storical monument,
and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the
sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death
(1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his
court." {17} "He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land,
he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . .
Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do
nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be
forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might
fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a
great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay
hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall
deer as if he were their father."

With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history
written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of
the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers
partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these,
such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and
William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the
Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished
his work in 1273. About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a
chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the
Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in
the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon
times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend.
All real knowledge of the period {18} dwindled away until in Capgrave's
_Chronicle of England_, written in prose in 1463-64, hardly any thing
of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten
their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that
Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from
authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of
ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and
Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who gives
in his second book of the _Faerie Queene_, a _resume_ of the reigns of
fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his
royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings of early England.
So completely had the true record faded