ABSTRACT
In an age when the song and recitation of the minstrel were the almost universal entertainment of the upper classes at meals and in the evening and indeed at all times when they could not find their recreation out of doors, literature was well-nigh indispensable. Since, as we have already seen, the language of the higher classes for more than two hundred years after the Norman Conquest was either wholly or mainly French, any literature that would be intelligible to them would have to be in that language. Naturally the whole body of French literature was at their disposal, but a nation seldom remains for any length of time solely dependent upon foreign sources even for its pleasure. It is not surprising, therefore, to find early in the twelfth century French poets in England, attracted no doubt by an aristocracy freely spending its newly acquired wealth. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries much that is important in Old French literature was written in England. The dialect in which it was written is known as Anglo-Norman, and this body of writings as Anglo-Norman literature.
