Layamon: poet; a priest at Arley Regis on the Severn, Worcestershire, England; wrote about 1200 the “Brut,” a rhyming chronicle of English history from the time of the fabulus Brutus of Troy to the death of King Cadwallader (689 A.D.). His work is an amplified translation of the “Brut d’ Angleterre” of the Anglo-Norman poet Wace, the additions being derived chiefly from the writings of Bede and St. Augustine of Canterbury, while Wace’s work is itself little more than a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin “Historia Brittonum.” The value of Layamon’s chronicle is mainly philological. It contains 32,250 lines, some alliterative, but more imitating the imperfect rhyme of its Anglo-Norman original. The best edition is that of Sir Frederic Madden, with a literal translation, notes, and a grammatical glossary, published by the English Society of Antiquaries (3 vols., 1847).
Layamon’s versification also is no less remarkable than his language. Sometimes he seems anxious to imitate the rhymes, and to adopt the regular number of syllables which he had observed in his original; at other times he disregards both; either because he did not consider the laws of metre, or the consonance of final sounds, as essential to the gratification of his readers, or because he was unable to adopt them throughout so long a work, from the want of models in his native language on which to form his style. The latter is, perhaps, the most probable supposition; but, at all events, it is apparent that the recurrence of his rhymes is much too frequent to be the result of chance; so that, upon the whole, it seems reasonable to infer that Layamon’s work was composed at or very near the period when the Saxons and Normans in this country began to unite into one nation, and to adopt a common language.
No work shews more satisfactorily than his “Chronicle,” the benefits which English poetry and literature have derived from the Anglo-Norman. In this composition we see a poem substantially Anglo-Saxon, but with none of that peculiar style of Anglo-Saxon mind and phrase which were its pervading characteristics; it is the simple style of the Anglo-Norman poetry transferred into the Anglo-Saxon: Hence, it presents to us the first state of our vernacular English poetry, divested of the inversions, transitions, obscurities, and metaphors of the Anglo-Saxon school, and approaching that form of easy and natural phrase which has been the nurse of our truest poetry and cultivated intellect.
It is a remarkable circumstance, that we find preserved in many passages of Layamon’s poem the spirit and style of the earlier Anglo-Saxon writers. No one can read his descriptions of battles and scenes of strife without being reminded of the Ode on Ælthelstan’s victory at Brunanburh. The ancient mythological genders of the sun and moon are still unchanged; the memory of the Witena-gemot has not yet become extinct; and the neigh of the hængest still seems to resound in our ears. Very many phrases are purely Anglo-Saxon, and with slight change, might have been used in Cædmon or Æfric. A foreign scholar and poet, versed both in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature, has declared, that, tolerably well read as he is in the rhyming chronicles of his own country, and of others, he has found Layamon’s beyond comparison the most lofty and animated in its style, at every moment reminding the reader of the splendid phraseology of Anglo-Saxon verse. It may also be added, that the colloquial character of much of the work renders it peculiarly valuable as a monument of language, since it serves to convey to us, in all probability, the current speech of the writer’s time as it passed from mouth to mouth.
His poem has more spirit and fire, in the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon style than had been supposed. Upon the whole, Layamon must be reckoned far more of the older than the newer formation: he is an eocene, or at most a miocene; while his contemporaries, as they seem to be, belong philologically to a later period.
Here is evidently a considerable amount of true poetic life in the conception, and also, as far as the apparent rudeness of the language will admit,—if we ought not perhaps rather to say as far as the imperfect knowledge of its laws now attainable enables us to form a judgment,—considerable care and aptness of expression.
He seldom conforms closely to the text of Wace, and his comparative elevation of diction, of thought, and of imagery, entitles his work to a higher rank than that of his original, and stamps it as a production of some literary merit…. His merits as a translator seem to be greater than his power as an original writer.
Sometimes happens to rhyme, sometimes fails, altogether barbarous and childish, unable to develop a continuous idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases, after the fashion of the ancient Saxon.
As one man from the banks of the Severn, born of a foreign father, living in a foreign land, writing in a foreign tongue, never lost his English heart, his love for England and her history, so it was another man by the banks of the Severn who first taught the English tongue to bear witness against itself, who degraded it to become the channel of those wretched fables which in the minds of so many Englishmen have displaced alike the true history and the worthier legends of our fathers. The opposite to Orderic of Ettingsham is Layamon of Ernley. He had read the English book of Bæda and the Latin book of Austin, but he turned from them to the book that a French clerk made that was hight Wace. Wace truly well could write; we blame not him for writing, nor do we blame the noble Eleanor, that was Henry’s Queen the high King’s, for hearkening to what he wrote. It was something that the Duchess of Aquitaine and the Canon of Bayeux should seek to know something of the past days of the conquered island; and, if ill luck threw the monstrous fables of Geoffrey in their way, the blame was his and not theirs. It was no crime in Wace to write a Brut in French; it was treason against the tongue and history of his race for Layamon to translate that Brut into English.
