in other
tongues. But the final form which the saga took in mediaeval England was
the prose _Morte Dartur_ of Sir Thomas Malory, composed at the close of
the 15th century. This was a digest of the earlier romances, and is
Tennyson's main authority.

Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister.
There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English,
consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the
_Ancren Riwle_ (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225, and the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_
(Remorse of Conscience), 1340, in prose; the _Handlyng Sinne_, 1303, the
_Cursor Mundi_, 1320, and the _Pricke of Conscience_, 1340, in verse;
metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the
Ten Commandments; the Gospels for the Day, such as the _Ormulum_, or
Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems in praise of
virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five joys of the Virgin,
the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the seven deadly
sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment; and dialogues between
the soul and the body. These were the work not only of the monks, but
also of the begging friars, and in smaller part of the secular or parish
clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety and superstition of the
Middle Age, the childish belief in the marvelous, the allegorical
interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of
hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body and the
loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a single
poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level
of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal
feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse.
A poem so distinguished is, for example, _A Luve Ron_ (A Love Counsel),
by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the
French poet Villon's _Balade of Dead Ladies_, with its refrain--

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
"Where are the snows of yester year?"

Where is Paris and Heleyne
That weren so bright and fair of blee[1]
Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne
Yseude and alle the,[2]
Hector with his sharpe main,
And Caesar rich in worldes fee?
They beth ygliden out of the reign[3]
As the shaft is of the clee.[4]

A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of
mention, among others, _The Owl and the Nightingale