century which had an effect on language and literature, was the Norman Conquest of which I shall tell you in the next talk. TALK VI. TELLING HOW WILLIAM THE NORMAN CAME TO THE CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. I have already told you briefly about the invasions of the Danes who for so many years were attempting the conquest of England. You can guess something of their power and activity from the fact that they placed a king on the throne in the early part of the eleventh century. Remember that these Danes, with Swedes and Norwegians, made the Scandinavian division of the Teutonic peoples, and that they are thus close cousins by race to the English. In the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, these Scandinavians showed such a wonderful spirit of adventure, and their deeds had so great an effect on history, and hence on literature, that I cannot make my story complete without giving a brief sketch of them. In spreading out from Denmark to Sweden and Norway, the Scandinavians (whom I will hereafter call by their shorter name of Northmen) had become, by force of their position on peninsulas girt about by Northern seas, the most daring sailors in the world. In the year 876 a party of these Northmen, coming principally from Denmark, but swelling their number as they went along with a mixture of Jutes and Angles, who joined them readily in this maurading march, went to invade France. Led by a famous Danish chieftain, Rolf, also called Rou and Rollo, they sailed up the river Seine, devastating the country all along its borders, and prepared to besiege Paris. The French made treaties with these powerful invaders, gave Rolf a princess of royal blood to wife, induced him to be baptized a Christian, and gave him a tract of land on the borders of the English channel, since called Normandy, from these Northmen, or Normans. They spread over their new home, marrying with the natives, increasing rapidly in population, and adopting the language of the people among whom they lived. In a century they had almost forgotten whence they came and the language they spoke at their coming, using wholly the Romance tongue, which afterwards became the modern French. Meanwhile the Danes, pressing on England, had put King Cnut in power. He seems to have been a good king, who made fair laws for those days. He was something of a poet, too, and a little song of his is still preserved which he made one day as he was going down the river Ouse in a boat, and heard from the open windows of the monastery the Monks singing their hymns. "Merrily sang the monkes in Ely, And hear ye the monkes' song." When Cnut got the throne, the English king, whose unfortunate name in history is Ethelred the Unready, fled to Normandy, where the descendants of Rolf were flourishing. Probably the reason he went there was because his wife, Queen Emma, was a Norman woman, a great-grand-daughter of the famous Rolf. And the son of this unfortunate Ethelred and Emma, the gracious young prince Edward, exiled from his English home during the reign of Cnut, spent all his youth in the Norman court, spoke its language, and took on the manners and polish of its best society-esteemed in those days a very polished and elegant society indeed. For you must understand that the rough Normans who came to Northern France one hundred and fifty years before the time of Prince Edward, had been wonderfully improved during this lapse of time. The French among whom they set tled had imparted to them their civilization. Southern Europe, especially Italy, had sent to them pious pilgrims, who carried learning and religion to foreign lands. These wandering scholars had been hospitably received in Normandy, and one of them, the celebrated Lanfranc, had established a school there, which became one of the most famous in Europe. Another people, who greatly aided in the spread of learning in Europe, were the Arabs, who had overrun Italy, conquered a large part of Spain, and made incursions into France during the century before Rolf came to Normandy. These Arabs were far in advance of the Europeans in all kinds of knowledge. They had instituted splendid libraries in Spain, had opened schools there, and their systems of teaching had an influence all over Europe. These Arabians, too, were great story-tellers-the Arabian Nights' Entertainment bears testimony to that-and they were also musical poets. When the Norman troops, following their taste for adventure, went into Southern Europe to help the Italians in battle against these Arabs, they must, even in so rough a meeting, have imbibed some of the culture of their foes. And in the mingling of all these influences which had touched him on all sides, it is certain that the Norman, who was always hospitable to new ideas, and held fast to all that came to him, either of an intellectual or a material kind, must have been very much improved and polished. So when young Prince Edward, son of Ethelred and Emma, and consequently descended on one side from Alfred the Great, and on the other from Rolf the Dane, was made King of England, after the death of Cnut and his sons, he took back to the English court the language and the manners in which he had been bred in the Norman court. With this Edward-known as Edward the Confessorthe first Norman influence came to England, although it was not Edward who fixed and confirmed it there. It was a much greater and stronger man than Edward the Confessor-no other than the great Duke of Normandy, whom we know best as William the Conqueror. William claimed that Edward had promised that his successor on the English throne should be the Norman duke, and the story is also told that William had extorted an unwilling promise from Harold, King Edward's brother-in-law, that he would favor the Norman claim. As soon as Edward the Confessor died, however, Harold took the throne. But Duke William was on the alert to urge his claim. A man like a lion was this William of Normandy; so strong and so brave that we can but admire him. In a very few months after Edward's death he had crossed the English channel with his troops, beaten the army of Harold in the battle of Hastings, in which Harold. was slain and had made himself the crowned king of England -the first of a powerful line of Norman kings. This Norman victory had an influence on literature which ranks as an event second in succession and importance to the coming of Augustine and his monks with their parchments of the Hebrew Scriptures. 1066. As the troops of William the Conqueror spurred to battle upon the field of Hastings, the king's minstrel, Taillefer, who could fight all the better doubtless because he could sing, made the English welkin ring with the strains of the Chanson de Roland, which celebrated the deeds of Charlemagne's heroes against Arabian foes. As the song rang gaily from the minstrel's lips, the arrow of a foeman silenced him forever. In this musical war-cry, so suddenly hushed in death, the new literary influence first made itself heard in England. TALK VII. ON LITERATURE UNDER THE NORMANS, ESPECIALLY IN THE REIGN OF HENRY II; AND THE Legends of ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE. Notwithstanding the pious labors of monks, beginning with the venerable Beda, there were very few books in England at the time of the Norman conquest, or indeed for years after. When the Norman came to France he brought with him little that could be called literature. Romance, the spoken language of Normandy, was hardly a written. language in William's time. However, the fact that a language is not a written language does not prevent the making of songs in the vulgar tongue or the singing of them by the people's minstrels. It was not long after the coming of the Normans to England before all sorts of minstrels swarmed in France and Germany. Trouveres, troubadours, jongleurs, minnesingers-all singing like the lark, until France, and especially the south of France, was like a sky full of birds. Thus, although the Norman did not bring many books when he came to England, he brought an impetus to poetry, and the form in which to clothe it. You will recognize that the spirit inherent in these descendants of the Northmen was akin to that which had inspired the heroic lines of Beowulf, acted upon by the refining forces it had met in France and southern Europe. But this spirit had now taken upon itself a new form. The verses, without rhyme or rhythmic grace, in which the Teutonic gleeman had sung the high deeds of his fathers, were not heard among Norman singers. Poetry put itself into melodious numbers, and the soft consonances |