The Rime of King William is a eulogy of William the Conqueror written in Old English. The poem is one of the earliest English poems with lines that are end-rhymed, classical Anglo-Saxon poetry having been alliterative. With its end-rhymes it is often taken as an example of the transition to Middle English, or, in the opening page of The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (David Wallace, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1999:7), an example of "the afterlife of Old English" in Seth Lerer's phrase: "a poem without regular metre, formalized lineation or coherent imagery." In manuscript it appears only once, inserted in the Peterborough Chronicle under the entry for the year of the Conqueror's death, 1087, "arrestingly inept when compared to the rhetorical sweep and homiletic power of the prose account of William's reign that contains it" (Lerer). Within the form of a lament for King William it expresses the indignation of the English at the introduction of the Norman forest laws. Stefan Jurasinski has shown that it is most likely by the compiler of the Peterborough Chronicle himself and that it stands at the head of a developing tradition of literary polemics against the injustice of the forest law.[1]
Notes
- ^ Stefan Jurasinski, " The Rime of King William and its Analogues", Neophilologus, 88.1, (January 2004), pp. 131-144. Previously the only treatment of the poem had been Bartlett J. Whiting, '"The Rime of King William", Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, Eds. T. A. Kirby and H. B. Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins) 1949.
