form suggests that they were intended, like the chansons de geste, to be recited or sung to
a wider audience in the great hall rather than in the chambre or soler, a tradition that may
have continued longer in England than on the Continent. Still other romances, notably
Waldef (late 12th c.), the Lai d’Haveloc (ca. 1200), and Gui de Warewic (ca. 1230),
marry the octosyllabic form to the characteristic Anglo-Norman content. In the case of
Gui de Warewic, the theme of exile and return is interrelated at first with that of a highly
conventional portrayal of fin’amor, but devotion to the lady as spur to heroic deeds is
eventually superseded in Gui’s case by devotion to God, and the romance acquires
hagiographic overtones. In the case of Fouke FitzWarin, an early 14th-century prose
rendering of a lost mid-13th-century poem in octosyllabic couplets tracing the
vicissitudes of the FitzWarin family from the time of the Conquest through the reign of
King John, the generic distinction between romance and chronicle is decidedly blurred.
Saints’ Lives. The Voyage de saint Brendan by Benedeit, dated variously between
1106 and 1121 depending on whether the original dedicatee is believed to be the first or
second wife of Henry I, is the first long narrative poem in French to use the octosyllabic
rhyming couplet. Combining adventure and a taste for the exotic with a didactic purpose
that seems never far below the surface of most Anglo-Norman works regardless of genre,
it relates the voyage of the abbot Brendan, with fourteen chosen monks and three last-
minute intruders, to the Earthly Paradise. Based on an Irish immram (voyage tale), this is
also the first French vernacular text to make use of Celtic lore, which was to be so
significant an element in later medieval literature.
That Anglo-Normans show a predilection for treating the lives of British or English
saints is not surprising. Local saints are at once a source of pride and profit. The shrines
of St. Alban, St. Edmund the King, St. Edward the Confessor, and above all St.Thomas
Becket, martyred in 1170 and canonized in 1173, were favorite pilgrimage sites. All have
one or more Lives translated from the original Latin into Anglo-Norman. Denis Piramus,
a monk who by his own confession had dabbled in courtly love poetry before seeing the
error of his ways, wrote a Life of St. Edmund the King (ca. 1173), and the noted 13th-
century chronicler Matthew Paris (d. 1259) composed Lives of St. Alban, St. Edward, and
the recently canonized St. Edmund of Abingdon. St. Thomas Becket was the subject of
several Latin Lives and at least three French Lives written within a few years of his
martyrdom in 1170. A Norman, Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, wrote two of them in
five-line stanzas of monorhyme Alexandrines, and Beneit, a monk of Saint-Albans,
composed a Life in six-line tail-rhyme stanzas. Other local saints recorded in Anglo-
Norman legends are St. Osyth (late 12th c.), St. Audrey of Ely (early 13th c.), and the
Irish St. Modwenna (early 13th c.), whose Life is written in monorhyme octosyllabic
quatrains. St. Richard of Chichester (d. 1253) is the subject of a Latin Life by his
confessor written between 1262 and 1270 and translated on request by Peter of Peckham.
The saints of the early church are not neglected, however. Although probably written
on the Continent, the Vie de saint Alexis is preserved in a number of Anglo-Norman
manuscripts, the finest from the famous abbey of Saint Albans. The Vie de saint Laurent
(mid-12th c.) is the oldest French version of that legend. St. Catherine of Alexandria, one
of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, is the subject of at least three Anglo-
Norman Lives, one of which, preserved only in a fragment (John Rylands Library fr. 6),
may be as early as the Voyage de saint Brendan. Its use of varied meters has led to the
suggestion that it may have been intended for some kind of dramatic presentation. The
The Encyclopedia 71