The Norman Conquest and Norman-French Literature

The Norman Conquest and Norman-French Literature

England was invaded anew, in the middle of the eleventh century, by men of Norse blood, the very brothers of the Vikings who had been raiding the shores of England before the reign of Alfred, who however brought with them the tongue and the literature of France. The new masters of the land did not trouble to learn the coarse idiom of their subjects; they continued to express themselves in Norman-French, and for nearly two centuries English was practically discarded as a literary language. At the court, in the castles in the monasteries, everybody spoke French or exceptionally Latin. A French literature soon sprang up on English soil.

Wace, an Anglo-Norman trouvère born in the Island of Jersey, wrote in French the Roman de Rou, a chronicle history of the Dukes of Normandy, and turned the Historia Regum Britanniae, in which Geoffrey of Monmouth had told the heroic struggles of the Celts of Britain against the Saxons in the Vth and VI th centuries under their illustrious king Arthur, into a poem of over 14.000 French lines entitled Geste des Bretons or Brut d'Angleterre (1155). According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Brut or Brutus the Trojan, grandson of Aeneas, landed after many adventures in the island of Albion to which he gave the name of Britain. In this long chronicle King Arthur is represented as a blameless and victorious king, whose knights sit at a round table in order that there should be no quarrel is interwoven the legend on the Holy Grail. The Arthurian legend rapidly became popular and before 1.200 a priest, Layamon, turned Wace's Brut into a poem of 32.000 lines of alliterative English verse.