France, the _Chanson de Roland_, pre-Norman in origin but Norman in its early form, which has recently been ascribed to Turold, bishop of Bayeux after the death of the more famous Odo and later for many years a monk of Bec. There is, one may object, nothing monastic in this wonderful pæan of mediæval knighthood, whose religion is that of the God of battles who has never lied, and whose hero meets death with his face toward Spain and his imperishable sword beneath him; but knights and monks had more in common than was once supposed, and we are coming to see that the monasteries, especially the monasteries of the great highways, had a large share in the making, if not in the final writing, of the mediæval epic as well as the mediæval chronicles. When we reach works like these, the literary history of Normandy merges in that of France, as well as in that of England, which, thanks to the Norman Conquest and the Norman empire, long remained a literary province of France. We must not, however, leave this vernacular literature, as yet almost wholly the work of clerks, with the impression that its dominant quality is romantic or poetical. Its versified form was merely the habit of an age which found verse easy to remember; the literature itself, as Gaston Paris has well observed,[57] was “essentially a literature of instruction for the use of laymen,” fit material for prose and not for poetry. It is thus characteristically Norman in subject as well as in speech--simple and severe in form, devout and edifying rather than mystical, given to history rather than to speculation, and seeking through the moralized science of lapidaries and bestiaries and astronomical manuals to aid the everyday life of a serious and practical people. * * * * *