moralité was no doubt taken from her experience, CHAP. when she added it to the two wolves and the lamb: These are the rich robbers- From covetousness, a false occasion, There they score their flesh and their skin, To the fable of the dog suing a sheep, she adds; The oppression of the rest of society by the great, is also implied in many other moralités. We will only add another, on the wolf and the crane: So it is with a bad lord, If a poor man works him honor, And then asks his reward, He will never receive any; The great ought to thank him for his life.30 The following is a specimen of her more serious moralités. The wise man ought rationally To beseech the Omnipotent God, That He would de his own pleasure: 28 Roquefort's Marie, v. 2. p. 67. 29 Ib. p. 77. 30 lb. p. 85. If Le Couronnement de Renart' be Marie's, it may be seen in M. Meon's edition of it, Paris, 1816. VII. LAYS AND MARIE, &C. BOOK LITERARY HISTORY OF From this great good may come : For God better knows what will suit us, 31 Roquefort's Marie, v. 2. p. 393. Her Purgatory of St. Patrick, p. 411, has been pleasingly abridged by Le Grand, v. 5, p. 126. A supposition as to the possible Authoress : In our total ignorance about this Mary, there is no harm in starting a new conjectural possibility, which suits the intimations which she has given of herself in her poems. But I propose this merely as a suggestion, not to be pressed as an historical certainty, nor to be confounded with it. Conjectures are not facts, and I would wish not to mislead the reader on any subject. Eleanor, the queen of our Henry II. had by her first husband, Louis VII. of France, a daughter named MARIE, who was married to the count of Champagne. Gesta Lud. 150. Aim. 525. She thereby became countess of Champagne during the reigns of our Henry II. and Richard I. Her husband was a great patron of poets and romance writers. He invited them to his court, and liberally rewarded them. Her mother, queen Eleanor was also a great favorer of the Troubadours; and Marie herself was so much attached to their gai licence' as to hold cours d'amour, and to give judgment on the questions there submitted to her by knights and Troubadours. One of these is dated 1174. See the Chapter on the Troubadours, in our fifth volume of this History. She survived her husband, and died in March 1197. Rigordus, 198. Thus our king Henry II. was her father-in-law, and his sons, Henry, Richard, and Geoffry, were her brothers by her mother's side. Of these, Henry was crowned king of England by his father in his own lifetime; so that England had then at the same time two king Henrys, in the persons of Henry II. and his eldest son. Her brother Geoffry was made count of Bretagne, and died in her lifetime. She attended his burial, and was in the French court at Compeign in 1196, when the count of Flanders did homage to Philip for his dominions, (Reg. 197.) where she died in the next year. She was sister to both Philip the reigning king of France, and to Richard the reigning king of England,-to Philip by her father, and to Richard by her mother. She stood therefore in the singular position of being equally related to both countries and connected with the most distinguished persons in both, and therefore probably familiar with the language of each. Queen Eleanor survived her daughter, for in 1199 she did homage to Philip for Poitou. Reg. 200. Now, in applying these facts to Marie the poetess, we find that what this lady mentions of herself, may be comprised in the following circum stances. In the conclusion of her fables she says, I will name myself for remembrance: For the love of the count William, And to translate it from English into Roman, They Besides the two descriptions of the Anglo-Norman CHAP. poetry already noticed, the history and the romance, They call this book Esop's, From Greek into Latin it was turned. Roq. Marie. v. 2. p. 401. In the prologue to her Fables, she mentions a king without naming him. The usual idea, but entirely a supposition, is, that this king was Henry III. and that count William was Long Sword, earl of Salisbury. But if this Marie was the countess of Champagne, then the king whom she thus addresses would be her brother king Henry, at that time reigning with his father, or her brother Richard I.; tho it might also be their parent Henry II. But the affectionate terms she uses, would suit better one of her brothers. That her stories are all Breton lays, would suit the countess Marie, because Geoffray her brother was the reigning count of Bretagne while he lived. The peculiarity required by the intimations she gives of herself, that she was well acquainted with both the French and English languages, corresponds exactly with the social position of the countess, as we have already remarked. That the count William should be the earl of Salisbury, will also coincide with our theory; for he was the illegitimate son of her mother's husband, and therefore by him, was the natural brother of her maternal brothers, Richard, Henry, and Geoffray. As such, he must have been as well known to her as they were; and from his high character and qualities, may have been greatly liked by her. If the count of Flanders