un deu est e serat
e fud e parmaindrat;
en la virgine se mist,
e pur hom charn i prist,
e pur virginited,
pur mustrer casteed,
a virgine se parut
e virgine le conceut.
virgine est e serat
e tuz jurz parmaindrat.
ores oez brefment
le signefiement.
Ceste beste en verte
nus signefie de;
la virgine signefie,
sacez, sancte Marie;
par sa mamele entent
sancte eglise ensement;
e puis par le baiser
ceo deit signefier,
que hom quant il se dort
en semblance est de mort:
des cum home dormi,
ki en cruiz mort sufri,
ert sa destructiun
nostre redemptiun,
e sun traveillement
nostre reposement.
si deceut des diable
par semblant cuvenable;
anme e cors sunt un,
issi fud des et hum,
e iceo signefie
beste de tel baillie.

_Bestiaries_ and _Computs_ (the French title of the Chronologies) were
for some time the favourites with didactic verse writers, but before
long the whole encyclopaedia, as it was then understood, was turned into
verse. Astrology, hunting, geography, law, medicine, history, the art of
war, all had their treatises; and latterly _Tresors_, or complete
popular educators, as they would be called nowadays, were composed, the
best-known of which is that of Walter of Metz in 1245.

[Sidenote: Moral and Theological verse.]

All, or almost all, these works, written as they were in an age
sincerely pious, if somewhat grotesque in its piety, and theoretically
moral, if somewhat loose in its practice, contained not only abundant
moralising, but also more or less theology of the mystical kind. It
would therefore have been strange if ethics and theology themselves had
wanted special exponents in verse. Before the middle of the twelfth
century Samson of Nanteuil (again an Englishman by residence) had
versified the Proverbs of Solomon, and in the latter half of the same
century vernacular lives of the saints begin to be numerous. Perhaps the
most popular of these was the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, of which
the fullest poetical form has been left us by an English trouvere of the
thirteenth century named Chardry, by whom we have also a verse rendering
of the 'Seven Sleepers,' and some other poems[84]. Somewhat earlier,
Hermann of Valenciennes was a fertile author of this sort of work,
composing a great _Bible de Sapience_ or versification of the Old
Testament, and a large numb