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TO A.D. 1189.]

GLANVILLE. JOSEPH OF EXETER.

65

20. In the latter part of this reign Ralph Glanville wrote nis Latin treatise Upon the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England (Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglia), which was completed towards the close of Henry's reign, and is the first treatise on English law. Ralph, or Ranulph de Glanville, famous as a lawyer and a soldier, was appointed, in 1180, Chief Justiciary of England under Henry II. He distinguished himself by valour in repelling the invasion of William King of Scotland, who was taken prisoner while besieging Alnwick Castle. After the death of Henry II., Richard I. is said to have extorted from Glanville £15,000 towards the expenses of the crusade in which he accompanied his new master. He was killed at the siege of Acre, in 1190. Glanville's authorship of the book attributed to him has been questioned, but is not open to much doubt. He says that the confusion of our laws made it impossible to give a general view of the whole laws and customs of the land; he sought rather to give a practical sketch of forms of procedure in the king's courts, and of the principles of law most frequently arising; discussing only incidentally the first principles upon which law is based.

21. Latin poems also were produced in the closing years of Henry II.'s reign by Joseph of Exeter and Alexander Neckam. Joseph of Exeter, or Josephus Iscanus, dedicated to Archbishop Baldwin a Latin poem, in six books, On the Trojan War, founded on Dares Phrygius, and finished when Henry II. was preparing for the crusade that Baldwin preached. He wrote also an Antiocheis, of which there remains only a fragment. Joseph of Exeter's Latin poem on the Trojan war was written about the same time as the French metrical romance, the "Geste de Troie," by that Benoit de St. Maure who supplanted Wace in the favour of King Henry II. Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, and Wace's romance version of it, called the "Brut," had brought Troy stories, as well as King Arthur stories, into fashion among us. For we had now been taught that the British were descended from the Trojans. After his escape from Troy with his son Ascanius and their followers, his establishment in Italy and marriage with Lavinia the daughter of King Turnus, Æneas died. Ascanius, the son of Æneas, had a son, named Silvius, who secretly loved Lavinia's niece. To this couple a son was born, of whom it was foretold that he should slay his father and his mother, and be driven from the land. The son was called Brutus; was the Brut who gave his name to Britain,

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[A.D. 1180 His mother died in giving birth to him. At the age of fifteen he accidentally shot his father when they were out hunting together. He was banished, went to Greece, and there found kindred Trojans who were slaves. He stirred them to revolt, was made their duke, compelled the King of Greece to give him his daughter Ignogen to wife, and freedom to the Trojans; also to give them all the ships of Greece in which to depart and establish themselves in a new country. On their way from Greece these Trojans landed in the island of Leogice, where Brutus sought counsel in the temple of Diana, and was directed to seek beyond France a winsome land named Albion, surrounded by the sea. So he sailed on, and added to his company, from Spain, a fourfold host of Trojans born of those who had been led thither by Atenor after the fall of Troy. Corineus, he who gave his name to Cornwall. adventures, Brutus, Corineus, and their Trojans reached this country, landed at Dartmouth, destroyed a few giants who were then the sole possessors of the land, and founded London as New Troy, or Troynovant. Such stories quickened interest in the affairs of Troy, and we have evidence of the new interest in Joseph of Exeter's Latin poem, and the French romance of Benoit de St. Maure. They both based their Troy legends upon the narratives ascribed to Dares and Dictys. Homer was no eyewitness of the siege; he was a partisan, too, of the Greeks. Dares, to whom a Phrygian Iliad was ascribed as early as the year 230, an account said to have been written before Homer's, was a Trojan priest of Vulcan, who warned Hector not to kill Patroclus, and was himself killed by Ulysses. His book existed only in a Latin version, said to have been made by Cornelius Nepos from the Greek autograph found at Athens. This prose history of the fall of Troy was usually associated with the six books on the history of the Trojan war ascribed to Dictys of Gnossus, the companion of Idomeneus. His narrative, said to have been written at the request of Idomeneus, on tablets of bark, in Phoenician characters, was further said to have been buried with its author in a leaden box, and disclosed by an earthquake in the thirteenth year of the reign of Nero. Nero caused the work to be translated into Greek, and from that Greek the Latin version was said to have been made by one Q. Septimius Romanus. In and long after the time of Henry II., Dictys and Dares were regarded as the chief original authorities for the story of the siege of Troy.

TO A.D. 1199.]

ALEXANDER NECKHAM. CHRONICLERS.

67

It is in Benoit de St. Maure's "Geste de Troie," based chiefly upon Dictys, that we have the germ of the tale, afterwards famous in literature, of Troilus and Cressida.

Alexander Neckam was born at St. Albans, in September, 1157, on the same night as King Richard, and was the king's foster brother. He was educated at St. Albans, and early entrusted with the school at Dunstable, dependent on St. Albans Abbey. In 1180, at the age of twenty-three, he was in Paris, distinguished as a teacher. He wrote, within the next ten years, a Treatise on Science, in ten books of Latin elegiac verse, wherein he treated of creation, the elements, water and its contents, fire, air, the earth's surface, its interior, plants, animals, and the seven arts. He wrote a similar book in prose, besides other Latin poems, grammatical and theological treatises, and commentaries upon works of Aristotle. Neckam

lived on through the reigns of Richard I. and John. In 1213 he became abbot of the Augustines at Cirencester, and he died in 1217.

