglo-Saxon words, of a sort which we had long missed in English lite- rature, and which we had every reason for believing had long become obsolete. Yet it is not likely that men who wrote for popularity would use obsolete words, which they would hardly be likely to under- stand themselves, and which certainly would not be understood by their hearers or readers. We must, therefore, conclude that even down to the end of the fourteenth century, " among the people," the mass of the words of the Anglo-Saxon language, much of its phraseology and construction, and even its forms of versification, continued to exist. On the other hand, when people wrote for the aristocracy, or for the court, they adopted the French forms of verse, and filled their language with what ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 57 we should now consider an extravagant proportion of French words. Such is the case in a great degree with Chaucer, who has been very erroneously termed " a well of English undefiled ; " and the reason why the writings of Chaucer are more easily understood by people in general than Piers Ploughman, or than many of the other literary monuments of the time, must be sought in the circumstance that a great proportion of the obsolete words in Chaucer are French, while nearly all those in the other writers alluded to are Anglo-Saxon, and as most modern readers have some knowledge of the French language, but very few know Anglo-Saxon, they are naturally less em- barrassed by the verses of the old court poet than by those of the man of the people. It will thus be understood that at the end of the fourteenth century the English language was in a very unsettled condition, and that in the hands of writers of different class or rank it assumed every variety of character, from that which presented the pure Anglo-Saxon element almost unmixed to that which was more than half French. Immediately after this period, the use of the French language in our island was entirely superseded by the English. It was the fifteenth century, low as it stood in literary character, which performed the great work of purging and purifying. By a process which we cannot dis- tinctly trace, and which we certainly cannot clearly explain, though it appears to have been in a great measure spontaneous, the English language, during the fifteenth century, rejected a very considerable proportion of the French words with which it was encumbered, and at the same time dropped an equally large quantity of superfluous Anglo-Saxon, which d2 58 ON THE HISTORY OF THE now became entirely obsolete, or fell, as I have just shown, into our local dialects. The English lan- guage was also undergoing another change during this period, which we must probably ascribe, in a great measure, to the revolution which was taking place in the social condition, and to the more active movement in commerce and politics. I have told you how, in the course of the twelfth century, the Anglo-Saxon language underwent an organic change in its verbal forms and inflections. Although the latter, however, were greatly simplified, and although the degradation continued during the thirteenth century, they were not entirely lost ; and the English language during the fourteenth century possessed a perfect grammatical construction, with regular inflec- tions, indicating cases and numbers both of nouns and adjectives, and of numbers and persons of verbs, which are never transgressed in the manuscripts except by the mere carelessness of the scribes. These inflections, represented chiefly by the final e and en 9 will be found strictly observed in the language of Piers Ploughman in the middle of the fourteenth century, and they are no less carefully observed in that of Chaucer at the end of that period. It is, in fact, through ignorance of the nature of those inflec- tions, and of the grammatical system of the English language in the fourteenth century, that the editors of our ancient poet, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, have done nothing but make con- fusion of his language and ruin the harmony of his verse. But immediately after Chaucer wrote, very early in the fifteenth century, the grammatical forms of the language began to be neglected, and people, pronouncing the words apparently more quickly^ ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 59 first ceased sounding the final e of the inflections, and then let it drop altogether. The fifteenth century, in fact, was equally a period of transition from the condition of our language in the fourteenth century to modern English, as the twelfth century had been a period of transition from Anglo-Saxon to the Eng- lish of the middle period. The invention of printing no doubt contributed towards the final purification of the English language, and to the settlement of its forms. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the English language, purged of the superfluous French and half-obsolete Anglo-Saxon which had previously encumbered it, and with very few grammatical in- flections of any kind, assumed a form which prepared it for the glories of the Elizabethan period, and the language of Shakespeare is so well known, that I feel sure that it is unnecessary for me to follow its history any further. I will, however, briefly point out a new danger to which the English language was exposed in the six- teenth century. The revival of learning was followed in England by an increased activity in scholastic education, and by an extraordinary reverence for the classical languages of antiquity. This soon assumed the character of a fashionable and exaggerated pedantry, and people began, both in conversation and writing, to interlard their English with Latin words, to which they merely gave an English form. In fact, as most writers and readers of books were now almost as well acquainted with the Latin language as with their own, the former began to assume towards it very much the same position which Anglo- Norman held towards Anglo-Saxon at an earlier period, and as each writer introduced into his Eng- GO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. lish just as many Latin words as he pleased, it might have been a question at one time whether the lan- guage we were destined finally to speak would not have been a sort of mongrel between Latin and Eng- lish. This affectation of Latin reached its greatest height in an age worthy of it, the reign of James I, after which it began rapidly to disappear, and, for- tunately, but a very small number of the Latin words which had thus been intruded into our language have been retained. But in one respect this dragging of the English language into an unnatural relationship with the Latin language exercised a disastrous in- fluence on its future. When men began to study the English language, and to seek and treat of its grammatical rules, they lay under a prejudice which had grown up with the Latinists, and which, unfor- tunately, had not died with them, and, forgetting that English was a language in itself, they took it for granted that its grammar was merely an English edition of Latin grammar, and where they found that the English forms as they existed did not agree with the rules of Latin grammar, they attempted to force them into concordance. This mistake has spoilt all the English grammars which have been published previous to our own days, and, unfortunately, we are not yet emancipated from it ; nor shall we be eman- cipated until the language of Alfred the Great, and that of Piers Ploughman and Chaucer, are more generally taught in our higher schools and colleges. This is certain, that our grammarians and lexico- graphers have, during the last two centuries, been labouring in their ignorance to reject from the Eng- lish language some of its purest and best phraseology. XV. ON THE ABACUS, OR MEDIEVAL SYSTEM OF ARITHMETIC. N the mathematical treatises of the ancients, the results of abstruse arithmetical calcu- lations are given, without any indication of the exact process by which they were obtained. The operations of arithmetic taught and practised in the schools, being perhaps of a kind not easily expressed in writing, have perished with the schools themselves. It is self-evident that arith- metical operations of any extent could not be per- formed with the clumsy notation of the Greek or Roman numerals. The somewhat varied writings of Boethius, who flourished at the beginning of the sixth century, were the channel through which chiefly the science and philosophy of the ancients passed to the middle ages, previous to the introduction of Arabian science in the twelfth century. A very obscure passage, at the end of the first book of the Geometrica of this writer, describes a tabular system of arithmetical 62 ON THE ABACUS. calculation, to which he gives the name of abacus, and he states that it was said to have been invented by the Pythagoricians, whence it was also called the mensa Pythagorica. The first of these names re- minds us forcibly of the lines of Persius the satirist, — Nee qui abaco numeros et secto in pulvere metas Scit risisse vafer. But so little has the passage in Boethius been under- stood in latter times, that his editors have generally substituted a common multiplication table for the diagram of the manuscripts. Aldhelm, at the end of the seventh century, tells us that he found arithmetic the most abstruse and difficult of all the sciences ; but, until the time of the celebrated Gerbert (the end of the tenth century) we find no direct allusion to the mode in which arithmetical operations were performed, Gerbert (subsequently raised to the papacy as Sylvester II) is generally looked upon as the first who introduced the abacus, upon which he wrote a brief treatise containing rules, or rather the titles of rules, which were almost as obscure as the passage of Boethius. William of Malmsbury, in the middle of the twelfth century, when the system had been perfected, describes them as regulcB quce a sudan- tibus abacistis vix intelliguntur. A larger treatise on the abacus — that is, on arithmetic — was composed by Gerbert's scholar, Bernelinus (probably Bernel- mus, or Beornhelm), and from that time to the end of the twelfth century, treatises under the same title became very common, including one by a celebrated mathematician of the end of the eleventh century named Gerland. They are of frequent occurrence in early manuscripts. A much esteemed and learned ON THE ABACUS. 63 friend of the writer of the present article, M. Chasles* (member of the Institute of France, and professor of pure geometry at the Ecole Polytechnique), by a careful comparison of these different treatises, first demonstrated — and that in my opinion to absolute conviction — that they all relate to one system of arithmetical operations, which was the same as that alluded to in the passage of Boethius, and which, in fact, was identical in principle with the system in use at the present day. A monk of St. Remi at Rheims, named Richerius, the friend and disciple of Gerbert, has left us a most interesting history of his own times, which has been published by the German antiquary Pertz ; this writer has inserted in his annals an account of the chief philosophical instruments of his illustrious master. He tells us that Gerbert caused a manu- facturer of shields to construct a table, which he divided into twenty-seven longitudinal columns, and he also caused to be made a thousand characters in horn, of the figures of the nine numerical symbols (probably square dice thus marked), by means of which he was enabled to express all numbers and make all calculations.! It appears clear that Ger- * In his "Aperqu historique sur Forigine et le developpe- ment des methodes en Geometric" I can only refer my readers to this book, which I do not possess, and its title does not appear in the catalogue of the British Museum library. M. Chasles has more recently published and commented upon some early treatises on the abacus, in the transactions of the Academie des Sciences. f Abacum, id est tabulam diraensionibus aptam opere scutarii effecit, cujus longitudini, in xxvii. partibus diducta?, novem numero notas omnem numerum significantes disposuit. Ad quarum etiam similitudinem, mille corneos effecit caracteres, 64 ON THE ABACUS. bert's invention was the machine to apply to a system which was already in use, and the obscurity of his brief tract on the subject arose from our not having the machine to which it was intended to refer. Subsequent writers drew the figure of the abacus in their books, and from them we learn the forms of the characters or symbols made to represent the numbers.* The object of the abacus machine of Gerbert was, by means of its columns, to represent what we now call the value of numerals by position. Characters, when placed in the first column to the right, repre- sented units, and were termed digiti. Those placed in the second, third, &c, columns, represented tens, hundreds, and so forth, and were called indiscrim- inately articuli. On vellum these columns were represented by vertical lines. The nine numbers were represented by the following apparently arbi- trary characters, to which were given the names igln, andras, ormis, arbas, quinas, calcus, zenis, temenias, and celentis, which seem equally arbitrary. Each 98 7 6 54 3 21 Celentis. Teruenias. Zenis. Calcus. Quinas. Arbas. Orruis. Andras. Igin. of these characters had a local power, according to the column in which it was placed : thus, andras in qui per xxvii. abaci partes mutuati, cuj usque numeri multipli- cationein sive divisionem designarent, etc. — Bicheri Hist., liber iii. c. 54. * Manuscripts of Boethius contain the drawing of the abacus, with the figures of the characters, as described in the system of Gerbert. See a fine manuscript in the British Museum, MS. Lansdown, No. 842. ON THE ABACUS. 65 the first column represented 2, in the second 20, in the third 200, and so on. Thus the nine characters might be made to express all numbers whatever, and the processes of arithmetic were performed in what appeared a mechanical game — much resembling a game at chess or draughts — the results being taken and expressed in the ordinary Roman numerals. When, however, we consider that most of the pro- cesses of calculation, as then employed, were very complicated and intricate, and that the operators did not call the characters they were working with one, two, three, &c. but iff in, andras, ormis, &c. — in fact they were continually obliged to translate numbers to characters and characters to numbers, as 12 is represented by andras in the first column, and igin in the second; 372 is represented hy andras in col. 1, zenis in col. 2, and ormis in col. 3, — we may easily conceive the great confusion which must have been created in many people's heads, and understand per- fectly why Aldhelm found arithmetic the most difficult of all the sciences. The above representation of the characters of the abacus is copied from an imperfect manuscript of the treatise by Gerland, in the British Museum (MS. Arundel, No. 343), the book in which the principles of the science are most clearly explained. The first part of the solution of a very simple question in division, with two of the diagrams representing the table of the abacus and the method of proceeding, taken from this same manuscript, will give the best idea of the complicated nature of these operations. The question is that of dividing 120 pearls among three damsels; and after some introductory explana- tion, we are directed to " place the three girls in the 66 ON THE ABACUS. Fig. 2. singular arc [the first column], a hundred pearls in the centenal arc, and twenty in the decenal, thus " (see Fig. 1). This was done by placing ormis in the first column for the number of damsels, and igin in the third and andras in the second for the number of pearls. Gerland then goes on to say, " next transfer ormis as the divisor, and place him in the next arc to the thing to be divided, for he is greater than igin, and let it be arranged thus (Fig. 2). Then say, as many times as ormis is into igin, the same is three into ten, thrice and remains one. Take therefore the three, and place it under the three, and place the one which remains, that is igin, beside andras"* And thus it goes on, with two other diagrams, before the question is solved. It was, in fact, a task upon the memory to carry in mind the names of the characters ; and we accord- ingly find in old manuscripts a great number of memorial verses in Latin, composed to assist the memory ; two of which, published by Mr. Halliwell, in his JRara Mathematica, from manuscripts of the fourteenth century, may be given as specimens. Sometimes the writer appears himself to have for- * Pone tres puellas in singulari arcu, centum margaritas in centeno, et xx. in deceno, sic. Postea transfer ormin divisoreni, et loca eum in proximo arco pecuniae dividends, nam major est quam igin, et sit hujusmodi figura. Confestim die, quoties est ormis in igin, idem ternarius in decern, ter et remanet unus : sume igitur ternarium, et suppone ternario, et unum qui remanet id est igin, pone juxta an dram, etc., and so it goes on. —MS. Arundel, 343, fol. 2, vo. ON THE ABACUS. 