Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Everyman's Library: Romance
He is easily the most distinguished of a long line of French versifiers, who erabodied in episodic romances material derived from many sources, but consisting principally of chivalric adventures, related in terms that reflect the life of the courts which they were destined to please. To the taste of Crestien's readers the tales afforded by the so-called "matter of Britain," already current in France, were peculiarly adapted, and lent themselves readily to him and his successors as a means for depicting the chivalric life and ideals with which they were surrounded. Crestien's work deservedly met with great success, and gave a powerful impetus to the production of lengthy chivalric poems dealing with Arthur and his knights. But in spite of the immense popularity that Arthurian verse romance attained at this period in France, it did not flourish on the neighbouring soil of England until the fourteenth century, when it had already begun to fade in its native land. It is true that the foundation for the literary development of romantic material in England had been laid in Anglo Norman days. From the time of the Conquest, minstrels from across the Channel, ever welcome in hall and bower, had played a large part in transporting to England the tales that had been versified in France. They found their audiences in courtly circles, where the recognised language was French, where composition in the vernacular, if it had been thought of at all, would have appeared useless and undignified, and where even the tales of Anglo-Saxon heroes were dressed in the language and verse of the conquerors. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, the English people were feeling the spirit of nationalism stir within them; the language which had existed, not as a unit, but in numerous dialects, began to be welded into a literary form, translations from the French poetical material into the vernacular were undertaken, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century, under the reign of Edward I., metrical romances in the English tongue occupied a recognised and important place in literature. The English poet, in selecting his subject-matter, was heedless of literary merit.
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