"Sire," said Taillefer, "a grace!
I have served you long and well;
All reward you owe me still;
To-day repay me if you please.
For all guerdon I require,
And ask of you in formal prayer,
Grant to me as mine of right
The first blow struck in the fight."
The Duke answered: "I grant."


Of course, critics doubt the story, as they very properly doubt
everything. They maintain that the "Chanson de Roland" was not as
old as the battle of Hastings, and certainly Wace gave no sufficient
proof of it. Poetry was not usually written to prove facts. Wace
wrote a hundred years after the battle of Hastings. One is not
morally required to be pedantic to the point of knowing more than
Wace knew, but the feeling of scepticism, before so serious a
monument as Mont-Saint-Michel, is annoying. The "Chanson de Roland"
ought not to be trifled with, at least by tourists in search of art.
One is shocked at the possibility of being deceived about the
starting-point of American genealogy. Taillefer and the song rest on
the same evidence that Duke William and Harold and the battle itself
rest upon, and to doubt the "Chanson" is to call the very roll of
Battle Abbey in question. The whole fabric of society totters; the
British peerage turns pale.

Wace did not invent all his facts. William of Malmesbury is supposed
to have written his prose chronicle about 1120 when many of the men
who fought at Hastings must have been alive, and William expressly