because the people in those days were so poetical--indeed, some of
these poems would be thought, in present times, very dreary
doggerel--but because rhyme is easier to remember than prose.
Story-tellers had generally much the same stock-in-trade--stories
of Arthur, Charlemagne, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of
Southampton, and so on. If a minstrel had skill of his own, he
would invent some new episode, and so, perhaps, turn a compliment
to his patron by introducing the exploit of an ancestor, at the
same time that he made his story last longer. People did not weary
of hearing the same tales over and over again, any more than little
children get tired of nursery rhymes, or their elders turn away
from "Punch and Judy," though the same little play has been
performed for centuries. As for inventing stories about real
people, that may well have seemed permissible in an age when
historians recorded mere hearsay as actual fact. Richard III.,
perhaps, had one shoulder higher than the other, but within a few
years of his death grave historians had represented him as a
hunchbacked deformity.

The romances connected with King Arthur and his knights went on
steadily growing in number until the fifteenth century; of them,
some have survived to the present day, but undoubtedly many have
been lost. Then, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the
most famous of all the Arthurian stories was given to the world in
Sir Thomas Malory's _Morte D'Arthur_. By good luck, the great
printer who made it one of his first works, has left an account of
the circumstances that led to its production. In the reign of
Edward IV., William Caxton set up his printing-press (the first in
England) in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. There he was
visited, as he himself relates, by "many noble and divers gentlemen"