22. We now pass from the reign of Henry II. to that of Richard I. (1189—1199). In this reign Walter Map was adding to the anecdotes in his "De Nugis Curialium." Towards the close of it, in 1198, William of Newbury wrote his Latin chronicle, the History of English Affairs. He was a Yorkshireman born and bred; born at Bridlington, and educated by the Austin canons at Newbury, in the North Riding. As a monk in their abbey he became known for his industry and skill as a writer; and it was at the request of the Abbot of Rievaulx that he wrote his "Historia Rerum Anglicarum," of which the preface hotly denied Geoffrey of Monmouth's credibility, and the substance proved himself to be a trustworthy chronicler of facts. Beginning at the Conquest, he ran through the events before his own time in a very short summary, and occupied himself almost wholly with the careful record of contemporary events. He died in 1208, aged seventy-two.

Another chronicler of this time, also a Yorkshireman, was Roger of Hoveden, or Howden, in the East Riding. He was attached to the household of Henry II., who employed him in collection of the revenues due to the crown from abbeys without abbots or priors. Roger of Hoveden is said to have been at one time a Professor of Theology at Oxford. He was writing in the time of Richard I. his Annals, which extend to the year 1201. They begin at the year 732 with a compilation

which professes to be planned as a continuation of Bede's History, and come in the second part to a more valuable history of the reigns of Henry II. and Richard I., continued to the third year of John, 1201. For their last nine years Hoveden's Annals are a minute and diffuse contemporary record of events.

23. To the reign of Richard I. belongs also our earliest piece of literary criticism, the treatise of Geoffrey de Vinsauf on the New Poetry, De Nova Poetria. This writer is called also Galfridus Anglicus. He was educated in the priory of St. Frideswide at Oxford, and in the nascent Universities of France and Italy. He was at Rome when, about the year 1195, he dedicated to his patron there, Pope Innocent III., his Latin critical didactic poem on the New Poetry. His new poetry was the old revived; Joseph of Exeter's Latin poem on the Trojan war was an example of it. Geoffrey of Vinsauf warned men back to the ancient measures, and to the critical standard of Horace. He condemned the Latin rhymes by which they had been superseded. There was, at least, some sign in the book of a tendency to the revival of scholarship. Geoffrey of Vinsauf probably was not the author of an Itinerary of King Richard and others to Jerusalem, which has been ascribed to him, and which sets forth that it had been written by Richard the Canon. This is the lively chronicle of an eyewitness, who went himself with King Richard, and saw the last flash of the crusading enthusiasm that Rome afterwards wanted power to sustain in Europe.

24. There is no more to be said of our literature in the reign of Richard I., except in discussion of one writer of mark, who began to use his pen at the close of the reign of Henry II., was writing throughout the reign of Richard I., and continued to write until the reign of John (1199—1216) was nearly ended. This was Gerald du Barri, or Gerald of Wales, commonly known as Giraldus Cambrensis. He was born in 1147, and died in the same year as King John, 1216. Gerald came of a fighting family, whose home was in the Castle of Manorbeer, three miles from Pembroke Castle, and who were among the chief helpers in Strongbow's conquest of Ireland. There was an uncle David, Bishop of St. David's, who cherished the young Gerald's turn for study. Study in Wales was continued abroad, and Gerald came home from Paris when his age was about twenty-five, to be entrusted at once with a share in the work of managing wild Wales by a well-organised ecclesiastical discipline. Gerald

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came of a Norman father and Welsh mother; he was tall, stalwart, and bold of spirit. As an archdeacon he laboured to re-establish Church discipline among clergy as well as laity, with a fiery zeal that proved inconvenient to many. He was unflinching in performance of his own duties, and in claim of his own rights; played a bold match of excommunication against a bishop himself, and told his story to the king, who heard it with shouts of laughter, but saw, nevertheless, that this hot Welsh enthusiast for right and duty would not much help the English Church and State as a Welsh bishop. After the death of Gerald's uncle there was a strong desire in Wales to get the vacant see of St. David's restored to its old metropolitan dignity. Archdeacon Gerald, who shared this desire, was elected bishop by the chapter; but King Henry was for the repression of Welsh national enthusiasm. The election was not confirmed, and soon afterwards Gerald went to Paris for more study. He came home and worried away from St. David's the feeble man to whom that. bishopric had been given. In 1184 Henry II. invited the clever Welshman to Court, made him one of his chaplains, and used him in the pacification of Wales, but gave him no substantial reward. In the following year Gerald was ordered to attend upon Prince John, then eighteen years old, in his unsuccessful Irish expedition; for Gerald's counsels would be vigorous, and he had intimate connection with many leading Irish families. It was then that he wrote his Topography of Ireland, and this was presently followed-both books, and all other writings of Gerald, being in Latin-by his History of the Conquest of Ireland, the best of his writings. The Irish chiefs had their names made classical-Fitzstephen became Stephanides-and they were furnished with ornamental orations, but their characters were described by a lively and shrewd observer, events were told after a careful sifting of evidence, and careful observation of the ground in the case of battles, sieges, &c. At Easter, 1186, Gerald returned to England, and soon afterwards went home to Wales, where he worked on at his "Topography of Ireland." This he published by reading it at Oxford in 1187. The three divisions of the work were read on three successive days, and Gerald entertained at his lodgings on the first day, the poor of the town; on the second day, the doctors and the more eminent pupils; on the third day, the other scholars and many citizens. The capture of Jerusalem by Saladin stirred Europe in the latter part of this year. In 1188 Gerald was by the side

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