And such like fitting orisons, praying to God for all;
And for to see the battle stood upon the high town wall.'1

The early romances, prose and metrical, have very commonly a strain of religious thought inwoven in their fabric. The two earliest, both of them thoroughly English in character, are King Horn, and Havelok the Dane. King Horn, taken apparently from an old English lay, was written in French by Waldef, in the reign of Richard I. The earliest English manuscript of it dates from the latter half of the thirteenth century. The old English lay must have had its origin at a time when the terrible irruptions of the heathen Danes were yet more or less fresh in memory. But when the French version was made, the mind of Europe was in the full ferment of the Crusades; and so the Pagans, who had doubtless been Danes in the original story, were converted into Saracens. The tale begins with an account of an invasion of these heathens into the land of King Murry, father of Horn.

The Pagans came to land,
And took it in their hand;
The folk they gan to quell,
The churches they did fell.2

The king was slain, and Horn fell into the hands of the heathens. The queen, Godhild, fled.

She went out of hall
From her maidens all.
Under a rock of stone

There she lived alone,

There she served God,

Against Pagan forbode [prohibition] :

There she served Christ,

Though no paynim wist,

Ever she prayed for her child

That Jesu Christ be to him mild.

1 Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, 2 vols., ed. by T. Hearne, 1724:
Vor honger deyde monyon, hou mygte be more wo?
Muche was the sorwe, that among hem was tho.—p. 404-6.
2 King Horn, 1. 59; ed. by R. Lumby, E.E.T.S. No. 14:
The pains come to londe,

And neme hit in here honde.

D

Horn was in Pagan hand
With the people of the land:
Mickle was he fair in face;

Christ had made him so by grace.1

When Horn had conquered the Saracens, his first work was to rebuild the ruined churches.

Horn let work, [caused to be built]

Chapell and kirk,
He let bells ring

And masses sing."

At the end Horn and his queen Rymenhild came back to their land, and lived there and died amid the love of their people; and the poem concludes with a Christianly aspiration :

Now be they both dead,

Christ to heaven them lead.
Here ends the tale of Horn.

Christ, that is heaven the King,

Send us all His sweet blessing. Amen.3.

Havelok the Dane is likewise of English origin, recovered into English from the French about 1280 A.D. The story of it is laid at Grimsby in Lincolnshire, probably in the times of Ethelbert of Kent and Edwin of Northumbria. In the beginning there is a due reminder of Christian faith and duty :

Christ make us ever so for to do
That we may all come Him unto,
And may He will it may be so !
Benedicamus Domino !4

1 King Horn, 1. 71, ed. by R. Lumby, E. E.T.S. No. 14′:

The Lay of Havelok the Dane, 1. 17-21, ed. by W. W. Skeat, for E.E.T.S. No. 4 (extra series).

Krist, late us hevere so for to do,

That we moten comen him to.

It begins with telling of the good king Athelwold, who was loved by old and young, earl and baron, knight and bondsman, widows, maidens, priests and clerks, and all for his good works :—

He loved God with all his might,

And holy Church, and sooth and right.1

The portion surviving of the story of Floriz and Blauncheflur, is, in its English form as taken from the French, of about the same date as Horn and Havelok. It ends with the lines, evidently a sort of pious formula proper to end a romance of any sort :

After sorrow cometh bliss:

Pray we that God grant us this,
That we all may love Him so

That we may to heaven go. Amen.2

Tennyson has so far familiarised to our age the general subject of Arthurian romance, that no readers are unaware of the spiritual and religious element which pervades it. We should indeed carry away a very mistaken idea of it, if we transferred to its original authors all the delicate idealism and mystic charm which are due in great measure to the conception of the modern poet. But the mystical and ideal element and the lofty spiritual tone were more or less present in it very early. Scarcely, however, from the first. In the fragmentary romance, Arthur, which is a sort of abstract, early in the fifteenth century, of the far earlier version by Geoffrey of Monmouth, written by him about the middle of the twelfth century, there is quite a religious tone, but it is of the simplest kind. The story is just that of a British king, founding the Round Table, conquering Scotland, Ireland, Gothland, and divers parts of France, killing a giant from Spain, beating Lucius, the Emperor of Rome, and

1 The Lay of Havelok the Dane, 35:

He lovede gode with all his micht.