67 gotten the name of a character, and to have sub- stituted another, as in the first of these examples, where the sixth is called termas instead of calcus or calcis. In this first the names are numerated briefly in a distich : — Primus igin ; andras ; ormis ; quarto subit arbas ; Quinque quinas ; termas ; zenis ; temenias ; celentis. The other is rather more detailed : — Unus adest igin ; andras duo ; tres reor armin ; Quatuor est arbas ; et pro quinque fore quinas ; Sex calcis ; septem zenis ; octo temenias ; jNovem celentis ; pro deno sunie priorem. The system of the abacus appears to have con-, tinued in use with little alteration till late in the twelfth century. M. Chasles has printed an anony- mous treatise from a manuscript of the end of that century, which appears to have been composed not long previous to that date. Early in the twelfth century the knowledge of Arabian science began to be introduced into the schools of western Europe, and this perhaps exerted some influence in modifying it. To simplify the operations of arithmetic, it was necessary to get rid of the tabular process, and to abolish the embarrassing technicalities. During the twelfth century the mathematicians were gradually throwing away the columns of the abacus, and giving independent value of position to the characters, though they had not yet come to regard them as numerals. They now found it necessary to denote in some manner what in the tabular process was re- presented by leaving the place blank ; and they in- vented for this purpose a new character, represented 68 ON THE ABACUS. by a circle, to which they gave the name of siphos or ciphos. It was not till a later period, when the characters had long been regarded as numerical figures, that their original names were dropped ; for we have seen that memorial verses to enable people to remember these names are found in manuscripts as late as the fourteenth century ; but in the sequel, the name of the siphos, corrupted into cipher, was the only one retained. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the table in columns had entirely disappeared, and we then find the name abacus exchanged for that of algorismus, which (in English algrim and awgrim) was the name commonly given to the science of arithmetic until the sixteenth century. One of the first treatises on algorismus was by an English scholar named Johannes de Sacro-bosco, who is said to have died about the year 1235. His system is seen at once to be that of the abacus, with the addition of the sipos (or, as he calls it, cifra) to enable the operator to dispense with the columns. The very words of the old writers, which had reference to the tabular columns, are retained to denote the position of the figures, and the technical terms remind us of the columns at every step. The numbers, according to their position, are still digiti and articuli* The figures are still understood as being characters by which number is artificially represented.! Towards the middle of the thirteenth century, a well-known * Numerorum alius digitus, alius articulus .... Digitus quidein dicitur omnis numerus minor denario ; articulus vero est omnis numerus qui potest dividi in decern partes aaquales, ita quod nihil residuum sit. f humeri per figuras competentes artificialis repraesentatio. ON THE ABACUS. 69 writer, Alexander de Villa-Dei (or Villedieu) com- posed memorial verses, not for the names of the characters, but comprising the whole system of arithmetic, under the title of Carmen de Algorismo, a tract which must have been extremely popular, if we judge by the number of manuscripts in which it occurs.* The abacus, or table, was still retained, but without the columns. I think that I have seen a drawing in an early manuscript representing a person operating on the Boethian abacus, but I have mislaid the reference ; representations of the algoris- mus table are less rare. In the annexed cut, taken from a manuscript of the end of the thirteenth or commencement of the four- teenth century (MS. Bur- ney, No. 275, p. 667), a female, the personification of arithmetic, is teaching her disciples the science of algorismus: — she appears to be drawing the figures with a styleona table covered with wax or some other soft sub- stance. Another represen- tation of a person working on the algorismus table will be found in a manuscript of the fourteenth century, in the British Museum (MS. Harl. No. 4350, fol. 15, v°.) It is now very difficult to say how far the know- * This and the treatise of Johannes de Sacro-bosco are both printed by Mr. Halliwell in the "Kara Mathematical 70 ON THE ABACUS. ledge of the Arabian system of arithmetic may have influenced the changes which were thus taking place in our mediaeval system. So much knowledge was borrowed from the Saracens during the twelfth century , that it became the fashion to ascribe to them the origin of many things which were known long before the intercourse which led to the introduction amongst our forefathers of the Arabian sciences. William of Malmsbury, in the middle of the twelfth century, supposed that Gerbert had obtained the knowledge of the abacus from the Spanish Arabs ; a notion which was, certainly, without foundation. The writer of the anonymous treatise on the abacus, of the end of the twelfth century, printed by M. Chasles, goes so far as to assert that the name abacus is an Arabic word.* Alexander de Villa-Dei, and other writers of the thirteenth and subsequent cen- turies, imagined that the characters used in the system of algorismus were derived from the Arabs and the Indians; and hence they have eventually obtained the title of Arabic numerals. A single glance, however, is sufficient to show that the figures of the algorismus are identical in every respect with the characters of the abacus, having merely passed through modifications inevitable when they came into more frequent use. For the sake of comparison, I give three specimens of arithmetical numerals, of different dates. No 1 is taken from the earliest manuscript of the treatise of Sacro-bosco that I have been able to find in the British Museum (MS. Arundel, No. 332, fol. 68, ro.), written in the latter * Ars ista vocatur abacus : hoc nomen vero Arabicum est, et son at raeiisa. ON THE ABACUS. 71 part of the thirteenth century. No. 2 is taken from another copy of the same work (MS. Eeg. 8, C. iv. fol. 36, vo.), written in the earlier part of the four- 3 $%>%&& 'tf&3 2A teenth century. No. 3 is taken from a calendar of the earlier half of the fifteenth century (MS. Sloane, No. 2927). It may be observed that in a manuscript calendar in the Cottonian library (Vespas. E. vn), which appears to have been written in the year 1380, the forms of the numerical figures are nearly identical with those of No, 3. We see, by these examples, how our modern numerals were derived from the characters of the abacus. Several of them have hardly been changed. It is probable that andras was a mere horizontal line, with a vertical curved line under it ; the 2 of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was a horizontal line with vertical line below, which latter took gradually a curling form, and later on in the fourteenth century the position of the figure was reversed. Ormis is at once identified with the figure 3. Arbas was rather more com- plicated in its form, and has, consequently, gone through a greater change to make it convenient for writing rapidly : it may, however, still be easily identified ; the common form of the figure 4 during the fifteenth century was R, to which, after the in- vention of printing, a more angular shape was given. 72 ON THE ABACUS. Quinas is found in some manuscripts in a reversed position ; — from either the transition to the 5 is easy- enough. The similitude between calcus and 6 need hardly be pointed out. Zenis is also frequently re- versed ; both limbs are sometimes of the same length, which was the case in the form of the 7 in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries ; during the latter century, the common form of the 7 was /\. Celentis has only to be reversed to become 9. The siphos was represented, as in No. 2, by a circle with a line across, and seems, from the words of Sacro- bosco,* to have been intended for a Greek 9. It is important, in various respects, for the anti- quary thus to know historically the origin and transfor- mation of the mediaeval numerals. Various instances occur of inscriptions on buildings in the so-called Arabic numerals, apparently of an early date, which have been severally the subject of obstinate discus- sion, simply because both disputants were equally ignorant of v the subject they were discussing. Such an inscription has been ascribed even to the eleventh century. This, it will at once be seen, is impossible, and the error has probably arisen from taking a 4 of the fifteenth century, of which the lower limbs had been nearly erased, for a 0. Even in the twelfth century, these characters were no more looked upon as numerals, than our modern algebraical a, b, c, and x, y, z ; none but a mathematician knew what they meant ; and if he had seen a date on a building ex- pressed in such figures, he would probably have wondered for what magical purpose four characters * Decima figura dicitur theta, vel nihil significat, sed locum tenens dat circulus, vel cifra, vel figura nihili quia aliis sig- nificare. ON THE ABACUS. 73 of the abacus had been stuck up against the wall. Both in the treatises on the abacus, and in those on the algorismus, down to a late period, the figures are only used in the operations, the results of which are stated in words or in Roman numerals. The former were considered as things only belonging to science. Charpentier, in his supplement to the Glossarium of Ducange, cites a document, of which he does not give the date (but it was probably of the thirteenth century), in which books that appear to have been marked with these figures are distinguished as libri signati per abacum* Even at the end of the four- teenth century, the figures were still considered as signs belonging to the science of " awgrim ;" a passage in the curious poem on the deposition of Richard II. informs us that, — Than satte sunime, As siphre doth in awgrym, That noteth a place And nothing availeth. It was only in the fourteenth century that these algorismic numerals became generally used in books, and it is not probable that they would be used in in- scriptions on buildings till long afterwards ; it will be evident that they could not possibly be so used in the twelfth century, and I believe it to have been equally impossible in the thirteenth. Rare examples of inscriptions in these figures occur in the fifteenth ; but even in the sixteenth, as it is well known, the prejudice was strongly in favour of the Roman nu- merals. * Hinc libri signati per abacum in Stat. Mant. forte sunt codices notis numericis per singulas paginas signati. II. E XVI. ON THE ANTIQUITY OP DATES EXPRESSED IN ARABIC NUMERALS. N the preceding paper on the Abacus, I have remarked, that the use of the so-called Arabic numerals in manuscripts was not general, except in books of science, till ate in the fourteenth century, and that they had not been found in inscriptions, in this country, before the fifteenth century. It will be useful as well as in- teresting to trace the history of such inscriptions, and to give a few examples of the forms of the figures, which will serve as a point of comparison for the researches of those who may have discovered such inscriptions, of which the age or reading is doubtful. Dates in manuscripts, written in these numerals, are of great rarity, until so late as the end of the fifteenth century. David Castley, in the plates to his catalogue of the Royal Library, has given two or three examples, among a great number of dates ex- pressed in Roman numerals. The earliest he had met with, is found in a Cottonian manuscript ( Yespas. A. Ii), and it is necessary to observe that this is in a ON THE ANTIQUITY OF DATES, ETC. 75 work on astronomical science : the words are, Anno Domini 1292, factus ad meridiem civitatis Tholeti. The manuscript, moreover, appears on reference to have been written at a later period than this date. In a manuscript in the Royal Library (2 C. v.) we find the date 1334, written by a scholar and, pro- bably, a man of science. The next known date in these numerals, in a manuscript in the same collec- tion (2 B. vin), is attached to a calendar compiled by an astronomer of Oxford, in the year 1380. These are all connected with men of science. The next date known to Castley, also occurs in one of the royal manuscripts (6 D. n), and is of the year 1467. Cast- ley gives after this the dates 1488 (in MS. Reg. 14 C. vn), 1497 (in MS. Ueg. 6 A. vin), and 1508 (in MS. Reg. 2 B. xm). It is evident, therefore, that until the fifteenth cen- tury the knowledge of these numerals was confined almost entirely to mathematicians, or arithmeticians, and that even at the end of the fourteenth century they were not in general use. This is confirmed by a curious passage of Chaucer's poem, commonly called in the old editions The Dream of Chaucer, but of which the more correct title appears to be The Boke of the Duchess : the poet, describing his dream, says : — " Shortly, it was so full of beasts, That though Argus, the noble countour, Sate to reckon in his countour, And reckon with his figures ten, For by tho figures newe all ken, If they be craftie, recken and number, Yet should he faile to recken even The wonders me met in my sweven." The " new figures " are here distinctly mentioned as being used only by the " countour," or arithmetician : 76 ON THE ANTIQUITY OF DATES and the second countour is perhaps merely the popular name for the abacus, or table on which the arithme- tician worked. I think none of Chaucer's commen- tators knew who this Argus was : Algus, or Argus, by some called a philosopher, by others a king of Castile, was the legendary inventor of arithmetic, which it was pretended took from him the name of algorismus. * The earliest authentic date that has, as far as I can learn, been yet discovered in England, carries us no farther back than the year 1445. It was kindly communicated to me by Mr. M. A. Lower, of Lewes, from whose rub- bing the accompanying cut is carefully reduced. This date, as Mr. Lower informs me, appears on a stone in the interior of No. 1. the tower of Heathfield church, Sussex; the surface of the stone is much corroded by natural causes, and it has suffered still further from the vandalism of a blacksmith, who, while employed in repairing the bells, defaced it in part with a pick-axe ; but it is still sufficiently dis- tinct to leave no doubt of the date. Gr. S. are pro- * Hanc igitur scientiam...edidit philosophus nomine Algus, unde Algorismus nuncupatur. — Jo. de Sacro-Bosco, de Arte Numerandi. Ab Algore rege quondam Castellise s'uo in Algo- rismo. — Johannes Norfolk, in Artem Progressions summula. L and r were constantly interchanged in the languages of the middle ages, especially in French and English. In the Image du Monde we have, — " En argorisme devon prendre," &c. 1 xxf EXPRESSED IN ARABIC NUMERALS. 77 bably the initials of a person who built or repaired the tower in 1445. Until lately the people of the neighbourhood imagined that this date was 1004 ! Gough, in his Funeral Monuments, has given a plate of early dates in arithmetical figures, whch con- tains a number of very good examples. The oldest with which he was acquainted was that of 1454, found on a brass in Ware church. Our next cut, No. 2, the drawing of which was given me by Mr. J. G. Waller, represents part of a date on a brass in Thornton church, Bucks, of the year 1472. It affords a curious instance of a date ex- pressed partly in words and partly in arithmetical figures : the whole in- „ n . . , & , , . No. 2. scnption on the brass being : — grmicer ecce yiuis facet fric tenure ftofcertus 3fng2lton t tiommus tie ^orneton jure patronus, 3[n quinto Tiecimo moriens ©ctobrte sib oibe 3D celos transit, mille C quater £ac 72 sirrwi atitie* £>it sibi propicia celi regina JSlaria et S>altoet eum ££rijetu0 matritf amore tieus* The 7 is a good example of the ordinary form of that figure in the fifteeenth century. It occurs again (No. 3) in the date 1487, in an inscription, for a rubbing of which I am in- debted to Mr. Goddard Johnson of Norwich. It is carved on a wooden door at Arminghall, the interesting remains of an No# 3 ' ancient building about four miles from Norwich, an engraving of which is given in Cotman's Antiquities. This house is considered to be one of the hospitia, or USA 78 ON THE ANTIQUITY OF DATES houses for the gratuitous entertainment of travellers, said to have been common in every county in England before the Reformation. The inscription, which runs across the door and is not very legible, appears to be, SDrate pro anima jftlactw WLilli ♦ ♦ ♦ qui fecit fieri £oc ostium, A x 1 1487* The cut No. 4, for the drawing of which I am also *. j^ y^ a indebted to Mr. Waller, repre- I \f ^? / sents the date 1489, on a brass H ^x £s f ' m ^ e cnurcn °f Allhallows ^r ^ Barking, near the Tower, Lon- No * 4 * don, and is somewhat remark- able for the angular forms of the figures. The in- scription on the brass is : — $ic iacent ®f>oma0 Gilbert, quontiam ctoi0 et pamtariu0 Hon* Hon* ac mercator stapuie trille ^Talisie, et acnes ujcor tius nuper uxor lof)amu0 £>auntier0 cit)i0 et pannarii citoitati0 preUicte et mercatoris Stapule toille Calisie, qui quitiam ^omas obijt xxvij nie 9lprilt0 anno Domini m cccc° lxxxiij. , et preUicta Scnes obiit xiij° tiie tTebruarii a U* 1489 The same date is found in arithmetical figures in an inscription in bishop King's chapel, Windsor, which is engraved in Funeral Monuments. Our next example (No. 5) is the celebrated Col- chester inscription, of the date 1490, which has been the object of so much dis- cussion, and has by some been very absurdly taken for a genuine inscription of the date 1090. The shape of the shield, which is that No. 5. ™ common at the end of the EXPRESSED IN ARABIC NUMERALS. 