the history of meter 31
invasion of England by Railroads in the nineteenth century,” the “Roman
yoke” and the railways both invading a more natural England, one that would
require a walking stick. Like Collins’s song “Chapter of Kings,” Rossendale
provides the musical score for Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne,” whose origi-
nal lyrics are, of course, all about remembering and forgetting :
About two thousand years ago,
Came Julius Caesar here;
And brought with him the Roman foe
With bright and glitt’ring spear
The natives that in England dwelt,
Were wild and cruel too;
And they—the pow’r of Druids felt, —
A tyrannizing crew.These stanzas, and the book as a whole, are easily sung ; and, like the lyrics of
“Auld Lang Syne,” they adhere easily to the pattern of ballad meter. I imagine
students sitting in public examinations and humming under their breath the
entirety of English history as we might hum our ABCs. But whose ABCs are
these? The familiar form of this popular schoolroom history was written by
the Scottish National poet Robert Burns, who gets no mention here—he is
forgotten, like the original words of “Auld Lang Syne”—just as the revised
“Chapter of Kings” makes no mention of the Irish schoolmaster John Collins.
The history of England and the shapes through which it is transmitted are
composed and carved by writers from communities whose dialects complicate
the dream of “standard” English, and whose imaginary “native” origins have
been co-opted as England’s own.
The “metrical” in English metrical histories refers at various times to simple
and pleasurable pedagogical methods, to artificial memory, to nation build-
ing, and to nature itself (as in the case of Raymond), and touches on issues of
education, racial origins, national identification, and class. Following the Re-
vised Code of 1861–62 and the examinations that these imposed on a new
generation of schoolchildren, shorter metrical histories appeared so that they
could be “learned completely by heart by any student of ordinary capacity,”^29 as
Montefiore’s 1876 The History of England in Verse promises. Catherine Rob-
son usefully summarizes the implications of the Revised Code (and its “pay-
ment by results” scheme) on pedagogical methods: “[i]n consequence of the
financial pressure [The Revised Code] exerted on over-extended educators,
the code . . . plays a significant role in the history of memorization: because
schools and teachers were subject to monetary penalties if their pupils did not
satisfy visiting examiners, rote learning, particularly in reading, became the
n o r m .”^30 Though there was a revival in the artificial memory method around
this time, with Lewis Carroll as a famous experimenter,^31 mnemonic systems