was the William she alludes to, the countess Marie was both allied to this nobleman and acquainted with him. If it should be thought unlikely that such a countess should write poetry, we may recollect that she her self describes an English king, Henry, having translated into English what she turned into French. What a king had done, a literary princess VII. ANGLO- CULAR POETRY. Lives of verse. VI. HISTORYOF 33 BOOK the clergy also wrote in verse the Lives of Saints, and moral treatises.32 Their rimed biography, however, LITERARY added nothing to the national poetry, altho one of them, Denis Piramus, in the reign of Henry III., really added, tho unheeded, to the national history.3 In their moral treatises in verse, a greater approach to poetry was exhibited. The poem of bishop Grosteste was at least an allegory, with some effort at description; 34 and the stories introduced by Wadigton, in might do. Her brother Richard wrote Provençal poems; and in a later age a French princess, Margaret de Valois, composed a volume of French tales. Her rank will account for the high estimation in which Denis Pyramus described her works to have been held among the ladies of quality in the reign of Henry III. Hence the supposition that Marie, the authoress of the Lais and Fables, was Marie the countess of Champagne, seems to have a stronger foundation than any other which has been suggested. 32 As Guerne's Life of Thomas à Becket. It contains about 6000 lines, in stanzas of five lines of the Alexandrine cast, riming together, which he thus describes Le vers est dune rime en cinc clauses cuplez MS. Harl. 270. Chardre's St Josaphat and the Seven Sleepers, comprises between four and five thousand lines. He mentions the preference given to the romans of fiction See M. de la Rue's Dissertation, Archaeologia, vol. 13, p. 234.-We see how anxiously these rimers sought for reputation, in Chermans, who wrote La Genesis de St Marie. He takes care to say Jeo ay a noum Chermans ne ubliez mye mon noun. MS. Harl. N° 270. 33 His work is called the Life of St Edmund. It is, in fact, a rimed excursive history of East Anglia. But it is remarkable for giving a truer account of Ragnar Lodbrog, the Danish sea-king, than any of the Saxon chroniclers furnish. It makes him, as he was, a powerful and cruel pirate, renowned for his exploits on many a shore; and declares Inguar, Hubba, and Biorn to have been his children.-MS. Cott. Domit. A 11. As this is almost the only ancient document we have that approaches the true history of these incidents, I have cited the passage at length in the 4th edition of the Anglo-Saxons. 34 It is in the Harl. MS. No 1121. After treating of Paradise and the fall of man, it begins a strange allegory, with the account of a king, NORMAN his Manuel des Peches," are occasionally told with CHAP. traits that shew a few of the first faint gleams of VII. poetical feeling. There are some other poems of the ANGLOAnglo-Normans not unworthy the notice of the an- VERNAtiquary. One of the most curious of these, for its CULAR subject, is the Institutes of Justinian in verse, already alluded to.37 36 The character of the Anglo-Norman poetry, from its happy consequences to our taste and intellect, merits a distinct contemplation. The verbal style of the Anglo-Saxon poetry was the arrangement of their words into short lines, with a who had a son and four daughters: the son was our Saviour; the daughters were Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace. The son enters a castle bel et grant;' and the poet occupies two long columns in describing it. This castle was the Virgin Mary! See extracts from it in M. La Rue's Essay in the Archaeologia. 35 This very curious work is in the British Museum, among the Harleian MSS. N° 4657 & 377. He thus names himself De dei seit beneit chescun hom Ky prie pour Wilham de Wadigton. In the MS. containing Chardre's work, is a dialogue between youth and age, intitled, Le Petit Plet, containing about 1800 rimed lines.The anonymous continuation of the Brut of Wace, contains the remarkable fancy of the council held by the conqueror to determine the dispositions of his three sons. See La Rue's Dissert. 13. p. 242.-Among the Harleian MSS. is the poem called Le Sermun de Guichart de Beau lieu;'-and another poem, of moral precepts, by Helis de Quincestre (Winchester), which he says he takes from Cato Ki vult saveir la faitement Ke Katun a sun fiz prent Sen Latin nel set entendre Ci le pot en romanz aprendre.-MS. In the king's library at Paris, there is a translation of Dares Phrygius into French rimes, by Godfrey of Waterford, an Irishman of the jacobine order, in the thirteenth century.-Warton, 1. p. xxiii, from Mem. Lit. 17. p. 736. The reader who wishes to enlarge his knowlege of the history of ancient romance, will be gratified by Mr. Weber's Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances;' and by the elaborate accumulation of curious circumstances in the last editor's preface to Warton, which, however, are rather materials for thought than the establishing of any certain system. 37 The author of this was Richard D'Annebaut, an Anglo-Norman. Archaeol. v. 13. POETRY. Style of Saxon the Anglo poetry. |