79 fifteenth century, ought to have deterred any one from forming such an opinion. Our cut is taken from a very faithful drawing, communicated by Mr. Sprague of Colchester, who observes, " upon exami- nation, I found the shield had from time to time been repaired and patched, particularly at the base and dexter side ; the bouche was entirely filled with putty, which I have removed, and which accounts for its not appearing in the engraving given in Cromwell's Colchester." It is carved on the sill of a window. The lower part of the 4 has been long defaced ; but the general form of the figures is that of the large formal writing in the church service books of the latter part of the fifteenth century. The next example that has occurred to me is re- presented in the cut No. 6. It is carved on a stone in the tower of Hadley church, Middlesex, and represents the date 1494. In a pane of glass in one of the windows of the hospital of St. Cross, we have the date 1499 in arithmetical figures, of a rather interesting form; they are engraved in Gough. The reduced fac-simile of a date on a brass in St. Mary's Coslany church, Norwich (No. 7), was kindly sent me by the very rev. F. C. Husenbeth, of Cossey, who be- lieved it to be 1507. Others have supposed it to be 1502. I am inclined to think the last figure jj 0# 7. No. 6. iftot 80 ON THE ANTIQUITY OF DATES has been a 4, or a 0, now defaced in part. The form of the letters bears a general resemblance to those of the Colchester date. The 5 is the usual form of that figure in manuscripts of this period. In the entire inscription on this brass we have again an instance of the curious mixture of the usage of Roman nu- merals and arithmetical figures, which shows how slowly the latter came into general use : — SSDrate pro anima Domini EoBerti i£la#o, quonHam I?uju0 ec* cleme capellam parocln qui oBiit xxvij "Die gits* 1 a x* 150 — . It is curious to observe how, even at this late period, the original forms of the figures are tradi- tionally preserved in the inscriptions, amid the changes which had followed the progress of the art of printing. In manuscripts of the beginning of the six- teenth century, as in the date 1508 given by Castley in his plate xvi, the cipher has a line drawn across it, which ap- pears to have been its original form, al- though partially lost during many years. In making some repairs at London Bridge, in the year 1758, a stone was found with an inscription of which the cut (No. 8) is a facsimile, with the date Anno Domini 1509. The cipher has here similarly a line drawn across. The form of the 5, in this inscription, is also very curious, though I believe that other ex- amples of it are found. No. 8. EXPRESSED IN ARABIC NUMERALS. 81 During the whole of the sixteenth century, in in- scriptions, the 5 took different forms, resembling more or less the same figure as commonly written in France at the present day, and in many instances it is easily mistaken for a 1, particularly in inscriptions of the middle and latter half of the century. The cut, No. 9, taken from a drawing given me by Mr. Wal- ler, represents the date 1526, on a painted glass window in South Mimms church, Middlesex. The next example (No. 10), also furnished me by Mr. m No. 9. No. 10. Waller, is the date 1537, carved on a wooden seat in Aldham church, Suffolk. The forms of the figures in both these examples are rather unusual ; in the last, the 7, compared with the same figure, in our dates, Nos. 2 and 3, shows distinctly the manner in which the modern form originated from the old one. A 7, written nearly like this, is found in the date 1497, in the manuscript cited by Castley (MS. Eeg. 6 A viii). The peculiar forms of the 5 in the sixteenth cen- tury were the source of most of the disputed inter- pretations of dates in arithmetical numerals, supposed to be older than the fifteenth century. The old form of the 4, sometimes mutilated, taken for a cipher, gave rise to the belief in such inscriptions being of the eleventh century. The 5, interpreted, sometimes as a E 2 82 ON THE ANTIQUITY OF DATES 1, made dates of the twelfth century; sometimes, inter- preted as a 2, it made dates of the thirteenth century ; and lastly, taken for a 3, it furnished dates supposed to be of the fourteenth century. We begin with an example of the date 1552 (No. 11), carved on a wooden beam at the Half- moon inn, near Magdalen College, Cambridge, the true interpretation of which cannot admit of a doubt; yet few dates have been the object of more discussion, and several learned men have persisted in reading it as 1332, and giving that erroneous date to the timber-house in which it was found. The next (No. 12), of the date of 1582, is from Walling, near Alder- maston, in Berkshire ; the 5, here, is not very easy to be distinguished from a 1. No. 12. . & The third example (No. 13), is of the date 1592, cut on a beam in Ashford church; it also has been the subject of some discus- No. 13. J sion, one party assertmg that it represents 1292. It may be well to observe, that I have copied the three last examples from the plate in Gough. Instances of these dates of the fif- teenth century being taken for the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, are not uncommon in dif- ferent parts of England. Mr. Lower has pointed out to me three in Sussex alone, — " there are dates," he says, " at Mayfield palace, and at Selmeston church, which have been stated to be of the four- UPS EXPRESSED IN ARABIC NUMERALS. 83 teenth century, in consequence of the 5 having been mistaken for a 3 ; and at Dalehurst there is another, which is doubtless of the sixteenth century, but which from the peculiar form of the five has been assigned to the twelfth." In Kent there are several examples of dates similarly mistaken. One of these has been the subject of much discussion — the ancient date for- merly on the Oast House, and still preserved at Preston Hall in Aylesford. In a note from the Rev. Lambert B. Larking, of Kyarsh, I am informed that " it stands most clearly and decidedly e 1 102.' Hasted enters fully into the discussion, but leaves the ques- tion just where it was, and, after all, I can do little more. The fact is as he represents it to be. The figures are clearly meant to represent 1102, and nothing else, and it is equally clear that they were cut in the sixteenth century. The very forms of the letters declare it — the whole building is indisputably work of Elizabeth's time — of this there cannot be a doubt. A false date, then, was put up, whether in- tentionally or by mistake must remain matter of con- jecture. It has always struck me that the whole was a blunder of the stone-cutter. In manuscripts of the sixteenth century, you well know how difficult it often is to distinguish between 5 and 1, especially when they are hastily written, as the correspondence of that day abundantly proves. In France, to this day, the same resemblance continues, and I should desire no better illustration of our argument than the first hotel bill which the traveller meets with on his arrival. When first put into his hand, he flatters himself that he has been feasting cheaply, but on payment of his bill, he finds all his units turned into 5's, and there ends his dream. My own early prac- 84 ON THE ANTIQUITY OF DATES tical experience of this inconvenience, led me, many- years ago, to account for this disputed date by sup- posing that Mr. Colepeper had written the order for his stonemason to cut the inscription 1502, and he, misreading it, cut ( 1102.' This was always from the first my interpretation of it ; and a few years ago I was gratified at finding somewhat of a confirmation of my view among the muniments of the Colepeper family. It appears by the purchase-deed, 1505, that Edward Culpeper purchased the manor of Preston in that year. The first contract for purchase may have been made in 1502, and so fixed the date to that year. The Colepepers were evidently seated at Aylesford, and had considerable station and influence there, long before 1502, as I have abundant evidence from very early rolls; so that the purchase appearing to be comparatively much more modern than the Con- queror's days, (to which the family have been in the habit of ascribing the date of their planting them- selves at Preston), need not at all deteriorate from their antiquarian glories — it merely refers to the possession of Preston — not to their other and probably larger possessions at Aylesford — for Preston in itself is a very small thing. Your paper on numerals in the last Journal has so strongly suggested the ease with which blunders may be made in reading dates, that I have taken a fresh start in this inquiry, and, quitting some of my old positions, I am led to ask whether the order was not to cut 1582. If it had been e 1502,' the initials accompanying the date, in strict correctness, should have been E. c, as proved by the charter cited above. But in 1582 the estate was owned by Thomas Colepeper, and T. c. are the initials which do accompany the date on the build- EXPRESSED IN ARABIC NUMERALS. 85 ings. He came into possession in 1571, and I find no Colepeper in the pedigree (at all events from Henry IV downwards) who bore T for his initial." There is another date, of the 16 th century, over the door of Ightham Court Lodge, the ancient seat of the James family, with a palpable 5 unmistakeable, but which has been taken for a 1.* After this was written, I received from the Rev. C. W. Bingham, of Bingham's Melcombe, near Bland- ford, facsimiles of several early dates in the so-called Arabic numerals, on buildings in the county of Dor- set. The earliest of these is the date of 1487, cut in free-stone in the belfry-door of the church of Piddle- trenthide : — " It is remarkably little injured by time or other causes. The whole inscription is as follows, in Roman letters : — Est pydeltrenth' villa in dorsedie « f%k f% A comitatu nastitur in ilia qua rexit M &J Wm ^^L. vicariatu. ^W#Cr iiij d - Item, to Heroude, iij s ' iiij d ' Item, to Pilatteis wyffe, ij s * Item, to the bedull, iiij d - Item, to one of the knights, ij s " Item, to the devyll and to Judas, xviij d- Item, to Petur and Malkus, xvj dl 176 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA Item, to Anna,- ij s * ij d ' Item, to Pilatte, iiij s ' Item, to Pilatteis sonne, iiij d- Item, to another knighte, ij Sl Summa, xxviij s ' The mynstrell, xiiij d- Under other dates, there are sometimes entries of payments of subordinate performers, of which I am tempted to give one, because it relates to the same play as the payments just mentioned, and because the duties performed by this particular player are peculiar. It is this : — p d to Fawston for hangyng Judas, iiij d * p d to Fawston for coc-croying, iiij d - The dresses of the characters appear in some cases to have been expensive, and the continual entries of payments for mending or renewing them give us a tolerable idea of their character ; but these entries are often made with a naivete which shocks our notions of propriety, and show us that the Wycliffite preachers were right in urging that the tendency of such per- formances was rather to spread a feeling of irreverence for things sacred, than to promote religious feeling. Thus we have frequently such items as — " Item, payd for the spret (spirit) of Gods cote, ij s ." We learn from these entries that God's coat was of leather, painted and gilt, and that he had a wig of false hair, also gilt. Caiaphas and Annas were robed as bishops. Herod appears to have had a mask, which, from the allusions to his character, had pro- bably a ferocious look : there are many payments for mending and painting his head, and he had a helmet and crest, which appear to have been much orna- mented. He had a gown of satin and blue buckram, IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 177 and carried a sceptre. Pilate, to judge by his wages, was the most important personage in this pageant, yet the principal expenses into which he led the com- pany related to the mending of his hat. His son is comparatively ill paid for his acting, as he receives in wages but fourpence; and he seems to have been employed merely to carry some of the attributes of the father, for the payments relating to him regard chiefly the repairs of his hat and of a poll-axe and sceptre. Pilate's wife was a more important person- age, as she figures in a dream wherein she was ad- monished to warn her husband as to his proceedings with regard to the Saviour. - She was named in the mediaeval legend Dame Procula, and, as she was dressed in a gown of the first fashion, it seems to have been customary to borrow one for the occasion from the most stylish-dressing dame in the town. We have an entry to the following effect: "Item, to re- ward to Maisturres Grymesby for lendyng of her geir ffor Pylats wyfe, xij d ." The devil seems to have been dressed in leather ; his head required often mending and painting ; fourpence is on one occasion paid for a staff for him, and there are continual charges for painting his club. It is hardly worth our labour to speak in detail of the dresses of the minor charac- ters ; it may simply be remarked that the canvas of Juclas's coat cost two shillings, and that tenpence was paid for making it ; that Peter had a wig, and apparently a long beard; and that the beadle was dressed in a jacket and hood. The stage, as I have already stated, was raised upon wheels, and it consisted of one, two, and some- times of three floors, representing respectively heaven, earth, and the infernal regions. The contrivances for I 2 178 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA producing stage effect seem to have been extremely ingenious, and sometimes complicated. The records we have been quoting throw little light on this part of the subject, but we learn more from the marginal stage-directions in some of the manuscripts of French mysteries of the same date. Thus, in the fall of Lucifer, it is directed in the margin of one of these that " Lucifer and his angels are now to be let down by means of a wheel secretly contrived to work upon a screw pivot." In the performance of the Creation, when God separates light from darkness, the stage direction is, " Now a painted cloth is to be exhibited, one-half black, and the other half white ! " When God separates the waters, " Now must be shown, as it were, a sea, which has previously been covered, and fishes in it." And when God creates the fowls, the stage direction is, " Now must some one secretly let fly little birds into the air, and place on the stage swans, geese, ducks, cocks, hens, with the most un- common animals that can be obtained." In one of the Coventry books we have the entry, " Item, p d for starche to make the storme in the pagente, vj d ." There are some amusing entries relating to stage machinery in the same books, as, for example : — Item, payd for mendyng hell mowthe, ij d> Item, payd for payntyng of hellmought, iij d * Item, payd for makynge of hell mothe new, xxj d * And again : — Item, payd for keepyng of fyer at hell mothe, iiij d * I have somewhere read that on one occasion the ne- cessity of making " hell mouth " new arose from an accident in the management of this fire, which in- IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 179 volved the infernal regions in a general conflagration. We have in these same books the commemoration of an equally serious and more deliberate case of incen- diarism : "Item, payd for settyng the world of fyer, It is curious that, when we compare that part of the collection preserved and printed as the Coventry Mysteries with the entries in the books of the Smiths' Company relating to their pageant, we see at once that it could not be the same play they acted. In fact, the substance of their play is broken into one or two smaller ones. These, however, are near enough in subject to allow of a brief analysis in illustration of the characters as described in the books, and of the general plan of these singular compositions. The scene introduces the Saviour leading his favourite disciples to the Mount of Olives, and at first both the dialogue and acting are a mere paraphrase of the Gospel narrative. At length he awakens his dis- ciples, and tells them that his time was come, and that Judas was at hand to betray him. " Here," says the stage direction, " Jesus with his disciples goeth into the place, and there shall come in about ten persons well beseen in white harness and brigan- dines, and some disguised in other garments, with swords, glaives, and other strange weapons, as cres- sets with fire, and lanterns and torches light; and Judas foremost of all, conveying them to Jesus by countenance." The Saviour asks them what they seek, and they reply, " Jesus of Nazareth." On his declaring that he is the man, they all fall to the ground, and only rise again at his bidding. After some further contention, Judas kisses Christ, and then his companions rush upon him. It is at this 180 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA moment that Peter, moved by his zeal, strikes Mal- chus with his sword, and cuts off his ear; which Christ immediately heals by a miracle, and expostu- lates with Peter for using violence in his cause. The Jews now seize upon Christ, and lead him away, with a good deal of vulgar abuse and ribaldry, which was calculated for the taste of the mob. Another scene now opens, in which Herod appears sitting upon his throne, surrounded by his doctors, or courtiers, who greet him with the most abject flattery. When they have concluded, he addresses the audience in a style of exaggerated pomposity, which is best described by Shakespeare's phrase of out-Heroding Herod. Herod may be truly said to swear like a