The people of Europe, who had no other knowledge of languages than their
own uncultivated dialects, seem to have possessed what, if we may so
dignify it, we would call a fugitive literature of their own. It is
obvious that the people could not be ignorant of the important
transactions in their own land; transactions in which their fathers had
been the spectators or the actors, the sons would perpetuate by their
traditions; the names of their heroes had not died with them on the
battle-field. Nor would the villain's subjection to the feudal lord
spoil the merriment of the land, nor dull the quip of natural
facetiousness.
Before the people had national books they had national songs. Even at a
period so obscure as the days of Charlemagne there were "_most ancient
songs_, in which the acts and wars of the old kings were sung." These
songs which, the secretary of Charlemagne has informed us, were
sedulously collected by the command of that great monarch, are described
by the secretary, according to his classical taste, as _barbara et
antiquissima carmina_; "barbarous," because they were composed in the
rude vernacular language; yet such was their lasting energy that they
were, even in the eighth century, held to be "most ancient," so long had
they dwelt in the minds, of the people! The enlightened emperor had more
largely comprehended their results in the vernacular idiom, on the
genius of the nation, than had the more learned and diplomatic
secretary. It was an ingenious conjecture, that, possibly, even these
ancient songs may in some shape have come down to us in the elder
northern and Teutonic romances, and the Danish, the Swedish, the
Scottish, and the English popular ballads. The kindling narrative, and
the fiery exploits which entranced the imagination of Charlemagne,
mutilated or disguised, may have framed the incidents of a romance, or
been gathered up in the snatches of old wives' tales, and, finally, may
have even lingered in the nursery.
Our miserable populace had poets for themselves, whose looser carols
were the joy of the streets or the fields. Unfortunately we only learn
that they had such artless effusions, for these songs have perished on
the lips of the singers. The monks were too dull or too cunning to
chronicle the outpourings of a people whom they despised, and which
assuredly would have often girded them to the quick. A humorous satire
of this kind has stolen down to us in that exquisite piece of drollery
and grotesque invention, "The Land of Cokaigne."[1] They had historical
ballads which were rehearsed to all listeners; and it was from these
"old ballads, popular through succeeding times," that William of
Malmesbury tells us that "he learned more than from books written
expressly for the information of posterity," though he will not answer
for their precise truth. They had also political ballads. A memorable
one, free as a lampoon, made by one of the adherents of Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester, in the fugitive day of his victory in 1264,
occasioned a statute against "slanderous reports or tales to cause
discord betwixt king and people," a spirit which by no means was put
down by that enactment.[2] This was a ballad sung to the people, as
appears by the opening line,--
Sitteth all stille, and harkeneth to me!
This ballad strikingly contrasts with another of unnerving dejection,
after the irreparable defeat of the party, and the death of the Earl of
Leicester, which, it is remarkable, is written in French, having been
probably addressed solely to that discomfited nobility who would
sympathise with the lament.[3]
The people, or the inferior classes of society, who despised the courtly
French then in vogue, formed such a multitude, that it was for them that
ROBERT of GLOUCESTER wrote his Chronicle, and that ROBERT of BRUNNE
translated the Chronicle of Peter Langtoft, and a volume of recreative
tales from the French. The people even then were eager readers, or, more
properly, auditors; and this further appears in the naivete of our
rhymer's prologue to this Chronicle. The monk tells us, that this story
of England which he now shows in English, is not intended for the
learned, but the illiterate; not for the clerk, but the layman;