al verse with rhymed
endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a
verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English
alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th
century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete
dialect, and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority
to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and
inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England
began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of
Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation
cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule.

The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was
the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals,
differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries
in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries
were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally
they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and
Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys
of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest
English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish {16} king Cnut
was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.

Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by;
Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land,
And here we thes muneches sang.

It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold
outlaw Hereward, "the last of the English," held out for some years
against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or
Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadow-homestead) that the
chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest,
breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death.
Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, "a very stern
man," and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and
his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its
treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the
Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later
portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern,
and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of
the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable hi