Turk, for he has nothing in his mouth but Mahom, or Mahomet. He boasts of being the greatest and most powerful per- sonage in the world, talks of everybody as his slaves, and declares that if any one dares to speak without his orders he would involve them in immediate and immense destruction. This impotent threatening appears to have been chiefly addressed to the audience, and must, no doubt, have created great amusement. We know from Chaucer that it was a great object of ambition to be thought worthy and capable of per- forming the part of Herod in the Mysteries. Herod gives orders to his officers to go and effect the capture of Jesus. Another scene introduces to us the two priests, Caiaphas and Annas, seated in state, and a messenger arrives with tidings of the capture of the Saviour, and gives an account of the whole trans- action. Soon afterwards Christ is led in by the Jews, and witnesses are heard against him, and he is reviled and beaten. One of the maid-servants accuses Peter of being one of the disciples, which he denies, IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 181 and the cock crows (Mr. Fawston's part). This is repeated^ and then Peter weeps, and goes out, and makes his lament. Caiaphas and Annas, meanwhile, despatch a messenger to Pilate, to require his pre- sence at the " Moot-Hall," on account of " a great matter " that required speed. Judas, in the mean time, is seized with repentance, and, returning to Caiaphas and Annas, offers back the money for which he had sold his Redeemer. They refuse it with bitter jeers, and, to use the words of the stage direc- tions, (i then Judas casteth down the money, and goeth and hangeth himself." We have seen in the books of the Smiths' Company that one of the sub- ordinate actors assisted the traitor in this last act of self-retributive justice. Next day, in consequence of the summons, Pilate takes his seat in the " Moot- Hall," and Jesus is brought before him for trial, Caiaphas and Annas acting as accusers. After hear- ing all the witnesses, Pilate is of opinion that no crime is proved, and is desirous of setting Jesus at liberty ; but this is opposed by the Jews, and after much contention on the subject, a quibble is raised about jurisdiction, and the prisoner is passed over to king Herod. Herod storms and rages considerably, and causes his victim to be scourged and tormented, and then he sends him back to Pilate with full autho- rity to condemn him to death. Pilate was, therefore, considered as a subordinate personage to king Herod. Meanwhile a new scene has begun. " Here entereth Satan into the place, in the most horrible wise." Satan outdoes Herod in his profane swearing and boasting, and exults over what he foresees will be the fate of Christ, knowing that he would descend to hell, and believing that he would remain there under 182 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA his subjection. In his joy, he calls to hell to prepare for his reception : — Helle ! helle ! make redy, for here xal come a gest, Hedyr xal come Jhesus that is clepyd Goddys sone, And he xal ben here be the oure of none, And with the here he xal wone, And han ful shrewyd rest. The subordinate fiends, however, appear to have had more shrewdness than their master, and one of them suggests that it would be better to keep such a guest away. He says, addressing himself to Satan : — Out upon the ! we conjure the, That nevyr in helle we may hym se ; For and he onys in helle be, He xal oure power brest ! An entirely new light now breaks upon Satan's mind, and, in his alarm at the destruction which threatens his own power, he determines to prevent the Saviour from being put to death. He resolves, therefore, to work upon the fears of Pilate's wife :— - To Pylatys wyff I wele now go, And sche is aslepe a bed ful fast, And byd here withowtyn wordys mo, To Pylat that sche send in hast. " Here," says the stage direction, " shall the devil go to Pilate's wife, the curtain drawn as she lieth in bed ; and he shall make no din ; but she shall, soon after that he is come in, make a e rewly ' noise, com- ing and running off the scaffold, and her shirt and her kirtle in her hand, and she shall come before Pilate like a mad woman, saying thus : — Pylat, I charge the that thou take hede ! Deme not Jhesu, but be his frende ! IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 183 Gyf thou jewge hym to be dede, Thou art dampnyd withowtyn ende!" And she goes on to tell her vision ; in consequence of which Pilate determines to have nothing to do with the persecution of Jesus, but, after a vain attempt to persuade the Jews to set him at liberty, he returns him back upon their hands. This seems to have completed the Mystery performed by the Smiths' Company. When it was concluded, the stage, or pageant, on which it was performed, moved forward upon its wheels, and proceeded, no doubt, to recommence in another part of the town, while the next stage in order took its place, and another set of performers acted the Mystery which came next in succession. The play I have thus briefly described was one of those in which the Scriptural story was least embel- lished with extraneous incidents. The authors of these compositions, however, were not without rea- son charged by the moralists with seeking mainly to cater to the taste of the vulgar populace, to do which they found it necessary to introduce comic scenes and burlesque, or at least droll characters. This was effected most frequently by giving the humorous parts to some of the lower personages who belonged to the plot itself; but in some cases personages are introduced purposely as humorous characters, who had otherwise no claim to a place in the story. Thus, in the play of Cain and Abel, in the Towneley col- lection, an ill-conditioned servant is given to Cain, and the disputes between him and his master are full of coarse humour. In the play of Noah's Flood, the wife of Noah, instead of obeying the call of her hus- band to enter the ark, proceeds at the last moment to 184 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA the tavern to join her gossips, to the great annoyance of the rest of the family, who are eager to get afloat ; they remain drinking, gossiping, and singing, until the danger becomes imminent ; and, after much mu- tual abuse, Xoah beats his wife soundly, or, accord- ing to another version, Noah himself is the van- quished. The play of the Shepherds, in every col- lection, gives room for the introduction of mirthful pictures of rustic life. Even the Virgin's conception is made a subject for ribaldry; and in the Coventry collection we have a mystery, or play, on the subject of her pretended trial. It opens with the appear- ance of the somnour, who reads a long list of offenders that appear in his book ; then come two " detractors," who repeat certain scandalous stories relating to Joseph and Mary, upon the strength of which they are summoned to appear before the ecclesiastical court. They are accordingly put upon their trial, and Ave have a broad picture of the proceedings in such a case, which would be worthy to employ the pencil of a Rowlandson. In the play of the Slaugh- ter of the Innocents, a laughable scene was always furnished in a skirmish between the slaughterers and the mothers of the victims, who are made to indulge to a considerable degree in what would now be called "Billingsgate" language. In the Coventry collec- tion, the Woman taken in Adultery is also made the subject of a good deal of merriment. Among the comic characters in these plays, we must not forget the executioners, or, as they are termed here, the tor- mentors, who are especially distinguished for their drollery ; and the various acts of the passion, the scornful treatment, the scourging, and the crucifixion of the Saviour, must have kept the audience in a roar IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 185 of laughter. Lastly, one of the merriest exhibitions in the whole course was Doomsday, or the Day of Judgment, in which all those individuals who are supposed to have given offence or scandal on earth are exposed to popular satire, and in very popular language. The miller, who stole his share of the corn which was brought to his mill, and the ale-wife, who sold short measure, were among the greatest persecutors of the lower orders during the middle ages, and are here held up to the bitterest scorn ; and the people of fashion, who it was pretended spent on fine clothes the money which ought to have gone to the poor, were not spared. It may be remarked, that the gross language which in these plays is put in the mouths of women as well as of men, gives us but a low opinion of the delicacy of manners among our forefathers of the fifteenth century. The same humorous scenes, or episodes, are found in the French Mysteries, where they exhibit usually more originality of conception. The characters, too, are here more frequently extraneous, or at least un- necessary, to the plot. In one of the earliest of these, the play of St. Nicholas, by Jean Boclel, the merri- ment was produced by a vulgar scene between a party of gamblers in a tavern. In the Miracle-plays, which were more abundant in French than in English, thieves, or persons of the lower classes of society in towns, or peasants in the country, or beggars and other vagrants, are introduced for the purpose of humorous scenes of this description. In one of these, which has for its subject the life and miracles of St. Fiacre, the humorous scene is introduced in the form of an interlude, and is called a farce — cy est interpose unefarsse. This farce consists of five personages, a 186 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA brigand or robber, a peasant, a sergeant, and the wives of the two latter. The brigand appears first on the stage, and meeting with the peasant, inquires of him the way to St. Omer. The peasant retorts in the style of clownishness which it was then fashion- able to ascribe to every one who was born a " vilan," or serf, or who was descended of such servile blood. The robber, offended, but putting the most charitable construction on the first offence, repeats his question, and that with sufficient politeness, but he meets with a second rebuff, more offensive even than the first. Finding him thus uncourteous, he avenges himself by robbing the peasant of a capon ; but in this con- juncture the sergeant comes up, interposes, and at- tempts to recapture the capon, and, in the struggle, the brigand strikes him a blow which fractures his arm. The brigand escapes, and his two antagonists quit the scene for a moment, while their wives come forward to occupy it. The peasant's wife informs the sergeant's wife of the injury which her hus- band has sustained, and the latter lady rejoices at an accident which she thinks has deprived him of the power of beating her. In all these scenes the women are made the object of broadest satire, and the picture of married life is not flattering to the domestic cha- racter of our forefathers. The two wives adjourn to a tavern, where they call for wine, and make merry, their conversation turning chiefly on the defects of their husbands, who, however, eventually return upon the stage, and give them practical evidence that they are neither of them disabled. This is one of the earliest instances of the applica- tion to these scenes of the word Farce, derived from an old French verb farcer, to make merry, and there- IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 187 fore signifying a drollery or merriment. In the Towneley Mysteries there is a second play of the Shepherds, the plot of which is a perfect farce, and has as little to do with the subject of the Mystery itself as the French farce just described with the story of St. Fiacre. A party of shepherds meet on the moors, where their sheep-walks lie, and enter into conversation on the evil times in which they live, their own miserable condition, and the inclemency of the weather. In the midst of it enters an individual of very equivocal character, who goes by the popular name of Mak, and who joins in the familiar discourse, and remains with them till they all compose them- selves to sleep, it being night. Mak then rises, picks out the fattest sheep in the flock, and carries it home to his wife. They consult on the best means of con- cealing their booty, and, at the wife's suggestion, they put it in the cradle, and she lays herself beside it, pretending to be just delivered of a child. At early dawn the shepherds awake, visit their flocks, and soon discover that a robbery has been committed. Their suspicion at once falls upon Mak, and they trace him to his house, where the various subterfuges of the offender and his worthy consort, and the final dis- covery of the stolen sheep, are represented in the broadest style of caricature, which is heightened by the pointed allusions to contemporary manners, and even to local circumstances and events. While the shepherds are rejoicing over the recovery of their lost property, an angel suddenly enters on the stage, and announces the birth of the Redeemer, and the play of the Mystery goes on as usual. Such are the scenes to which the term farce was first applied. In France, these farces began to be separated from 188 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DEAMA the Mysteries in the course of the fifteenth century, a circumstance which arose partly from the existence in that country of certain joyous societies or clubs. One of the oldest of these societies was that of the clerks of the Bazoche, or lawyers' clerks of the Palace of Justice, who had their president, a sort of king of misrule, and, among other ceremonies, performed drolleries of the kind I have been describing. This society had existed from the fourteenth century. Early in the reign of Charles VI, that is, about the end of the fourteenth century, there was formed at Paris another society of young people of education and mirthful disposition, who took the name of Enfans sans Souci (or Careless Boys), and chose a chief, to whom they gave the title of Prince des Sots (the Prince of Sots, or Fools.) While the Bazochians, as the others called themselves, performed their farces, the Enfans sans Souci got up a sort of dramatic satires, which they called Sotties, which had sufficient ana- logy with the others to excite considerable jealousy, for it appears that each had obtained a privilege for the sole performance of their peculiar representations. The jealousy between them was finally appeased by a sort of treaty, whereby the Bazochians gave their rivals the permission to perform farces, and the En- fans sans Souci allowed the Bazochians to perform softies. The Bazochians, meanwhile, had invented a new class of dramatic compositions, which they called Moralities, and in which they sometimes introduced real personages, and at others allegorical personages, such as Good Advice, Instruction, Discipline, Luxury, &c. These various productions, especially the farces, soon became extremely popular in France, and great numbers of them were printed in the earlier part of IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 189 the sixteenth century, and many of them are pre- served, though they are regarded among the rare productions of the popular literature of the age, and fetch high prices among collectors. The character of these farces was entirely identical with the humo- rous scenes which had been introduced into the Mys- teries, and they were equally barren of invention. A popular story, an ancient fable, a contemporary ad- venture — anything of this kind served for a plot. Many of them are mere tavern scenes ; others expose family quarrels and domestic mishaps. The adven- tures of two rogues, one of whom steals a tart from a pastrycook, while the other is caught in the attempt to follow his example, are the subject of one farce. In another, the wives, dissatisfied with their hus- bands, because they were growing too old for them, discover a method of making them young again. Sometimes the scene is laid in a court of law. But the most common subjects are love intrigues, and these, as well as the general character of these pieces, speak little for the morality of the age in which they were composed. In one of these farces, the wife sends her good man to the tavern to fetch wine, while she enjoys the company of her amour eux ; and the repeated return of the husband to ask some frivolous question relating to his errand causes many disagree- able interruptions to the confidences of the lovers, in whicli the mirth of the piece consists. The Sotties and Moralities were more fanciful and extravagant in their plan, but they always combined more or less of satire on the character and condition of the age. The title of one of these pieces will be sufficient to give a notion of their general character; it is, "A new Morality of the Children of Now-a-days (Mainte- 190 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA nant), who are the scholars of Once-good (Jahieri), who shows them how to play at cards and at dice, and to entertain Luxury, whereby one comes to Shame (Honte), and from Shame to Despair (Deses- poi?