Then, this Arthur mine of legends was explored again by another priest and Welshman, who came to have some place at Oxford, where the beginnings of the great university were then a-brew. This writer, Walter Map[17] by name--or Mapes, as he is sometimes called--lived just about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the crusades were in full blast, and when dreams about the Holy Sepulchre hovered round half the house roofs of England. People saw in visions the poor famished pilgrims, fainting with long marches toward the far-away Jerusalem, and shot down by cruel Saracen arrows, within sight of the Holy of Holies. So Walter Map, the priest (they say he was one while chaplain to Henry II.), writing under light of that fierce enthusiasm, puts a religious element into the Arthur stories; and it is from him--in all probability--comes that Legend of the Holy Graal--the cup which caught the sacred blood, and which saintly knights were to seek after, the pure Sir Galahad being the winning seeker. Nor did the Arthur legends stop here: but another priestly man, Layamon[18]--he, too, living on the borders of Wales, in the foraging ground of Arthur’s knights, not far from the present town of Kidderminster (which we know carpet-wise)--set himself to turning the Legends, with many additions, into short, clanging, alliterative Saxon verses, with occasional rhyme--the first English (or Teutonic) wording of the story; Map’s version being in Latin and French. He copies very much from Wace (_Le Brut d’Angleterre_), but his book is longer by a half. It has its importance, too--this Layamon version--in the history of the language. Of the why and the how, and of its linguistic relations to the Anglo-Saxon, or the modern tongue, I shall leave discussion in the hands of those more instructed in the history of Early English. We know this Layamon in our present writing, only as a simple-minded, good, plodding, West-of-England priest, who asked God’s blessing on his work, and who put that quaint alliterative jingle in it, which in years after was spent in larger measure over the poem of Piers Plowman, and which, still later, comes to even daintier usage when the great master--Spenser “----fills with flowers fair Flora’s painted lap.”