While the troubadour and trouvère literatures were thus flourishing in the two halves of France, the cultivated circles of Norman and Plantagenet England found those literatures sufficiently adapted to their needs. The ordinary language of these circles was identical with that of the trouvères, and at the same time the English possessions in Languedoc, including the cultured centre Bordeaux (gained by the marriage of Henry II with Eleanor of Guienne and Poitou), brought the Court into direct communication with the lyrics of the troubadours. Henry’s son, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, was himself a troubadour and the friend of troubadours, in particular of Bertran de Born. But better suited to the Anglo-Norman temperament, and, of course, completely intelligible to the French-speaking barons and gentry, were the romances, _lais_ and _fabliaux_ of the trouvères. The work of the Norman Wace (_Geste des Bretons_) in 1155 was as much intended for England as for France. So also was the _Roman de Troie_ (1160) of Benoît de Ste. More, which included the story of Troilus. The French _Saint Grael_ stories of Walter Map (1180) and the _lais_ of Marie de France (1210) were produced in our island, and were the common property of England and Norman France. The jongleurs wandered from baron’s court to baron’s court, and the stories of Arthur, Of Greece and Troy the strongë stryf, There many a man lost his lyf; Of Brute that baron bold of hand, The first conqueroure of Engeland; Of King Arthur, that was so riche, Was not in his tyme him liche; How Kyng Charles and Rowland fought, With Sarazens nold they be caught; Of Tristrem and Ysoude the swete, How they with love first gan mete; Of King John and of Isumbras, Of Ydoine and of Amadas; Stories of diverse thinges, Of princes, prelates and kinges; Many songes of divers rhyme, As Engelish, French and Latyne. Before French literature could make much further advance, it must pass, after that of Italy, under pupilage to the Renaissance. As in England of the fifteenth century, there is first a period of stagnation, and then one during which France is borrowing and assimilating to its utmost lessons in thought and style, in form and substance, from the lately recovered classical masterpieces of Greece and Rome, as well as from the Italian writers who first enjoyed and exploited these treasures. During these stagnant and growing stages of French literature it exercises comparatively little effect upon our own.