-), and from Despair to the gibbet of Perdition, and then turns himself to Good-doing." All these personifications, Now-a-days, Once-good, Luxury, Shame, Despair, Perdition, and Good-doing, are per- sonages in the play. This arbitrary personification is sometimes carried to an extraordinary length. The three personages in one of these Moralities are Every- thing ( Tout), Nothing (Rieri), and Everybody ( Chas- curi). The idea of personifying Nothing on the stage is certainly ingenious, and could hardly have entered the head of anybody but one of the Enfans sans Souci. For some reason or other, the Moralities and Sot- ties found more imitators in England (when at the beginning of the sixteenth century these compositions were introduced here) than the farces. Perhaps this arose in a great measure from the general preoccupa- tion of people's minds with the religious and social revolution which was then in progress, and the apt- ness of a morality or a sottie for conveying instruc- tion or reproof. The fashion for this class of dramatic compositions did not, however, last very long in this country, and, as the Mysteries also went out of re- pute at the time of the Reformation, their place was supplied gradually by a new class of plays. The reformers saw at once the advantage which might be taken of the stage in spreading in a popular form their principles and opinions, although they were shocked by the irreverence and profanity of the re- presentations which had previously occupied it, and IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 191 they introduced in place of these, plays in which were acted by personages histories of different kinds which illustrated the crimes and evils of the Papal govern- ment. Such was the play of " King John," by the celebrated bishop Bale, and other similar composi- tions might be mentioned. These, however, were heavy and dull, and they wanted that principal ele- ment of popularity — the comic scenes — which had been the great support of the Mysteries. But the taste for dramatic performances was now so strongly established, that, as these disappeared from the stage, they were succeeded by plays which differed from them only in subject, and which differed from the farces in the much greater extent of their outline. They also formed a feature of the new and more mas- culine character of the literature of the age. It was, however, nothing more than the Mysteries enlarged, and their subjects changed ; for the new playwrights only took stories from profane history, or from ro- mance, or from the narratives of the story-tellers, and arranged them so as to be represented by per- sonages, and they followed so closely the old plan that they introduced into these histories and stories the same sort of comic scenes, and in the same man- ner, which, indeed, had been preserved in the Sotties and Moralities, where, in consequence of these comic scenes being given ordinarily, as in the Mysteries, to the more vicious or the more foolish of the personages of the piece, these characters were termed, techni- cally, the Vices, or the Fools of the play. The Mo- ralities themselves, which in England took the more scholastic title of Interludes, which had, indeed, been sometimes given in the previous period to the Mys- teries, gradually ran into this new form of composi- 192 ON THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA tion. The struggle between the Interlude, or Mora- lity, and the new class of drama, was going on during the earlier part of the reign of Elizabeth ; and al- though several attempts had already been made, the latter was not brought to its perfect form until the middle of her reign. Soon after that period it was raised to its most glorious and elevated point by the genius of Shakespeare. But even in Shakespeare him- self, we still see the influence of the old mediaeval forms, the boldness of the personification, the care- lessness of the dramatic unities, the reckless ana- chronisms, and, especially, the interweaving of the favourite comic scenes with the most serious and even tragical plots— those characteristics, indeed, which the foreign critics of Shakespeare have so often misunderstood. It may be added, that the old Mys- teries were still performed to the lower classes in a debased form by mountebanks in booths at fairs, though they had lost all their former importance ; the memory of which, however, was still preserved in the use of the term a play, a farce, &c, and in such phrases as to play, to bring on the stage, and the like, which we still preserve. My sketch of the history of the English drama ends with the close of the mediaeval period ; but we may cast a glance at what was going on in the lite- rature of neighbouring countries while it was here experiencing this wonderful development. In Ger- many, the same kind of development was showing itself more feebly, and there was there, contemporary with Shakespeare, a drama which differed from his mainly in its want of energy and vitality. In fact, it did not live long. In France, the development itself was wanting. The Moralities and other plays of that IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 193 class gradually became obsolete, and bad no succes- sors but the mere routine of masques and court pageantry. Our neighbours can hardly be said to have possessed a stage of their own, until, in the fol- lowing century, they formed one upon the model of the ancients, which was formal and cold ; and though France has since had her great and perfect dramatists, she cannot be said to possess, like England, a national drama, which has grown up and firmly rooted itself in the genius of the people, and the first seed of which, as I before observed, was sown in the Mysteries of the middle ages. II. XXII. ON THE LITERATURE OF THE TROBADOURS. S the vast fabric of the empire of the Caesars crumbled to pieces before the in- roads of successive invaders, the two principles of civilization and barbarism were brought face to face, and, while the latter gained the physical victory, the moral superiority of the former was soon felt far beyond the limits of Roman provinces. In the general fusion of races, which immediately followed, the degree of social refinement depended upon the proportion of the Roman element of civilization, and was, therefore, greater as it ap- proached near the seat of the Roman power : it was marked by the general adoption of the language of the conquered, derived immediately from Rome. The ISTeo-Latin dialects, thus formed, prevailed throughout Italy, the Spanish peninsula, and Gaul. Beyond these limits, towards the west and north, where the various Teutonic dialects held undisputed sway, society presented a harsher and less refined tone, but in the sequel, perhaps, a more healthy one. Singu- larly enough, this harsher spirit got possession of the Church, which, during the middle ages, exhibited almost universally a feeling hostile to civilization. LITERATURE OF THE TROBADOTJRS. 195 It was amid the beautiful scenery, and beneath the mild climate, of the Roman provinces of Narbona, opening upon the Mediterranean sea to the south, between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and known in subsequent ages by the general appellation of Pro- vence, that the remains of Roman refinement seem to have held their ground longest, amid the general wreck that surrounded them. It was there that the language preserved with least change the forms of its Roman prototype ; there, still, are found many of the noblest monuments of Roman art; and there was long cherished that unyielding hostility to the bar- barised form of Romish Christianity, which caused it to be regarded by the medieval Church as a mere nest of pestilential heresy. There, too, existed a literature strongly distinguished from that of the cloister in an age when the coarse asceticism of the monastery appeared everywhere to have chilled the hearts of those who professed to hold the genial humanising faith of the Saviour. In the decline of the Roman power, the greater portion of this district was occupied by the Visigoths; of all the Teutonic tribes, the most apt for civilization, and the one which most readily adopted the Roman manners. The fourth in succession of their chiefs, the first Theodoric, lent his arm successfully to shield Rome from the invasion of Attila, and left his body among the hundreds of thousands who fell in the ter- rible battle of Chalons. On his son, of the same name, history has conferred the title of Theodoric the Great. The Burgundians, who followed the Visi- goths into these parts, also embraced with alacrity the civilization which offered itself to them. The Franks came in last, one of the least cultivated of the German tribes, and gradually, during the sixth cen- 196 ON THE LITERATURE tury, effected the conquest of the Burgundians and Goths ; and the period which followed was anything but favourable to the progress of social improvement. For some time, Provence remained an integral por- tion of the empire of the Carlovings ; but as that empire was also weakened and broken, this part of Gaul obtained its independence, under a number of feudal chiefs, who were in character essentially me- diaeval, but still preserving in their domestic manners much of that politeness and refinement which must be ascribed to Roman, and perhaps, also, in some measure, to Saracenic influence. The leisure of the feudal lord and his knights must have hung heavy upon their hands, for feudal life was, above all others, unceasingly monotonous. The chief pastime of their unconverted forefathers had been hard drinking, during which they told boast- ful tales of their. own valour, or listened to the ex- ploits of those mythic heroes, whose history had been handed down from generation to generation. When we become more intimately acquainted with the social life of the castle, in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies, we find that the chess-board, the dance, and a number of games, mostly of a childish character, helped to give a little variety to such amusements. The ardent spirited inhabitants of the south required more exciting diversions ; and a peculiar form had been given to these by the traditional refinement of manners before mentioned. From a few expressions which lie scattered through the pages of monkish writers, we learn that, even in their worst times, the natives of Provence loved the dance and the song, and that they were distinguished by a tone of gal- lantry which contrasts strongly with the habitual OF THE TEOBADOUKS. 197 ferocity of barbaric life, but which was regarded with no indulgent eye by the monkish writers alluded to. Under the counts of Provence, this taste for gallan- try was matured into a system which might vie with the polite affectation of the age of Louis XIV. By one general assent, love became with the Provencal knight his entire occupation, when not engaged in the field — love, carried on according to prescribed forms and rules, was the game with which every one was expected to be acquainted ; and in its language, poetry, he was expected to converse. It was this cir- cumstance which gave its distinguishing character to the literature of Provence. The poetry of the troba- dours is chiefly of a lyric form, and may be divided into two classes — songs of strife and songs of love, — of which the latter is by much the most extensive. That love and poetry were inseparable, was a fundamental doctrine ; " No man can be a good poet if he be not in love," says the trobadour Elias Cairels : Nulhs horn non pot ben chantar Sens amar." And we shall find repeatedly, if we look through their lives, that the trobadours dated the rise of their poetic talent from the time of their first amorous adventures. " Griroud le Eoux," says his ancient biographer, " was a courteous and good composer of songs ; he fell in love with the countess, daughter of his feudal lord, and the love he cherished for her taught him poetry." There was a curious difference between the two great families of the Teutonic and Neo-Latin lan- guages in the appellation given to the poet. In the former, it was derived from a verb, which signified to create, in the latter, from one signifying to find; and 198 ON THE LITEEATURE thus, with the Saxons and Germans, poetry was a creation, while with the Provencals and French it was an invention, and the poets were called (accord- ing to the dialect) trobadours or trouveres, persons who invent. These trobadours, or trouveres, were in general wild, restless, extravagant fellows, like too many of their descendants in later times, and this character became still more strongly impressed by the mode of life which their profession entailed upon them. A poet now profits by the sale of his book ; but a trobadour of the olden time had no other means of publishing his compositions to the world but by wandering from court to court, and reciting them himself. A numerous class of society throughout Europe lived in this manner, repeating from house to house their own works, or those of others, which they had committed to memory, and they were everywhere honoured and rewarded by their hearers. This was the practice in Provence, as well as in other coun- tries; but there, from the peculiar state of society we have just described, there appeared another and totally different class of poets — a knightly race, who composed, not for gain, but with the object of insult- ing their enemies, or, more frequently, with that of paying their court to their ladies. These are the trobadours of whom we would more especially speak on the present occasion, for it is to them chiefly we owe the love-songs and the biting and satirical sir- ventes, the classes of literature more peculiarly that of the trobadours. Literature, among this class of trobadours, had a totally different value from that which it possessed in the hands of the wandering minstrel. The latter was ever regarded as belonging to a servile caste, and, OF THE TROBADOURS. 199 though rewarded and patronised, he was not allowed a position of familiarity with his worldly superiors. For him, literary talent procured food and clothing, but with the poor or inferior knightly trobadour it stood in the place of riches, and even of rank, and he associated freely with all that was great and noble. Giraud le Roux, already mentioned as having fallen in love with the daughter of his feudal lord, the count of Toulouse, was the son of a poor knight. The ad- ventures of the lady were, however, in this instance, much more remarkable than those of her lover. In 1 147 she accompanied her father to Syria, where she was taken prisoner by the Saracens, and became an in- mate of the seraglio of Noureddeen, prince of Alep- po, who eventually made her his wife ; and after the death of her husband, she governed for some time the little kingdom of Aleppo as guardian of her infant son. After the departure of his lord and his mistress for the crusades, Giraud le Roux appears to have given up the life of a courtier, and to have thrown himself upon the world in the character of a wander- ing jongleur. Bernard de Ventadour, one of the most eminent of the Provencal poets of the twelfth century, was the son of a menial servant in the castle from which he took his name. The court of the viscount of Ven- tadour was at that time celebrated for its literary splendour; and his lord, Ebles III., gave every encouragement to a youth who attracted attention equally by the beauty of his person and by his poetic talents. Bernard fixed his love not on the daughter but on the wife of his feudal lord, the viscountess of Ventadour, and he was secretly received on that equivocal footing legalized in the love code of Pro- 200 ON THE LITEEATUKE verbal gallantry. For this lady he composed a great number of lyric pieces, all remarkable for a graceful- ness of style superior to that of most of his contem- poraries. Bernard made no secret of his conscious- ness of this circumstance ; — " It is no wonder/' he says, in one of these songs, "if I sing better than any other trobadour, since I have a heart more inclined to love, and more pliant to its laws. Body and soul 3 talent and knowledge, force and power, I have put all in love ; I have reserved none for any other thing." The familiarity between the lady of Ventadour and the poet at length aroused the jealousy of the viscount, who banished Bernard from his court, and confined his wife in her chamber, where she was cut off from communication with the world. Bernard quitted the Limousin, and repaired, about the year 1160, to the court of Normandy, where literature was encouraged by the duchess, Eleanor of Guienne, who four years afterwards ascended the throne of England, with her husband, Henry II. With this lady, whose son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, derived from her his love of poetry, and who was at this time in the prime of her beauty, Bernard formed the same kind of liaison which he had been compelled to break with the vis- countess of Ventadour, but which appears, as far as we know, to have been, in this instance, without in- terruption. For Eleanor, as duchess of Normandy and queen of England, Bernard composed some of his best songs. Two stanzas from one of them will show the sort of familiar services which it was the duty of the favoured lover to perform — he is admitted to her bedroom, and assists in undressing her : — " My lady has so much craftiness and address, that she makes me always believe that she is going to love OF THE TROBADOURS. 