Transcribed from the 1896 George Allen edition ,

OLD FRENCH
ROMANCES

DONE INTO ENGLISH

BY

WILLIAM MORRIS

WITH ANINTRODUCTION BY

JOSEPH JACOBS

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, RUSKIN HOUSE
1896

All rights reserved

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

p.vINTRODUCTION

Many of us have first found our wayinto the Realm of Romance, properly so called, through the pagesof a little crimson clad volume of the BibliothèqueElzevirienne. [1]  Its last pages contain thecharming Cante-Fable of Aucassin et Nicolete, which Mr.Walter Pater’s praises and Mr. Andrew Lang’sbrilliant version have made familiar to all lovers ofletters.  But the same volume contains four other tales,equally charming in their way, which Mr. William Morris has nowmade part of English literature by writing them out again for usin English, reproducing, as his alone can do of livingmen’s, the tone, the colour, the charm of the MiddleAges.  His versions have appeared in three successive issuesof the Kelmscott Press, which p. vihave been eagerly snapped up by thelovers of good books.  It seemed a pity that these cameos ofromance should suffer the same fate as Mr. Lang’s versionof Aucassin et Nicolete, which has been swept off the faceof the earth by the Charge of the Six Hundred, who were luckyenough to obtain copies of the only edition of that littlemasterpiece of translation.  Mr. Morris has, therefore,consented to allow his versions of the Romances to be combinedinto one volume in a form not unworthy of their excellence butmore accessible to those lovers of books whose purses have ahabit of varying in inverse proportion to the amount of theirlove.  He has honoured me by asking me to introduce them tothat wider public to which they now make their appeal.

p.viiI

Almost all literary roads lead backto Greece.  Obscure as still remains the origin of thatgenre of romance to which the tales before us belong,there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals,were once extant at Constantinople.  Though in no singleinstance has the Greek original been discovered of any of theseromances, the mere name of their heroes would be in most casessufficient to prove their Hellenic or Byzantine origin. Heracles, Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus, Hippomedon,Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus—names suchas these can come but from one quarter of Europe, and it is aseasy to guess how and when they came as whence.  The firsttwo crusades brought the flower of European chivalry toConstantinople and restored that spiritual union between Easternand Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the greatschism of the Greek and Roman Churches.  The crusaders p.

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