Geoffrey Gaimer put these stories into French. The stories traveled to France. Once there, other legends were added, and when Geoffrey's Chronicle turned up again in England it came back as the work of Wace, a Norman trouveur, or ballad-singer. But Geoffrey's stories were too good to let drop even after they had been through so many hands. An English priest in Worcestershire by the name of Layamon, translating the French poem which Wace had made out of Geoffrey's prose stories, retold the stories in English poetry. That was in 1205, after Geoffrey had died. Geoffrey of Monmouth must have been very happy as he sat in his sunny, golden window and heard about the tales he had written there. He must have chuckled many a time over what the world had made out of his nimble story-telling wits. English literature could not be at all the same, in either prose or poetry, if it were not for that golden palace door over which was written _Welsh_ or that window upon the stairway where Geoffrey sat. But it was the Normans who brought the taste for history with them to England in 1066, when they conquered the land which had been King Alfred's land. It was some time before the Normans became what we call English in their feeling. Probably the Normans would never have become so strongly English in feeling if English patriotism, even after the conquest of 1066, had not remained very much alive. The English had written down in English some of the proverbs of their former King Alfred. The parents of the chronicler, William of Malmesbury, were both English and Norman. And, strangely enough, Layamon's "Brut" is not unlike the poetry of the cowherd Cædmon, the first of the great English singers, the first of English poets. Perhaps this very hour the sun is shining down upon that golden window of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and laughing for joy because the man who "lied so saucily" was the first of the great English story-tellers. X A FAMOUS KITCHEN BOY Geoffrey's window is a very fascinating place to be--possibly the most interesting window the world has ever seen. It is not just one lifetime which has found that window interesting, but more lifetimes than we can count comfortably. Sir Thomas Malory, who wrote his _Morte d'Arthur_ in 1469, fairly lived in that window; so did Shakespeare when he wrote "King Lear" in 1605, and even the modern poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade," composed a series of poems called "Idylls of the King," which return for their sources through Malory to Geoffrey at his window.