201 me. She deceives me agreeably ; she leads me into error by her sweet semblances. Lady, leave your craft and deceit. In whatever manner your vassal suffers, the hurt will fall upon you. " Oh ! she will do ill, my lady, unless she makes me go where she undresses herself ; and unless, hav- ing permitted me to kneel beside her bed, she deigns to present me her foot, that I may untie her well- fitting shoes !" A few years later, Bernard de Ventadour left the court of Eleanor to revisit his native land, — to sing new songs and make new conquests, — and he took up his abode during the remainder of his life, at the court of Raymond count of Toulouse. The gallantry of the trobadours led them, not unfrequently, into more daring adventures in the service of their ladies. Pierre de Maenzac, a poor knight of Auvergne, in the latter half of the twelfth century, was to the wife of Bernard de Tiercy what the trobadour last mentioned had been to the vis- countess of Ventadour, and had composed many songs in her praise. Perhaps Bernard was a cruel hus- band ; and for this, or some other reason, the lady of Tiercy allowed herself to be carried off from the castle of her lord by Pierre de Maenzac. It was a great prey for a poor knight, who had neither castle to shelter nor retainers to defend her ; but fortunately he was beloved and protected by the dauphin of Auvergne, and into one of his castles he carried his mistress. The lord of Tiercy soon discovered the place of their retreat, and demanded the restoration of his wife. But the dauphin, who (as we learn from the biographical fragments relating to the trobadours preserved in old Provencal manuscripts) was " one of k2 202 OK THE LITERATURE the wisest and most courteous knights in the world, the most liberal, the most skilful in arms, and most knowing in love and in war," refused to give up either the ravisher or the lady. The result was an open war, the more serious because the bishop of Cler- mont took part with the husband, and joined his forces with those of Tiercy in the invasion of Au- vergne ; but the dauphin defended himself well, and in the end Pierre de Maenzac was allowed to keep his prize. Acts of violence like this were not uncommon at the period of which we are speaking, and several stories might be told remarkably characteristic of the state of society amongst these feudal chiefs. Baym- baud de Vaqueiras, a distinguished trobadour of the twelfth century, was the friend of Boniface marquis of Montferrat, one of whose vassals, and his especial friend, Boson d'Anquilar, was passionately enamoured of a young damsel named Isaldina Adhemar, but her parents refused their consent to the union, and, to put her out of his reach, placed her under the protec- tion of Albert marquis of Malaspina, in whose castle she was shut up. Boson, heart-broken at the loss of his mistress, took to his bed, refusing every consola- tion that could be offered, and there seemed little hopes of his recovery. In this emergency, Boniface collected a few of his friends, and, accompanied by the trobadour Baymbaud, who tells the story, penetrated into the castle of Malaspina by night, and carried away the lady by force. Baymbaud relates another adventure in which he was engaged with the mar- quis of Montferrat, when they carried away a lady by open daylight, as she was going to be married against her will. OF THE TROBADOTTRS. 203 In accordance with the Provencal love code to which we have just alluded, when the knight had selected his mistress, he could not be received into her favour at once, but was obliged to pass through a regular novitiate, and advance by several steps or degrees. A trobadour of the thirteenth century has limited these degrees to four; during the first of which the suitor was to pay his court in silence, without venturing to give utterance to his wishes ; in the second, which was to commence with the moment when the lady gave him sufficient encouragement to allow him to speak, he was to go no further than re- spectfully praying for her good will ; the third step was that in which he had prevailed so far as to be listened to, and was rewarded now and then with gloves, or a scarf; the last degree was that of lover, which the lady at length condescended to grant by the first kiss with which he had been favoured, and from this time the knight became irrevocably attached to her service. The admission to this last degree was an imposing ceremony. Kneeling before his lady, with his two hands joined between her two hands, the knight devoted himself entirely to her, swore to serve her faithfully even to death, and to guard her with all his power from hurt or from outrage. The lady, on her part, declared that she accepted his homage, pledged to him the tenderest affections of her heart, and, in sign of the union which was thence- forth established between them, she generally pre- sented him with a ring, and with a kiss raised him from his kneeling posture. To render this ceremony still more solemn, a priest was not unfrequently in- troduced, who blessed the union of the lady with her suitor, and the latter was now understood to possess 204 ON THE LITERATURE all her love and affections, her body alone being the property of her husband. Matrimony was thus re- duced to its lowest degree of moral importance, even supposing, with M. Fauriel (which, however, is rendered very improbable by the general tone of contemporary history), that the attachment between the lady and her love were, in many cases, of a Pla- tonic character. It was a doctrine of this school of gallantry, that love could not possibly exist in the married state, and that, if a lady subsequently married a knight who had been her lover, the love between them ceased from the moment of solemnising the nuptials. We ought, perhaps, not to be surprised at the existence of such loose notions of marriage, when we consider that in those feudal times it was seldom anything more than an interested or political union. Among the innumerable love questions which were debated in the courts of gallantry, we find one which peculiarly illustrates the doctrine just mentioned. A knight made love to a lady who was already pro- vided with a lover, and she therefore could not listen to his suit ; but, unwilling to leave him entirely without hope, she promised to take him for her knight, in case she should lose the one who already enjoyed her love. Shortly after this promise, the lady married her first lover, on which the second knight claimed the fulfilment of her promise. The lady, in surprise, said that she owed him nothing, since, so far from having lost her first lover, she had taken him for her husband. But the knight persisted, and a lady of high rank and celebrity was called upon to sit in judgment, who condemned the married woman to fulfil her promise, on the ground that she had veritably lost her first lover in making him her OF THE TKOBADOURS. 205 husband. The knight, in all such cases, was bound to keep secret the name of his lady, who was only spoken of either by some poetic name, or by some allusive phrase, known to themselves, so that when she was celebrated in the trobadour's songs, none but herself knew who was referred to. Such was the artificial character given to social life in the land of the trobadours during the twelfth century, under the influence of which almost every knight who laid claim to a courtly education, became a poet, and the number of their love-songs, still pre- served, is very considerable. The period at which this state of society arose is uncertain ; but it cannot be distinctly traced further back than the twelfth century. The courts of love, which were the highest refinement of these principles of gallantry, and in which questions like that just stated were pleaded and judged, existed in the middle of that century. They probably originated in the games and amuse- ments of the castle, in which such questions had been put and answered in sport ; and it is, perhaps, to one of these games only that the count of Poitiers, the earliest known trobadour (who wrote about 1 100), refers, when he says to his lady in one of his songs, is And if you propose to me a game of love, I am not so foolish but that I know how to choose the best [question?] rather than the bad one." E si m'partetz un juec d'amor, No suy tan fatz Non sapcha triar le melhor Entr'els malvatz. In fact, we might easily adduce evidence of the existence of such games in countries where the courts 206 ON THE LITERATURE of love, in their more perfect form, were never estab- lished. Early in the thirteenth century the poetry of the trobadours began to decline. The state of society which we have been describing, combined with the independent position which the feudal chiefs of these districts had held towards the court of Rome, had produced freedom of inquiry in religious matters, and old traditions of a less corrupt form of Christianity were gaining ground, and became what the church of Rome looked upon as a dangerous heresy. In the sanguinary war raised by the church under pretence of a crusade against the sect of the Albigeois, the fair countries where the trobadour had sung were devastated with rapine and slaughter in their most savage forms ; and before the middle of the thirteenth century, the last sparks of poetry in Provence were extinguished by the blind bigotry of Romanism. The poets who followed were only tro- badours in name — the talent which had distinguished their predecessors was fled for ever, or, in a few in- stances, had taken refuge in other lands. The courts of love were continued in name, but their practical amplication had ceased, and they gradually degenerated into poetical or rather rhyming clubs, such as were formed at a somewhat later period in Italy and Spain. The gallantry of the earlier age was con- tinued in an equally immoral, but in a coarser form. Provence no longer offered, in its social manners, the same model of polite refinement ; but it is a difficult thing to extinguish civilization entirely, and the spirit of refinement which had been checked in the land of the trobadours, scattered, in its departure thence, a sprinkling in almost every country in Europe. In Italy, before the end of the century, it OF THE TKOBADOURS. 207 produced the immortal Dante. In France, almost at the same time, the mystical principles of the gallantry of the trobadours were embodied in the celebrated " Romance of the Rose." And in England, not quite a century later, the same spirit, derived through Italy and France, burst forth in the poetry of Chaucer. A Latin writer, probably at the beginning of the fourteenth century, who is known only as master Andrew the chaplain, published a collection of ques- tions propounded in the courts of love, with the judgments given in each case, and he generally adds the names of the ladies who judged them, who all belong to the twelfth century. An example or two will best show the peculiar character of these ques- tions, which often become too trivial to bear repeat- ing. A young lady, possessing already a lover, is married to another man ; has she the right, after her marriage, of discontinuing her attachment to the lover and refusing him her accustomed favours ? The viscountess Ermengarde of JSTarbonne was called to judge this case, and decided it against the lady. A lover had no other means of corresponding with his lady but by a secretary ; the latter took advantage of his position, and obtained the lady's favours; the question to be decided was, whether the secretary should be the lady's lover or the man he had betrayed. This case was brought before the countess of Cham- pagne, who gave judgment that, as the secretary had shown his unworthiness in betraying his trust, and the lady had degraded herself by listening to a secre- tary, they should be allowed to continue their love to each other, but that they should for ever be cut off from communion with other lovers, and that no knight should ever make love to the lady, and no lady 208 ON THE LITERATURE ever listen to the secretary. It will be quite enough to mention one other question, and as the ladies were always chosen as the worthiest judges in courts of love, we willingly leave to our fair friends its decision. Twenty wandering knights were riding together in " horrible " weather, far from any place of hospitality ; two barons, who were riding by in great haste to visit their ladies, heard these knights lamenting to one another that they were without shelter, and knew not where to find one ; one of the barons re- turned to succour the wandering and friendless knights, but the other turned a deaf ear to the knights, and continued on his way to his mistress : which of the two barons behaved best ? In general, poetry, as the language of homage in love, was the province of the suitor ; but love some- times made poets of the ladies also, and ten or twelve poetesses flourished in the latter half of the twelfth century, some of them persons of high rank, such as the countess of Provence, the countess of Die, Clara d'Anduse, &c. Their compositions are marked by an imagery less laboured and striking, and by a tenderness of feeling more naive, than those of the masculine trobadours. Clara d'Anduse (who, it must not be forgotten, was, like the others, a married lady) addresses a lover, whom some of her acquaintance had urged her to discard, in the following terms (we translate two couplets only) : — " Those who blame me and forbid me to love you, only render my heart more inclined to you, and greater the soft desire I have of you. There is not a man, let him be ever so much my enemy, whom I do not love if I hear him speak well of you ; and he who speaks ill of you can neither say nor do anything more to please me. OF THE TROBADOURS. 209 " Ah ! fair ami, fear not that my heart shall ever deceive you, or that I will ever have another lover, were there a hundred ladies who urged me to it. Love, which holds me your captive, ordains that I preserve you in my heart in secret ; I keep it for you, and if I could steal away also my body, he who now holds it should never have it again." The songs of the trobadours strike us at once by a remarkable facility in the management of rhymes, and by their perfect and harmonious versification, at a period when the poetry of other parts of Europe was extremely rude. But the great mass of poetry thus devoted to the one subject of love, naturally produced a constant repetition of the same ideas, and led to a continual straining after novelty, in order to diversify the mode of expressing them. It would, indeed, be no easy task at any time to vary the praise of the same object a hundred different times. The love poetry of the trobadours becomes thus wearisome by its sameness when collected together. Yet here and there we find the tenderest sentiments expressed, delicately and poetically, presenting a singular con- trast to the rough and turbulent character of the twelfth century, as it is represented in history. " When I see the green grass and the leaf bud forth," says the trobadour Bernard to the viscountess of Ventadour, " and the flowers open in the fields, when the nightingale raises its voice high and clear, and bestirs itself to sing, I am happy of the nightin- gale and of the flowers, I am happy of myself, and more happy of my lady ; I am on all parts enveloped, laden with joy ; but joy of love passes all others. . . . " If I had the power to enchant the world, I would transform my enemies into children, in order that 210 ON THE LITERATURE none of them might be able to imagine anything to the hurt of my lady or of myself. I would then con- template at my leisure her beauty, her ruddy colour, and her beautiful eyes. I would kiss her on all points of her mouth, and so ardently that the mark would appear a month afterwards." In another song, the same poet says to his lady : cc The sweet song of the birds in the grove soothes me and brings back my heart ; and since the birds have their reason for singing, well may I also sing ; I who have greater joy than they, I whose days are all days of singing and joy, I who dream of nothing else. . . . " At night, when I make myself ready for my bed, I know well that I shall not sleep : I lose my sleep, I lose it in thinking of you, O my lady ! There where a man has his treasure, he will have his heart ; thus do I myself; thus have I placed in you all my care and all my thoughts." Arnaud de Marveil, another trobadour of the latter half of the twelfth century, was one of the poets of the olden time whose compositions were especially admired by Petrarch. Arnaud, although, like others of the more distinguished of his profession, born of parents in a low walk of life, was the accepted lover of the countess of Beziers, of whom he says, in one of his pieces: — (( When my lady speaks to me and looks on me, the brightness of her eyes and the sweetness of her breath penetrate together into my heart ; and there rises to my lips a deliciousness such as I feel cannot come from my nature ; it can only spring from love, which has fixed its dwelling in my heart." In another poem, when he appears to have offended the countess by an indiscretion, he says : — ■ OF THE TROBADOURS. 