The power of the Church to mould the early growth of vernacular literature is so often manifested that there is a risk of underestimating the compromises and surrenders which are the signs of its wane. The figures of romance invaded the churches themselves, creeping into the carvings of the portals, along the choir-stalls, and into the historiated margins of the service books. Ecclesiastics collected and multiplied stories to adorn their sermons or illustrate their manuals of vices and virtues. In the lives of saints marvels accumulated until the word 'legend' became a synonym for an untrue tale. Though there are moments in the fourteenth century when the preponderance of the clerical over the secular element in literature seems as great as ever, by the end of the Middle Ages the trend of the conflict is plain. It is the Church that draws back to attend to her own defences, which the domestic growth of pious fictions has made everywhere vulnerable. But imaginative literature, growing always stronger and more confident, wins full secular liberty. Emancipation from the bondage of fact, and to some extent from ecclesiastical censorship, coincided with the acquisition of a new freedom in the form of English poetry. Old English had a single metre—the long alliterative line without rime. It was best suited to narrative; it was unmusical in the sense that it could not be sung; it had marked proclivities towards rant and noise; and like blank verse it degenerated easily into mongrel prose. Degeneration was far advanced in the eleventh century; and about the end of the twelfth some large-scale experiments show that writers were no longer content with the old medium. In _Layamon_, the last great poem in this metre before the fourteenth century, internal rime and assonance are common. Orm adopted the unrimed _septenarius_ from Latin, but counted his syllables so faithfully as to produce an intolerable monotony. Then French influence turned the scale swiftly and decisively in favour of rime, so that in the extant poetry of the thirteenth century alliteration is a secondary principle or a casual ornament, but never takes the place of rime. The sudden and complete eclipse of a measure so firmly rooted in tradition is surprising enough; but the wealth and elaborateness of the new forms that replaced it are still more matter for wonder. It is natural to think of the poets before Chaucer as children learning their art slowly and painfully, and often stumbling on the way. Yet in this one point of metrical technique they seem to reach mastery at a bound.