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No. 107 of Maynard's English Classics contains selections from both Wycliffe's Bible and Mandeville's Travels. What is the subject matter of the Ancren Riwle? What is the keynote of the work? Mention some words of French origin found in it. What is the character of Mandeville's Travels? Why was it so popular? In what does Wycliffe's literary importance consist?
Miscellaneous literature, the Ancren Riwle, our best piece of early English prose; Orm's Ormulum; Cursor Mundi, with its suggestive parallel to the Miracle plays; and ballads, like King Horn and the Robin Hood songs, which were the only poetry of the common people.
In the "Ancren Riwle," a book of directions for the cloistered life of women, nuns are forbidden to wear "ne ring ne brooche," and to deny themselves other personal adornments. Archbishops seem to have possessed numerous rings in ancient times. In the romance of "Sir Degrevant" a couplet alludes to: "Archbishops with rings More than fifteen."
The following simile affords an instance of this quality in the work: Professor Sweet calls the Ancren Riwle "one of the most perfect models of simple, natural, eloquent prose in our language." For its introduction of French words, this work occupies a prominent place in the development of the English language.
Those interested in the development of "transition" English will find in the Ancren Riwle, i.e. It is a book of excellent religious advice and comfort, written for three ladies who wished to live a religious life, without, however, becoming nuns or entering any religious orders. The author was Bishop Poore of Salisbury, according to Morton, who first edited this old classic in 1853.
The Ancren Riwle, that quaint form of life for ankeresses drawn up by a Dominican in the thirteenth century, shows that even then, despite the distance of years and the passing of so many generations, the manners and ways and mental attitudes of people depended very much as to whether they were among those who had, or who had not; the pious author in one passage of homely wit compares certain of the sisters to "those artful children of rich parents who purposely tear their clothes that they may have new ones."
This scheme is followed with great precision throughout the poem, which employs neither rime nor regular alliteration. Orm used even fewer French words than Layamon. The date of the Ormulum is probably somewhere between 1200 and 1215. The Ancren Riwle. About 1225 appeared the most notable prose work in the native tongue since the time of Alfred, if we except the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
SELECTIONS FOR READING. For advanced students, and as a study of language, a few selections as given in Manly's English Poetry and in Manly's English Prose; or selections from the Ormulum, Brut, Ancren Riwle, and King Horn, etc., in Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. HISTORY. Text-book, Montgomery, pp. 58-86, or Cheyney, pp. 88-144.
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