and the image of the grave cause him anguish that all his piety
cannot allay. His style, like his life, is uneven and full of change; to
calm passages, to beautiful and edifying tales succeed bursts of
passion; his phrases then become short and breathless; interjections and
apostrophes abound. "Ihesu es thy name. A! A! that wondyrfull name! A!
that delittabyll name! This es the name that es abowve all names.... I
yede (went) abowte be Covaytyse of riches and I fande noghte Ihesu. I
rane be Wantonnes of flesche and I fand noghte Ihesu. I satt in
companyes of Worldly myrthe and I fand noghte Ihesu.... Tharefore I
turnede by anothire waye, and I rane a-bowte be Poverte, and I fande
Ihesu pure, borne in the worlde, laid in a crybe and lappid in
clathis."[350] Rolle of Hampole is, if we except the doubtful case of
the "Ancren Riwle, "the first English prose writer after the Conquest
who can pretend to the title of original author. To find him we have had
to come far into the fourteenth century. When he died, in 1349, Chaucer
was about ten years of age and Wyclif thirty.

II.

We are getting further and further away from the Conquest, the wounds
inflicted by it begin to heal, and an audience is slowly forming among
the English race, ready for something else besides sermons.

The greater part of the nobles had early accepted the new order of
things, and had either retained or recovered their estates. Having
rallied to the cause of the conquerors, they now endeavoured to imitate
them, and had also their castles, their minstrels, and their romances.
They had, it is true, learnt French, but English remained their natural
language. A literature was composed that resembled them, English in
language, as French as possible in dress and manners. About the end of
the twelfth century or beginning of the thirteenth, the translation of
the French romances began. First came war stories, then love tales.

Thus was written by Layamon, about 1205, the first metrical romance,
after "Beowulf," that the English literature possesses.[351] The
vocabulary of the "Brut" is Anglo-Saxon; there are not, it seems, above
fifty words of French origin in the whole of this lengthy poem, and yet
on each page it is easy to recognise the ideas and the chivalrous tastes
introduced by the French. The strong will with which they blended the
traditions of the country has borne its fruits. Layamon considers that
the glories of the Britons are English glories,