Anglo-Norman Books of Courtesy and Nurture

Abstract

If the Normans were, as ten Brink has called them, the foremost representatives of chivalry, they certainly had good measure of instruction to fit them for the part. Among the flood of Anglo-Norman didactic literature which has come down to us, we find a number of treatises on manners for the benefit of budding chivalry; they differ from the many Continental Arts d'aimer in that they are mostly written for quite young boys, and the elaborate doctrines of courtly love are replaced by practical details of a page's service, mingled haphazard with moral precepts of a more general nature. Even when the pupil is considered as having emerged from pagehood and attained to the dignity of a lover, we never exchange an atmosphere of reality and common-sense for the complex artificiality of the first part of the Roman de la Rose, any more than we approach the literary grace and finish of that poem. The little Norman pages were instructed in no fantastic chivalry, such as bound the heroes of the romances, but in a doctrine calculated to assure their success in this world, without endangering their chances in the next.