On Easter Day, 1158, Henry
II. and his wife Alienor of Aquitaine enter the cathedral of Worcester,
wearing their crowns, and present themselves before the tomb of the holy
protector of the town. They remove their crowns, place them on his tomb,
and swear never to wear them again. The saint was not a French one, but
Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, one who held the see at the time
of the Conquest.[149]

The word of command has been given; the clerks know it. Here is a poem
of the thirteenth century, on Edward the Confessor; it is composed in
the French tongue by a Norman monk of Westminster Abbey, and dedicated
to Alienor of Provence, wife of Henry III. In it we read: "In this world
there is, we dare to say, neither country, nor kingdom, nor empire where
so many good kings and saints have lived as in the isle of the English
... holy martyrs and confessors, many of whom died for God; others were
very strong and brave as Arthur, Edmond, and Cnut."[150]

This is a characteristic example of these new tendencies. The poem is
dedicated to a Frenchwoman by a Norman of England, and begins with the
praise of a Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane.

In the compiling of chronicles, clerks proceed in the same manner, and
this is still more significant, for it clearly proves that the pressing
of literature into the service of political ideas is the result of a
decided will, and of a preconceived plan, and not of chance. The
chroniclers do, indeed, write by command, and by express desire of the
kings their masters. One of them begins his history of England with the
siege of Troy, and relates the adventures of the Trojans and Britons, as
willingly as those of the Saxons or Normans; another writes two separate
books, the first in honour of the Britons, and the second in honour of
the Normans; a third, who goes back to the time when "the world was
established," does not get down to the dukes of Normandy without having
narrated first the story of Antenor the Trojan, an ancestor of the
Normans, as he believes.[151] The origin of the inhabitants of the land
must no longer be sought for under Scandinavian skies, but on Trojan
fields. From the smoking ruins of Pergamus came Francus, father of the
French, and AEneas, father of Brutus and of the Britons of England. Thus
the nations on both sides of the Channel have a common and classic
ancestry. There is Trojan blood in their veins, the blood of Priam and
of the princes who defended Ilion.[152]