Page:Archaeologia Volume 13.djvu/303

Robert Wace in 1155 turned the Brutus, compoded in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, into French verde. The manuscript of the Cottonian Library Vitellius A. X. comprises this translation, with a supplement in like manner, in French verse, by an anonymous author^[1].

That part of the work by Robert Wace finishes, like his original, at the death of king Cadwallader, at the end of the seventh century; but that of his continuator, beginning at this epocha, goes down to the twenty-fourth year of the reign of Henry the IIId.; not however that he gives us any account of this monarch; he does no more than name him. But he speaks of the death of the princess Eleanora, daughter of the duke of Bretagne, and sister of the unfortunate Arthur, assassinated by king John his uncle; and as she was interred in the priory of St. James at Bristol in 1341, it is at, or about this time that we ought to fix the composition of this supplement in French verse.

If the poet, the author of this work, has not transmitted to us his own name, he has however pointed out that of the place, where it was written, and where probably he was born. He says that he translated his work at Amesbury in Wiltshire. But I should be strongly inclined, whether by extraction he was Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman, to Suppose him to have been a descendant of one of those families, who were deprived of their estates at the time of the conquest. The energetic manner in which he bitterly inveighs against

the