away that it made no appeal to
the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had
been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had
imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the
conquerors. In the _Roman de Rou_, a verse chronicle of the dukes of
Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle
of Hastings the French _jongleur_, Taillefer, spurred out before the
van of William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of
"Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at
Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman
song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines
which Taillefer {19} sang were from the _Chanson de Roland_, the oldest
and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had
ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the
course of one hundred and fifty years, completely identified with the
French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native
women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was
the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike, adventurous spirit of the
vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and
fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of knights-errant,
with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was at
once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled in embroidery, a
splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in
which the conqueror's wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court
wrought the history of the Conquest.

This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the
ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in
literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to
English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These
were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of
every great feudal baron, or by the _jongleurs_, who wandered from
court to castle. There is a whole literature of these _romans d'
aventure_ in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are {20}
very long--often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines--written
sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but
commonly in the short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of
them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th
centuries.