The "Leechdoms," and works on herb-lore and medicine of the period, partly derived from late Latin books, partly from popular charm songs, are merely curious; they are full of folk-lore. After the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose, save in the "Chronicle," was almost submerged, though, in poetry, there were doubtless plenty of popular ballads, for the most part lost or faintly traceable as translated into the Latin prose of some of the writers of history. There would be songs chanted among the country people about the deeds of Hereward the Wake and other popular heroes; minstrels, now poor wanderers, would sing in the farmhouses, and in the halls of the English squires, but not much of their compositions remains. We have, however, a few famous brief passages of verse, like the poem of "The Grave," familiar through Longfellow's translation, and probably earlier than the Conquest. It is written on the margin of a book of sermons, and the author's mood is truly sepulchral. The "Rhymed Poem" is celebrated only because it is in rhyme, which was a novelty with a great future before it; it is older than 1046, its muse is that of moral reflection. The one verse of a song of King Canute is handed down by a monkish chronicler who lived more than a century later. The king in a boat on the Ouse, near a church, bids his men row near the shore to hear the monks sing:-- Merie sungen the munaches binnen Ely, Tha Cnut ching rew therby: "Roweth cnihtes neer the land, And here we thes munches sang." This contains a kind of rhyme, or incomplete rhyme, of the vowel sounds only (assonance) in Ely, ther_by_, "_land_", "_sang._" St. Godric (died 1170) also left a hymn to Our Lady, in rhymed couplets, with the music. Of about the same period is a rhymed version of the Lord's Prayer; the number of syllables to each line varies much, as in Anglo-Saxon poetry, contrary to the rule in the poetry of France. There are other examples all showing the untaught tendency of the songs of the people towards rhyme and towards measures unknown to the early Anglo-Saxons. [1] The Amazons appear to have been the armed priestesses of the Hittite empire in Asia Minor, about 1200 B.C. CHAPTER IV. AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST. At the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), the invaders possessed a literature in their own language, poems on the adventures of Charlemagne, and of Roland and the other peers and paladins. But perhaps none of the French poems on Charlemagne, or only one, the "Song of Roland," now exists in a form as early as the date of the Conquest, and they did not then reach the English people.