"Saint Austine came and to the heathen folk He preached God's law. Full earnestly he spoke; But they, as men by nature vile and naught, Were careless of the holy truths he taught; And even as he stood before them, there, --One sent by God, God's precepts to declare-- They fastened to his garments tails of ray, And with those tails they drove the Saint away. Then Austine prayed that, for His servant's sake, The judgment of the Lord might overtake The impious scoffers and His wrath proclaim Against the men who did the deed of shame. And so it was and shall be through all time, In punishment of their detested crime: For, sooth to say, to every man among The rabble rout by whom the tails were hung There grew a tail; and thus, for evermore This token of disgrace the tailards bore; And all their progeny, from sire to son, Have suffered for the deed which then was done; And so 'tis now, for all the kith and kin Are tailards, too, in memory of the sin Incurred by those who, lewd and reprobate, Defiled the friend of God with tails of skate."[344] Some fifty years after Robert Wace wrote his _Brut_, Layamon translated, or rather, paraphrased and expanded the poem. In this Old English version of it, St. Augustine's adventure is enriched by the addition of further details. Layamon's most interesting contribution to the history of the development of the legend consists of the information that an exaggerated notion as to the extent of the Saint's vengeance had, by this time, got abroad, and that foreigners now credited all Englishmen indiscriminately with the tails which the transgressors themselves and their posterity had alone been condemned to bear. That those tails were called "muggles", and that the men whom they disgraced were nicknamed "mugglings", are further circumstances for the knowledge of which we are indebted to Layamon. And the fact that, whilst one manuscript of his poem follows Wace with regard to the locality of the incident, another transfers it from Dorchester to Rochester, suggests a desire on the part of the scribe to exonerate the West Country, with which he may possibly have been connected.[345] In Sir F. Madden's prose rendering of the old English _Brut_, the whole episode is thus given: