380 ROMANCES. 



trouveurs, and jugglers made their appearance in all countries. The twelfth 

 century was the great epoch of romance and of jugglery. There were several 

 changes, however, in the style and fashion of the ancient romances, in propor- 

 tion as the vulgar tongue underwent its successive modifications, and it would 

 be difficult to recognise in the present day the ancient text when comparing 

 it with the new. It would be not less difficult to assign a fixed date to the 

 beginning of each cycle, all of which started from the primitive cycle of 

 Charlemagne. There was an incessant competition between the jugglers, 

 whose audiences were always clamouring for some new thing ; and it was to 

 satisfy this demand that the trouveurs of the Oil language put into rhyme 

 and prose the old Breton lays, and increased the already large domain of 

 French romance. This was the commencement of the long series of Breton 

 romances, otherwise called of the " Round Table," and which must not be 

 confounded with the chansons de geste. 



M. Paulin Paris, whose opinions on these matters may generally be relied 

 upon, holds that the chevaliers of Flanders and the Franche-Comte had 

 previously to this gathered from the conversation of Breton jugglers, or from 

 Latin books written upon the authority of ancient narratives, the traditions 

 of the Celts and of the fabled kings of Armorican Brittany. There were, for 

 instance, the stories of Tristan, son of a King of Leon, in Little Brittany, who 

 was in love with his uncle's wife ; of King Mark, under the fatal influence of 

 a philter against which all remedies were powerless ; of King Arthur, the 

 Celtic Hercules, the husband of Queen Guinivere, the most beautiful and the 

 most inconstant of women, and surrounded by a court of heroes such as 

 Launcelot, Gauvain, Perceval, Lionel, Agravain, &c. For some time already 

 the sham combats in which the young nobles learnt the rude art of war were 

 called tournaments (tournoys), because the champions turned about in a sort of 

 circular arena, while endeavouring to hit a certain mark, a movable figure, 

 or a quintain, with their lance or their sword. The authors of the Breton 

 romances represented King Arthur as the founder of chivalry and the creator 

 of tournaments, and said that this valorous king assembled at his Eound 

 Table the twenty-four bravest chevaliers of his kingdom, who thus formed 

 his Supreme Court of Chivalry. These old Breton romances, in which the 

 fair sex was assigned a more dignified and attractive part than in the Carlo- 

 vingian romances, were, so to speak, the school in which were formed the 

 rammers of chivalry, and which favoured the development of refined polite- 



