great-grandson of William, Henry II., was upon the throne of England. The
Roman de Rou contains also the history of Rollo's successors: it is in two
parts; the first extending to the beginning of the reign of the third
duke, Richard the Fearless, and the second, containing the story of the
conquest, comes down to the time of Henry II. himself. The second part he
wrote rapidly, for fear that he would be forestalled by the king's poet
_Benoit_. The first part was written in Alexandrines, but for the second
he adopted the easier measure of the octo-syllabic verse, of which this
part contains seventeen thousand lines. In this poem are discerned the
craving of the popular mind, the power of the subject chosen, and the
reflection of language and manners, which are displayed on every page.

So popular, indeed, was the subject of the Brut, indigenous as it was
considered to British soil, that Wace's poem, already taken from Geoffrey
of Monmouth, as Geoffrey had taken it, or pretended to take it from the
older chronicle, was soon again, as we shall see, to be versionized into
English.



OTHER NORMAN WRITERS OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.



_Philip de Than_, about 1130, one of the Trouvères: _Li livre de
créatures_ is a poetical study of chronology, and his _Bestiarie_ is a
sort of natural history of animals and minerals.

_Benoit_: Chroniques des Ducs de Normandie, 1160, written in thirty
thousand octo-syllabic verses, only worthy of a passing notice, because of