It could not be expected that the slowly changing language should at once change its habits in this respect. And so, as the century immediately before the Conquest had seen little but chronicles and homilies, leechdoms and laws, that which came immediately afterwards gave at first no very different products, except that the laws were wanting, for obvious reasons. Nay, the first, the largest, and almost the sole work of _belles lettres_ during the first three-fourths of our period, the _Brut_ of Layamon, is a work of _belles lettres_ without knowing it, and imagines itself to be a sober history, while its most considerable contemporaries, the _Ormulum_ and the _Ancren Riwle_, the former in verse, the latter in prose, are both purely religious. At the extreme end of the period the most important and most certain work, Robert of Gloucester's, is, again, a history in verse. About the same time we have, indeed, the romances of _Havelok_ and _Horn_; but they are, like most of the other work of the time, translations from the French. The interesting _Poema Morale_, or "Moral Ode," which we have in two forms--one of the meeting-point of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one fifty years later--is almost certainly older than its earliest extant version, and was very likely pure Saxon. Only in Nicholas of Guilford's _Owl and Nightingale_, about 1250, and perhaps some of the charming _Specimens of Lyric Poetry_, printed more than fifty years ago by Mr Wright, with a very few other things, do we find pure literature--not the literature of education or edification, but the literature of art and form. [Sidenote: _Layamon._] Yet the whole is, for the true student of literature, full enough of interest, while the best things are not in need of praising by allowance. Of Layamon mention has already been made in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend. But his work covers very much more than the Arthurian matter, and has interests entirely separate from it. Layamon, as he tells us,[89] derived his information from Bede, Wace, and a certain Albinus who has not been clearly identified. But he must have added a great deal of his own, and if it could be decided exactly _how_ he added it, the most difficult problem of mediaeval literature would be solved. Thus in the Arthurian part, just as we find additions in Wace to Geoffrey, so we find additions to Wace in Layamon. Where did he get these additions? Was it from the uncertain "Albinus"? Was it, as Celtic enthusiasts hold, that, living as he did on Severn bank, he was a neighbour of Wales, and gathered Welsh tradition? Or was it from deliberate invention? We cannot tell. [Footnote 89: Ed. Madden, i. 2.]