The translations were usually inferior to the originals.
The French _trouvere_ (finder or poet) told his story in a
straight-forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action
and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc.
He invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which
later poets have profited, but his own handling of them was feeble and
prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a
certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the _trouveres_ which
the rude, unformed English failed to catch.

The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick,
and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of
Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favorite
hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh
legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach
invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and
literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on
their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the
English speech, such as _bard_ and _druid_; but in the old Anglo-Saxon
literature there are {21} no more traces of British song and story than
if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being
borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own
national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free
from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form,
entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into
contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh
marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the
population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent
speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh.

About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh
descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward
bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called _Historia Britonum_
in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, came to
Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city
of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of
historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact
chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author
referred, as his author