avery in battle.
Woman's place is comparatively obscure, and of love-making there is
little said. It is a poetry of vigorous manhood, of uncompromising
morality, and of hard knocks given and taken for God, for Christendom,
and the King of France. This poetry is written in ten- or twelve-
syllable verses grouped, at first in assonanced, later in rhymed,
"tirades" of unequal length. It was intended for a society which was
still homogeneous, and to it at the outset doubtless all classes of the
population listened with equal interest. As poetry it is monotonous,
without sense of proportion, padded to facilitate memorisation by
professional reciters, and unadorned by figure, fancy, or imagination.
Its pretention to historic accuracy begot prosaicness in its approach
to the style of the chronicles. But its inspiration was noble, its
conception of human duties was lofty. It gives a realistic portrayal of
the age which produced it, the age of the first crusades, and to this
day we would choose as our models of citizenship Roland and Oliver
rather than Tristan and Lancelot. The epic poems, dealing with the
pseudo-historical characters who had fought in civil and foreign wars
under Charlemagne, remained the favourite literary pabulum of the middle
classes until the close of the thirteenth century. Professor Bedier
is at present engaged in explaining the extraordinary hold which these
poems had upon the public, and in proving that they exercised a distinct
function when exploited by the Church throughout the period of
the crusades to celebrate local shrines and to promote muscular
Christianity. But the refinement which began to penetrate the ideals of
the French aristocracy about the middle of the twelfth century craved a
different expression in narrative literature. Greek and Roman mythology
and history were seized upon with some effect to satisfy the new demand.
The "Roman de Thebes", the "Roman d'Alexandre", the "Roman de
Troie", and its logical continuation, the "Roman d'Eneas", are all
twelfth-century attempts to clothe classic legend in the dress of
mediaeval chivalry. But better fitted to satisfy the new demand was the
discovery by the alert Anglo-Normans perhaps in Brittany, perhaps in the
South of England, of a vast body of legendary material which, so far as
we know, had never before this century received any elaborate literary
treatment. The existence of the literary demand and this discovery of
the material for its prom