To politics as well as to love and the delights of spring the Muse of the people was alive. The popular hatred of Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, expressed itself thus after the battle of Lewes (1264). The English is here but slightly modernized:-- Be thou lief, be thou loth, Sir Edward, Thou shalt ride spurless on thy lyard All the right way to Doverward Shalt thou never more break forward, Edward, thou did'st as a shreward, Forsook thine uncle's lore, Richard, though thou be ever trichard Trick shalt thou never more. (A lyard is a grey, spoken of a horse, The Dinlay snaws were ne'er so white As the lyart locks o' Harden's hair, says the ballad of "Jamie Telfer".) The English view of Wallace, the patriot knight of Scotland, cruelly executed, is thus set forth:-- To warn all the gentlemen that be in Scotland The Wallace was drawn, thereafter hanged, Beheaded alive, his bowels burned, The head to London Bridge was sent, To abide After Simon Frysel, That was traitor and fickle And known full wide. (Frysel or Fraser; a later Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat of 1745, was traitor and fickle enough.) Robert of Gloucester. By no means so lively, though useful in its day, is the very long metrical chronicle (about 1300) of Robert of Gloucester, whether it be by two hands or by one. One, at least, named Robert, was living at the dates of a great Oxford town and gown row, which he describes, and of the battle of Evesham (1265). He was fortunately not nearer than a distance of thirty miles from that stricken field, and records his own fear of a dense darkness which prevented the monks from reading service in church. Robert dwelt in Gloucester, as his minute local allusions prove. He began his chronicle by versifying the fabulous work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but put into it not a glimmer of the poetry of Layamon. For the rest, till he reached his own time, he copied Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, and "Lives of the Saints". Robert's learned modern editor, Mr. Aldis Wright, outworn by all the tediousness which the poet bestows on us, says "as literature, the book is as worthless as twelve thousand lines of verse without one spark of poetry can be". But Robert's praises of England, "a wel god loud," and of English folk, so clean and handsome, have a sound spontaneous note of patriotism, and there is a swing in what Mr. Wright cruelly styles his "doggerel verse in ballad metre," which is not to be despised. To be sure he has, without knowing it, several different sorts of verse, and is nearly as irregular as Layamon himself, in his measures. His readers would not be offended by these defects, and they learned from him, with a great deal of inaccurate history, a sense of pride in their country, and to speak English, though the nobles and gentry, he says, spoke French. Cursor Mundi.