story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers
partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these,
such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and
William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the
Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his
work in 1273. About 1300, Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a
chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the
Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in
the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon
times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. All
real knowledge of the period dwindled away until in Capgraves's
_Chronicle of England_, written in prose in 1463-1464, hardly any thing
of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten
their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that
Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from
authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of
ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland--as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth,
respectively--ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who
gives in the second book of his _Faerie Queene_ a _resume_ of the reigns
of fabulous British kings--the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth,
his royal patron--has nothing to say of the real kings of early England.
So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to
the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been
dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed
their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors.

In the _Roman de Rou_, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy,
written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings
the French _jongleur_, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of
William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of
"Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at
Roncesvals." This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman
song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines which
Taillefer sang were from the _Chanson de Roland_, the oldest and best of
the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts
of France in the 10th century, had become in the course of one hundred
and fifty years completely identified w