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Transcribed from the 1896 George Allen edition by David Price, emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk

OLD FRENCH ROMANCES DONE INTO ENGLISH BY WILLIAM MORRIS

INTRODUCTION

Many of us have first found our way into the Realm of Romance, properlyso called, through the pages of a little crimson clad volume of theBibliothèque Elzevirienne. {1} Its last pages contain the charming Cante-Fable of Aucassin et Nicolete,which Mr. Walter Pater’s praises and Mr. Andrew Lang’s brilliantversion have made familiar to all lovers of letters.  But the samevolume contains four other tales, equally charming in their way, whichMr. William Morris has now made part of English literature by writingthem out again for us in English, reproducing, as his alone can do ofliving men’s, the tone, the colour, the charm of the Middle Ages. His versions have appeared in three successive issues of the KelmscottPress, which have been eagerly snapped up by the lovers of good books. It seemed a pity that these cameos of romance should suffer the samefate as Mr. Lang’s version of Aucassin et Nicolete, whichhas been swept off the face of the earth by the Charge of the Six Hundred,who were lucky enough to obtain copies of the only edition of that littlemasterpiece of translation.  Mr. Morris has, therefore, consentedto allow his versions of the Romances to be combined into one volumein a form not unworthy of their excellence but more accessible to thoselovers of books whose purses have a habit of varying in inverse proportionto the amount of their love.  He has honoured me by asking me tointroduce them to that wider public to which they now make their appeal.

I.

Almost all literary roads lead back to Greece.  Obscure as stillremains the origin of that genre of romance to which the talesbefore us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not theiroriginals, were once extant at Constantinople.  Though in no singleinstance has the Greek original been discovered of any of these romances,the mere name of their heroes would be in most cases sufficient to provetheir Hellenic or Byzantine origin.  Heracles, Athis, Porphirias,Parthenopeus, Hippomedon, Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus- names such as these can come but from one quarter of Europe, and itis as easy to guess how and when they came as whence.  The firsttwo crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinopleand restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendomthat had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and RomanChurches.  The crusaders came mostly from the Lands of Romance. Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme Eastand the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by theadmission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry. These ties went on increasing throughout the twelfth century till theyculminated at its close with the foundation of the Latin kingdom ofConstantinople.  In European literature these historic events arerepresented by the class of romances represented in this volume, whichall trace back to versions in verse of the twelfth century, though theywere done into prose somewhere in Picardy during the course of the nextcentury.  Daphnis and Chloe, one might say, had revived after asleep of 700 years, and donned the garb and spoke the tongue of Romance.

II

The very first of our tales illustrates admirably the general courseof their history.  It is, in effect, a folk etymology of the nameof the great capital of the Eastern Empire.  Constantinople, soruns the tale, received that name instead of Byzantium, because of theremarkable career of one of its former rulers, Coustans.  M. Wesselovskyhas published in Romania (vi. 1. seq.) the Dit de l’empereurConstant, the verse original of the story before us, and in thisoccur the lines -

Pour ce que si nobles estoit
Et que nobles œvresfaisoit
L’appielloient Constant le noble
Et pourçou ot Constantinnoble
Li cytés de Bissencea non.

From which it would appear that we are mistaken in thinking of thecapital of Turkey as the “City of Constantine,” whereasit is rather Constant the Noble, and the name Coustant is further explainedas “costing” too much.  Constantinople, therefore,is the city that costs too much, according to the prophetic etymologyof the folk.

The only historic personage with whom this Coustant can be identifiedis Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine the Great and thehusband of St. Helena, to whom legend ascribes the discovery of theHoly Rood.  But the Coustans of our story never lived or ruledon land or sea, and his predecessor, Muselinus, is altogether unknownto Byzantine annals, while their interlaced history reads more likea page of the Arabian Nights than of Gibbon.

But such a legend could scarcely have arisen elsewhere than at Constantinople. It is one of those fables that the disinherited folk have at all timesinvented to solace themselves for their disinherison.  The suddenand fated rise of one of the folk to the heights of power occurs sufficientlyoften to afford material for the day dreams of ambitious youth. There is even a popular tendency to attribute a lowly origin to allfavourites of fortune, as witness the legends that have grown up aboutthe early careers of Beckett, Whittington, Wolsey, none of whom wasas ill-born as popular tradition asserts.  Yet such legends invariablygrow up in the country of their heroes, which is the only one sufficientlyinterested in their career, so far as the common people are concerned. Hence the very nature of our story would cause us to locate its originon the banks of the Bosphorus.

But once originated in this manner, there is no limit to the travelsit may take.  Curiously enough, the very legend before us in allits details has found a home among the English peasantry.  TheRev. S. Baring-Gould collected in Yorkshire a story which he contributedto Henderson’s Folklore of the Northern Counties, and entitledThe Fish and the Ring. {2}