citizenship Roland and Oliver rather than Tristan and Lancelot.
The epic poems, dealing with the pseudo-historical characters who
had fought in civil and foreign wars under Charlemagne, remained
the favourite literary pabulum of the middle classes until the
close of the thirteenth century. Professor Bedier is at present
engaged in explaining the extraordinary hold which these poems
had upon the public, and in proving that they exercised a
distinct function when exploited by the Church throughout the
period of the crusades to celebrate local shrines and to promote
muscular Christianity. But the refinement which began to
penetrate the ideals of the French aristocracy about the middle
of the twelfth century craved a different expression in narrative
literature. Greek and Roman mythology and history were seized
upon with some effect to satisfy the new demand. The "Roman de
Thebes", the "Roman d'Alexandre", the "Roman de Troie", and its
logical continuation, the "Roman d'Eneas", are all twelfth-
century attempts to clothe classic legend in the dress of
mediaeval chivalry. But better fitted to satisfy the new demand
was the discovery by the alert Anglo-Normans perhaps in Brittany,
perhaps in the South of England, of a vast body of legendary
material which, so far as we know, had never before this century
received any elaborate literary treatment. The existence of the
literary demand and this discovery of the material for its prompt
satisfaction is one of the most remarkable coincidences in
iiterary history. It would seem that the pride of the Celtic
populations in a Celtic hero, aided and abetted by Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who first showed the romantic possibilities of the
material, made of the obscure British chieftain Arthur a world
conqueror. Arthur thus became already in Geoffrey's "Historia
regum Britaniae" a conscious protagonist of Charlemagne and his