Copy 1, Volume 1
Essays on subjects connected with the literature, popular superstitions, and history of England in the Middle Ages / By Thomas Wright.
- Thomas Wright
- Date:
- 1846
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Essays on subjects connected with the literature, popular superstitions, and history of England in the Middle Ages / By Thomas Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.
117/324 page 101
![poem, and with the numerous popular traditions con- cerning its hero, which certainly at that time existed in England. Of the three stories of English growth, which are spoken of collectively in the passage quoted by Warton, from a manuscript at Oxford, (three of what M. Paris would term our “ chansons de geste,’”’)— “ Of [H]eveloke, Horne, and of Wade, In romances that of them be made,” two still exist both in English and in French verse. The romance of Horn seems to have been popular in every form, and we have, in French and in English, no fewer than seven manuscripts of it. The manuscript of the French version of Horn, which is preserved at Cambridge, (MS. Bib. Pub. Ff. 6, 17,) is by much the best, but it is un- fortunately defective at the beginning and end by the loss of two or three leaves. It is of the thirteenth century. The other two, one in the Harleian MS. No. 627, the second in a manuscript which belonged tothe late Mr. Douce, and which is now at Oxford, are but fragments, and supply very little of what is wanting in the Cambridge copy, though they afford some valuable readings, and one of them acquaints us with the name of the Norman poet who wrote it, who is there called Thomas.* In the in- * We have printed our extracts from this romance as they stand in the manuscript of Cambridge. As we cannot suppose all our readers to be conversant in this antiquated language, wherever we have thought it absolutely necessary, in order to preserve the thread of the story we have given in the text a loose rhyming version, in which we have endeavoured as much as possible to imitate the style and manner of the original.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33097963_0001_0117.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