211 " Fair lady, well did you kill me the day when you gave me a kiss, which has left in my heart an eternal trouble. But greater was my folly when I boasted of the kiss; and I deserved to be torn to pieces by horses. O sweet object! mercy for the culpable! Restore me to joy and to hope; for I shall be a creature of nothing in the world, until the day when I shall again be allowed to serve you.'' Arnaud de Marveil long enjoyed the love of the beautiful countess, until king Alfonso, of Aragon, saw and became enamoured of her ; and he, jealous of the trobadour, prevailed upon her to break off her connection with him. It is said of Arnaud, that he was one of the small number of trobadour s known to have confined his love to one object. His contem- porary, Hugues Brunet, loved a lady of Aurillac, who at first encouraged his suit, and then, for some reason or other, refused to listen to him. Hugues composed some pathetic pieces, in which he sung his grief, and then retired to a monastery and died. In one of his songs, composed when his love was not hopeless, he says: — " Let my lady remember me in her heart : for the rest I will wait, provided only that looks and sighs, may kiss each other, in order that the amorous desire may not be repulsed." Folquet de Marseilles was one of the most cele- brated of the trobadours, and, although his father was only a merchant of the city from which he took his name, was distinguished by the friendship of the lion-hearted king Richard. He was also high in favour with Alfonso II., king of Aragon, Alfonso VII., king of Castile, and Raymond V., count of Toulouse ; but he lived almost entirely at the court 212 ON THE LITERATURE of Barral de Baux, lord of Marseilles. Barral's lady was Azalais de Boche-Martine, and to her Folquet, although himself married, offered his love, and she was the object of nearly all his poetry that has come down to us. But, for reasons which are differently explained, he lost the good graces of the lady, and was forbidden to sing of her any more. In the midst of his chagrin, Azalais died, and shortly afterwards her husband followed her to the grave. King Bichard, Alfonso of Aragon, and the count of Toulouse were also dead; and Folquet, disgusted with the world, retired to the monastery of Toronet, of which he was made abbot in the year 1200. The poetry of Folquet de Marseilles is distinguished by a greater degree of mannerism than appeared in that of his pre- decessors. His pieces are all in the same style, with little variety of sentiment or expression, consisting in general of affected and tiresome apostrophes to love. In fact, the poetry of the trobadours was already on the decline. A single stanza of Folquet de Marseilles will be enough : — " Mercy ! love, mercy ! do not make me die so often, since you can kill me with a single blow. You make me to live and to die at the same time, and thus double my martyrdom. Nevertheless, although half dead, I remain faithful to your service, and I find it still a thousand times preferable to the recompenses which I should find in another." We must not be surprised if the trobadours them- selves at times became weary of making love in this formal and affected manner, and if they sometimes sought relaxation among country maidens. This was what they called, very expressively, joie de chambre en paturage. Adventures of this kind became the OF THE TROBADOURS. 213 subject of pieces of a pastoral character, in which a knight riding into the country meets with a pretty- shepherdess, descends from his horse, and seats him- self by her and makes love, sometimes successfully, while at others his advances are resolutely opposed, and sometimes the damsel is obliged to call a party of shepherds to her assistance. In these pieces, perhaps from a sentiment of bienseance, in deference to the more polite and refined love code of the day, the shepherdesses are often painted somewhat in the style of those who figure in the dull, prudish novels of the age which followed the publication of "Astree." Sometimes, however, the loves of the knights and the shepherdesses are described in very plain and un- equivocal language. As we have seen trobadours quit their profession and retire to the cloister, so we find others who left the cloister to devote themselves to love and poetry. Among the most remarkable of these was a singular personage, known only in history by the epithet of the monk of Montaudon. His father was a gentle- man of the neighbourhood of Aurillac, in Auvergne, who placed him while young in the famous monastery of that town. Very soon after he took the habit, he was made, perhaps by family interest, prior of the dependent monastery of Montaudon. In this position he gave free scope to his natural inclination for com- posing poetry and living joyously, and the extreme gaiety and vigour of his pieces, which were mostly satires on the manners and events of the day, made him a welcome guest at the tables of the barons and knights of the surrounding country. As his fame increased, he was loaded with gifts, and, careless himself of money, he gave all he gained to his monas- 214 ON THE LITERATURE tery, which, from a poor house, soon became rich by his means; and, in return, the abbot of Aurillac granted him, at his own request, a dispensation to lead in future the kind of life which should be pre- scribed to him by the king of Aragon. This mo- narch, who was a great lover of the trobadours, and was probably well acquainted with the character and inclinations of the monk, ordered him to live in the world, to make good cheer, to compose verses, to sing, and to love the ladies ; and the king's commands were obeyed to the letter. Most of the monk of Montau- don's poetry is satirical, and often grotesque. In one of these, which, as M. Fauriel observes, possesses something Aristophanic in its character, the monk describes himself as present in the court of Paradise, where different creatures are pleading against each other before the Creator. Among the rest, the vaults and walls of houses come to make their complaint against the ladies, who used so much paint for their faces, that none was left to paint them. The plead- ing is carried on with obstinacy, and the satire is of a coarse cast, but the ladies in the end gain their ob- ject. It appears that painting was a general prac- tice among the ladies at this period. The trobadours entered upon the crusades against the Saracens with no great zeal, and those who left their country to join in these distant expeditions re- joiced more at their return than at their departure. Some of the more eager of the crusaders complained bitterly of the facility with which the barons and knights of the midi found excuses for remaining at home. One had a young wife ; another had children to attend to and protect ; a third was sick, or imagined he was. Some made the supineness of their supe- OF THE TEOBADOUES. 215 riors an excuse for their own ; others thought that the service of their ladies was more important than that claimed by the church. Even the turbulent war-loving Bertrand de Born, in a song addressed to Conrad de Montferrat (then actively engaged in Syria resisting Saladin), says, " I should have been there with you, if the delays of counts, dukes, princes, and kings, had not obliged me to renounce my project. And since that I have seen my beautiful lady, and I have lost all inclination to go /" This general dis- inclination to take part in the war in the East arose from no prejudice in favour of peace and tranquillity, for the trobadours loved war passionately, and were constantly engaged in those petty hostilities between baron and baron which characterised this period of feudal history. Many of their war-songs furnish strange pictures of a turbulent and licentious age. Bernard Arnaud, of Mantua, a trobabour knight of the latter half of the twelfth century, attached to the service of the court of Toulouse, says, in one of his pieces : — " Spring never arrives so beautiful for me as when it comes accompanied with uproar and war, with trouble and alarm, with great inroads and great plun- dering. Many a one who previously had done nothing but give counsel and sleep, then rushes forward courageously, his arm raised to strike. " I love to see the herdsmen and shepherds wan- dering about the fields, in such trouble that not one of them knows where to seek refuge. I love to see the rich barons obliged to squander that of which they have been niggard and sparing. He then is eager to give who never had a thought of giving before ; and many a one then honours the poor man 216 ON THE LITEEATUKE who used to despise him. War forces every had lord to hecome good to his people." Another trobadour of the same age, named Bla- casset*, in a song urging two lords to decide a quarrel by force of arms, in which he does not conceal his intention of joining, exclaims: — " War pleases me ; I love to see it begin ! It is by war that brave men raise themselves ; war helps them to pass their nights ; war brings them gifts of handsome steeds ; it forces the miser to become libe- ral ; it obliges people to give and to take. War is a good dispenser of justice; it pleases me, without end and without truce " Oh ! when shall I see, in fair field, our adversa- ries and ourselves drawn out in close lines, so that at the first fine shock there may be many overthrown on both sides ? There many servants shall be cut to pieces, many horses killed, many knights wounded. If nobody ever returns from it, I care not : I shall feel no sorrow ; I had rather die than live without honour." "If," says Bertrand de Born, with the prospect before him of a war between Bichard Coeur-de-Lion and the king of France — " if the two kings are brave and valiant, we shall soon see the fields strewed with fragments of helms and shields, of swords and saddles, of breast pieces cloven down to the girdle. We shall see steeds wandering about loose, with lances hang- ing to their flanks and breasts ; we shall hear laugh- ing and weeping : the cry of distress, and the cry of joy ; great will be the losses, immense will be the gain. " Trumpets and drums, standards, banners, and ensigns, horses white and black ; in the midst of these OF THE TROBADOURS. 217 we shall live ! Oh ! the good time there will be then ! Then we shall plunder the usurers; we shall then see on the roads neither baggage-horse safe, nor burgher who does not tremble, nor merchant coming from France ; then he will be rich who has the courage to take." Bertrand de Born was perhaps, without exception, the most turbulent baron of his day. From his castle in Perigueux, he was perpetually at war with the various feudal lords whose territories surrounded his own, and he was as constantly occupied in setting his neighbours by the ears among themselves. In his youth, his brother had attempted to deprive him of his estates, and Bertrand was only saved by the pro- tection given to him by Henry II. of England. He showed his gratitude afterwards by allowing no op- portunity to escape of stirring up war between that monarch and his undutiful sons, sometimes allying himself with one party, and sometimes with the other. He seems to have been distinguished chiefly by a wild unbridled love of war and confusion. Yet the old biographers of the trobadours say that Bertrand "was a good knight, a good warrior, a good troba- dour, a good lover of the ladies, well instructed and skilful in speaking, and he knew well how to govern himself in good and bad fortune." The enemy of everybody has everybody for his foe; and it does not appear that Bertrand de Born was often left in peace, even had he desired it. In one of his sirven- tes, or satirical pieces, he says — 6 [I am obliged every day to be at war, to stir me, to defend myself, to put myself out of breath. On every side they burn and ravage my lands, they root up my trees, they disforest my woods, they mix my grain with II. L 218 ON THE LITERATURE my straw ; and I have not an enemy , either coward or brave, who does not come forward to attack me." In another, he expresses his contempt for all his neighbours who were inclined to be peaceful : — " I make another sirvente against our degenerate barons ; for you will never hear me praise them. I have broken more than a thousand spurs upon them, without being able to make one of them run or trot. They let themselves be despoiled without complain- ing ! Oh ! may God curse them, our barons ! And what do they intend to do then ? There is not one of them, but you might shear and shave him like a monk, or shoe him on four feet without shackles for his legs ! " As old age approached, Bertrand de Born, like so many others, was seized with repentance for the nu- merous crimes of his turbulent life, and he became a monk, and ended his days in a monastery. The last war-cries of the trobadours were raised loudly and fiercely against the French invaders of their liberties. Of these, as of all the remains of their warlike poetry, it is difficult to give extracts, because they are so full of local and temporary historical al- lusions, that it would require a page to explain each passage. The French influence was always disagree- able to the Provencals, and their poetry has preserved many a bitter testimony of their hatred for the govern- ment of Charles of Anjou. Boniface de Castellane was a small feudal lord and trobadour, who resisted the count of Anjou to the last, both as a warrior and as a poet, and his sirventes were well calculated, by their vigour and violence, to spread abroad the spirit of opposition. When Boniface shut himself up in his own castle, he issued the following poetic manifesto : OF THE TROBADOURS. 219 tc Although the season be not gay, I will compose a sirvente in biting words, against the recreants and the perverse. The French leave neither breech nor coin to these poor and sorrowful Provencals, to the cowardly and vile race. ee From some they take their lands, and that with- out even showing them the favour to leave them their money. Others, knights and servants, they send them prisoners to the Tower of Blaie, as they would vile bandits : and if they die there, all the better for the French who seize upon their goods. " The cowards and traitors have deserted me with their false servants. I give myself no sorrow about it : I shall be none the weaker on that account. I will hold good in my fortress with my brave men, and I care little if the count comes against me with his numerous forces. " Whoever kills, shall die, says the Gospel ; the day will come, then, when the count shall suffer for that which he inflicts upon others. " Let his gaolers come and make war upon me, and I will send them back in sorrow and mortification. I will stain my sword with their blood, and upon them I will make of my lance a short staff." The count of Anjou, in his resentment, laid siege to Boniface's castle, took it, and immediately hanged the trobadour. Such was the literature of the trobadours, or poets of the south of what is now called France ; a litera- ture totally distinct in its character from that of any other country at the same period of history. We have described it according to its two divisions of love- songs and war or political songs, of which the minor 220 ON THE LITERATURE classes of poetry peculiar to this literature are but varieties. It must be understood, however, that con- temporary with these there existed a large class of poetical compositions which were common to Pro- vence with other countries of the West. The min- strel was a person who wandered over many lands, and, at the period when minstrelsy was most honoured, he had often learnt, in the course of his travels, several languages. We trace the Christian minstrel some- times wandering among the Arabs, as at times we find the Arab minstrel among the Christians of the West. They were a class of persons received every- where gladly, because they not only furnished amuse- ment wherever they came, but they imparted know- ledge, as they were the great carriers of news from one country to another. It was by their intermedia- tion that the West received so many of the stories and traditions of the East. The languages of France, of Provence, and of the superior classes of society in England, as well as those of Italy and the Christian portions of the Spanish peninsula, were, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, only so many dialects of one tongue ; and the minstrel easily changed the dialect of the poetry he had to recite into that of his hearers. It is thus that we still sometimes find in early manu- scripts, the same piece written in one manuscript in the dialect of France or in Anglo-Norman, and in another manuscript in Provencal, leaving it in some instances doubtful to which of the languages or dia- lects it originally belonged, while in other cases this is only known by some accidental circumstance. We thus find a considerable variety of literary produc- tions in the Provencal language, which do not strictly belong to it ; and there were also, doubtless, writers OF THE TROBADOUKS. 221 in the south of France who employed their talents in the same styles of composition as those for which their brethren in the north were distinguished. The poetry which we have been describing seems to have belonged so essentially to a peculiar state of society, that we find comparatively few traces or even imitations of it in the literature of France or England. It was most successfully imitated by the minnesingers of Germany, whither somewhat of the spirit of Pro- vencal society was carried early in the thirteenth century. It was not, as we have already observed, till a later period, after it had ceased to resound in the country which gave it birth, that this poetry exerted its great influence on the literature of Europe, and that rather indirectly than directly. The final decline of the poetry of Provence is easily accounted for. The war against the Albigeois destroyed the condition of society which chiefly sup- ported it. The inquisition was brought in in place of the courts of love ; and the papal authority, now become paramount, had many reasons for discouraging those trobadours, who were then placed, towards the Church, much in the same position which the Welsh bards are traditionally represented as holding towards Edward L, in his invasions of Wales. A still more effective cause of this decadence may be seen in the proscription of the language which followed the es- tablishment of the French domination, when French became the only dialect fashionable among the higher classes of society in the south, and Provencal was degraded to be the mere conversational dialect of the vulgar. From this moment, the poetry listened to most favourably in the baronial-hall was that brought by the minstrels of the north. 