CHAPTER III.
the rise of the new english.
(A.D. 1303.)
We have seen the corruption of speech in the Mercian Danelagh and East Anglia; a corruption more strikingly marked there than in other parts of England, with the exception of Yorkshire and Essex, where the same intermixture of Norse blood was bringing about like results. We shall now weigh the work of a Lincolnshire man who saw the light at Bourne within a few miles of Rutland, the writer of a poem begun in the year that Edward I. was bringing under his yoke the whole of Scotland, outside of Stirling Castle. It was in 1303 that Robert of Brunne (known also as Robert Manning) began to compile the Handlyng Synne, the work which, more clearly than any former one, foreshadowed the road that English literature was to tread from that time forward.[1] Like many other lays of King Edward I.'s time, the new piece was a translation from a French poem; the Manuel des Pechés had been written about thirty years earlier by William of Waddington.[2] The English poem
- ↑ This work, with its French original, has been edited for the Roxburgh Club by Mr. Furnivall.
- ↑ The date of Waddington's poem is pretty well fixed by a passage in page 248 (Roxburgh Club edition of the Handlyng Synne). He writes a tale in French, and his translator says that the sad affair referred to happened ‘in the time of good Edward, Sir Henry's son.’