Of all English poets after the Conquest, none approached the Old English epos so closely as he, and hardly any metrical chronicle of the Middle Ages can rival Layamon’s “Brut” in poetical worth. The merits of his style appear most brilliantly in the portrayal of battle and strife, and of the combat with the surging sea. Though his diction has none of the copiousness of the ancient epic language, yet in comparison with later times, it must be termed rich, and most graphic and effective. It is highly imaginative, but contains few detailed similes…. A most significant figure, Layamon stands upon the dividing line between two great periods, which he unites in a singular manner. He once more reproduces for us an age that is forever past. At the same time he is the first English poet to draw from French sources, the first to sing of King Arthur in English verse.
The “preost Layamon ihoten” makes no inconsiderable additions to the matter embodied by the authorities whom he professes to follow; and his additions are by far the ablest and most spirited portions of his work.
Layamon is filled full of illustrations of the shall-and-will idiom. There is hardly a score of lines in which the distinction is not made.
Layamon was a modest, pious English priest, who loved his country, and enjoyed traditions of its ancient time. Having the true fine natural spirit of a poet and a scholar, he was among the many in almost every part of Europe who had their imagination kindled by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fictions. He had discoursed much and pleasantly with his neighbours, for his mind was stored with the oral tradition only to be gathered in familiar social talk; and when he translated Wace’s “Brut” he added not only fresh legends of his own gathering, but new touches to the old…. From his work, then, we have a right to infer that this earliest poet in our modern tongue was a devout, gentle, an affectionate parish priest, who loved his home and his country, and was friend as well as spiritual counsellor to the small flock of rustic parishioners, whose boys he taught and whose good will satisfied all but his intellectual wants.
That monumental testimony to the self-sustaining vigour of our English tongue which, written nearly a century and a half after the Conquest, contains in thirty thousand lines but some fifty words of the Conqueror’s language.
Layamon, who was stirred thus deeply by the genius of the ancient Saxon poetry, naturally sought to mould his matter in the traditional forms of song. But his metrical style remains a striking monument of the inward changes wrought in the language since it had passed from the lips of the singer to the pen of the literary composer. It was not only that terminations had been assimilated, genders confused, inflections dropped, the weak ending of the preterite tense substituted for the internal change of the vowel: the whole character of the metrical sentence had been altered by the introduction of the article, by the frequent use of conjunctions, and by the constant association of the preposition “to” with the infinitive mood. The abrupt, energetic effects of the ancient recitation were modified to suit the literary style of the historian, and the rhythmical period was broken up by the insertion of numerous wedges, in the shape of small auxiliary words, which pointed the logic of the thought, while they destroyed the compactness of the syntax. In a measure distinctively Teutonic the influence of French verse is of course scarcely perceptible; Layamon’s vocabulary contains scarcely more foreign elements than Ormin’s. The laws of alliteration, however, are not strictly observed; in many verses the dominant letter is capriciously distributed; in others it is altogether absent; and the alliterative couplet is often replaced by a rhyming one. Compared with “Beowulf,” the metrical structure of the “Brut” resembles those debased forms of architecture in which the leading external features are reproduced long after the reason for their invention has been forgotten.
His alliterative poem—in which now and then a stammer of rhyme is heard—belongs to the threshold of the thirteenth century, and stands at the head of English literature: its author has been called the English Ennius. A qualification is necessary, however; Layamon wrote in a dialect, in the speech of the south of England—one of the three dialects among which English writings are to be divided for the next hundred and fifty years. His language is difficult, no doubt; special preparation is required to understand it, and a glossary must be constantly consulted; but it is not like learning a foreign tongue,—two or three hours of study a day for three or four days would make one master of the grammatical difficulties that stand in the way of one’s enjoyment of the poem.
As Geoffrey fell into the hands of Wace, so did Wace fall into those of Layamon; but here the result is far more interesting, both for the history of the legend itself and for its connection with England. Not only did the priest of Ernley or Arley-on-Severn do the English tongue the inestimable service of introducing Arthur to it, not only did he write the most important book by far, both in size, in form, and in matter, that was written in English between the Conquest and the fourteenth century, but he added immensely to the actual legend.
