d by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in the twelfth
century wrote his famous "Historia Regum Britanniae," the influence of
which in England and on the Continent has already been seen. Prose tales
were written in astonishing quantities, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, by those pious authors who, under pretext of edifying and
amusing their readers at the same time, began by amusing, and frequently
forgot to edify. They put into their collections all they knew in the
way of legends, jokes, and facetious stories. England produced several
such collections; their authors usually add a moral to their tales, but
sometimes omit it, or else they simply say: "Moralise as thou wilt!"

In these innumerable well-told tales, full of sprightly dialogue, can be
already detected something of the art of the _conteur_ which will appear
in Chaucer, and something almost of the art of the novelist, destined
five hundred years later to reach such a high development in England.
The curiosity of the Celt, reawakened by the Norman, is perpetuated in
Great Britain; stories are doted on there. "It is the custom," says an
English author of the thirteenth century, "in rich families, to spend
the winter evenings around the fire, telling tales of former
times...."[268]

Subjects for tales were not lacking. The last researches have about made
it certain that the immense "Gesta Romanorum," so popular in the Middle
Ages, were compiled in England about the end of the thirteenth
century.[269] The collection of the English Dominican John of Bromyard,
composed in the following century, is still more voluminous. Some idea
can be formed of it from the fact that the printed copy preserved at the
National Library of Paris weighs fifteen pounds.[270]

Everything is found in these collections, from mere jokes and happy
retorts to real novels. There are coarse fabliaux in their embryonic
stage, objectionable tales where the frail wife derides the injured
husband, graceful stories, miracles of the Virgin. We recognise in
passing some fable that La Fontaine has since made famous, episodes out
of the "Roman de Renart," anecdotes drawn from Roman history, adventures
that, transformed and remodelled, have at length found their definitive
rendering in Shakespeare's plays.

All is grist that comes to the mill of these authors; their stories are
of French, Latin, English, Hindu origin. It is plain, however, that they
write for Englishmen from the fact that many of the