2 Floriz and Blauncheflur, 1. 820, ed. Lumby, E.E.T.S. No. 14:

After bale cometh bote

God leve that us so mote.

returning home to lose his own life after the battle in which the traitor whom he had trusted, and who had seized his queen and his land, was slain." At intervals the teller of the story pauses, and calls upon his hearers to say a short prayer:

Now rest ye all with me,

And say a 'Pater' and 'Ave,❞2

or other words to a similar effect. The following is an
extract from the story itself. Arthur had just received
intelligence that 'the Emperor with his host were coming
fast in great boast,' covering the land, in number four
hundred thousand, a hundred and four and twenty,
gathered to him of Christian and of Saracen, purposing,
'with all his wit and labour,' to destroy the British king.
With th' emperor, kings many a one
And all their power, whole and some,
Stronger men might no man see,
As full of dread as they might be.
But Arthur, he was not dismayed;

He trusted God and was well paid [satisfied],
And prayed to the high Trinity

Ever his help and stay to be;

And all his men with single voice

Cried unto God with hearty noise :

'Father in heaven, Thy will be done;

Defend Thy people from their foe'n,
And let not godless heathen men

Destroy Thy people Christian;

Have mercy on Thy servants' land,

And keep them from the heathen's hand.

The muckelness of man sans fail

Giveth not victory in battail,
But as Thy will in heaven is

So falleth victory, we wis.' 3

Such stories of Arthur had probably been a subject for Welsh and Breton lays for centuries.

1 Arthur, ed. by F. J. Furnivall, E. E.T.S. No. 2.

2 Id. 1. 189:

3 Id. 1. 423:

Now resteth alle wijth me.

Wyth the Emperour come kynges many oon
And alle theire power hoolle and soome.

But the

regular cycle of Arthurian romance begins a little later than Geoffrey of Monmouth, with Walter de Map, the able, witty, and high-minded chaplain of Henry II. It was he who introduced into the old legend an ideal of holy purity in Sir Galahad, and the mystic story of the Holy Graal, which was once with the Knights of the Round Table a warrant of honour and peace in England, but which disappeared when men became sinful. There is no doubt that sight of the Graal means, in purpose, that 'the pure in heart shall see God.'1

Joseph of Arimathea, or The Romance of the San Graal, comes first. The English poem dates from about 1350, and follows in the main the French of Robert de Borron, written in prose before 1209. The original is supposed to have been written by Walter de Map about 1170, the general groundwork of the story, then entirely disconnected with Britain, being the so-called 'Gospel of Nicodemus.' The following is an extract from the commission which Joseph, after a forty years' captivity, was supposed to have received from Christ to preach the Gospel in the furthermost parts of the earth :

'Walk, Joseph, in the world, and preach abroad my words
Unto the proudest men; and some of them will hear.
And though men speak to thee with menace and with threat,
Be thou no whit afraid, for thee they shall not harm.'
'Lord, I was never clerk; what if I should not know?'
‘Yea, loose thy lips atwain, and let the spirit work :

Speech, grace, and voice shall spring forth from thy tongue,
And wholly and at once all to thy lips shall come.'
So he sets forth afoot; he takes the Holy Blood,

And in the Father's name straightway he forthward wends.2
It is in this romance that we have the red cross of
England accounted for, the old crusading device of the
Knight Templars. Joseph is here described as making

1 Cf. Morley's English Writers, iii. 134.

2 Joseph of Arimathea, or The Romance of the San Graal, ed. by W. W. Skeat for E. E.T.S. No. 44: 'And, Joseph, walk in the world and preche myne wordes.'