222 ON THE LITERATURE I have, as yet, hardly mentioned the " Histoire de laPoesie Provencale" of the late M. Fauriel, which has chiefly given rise to the foregoing observations, my object being only to give an accurate notion of what that poetry really was. I have taken this book as a heap of materials — good and bad— ready to my hand. The name of Fauriel had been long known in the literature of France, and endeared to his personal acquaintance (among whom I rejoiced to reckon myself) by his great amenity of temper and other amiable qualities. He was a man of considerable taste, and of extensive, but not very profound, read- ing ; but deficient in critical judgment, and apt to form hasty conclusions from very inconclusive evi- dence. His reputation as a literary man was first made by a collection of the popular songs of modern Greece, published in 1824. Himself an homme du midi, he subsequently devoted his energies to the in- vestigation and illustration of the history and litera- ture of the south of France, and published, in 1836, a " Histoire de la Gaule Meridionale," in four octavo volumes. In 1831 he had been chosen to fill the newly-established professorship of foreign literature, at the Sorbonne ; and it was in that capacity that he delivered a series of lectures on the literature of Provence. These lectures, collected together since his death, by one of his friends to whom he has left his papers, form the book mentioned above ; and, after perusing it carefully, I am inclined to think that it would have been better for the author's literary memory had they still remained unpublished. My personal recollections of the man would lead me to pass in silence over the errors of his book ; but they are of too grave a character to be allowed to be spread OF THE TROBADOURS. 223 abroad under so honourable a name, and to be ren- dered more mischievous by the injudicious admiration of some critics, who have praised such a work without understanding its merits. It is a book, too, which con- tains much valuable matter — more, probably, than any existing work on the same subject, and written in the same popular style — although ill-arranged and ill- digested. Professing to give a history of the poetry of Pro- vence, M. Fauriel has included in his work not only that which was peculiarly the poetry of the troba- dours, but also that which we have just described as imported from northern France. To this, we have, of course, no objection, had the different circumstances connected with the history of each class been care- fully and accurately stated ; but the strong prejudices of the author led him to form the paradoxical opinion that the whole body of this literature was purely Provencal, and that Provence was the birth- place and nursery of the literature of almost all other countries. The long metrical romances of the middle ages, as well as the shorter popular stories known in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the title of Fabliaux, and, indeed, every other class of mediaeval poetry, were, according to the system of M. Fauriel, of Provencal origin. In his zeal to establish this favourite position, the lecturer of the Sorbonne neglects or confounds dates and facts, takes his own suppositions and misconceptions as evidence, repeats old erroneous statements which have been disproved and exploded over and over again in our modern in- creased knowledge of mediaeval antiquities, and con- sequently produces a treatise which is disfigured by a multitude, not only of indefinite and confused 224 ON THE LITEEATUEE statements, but of downright blunders. We need only mention, to show our readers how little trust can be placed in the accuracy of M. Fauriel's " Histoire de la Poesie Provencale," that, to support some strange theory relating to the origin of the German national romances, he heedlessly confounds the ancient Edda with the younger Eclda, and makes his own error the foundation of his subsequent arguments. Among the poems recited by the minstrels, and thus carried from one land to another, were the lengthy metrical romances so much in vogue during the middle ages, which were founded sometimes on the imaginary annals of king Arthur and his knights ; at others, on the traditionary histories of the wars and feuds of the earlier Frankish races of kings ; and at others again, on mythic stories, taken from ancient fa- ble, and a variety of kindred subj ects. These romances are very numerous, and many of them are very long ; the greater proportion, at least, were, no doubt, com- posed in France, and they are found in manuscripts, written in Anglo-Norman and in various French dialects, according to the district in which they happened to be committed to writing, either from other copies, or from the mouth of the minstrel. The number and character of the variations found in different copies of the same romance, show that they must have been frequently taken down from oral re- citation. Some half-dozen of these romances are found written in the Provencal tongue ; and M. Fauriel immediately arrives at the conclusion that not only these, but all other romances of the same stamp, were invented by the trobadours, and that this class of compositions also was imitated and copied OF THE TROBADOURS. 225 from them by the poets of the north. Even the cycle of king Arthur and his Round Table is not excepted. Not only is this extraordinary theory utterly un- supported by any evidence better than the various suppositions of the author, but it happens, to be a notorious fact, that all these Provencal romances but two are found repeatedly in manuscripts written in French of an earlier date than the single copies written in Provencal, and that they there occur in the same words, making allowance for the difference of dialects, and for the usual various readings of manuscripts. The two romances which are excep- tions to this belong to the same class of fictions, and are composed in much the same style, so that there is very little room for doubt that all the Provencal ro- mances are mere copies from the French romances. The allusions to so many of these compositions found in the genuine poetry of the trobadours is easily explained, by the rapidity with which we know that the* taste for the French romances was spread over neighbouring countries by the wander- ing minstrels. They were translated into German, almost, if not quite, at as early a period as into Provencal. 5 M. Fauriel perpetrates a still greater absurdity in the attempt to prove that even the national romances of Germany originated in his favourite Provence. With this object, he actually gives a place in his book to a long analysis and to a dissertation on the history of the celebrated romance of the " Niebelungen," which he follows previous writers in supposing (with probability enough) to have been compiled from older popular ballads ; but he seems to imagine that these popular ballads came from the south of France, with- 226 ON THE LITERATURE out, however, stating any kind of admissible evidence for such a supposition. No less than three or four long chapters are also devoted to the curious early Latin poem of Waltharius, or, as it is here entitled, (i Walter of Aquitaine," a romance closely connected with the German cycle of the " Niebelungen." This M. Fauriel pronounces to be an undoubted produc- tion of a Provencal writer of the tenth century, and he pretends to discover in the idioms of his language proofs that his mother-tongue was no other than Proven cal. But when he comes to state his reasons for this appropriation, we find him falling into the same confusion of blundering citations and erroneous interpretations which occur so frequently in other parts of the book. " There is now," he says, " no need of further conjecture on the subject. Two new manuscripts of the poem in question recently dis- covered, one in Belgium in the municipal library of Brussels, the other in the royal library at Paris, have made known with certainty the author of this com- position. The manuscript of Brussels points out as the author a monk of the abbey of Fleury, or Saint- Benoit-sur-Loire ; and this indication is confirmed and developed by the manuscript in the royal library. In this last, the text of the poem is preceded by a dedication of twenty-two dull and half-barbarous Leonine verses. The author of this poem speaks of himself as the author of the poem, and describes him- self by the name of Gerald. Without expressly calling himself a monk, he says enough to lead us to conclude that he was one. Gerald dedicates his work to a brother of his, whom he names Archambauld (Erkambaldus), and to whom he gives the title of bishop. Thus it remains clearly and fully established OF THE TKOBADOURS. 227 that the poem of Walther of Aquitaine was composed on the banks of the Loire, on the confines of the Prankish Gaul and the Aquitaine of the middle ages, and that it was composed by a monk named Gerald, of whom everything announces that the maternal idiom was a romane (ISTeo-Latin) idiom, and rather that of the south than that of the north." It would hardly be believed, if the facts were not before the eyes of everybody who chooses to look at them, that the dedication here made so much of, which is found in the two manuscripts of Brussels and Paris, states no more than simply that the author was a monk named Gerald, or Gerard, and that he dedicated his book to a bishop named Erkambald, without the slightest allusion to assist in fixing the country to which either of these personages belonged. M. Fauriel, in calling the monk the brother of the bishop, has mistranslated the Latin of the ori- ginal : — " Sis felix, sanctus per tempora plura sacerdos ; Sit tibi mente tua Geraldus carus adelphus" The word adelphus, in the Latin of the age to which this poem belongs, was used simply to designate a monk (frater) ; and is thus a distinct statement of the author's sacred profession, which M. Fauriel sup- posed was only to be presumed by indirect implica- tion. M. Fauriel had concealed from his readers, or he had overlooked (which is equally unpardonable), the fact that the statement that Gerald or Gerard was connected with the abbey of Fleury, instead of being (as he says) found in the Brussels manuscript, was the mere hasty and improbable conjecture of some one who, at a much later period, wrote in the fly-leaf 228 ON THE LITERATURE of the Parisian manuscript, that perhaps this Gerard was St. Gerard, monk of Fleury. There are good reasons, on the contrary, for supposing that the author of the Latin poem of " Waltharius " was a monk of St. Gall, and there is scarcely room for doubting a moment that it was written by a German, and founded upon German traditions. Thus, between the " Niebelungen " and " Waltharius," M. Fauriel has composed nearly one-half of his first volume of materials altogether foreign to his subject. In his anxiety thus to enlarge the field and in- fluence of Provencal literature, M. Fauriel has striven to reconcile dates by giving to that literature a much earlier existence than is warranted by any historical facts. It is quite clear, from what remains, that the poetry of the trobadours was only rising into existence at the beginning of the twelfth century, when there was a contemporary poetry equally ex- tensive existing in France, and another in Germany ; that the period at which that poetry flourished was the latter half of the twelfth century ; and that it was already declining at the beginning of the thirteenth. It is equally clear that during the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries the poetry of northern France was carried to Provence by the French minstrels, and taken from them by the minstrels of the south. I have several times heard it whispered that an Eng- lish translation of M. Fauriel's book is or was in preparation, under the impression that it was a capital work ; the subject is sufficiently interesting to be treated in a better manner, and if it should ever be translated, I sincerely hope that it may fall into the hands of somebody who understands it sufficiently well to be able to correct the errors by numerous OF THE TROBADOURS. 229 notes. The subject itself is of sufficient interest, both as a national literature which has long become extinct, and as a very important element in the his- tory of mediaeval civilization and intellectual develop- ment, to merit a better treatment, and to form the object of an original work. XXIII. ON THE HISTORY OF COMIC LITERATURE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. HERE is no instrument of attack to which mankind is more universally sensible than ridicule. Everybody has a perception of what is droll and ludicrous. A taste for the humorous is in a great degree independent of national difference, of caste or rank, or even of educa- tion and refinement. It is often found in the greatest perfection among the lower orders of society. Hence the history of comic literature is not one of progres- sive improvement. But this branch of literature, more than any other, is affected and modified by the political circumstances of the age, or by the peculiar character of the people. It prevails least among tribes in a wild and unsocial state of life, as among wandering savages, or with the modern Oriental, who, in his closed serail, seeks for amusement that will flatter or excite his passions. There are people of that gloomy character who never laugh. On the other hand, it finds the greatest encouragement amid the turbulence of moral or political revolution. Hence HISTORY OF COMIC LITERATURE, ETC. 231 the history of this class of literature has a peculiar interest, not shared in an equal degree by any other class. The materials for the history of comic and bur- lesque literature among the ancients are incomplete, for we know little of such productions as those of the Atellane and Fescennine muses, and of many other classes of popular compositions which were in vogue among the Greeks and Romans. We know still less of the history of this branch of literature among the Germanic tribes for ages after their settle- ment in the imperial provinces, but the earlier me- diaeval compositions of this description appear in general to have been imitations of Roman models. The wit or ingenuity of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers was chiefly exerted in playing upon words, one of the worst blemishes of. mediaeval taste; and their literary amusement seems to have consisted princi- pally in guessing at the meaning of riddles, of which a great variety are still preserved. Puns and riddles are indeed, as far as we know, the only comic forms to be discovered in the Anglo-Saxon writers. It is not until after the entrance of the Normans that we find any traces in England of what is properly termed satire. In the life of the Saxon Hereward, we see the Norman knights in their baronial hall listening to their jongleur or minstrel, while he turned to ridicule, by his coarse and indecent satire and his comic gestures, the manners of the people whom they had dispossessed of their lands.* From this time forward we have abundant proof of the prevalence and increasing popularity of com- * " De Gestis Herwardi Saxonis," c. 14, in the " Chroniques Anglo-Normandes," vol ii. p. 41. 232 ON THE HISTORY OF COMIC LITERATURE positions of a satirical character, which were nourished into vigour by the violent struggle between the ecclesiastical and secular powers, in which the latter laid bare with unsparing knife the wickedness of the Romish system in all its workings. A Latin rhymer of the tenth century did not scruple to turn into ridicule the popish purgatory legends, in a burlesque narrative of a man who had been in Paradise, and had seen John the Baptist acting as butler, and his namesake, the Evangelist, performing the part of cup-bearer, while St. Peter held the office of master of the cooks. Another Latin poet, of the earlier part of the twelfth century, boldly charges Rome with worshipping silver like the pagans of old, and with devouring, in her insatiate greediness, the riches of every country which acknowledged the supremacy of the papal see : — " Gens Romanorum subdola antiqua colit idola. * * * * Ornatas vestes Grsecise, ebur cum gemmis Indise, Deliciosa Francise, argentum, aurum Anglise, Lac et butyrum Flandriaa, mulas, mulos Burgundiae, Roma deglutit penitus, digna perire funditus." After boasting at length of its all-powerful influ- ence, and the mode in which that influence was exerted, the papal see is made to sum up its actions : — " Qusecunque volo facio ; ego nuptas decipio ; Ego corrumpo virgines ; edomo cunctos homines." Such satires as these, it must be remarked, came from the pen of ecclesiastics, who scorned to imitate the larger body of their brethren in pandering to the support of a system of which the vice was apparent to every one. Some of the adventurous satirists of DUKING THE MIDDLE AGES. 233 this early age are guilty of parodying scriptural lan- guage in a manner which, not many years ago, might have subjected them to a criminal prosecution. We give a translation of one of the shortest and least ob- jectionable of these, as a curious proof of the opinion of the scandalous venality of the court of Rome in the twelfth century, at which period it was written. It was a famous joke among the satirical reformers of that age, that the pope had mistaken Mark, the evangelist, for a mark of money : — " The beginning of the holy gospel according to a mark of silver, ie In that time the pope said to the Romans, s When the son of man shall come to the seat of our majesty, first say to him, M U :«-»: & If * •^ £i V s * s iW . ■ &r*L *mm^ ■urn WA mm 1 a M&ii : '■■:'; - • ^> l f>i^i iin