habits of animals, generally drawn originally from classical tradition, and
most of them highly fantastic and allegorized in the interests of morality
and religion. There was an abundance of extremely realistic coarse tales,
hardly belonging to literature, in both prose and verse. The popular
ballads of the fourteenth century we must reserve for later consideration.
Most numerous of all the prose works, perhaps, were the Chronicles, which
were produced generally in the monasteries and chiefly in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, the greater part in Latin, some in French, and a few
in rude English verse. Many of them were mere annals like the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, but some were the lifelong works of men with genuine historical
vision. Some dealt merely with the history of England, or a part of it,
others with that of the entire world as it was known to medieval Europe.
The majority will never be withdrawn from the obscurity of the manuscripts
on which the patient care of their authors inscribed them; others have been
printed in full and serve as the main basis for our knowledge of the events
of the period.

THE ROMANCES. But the chief form of secular literature during the period,
beginning in the middle of the twelfth century, was the romance, especially
the metrical (verse) romance. The typical romances were the literary
expression of chivalry. They were composed by the professional minstrels,
some of whom, as in Anglo-Saxon times, were richly supported and rewarded
by kings and nobles, while others still wandered about the country, always
welcome in the manor-houses. There, like Scott's Last Minstrel, they
recited their sometimes almost endless works from memory, in the great
halls or in the ladies' bowers, to the accompaniment of occasional strains
on their harps. For two or three centuries the romances were to the lords
and ladies, and to the wealthier citizens of the towns, much what novels
are to the reading public of our own day. By far the greater part of the
romances current in England were written in French, whether by Normans or