the history of meter 27
ter (he had already attempted to simplify Latin grammar and would later go
on to simplify Greek grammar) and he intended his work to be used primarily
in his own school, but the book went through sixteen reprints and was ab-
sorbed as the appendix to Putnam’s more historical, non-poetic chronolog y in
- If facts can be reduced to a simple poetic form, then the student might
easily recall them, without the “harshness of measure” (4) to which we are
subjected in Grey’s Memoria Technica.
Metrical histories that abandoned the “artificial memory” method, and
abandoned “ancient history,” (meaning Roman history) began to appear in
1812, along with a revival of ancient ballads and translations from Alfred.^19
Rather than focus on learning a new system, the majority of nineteenth-
century metrical histories emphasized the ease with which verses could be
remembered and the connective tissue to a metrical and national community
that the meter provided.^20 The wider historical context of a revived interest in
all things Anglo-Saxon is important as a possible reason why many of the
nineteenth-century histories, though they tended to be shorter and easier to
memorize, began before 1066, returning to a pre-Norman past, rewriting the
Battle of Hastings as “the Norman yoke,” as well as appealing to vernacular
and less complicated verse structures, mostly ballads and tetrameters. Peda-
gogically, these metrical histories tended to emphasize that poetic learning
could be pleasurable and, just as Anglo-Saxon was being rewritten as a native
and natural form in English, so too did the nineteenth-century metrical his-
tories tend to emphasize ease and instinct in memorizing verses. For instance,
we can immediately sense the appeal of the popular late eighteenth-century
song, the “Chapter of Kings”: “The Romans in England they once did sway, /
And the Saxons they after them led the way, / And they tugg’d with the Danes
‘til an Overthrow, / They both of them got by the Norman Bow. / Yet barring
all Pother, / the one and the other / Were all of them kings in their turn.” The
song, by Irish schoolmaster John Collins,^21 was printed in a slightly less ver-
nacular form in 1818, changing “butchering Dick” back to “Richard” (but
keeping the line that calls Henry the Eighth “fat as a pig”). Reducing the
complexities of English history to a schoolroom song created communities of
subjects who could easily imagine becoming “kings in their turn,” no matter
their background. The refrain of “the one and the other” is particularly
evocative at a moment when grammarians and rhetoricians, as scholars like
Strabone and Elfenbein have noted, were attempting to suppress the internal
“others” of Saxon-derived dialects in the process of standardizing English
grammar.^22 The fact that the song was originally composed by an Irish school-
master gestures to the way that nineteenth-century England often derived its
native “authenticity” from linguistic communities that it had attempted to
erase or eradicate.
The wide circulation of popular songs and ballads about English history
promoted and sustained the perceived connection between England’s regal